Cookies, cookies, cookies.

Do not try and live in a world without cookies.

Today’s magisterial substack offering is going to end in a recipe.

If you frequent cooking sites, as I do, you are well aware that every recipe begins with a meandering reminiscence by the theoretical chef about his or her relationship to the food they are recommending. There is also a link at the top of the page, just under the title, that says “Jump to recipe” And when you click on it, you can scoot past that lengthy, sometimes endless, intro and land quickly at the cooking instructions. Which is why it saddens me to report that I don’t know how to set-up those kinds of page pyrotechnics here on Substack. But on the bright side, I think this recipe, which I invented, would be a lot more puzzling if you never read the intro.

So here it is:

It’s probably no accident that the first word I ever spoke, when I was six months old, was cookie. After only 180 days as a resident of planet earth, I already knew enough about what I liked to ask for it by name.

From toddler-hood on, there was only one unqualified complement that I knew how to get from my mother and grandmother. They’d each light up like a full moon when they said “Merrill is a good eater.” That would be my cue to proudly shovel in any amount of whatever edible substances they put in front of me as though I was accomplishing something impressive. I was not yet aware that an aptitude for eating comes bundled in with the free digestive system software of every life form ever created. It is not evidence of a precocious talent on which a person will one day be able to base an identity.

Sadly, those early days of carefree eating came to a screeching halt on June 14, 1958. I know the correct date because what took place that day was so upsetting that I recorded it in my diary. But it wasn’t until I re-encountered that diary a few years ago that I gave the page its own name. It now lives inside me as THE DAY THAT EVERYTHING CHANGED.

This ominous day would never have dawned had I been raised in Mauritania, where female obesity is such a sought after sign of family wealth and status that young girls are force-fed high calorie diets. Unfortunately, I was living in perennial-candidate-for- the-craziest-state-in-the-United-States, Florida, where I only got to the age of eight before I found myself choking on the rigid demands of a feminine beauty regimen. It was then that I realized for the first time that my mother and grandmother had been peddling a false narrative. Being a “good eater” was no a badge of honor. Food was the enemy.

The horrifying events of “The Day That Everything Changed”began with a mindless step onto the scale during a routine check up at the pediatrician. That was how I first received the bewildering news that I was a few pounds over weight. It took seconds for my brother to translate this information into blistering taunts. And just a few seconds longer than that for me to insist that my mother buy me the little pocket sized calorie-counter booklet that I saw for sale in every supermarket check out area next to the National Enquirer.

This was the actual size. For a tiny book, it packed more nightmarish information per page than any document until Trump’s Project 2025. By the way, I’m sure the author’s name is really Marvin SMALL.

If this were a scene in a movie, the accompanying musical score would now fade up to become a foreboding cello solo in a minor key as I began to examine, for the first time, the wonderful world of gender based body-dysmorphia.

The first thing I learned was that there were only 900 calories permitted per day on a weight loss diet. The second thing I learned was that a medium sized chocolate chip cookie was 450 calories. Was there a misprint? Could it really be possible that two medium sized chocolate chip cookies, alone, were equal to all the calories permitted for the entire day? Now we hear the sound track growing louder, and more insistent as it becomes an accelerando reprise of the same dark cello solo we heard before, growing faster and faster, louder and louder. And at the same time, we witness an alarming flash back of me, from earlier that very day, without a care in the world, happily consuming an entire box of chocolate chip cookies. Behind me are the sounds of screeching violin stings, screaming like a wounded animal, as the camera pans over to various close-ups of frightening calorie totals listed on every page. Can it be true? Can ONE cup of peanuts really be 862 calories?

By high school, my idea of a sensible daily diet plan had become celery, three times a day. And in my free time, I stood at the book rack in organic food stores, searching for a diet anchored in the kind of promises of good health that would also provide me with the fool proof set of counter arguments I needed to win the contentious meal time fights I was having with my parents. And that is how I found my way to books about healing and nutrition written at the turn of the previous century.

The one I took most seriously had the unsettling title of “The Mucusless Diet.” Written in 1924, its cover was memorably adorned with a black and white photograph of its German author, Arnold Ehret, a Ringling Brother’s Ringmaster-look-alike who glowered ominously behind his meticulously waxed handlebar mustache and goatee. Arnold blamed an over-production of mucus for all the common health misfortunes plaguing mankind. And his path to a cure was simple: eliminate all of the foods that caused mucus production.

It was an easy diet to follow because on The Mucusless Diet, almost every food was off limits.

As I took in all his harsh anti-mucus dietary demands, I tried hard not to imagine the problems he must have had with his facial hair configuration of choice before he got his mucus overproduction problem under control. By college, I’d become a vegetarian.

My new vegetable intensive eating regime helped simplify the rules of eating for me, once and for all. The path to freedom was found in restricting your choices. I also adopted a rule of my own design that made meal planning even more user friendly. I would refuse to eat anything which, while alive, would have caused me to offer it a warm and cheery ‘Hello!’ This principle served me well until the advent of “nouvelle cuisine” which often made me want to say ‘Hello!’ to those eensy weensy miniature carrots and new potatoes.

But I digress.

By my sophomore year of college, I had reorganized my diet yet again after I stumbled upon a packaged weight loss product called ‘Metrecal Cookies™’  It claimed to provide a person (me) with a balanced 900 calorie ­diet via three small flavorless, unappealing ‘cookies’ per meal. 

 They were so awful that every bite came drenched in an ordeal of self-sacrifice, providing the dieter with a few much sought after martyr-like daily moments of masochism. Nevertheless, I embraced those dreadful cookies cautiously, usually eating only half of the suggested portion because, deep inside, I harbored a suspicion that anything calling itself a cookie could never be trusted.

And so, as the years danced gaily by, it came to pass that I banished cookies from my life entirely.  I became such a devoted acolyte of all things nutritious and low calorie that when offered a choice between a delicious fresh baked chocolate chip cookie and a sad plate of damp tofu, I would choose the tofu one hundred percent of the time. Yes! ONE HUNDRED PERCENT! Even if the tofu looked and smelled like dirty laundry!

These were the sacrifices I made willingly on my chosen path to emaciation and immortality.

By the time the internet came along, I hadn’t indulged in a cookie for years. But not a day went by where I didn’t succumb to a slide show of eight (or twelve or thirty) important super foods which I would instantly incorporate into my meal planning.

I followed them up with so many types of vitamins and food supplements that there was no longer any room on my kitchen counter for utensils or food. All it took for me to join another march to greater health was an article in any semi-respectable publication that made any kind of a serious health claim. When everyone was adding oat bran to everything, I added oat bran to everything. When they all got mad at gluten, I got mad at gluten. I didn’t need no celiac disease. I just found out where gluten was hiding in my very home and promptly showed it the door.

Of course, I was starting each bright new day in the holiest of all possible ways; with a combination of raw vegetable juices, every glass a ‘powerhouse’  of semi-palatable nutrients extracted just for me by me on my very own juicer. Looking back, the only thing I forgot to do was grow my own food. Well I didn’t forget. Those eight organic pea pods I grew that one year didn’t stretch nearly as far as I had intended. But my grape-sized cantaloupes were the talk of the L.A. County fair!

And that was how I rolled. Until one night, on Memorial Day eve about four years ago, extreme feelings of nausea and chills sent me to the emergency room. To my surprise, I was admitted to the hospital with an infected gall bladder and had to stay there three days until a surgeon was available. Before that I had given a lot of thought to my consumption of over processed foods. But I had never given even the briefest of thoughts to the whole idea of a gall bladder.

What happened next was surreal. As I sat in my hospital bed, goofy from dilaudid and awaiting surgery, every nurse and doctor I spoke to, after looking at the x-ray of my infected gall bladder, grew slack-jawed and wide-eyed as they asked me the same question: “What kind of diet have you been eating?” And they all were confident that they already knew the answer. “A lot of fried foods?” guessed the nurse. “A lot of hot dogs and pizza? A lot of sweets?” guessed the surgeon.

They were asking this of ME….a woman who didn’t even own a box of sugar! A woman whose refrigerator was stocked with avocados, blueberries, wheat grass, kale and sorghum but who never even walked down the cookie aisle at a grocery store!

“FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, MOTHERFUCKERS, ” I screamed at them all, “You’re asking me what I have been EATING?? How about FORTY STRAIGHT YEARS OF SALAD? How about raw unsalted nuts and seeds and lentils and quinoa?‘

And here is the craziest part: I could see that they didn’t believe me. Talk about gaslighting! They actually sent my husband in as an emissary to privately interrogate me further. “Have you been secretly eating a lot of crap?” he asked me, adding “I’m not going to judge you. You can be honest with me.” Of course, I exploded at him. “Only if you are going to define baby spinach and fresh raspberries and organic shishito peppers as crap.” I yelled at him. Now it was my turn to sit there, wide-eyed and slack- jawed, stunned and saddened as my dreams of immortality through eating healthy lay shattered in tiny pieces all around me.

That night after my surgery, when I didn’t want to eat any of the hot dogs or lasagna that were on the dinner menu at the hospital, (because there seems to be a law that hospitals can not serve healthy food) I ordered a plate of chocolate layer cake for my dinner. If fresh juice every morning didn’t save me from surprise health problems, there seemed to be no good reason not to head in the more appealing opposite direction.

When I got home from the hospital, I fully intended to start eating junk food and only junk food. But it turns out good habits are as hard to break as bad ones. After all those years of unprocessed foods, the empty sweetness of donuts and cake no longer seemed like a very fun treat.  I realized I was stuck for life in a “healthy” eating pattern even though I no longer really believed in what “eating healthy” actually meant.

I could take only one important lesson away from this experience. It was time to start eating cookies again.

Having spent so many years in self-imposed wellness jail, I couldn’t transition myself into eating more than a bite or two of store bought, analog-style, contemporary cookies. But I solved the problem for myself by creating a recipe amalgam out of other people’s healthy cookie recipes. And thus did I end up creating the sugar-free, low-calorie, high-protein, nutrient-dense cookies that I am finally going to get around to sharing below.

‘Whew..That was a long way to go to finally get the recipe,’ I can hear you saying.

The important point I am trying to make, though, is that I am not frightened by eating these cookies. They are definitely cookies. But they also are not only ‘good for you’ they have things in common with the old-timey cookie recipe foundations of other people’s mostly healthy cookies. AND they definitely continue to fulfill my essential cookie fantasies without making me think I am betraying the oath I took to whatever it was I once pretended to have taken an oath to.

So now I am finally going to share with you the recipe that I invented. It is basically a cookie improvisation. As with all Elaine May style classic improv, it begins with “Yes, and…” So if someone in your house yells out “ pumpkin seeds!” you begin by saying “Yes and….”then throw a few pumpkin seeds into this batter and continue on your merry way. Much as you would in a sketch with your critically acclaimed but poorly attended edgy, little Improv group.

All you need to do is understand that your end-game is a tasty dough-like substance which, when combined with heat,is destined to become baked goods.

And scene.

Your first goal is to create dough or batter. If you thin the mixture with more of any liquid or some egg whites, then pour it into a greased loaf pan, it will turn into cake! If you make it thicker by adding more almond flour or oatmeal or something, then drop it by the spoon full onto a greased baking sheet, it will become cookies.

It’s a miracle! A study in versatility!

Here is a step by step description of what I usually do:

1. For a small amount of cookies, I strive for 1 cup of dry stuff….about a third of which is (unprocessed, high protein) almond flour, with some oat bran and flax seeds/chia seeds/hemp seeds/ other seeds added. Ditto other assorted nut flours. Or cereals. Or fruit. Bananas are good in this.

2. Now for the only critical ingredient: 1 teaspoon of baking powder.

3. Add some JustEggs (a vegan egg substitute) or Egg whites. Use as much as it takes to moisten it the dry stuff. If you want to use real eggs, go ahead. I will not be there in your kitchen, making a face at you.

4. Now add 1 tablespoon avocado oil, and couple tablespoons of whichever sweetener you feel will not give you cancer, diabetes or Alzheimers. Strive for the level of sweetness that you, the consumer, require. After decades of eating rubbery health food, I don’t require much. I have learned to think of rubbery and tasteless as a version of ‘umami’.

5. Other things you might want to add: a dash of vanilla, (or ½ cup of blueberries, or chocolate chips or peanuts. Just go ahead and add whatever you want to encounter while you are chewing your cookie).

6. As I mentioned before, I see this recipe as an improv. You might need more moisteners. Any of the liquids that are not bad for you will work: a plant-based milk, real milk, a juice, water. As I mentioned before, a lot of the ingredients are interchangeable. Go ahead and use more or fewer egg-like substances, or seeds. Or you can throw in a few raisins or add cinnamon! I, for one, am not going to stop you! The carrot pulp that is left after you’re finished juicing is a good ingredient (if you have the guts to keep juicing in the wake of my gall bladder story.) It creates cake or cookies that are dense and moist. Or obviously you can dissolve some cocoa powder into a hot milk facsimile and make things chocolatey. It goes without saying that chocolate is always a good cookie option.

7. Stir it all up. Thicker makes better cookies. Thinner makes better cake.

8. PS: If, perhaps you would like some ICING, here is a pretty good icing cheat: Simply mix no fat plain yogurt (plant based or other) with the same amount of low-fat cream cheese (tofutti works, too) Then add flavoring like vanilla, melted chocolate or cocoa powder, sweetener, etc. Voila: ICING that maybe isn’t as bad for you as icing…which of course is bad for you. But didn’t I just prove that it doesn’t matter? (I need to re-read my own words.)

   If this recipe is too loosey-goosey for your culinary needs, fine. Have it your way. Go find one of those recipe websites where they let you click on “Jump to Recipe.” Then sit there and read all about someone’s grandmother from the old country and how they gathered their own olives from their olive grove in Sicily.

   I’m sure it will probably be a warmer and fuzzier experience than my gallbladder story. But will it provide you with any information about The Mucusless Diet? Or Mauritania? Will it include the word accelerando?

   I think not.