Dinner tonight was a total flop. I don’t want to talk about it.

Okay, fine – I’ll talk about it. Let’s just say it involved the crock pot and a bag of frozen spinach, among other ingredients. Frozen spinach is the only ingredient worth noting as I’m fairly confident that’s what made tonight’s meal… an experience.

Anyway, the whole reason I was using the crock pot was because I was once again assisting this afternoon in a homeschool class the girls are in. I thought it would make the day a lot easier to have dinner hot and ready when we got home – so the crock pot was dragged out, and yeah. I already told you how that story ended.

Being the parent assistant today is also the reason I was making cookies at 10:30 this morning.  One of the parent duties for this particular class includes “bringing a healthy snack to share”.

Given this is a decent sized group of kids, the whole food allergy thing comes into play – so I needed to bring something that was free of dairy, nuts and red dye.

Check, check and check.

I’ve made Apple Apple Not Carrot Cake Muffins for this class before – and thanks to Ava’s suggestion, I momentarily considered making banana bread today.  I eventually settled on cookies made with bananas to make the bake time shorter and the serving of 12 hungry kids at 3pm easier.

Now I’ll give the disclaimer that these are not the most incredibly decadent cookies you’ll ever have the pleasure of sinking your teeth into (more sugar and chocolate might have upped the delicious factor) – but they were still plenty good and definitely easy, and they absolutely worked for a healthy snack (served with apple slices) for 12 kids + 1 teacher + 1 parent helper on a Thursday afternoon.  Every cookie disappeared, nobody spat their’s out and no one went into anaphylactic shock.

Win, win and win.

Banana Oatmeal Cookies

2 ripe bananas, mashed
1 egg, beaten
1 c flour (I used 50/50 blend)
1 c rolled oats
1/2 c sugar
1/4 c butter or coconut oil
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
dash cinnamon and nutmeg

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.  Combine banana, egg, vanilla, butter and mix well. In a separate bowl combine all dry ingredients and then stir in banana-egg mixture. I used an 1/8 cup measure to scoop cookie dough onto lightly oiled cookie sheets and baked for 10 – 11 minutes.

These cookies were chewy, sweet (but not overly so) and were quite banana-y.  This recipe made 16 cookies – even Maxine ate one!  That fact alone is very telling, and it also makes these cookies something I’m totally willing to talk about.