glutenfreedirtcheap

You don’t need flour to make cookies.  You don’t even need an oven.   You don’t need a kitchen, real utensils, or, in my case, a man.  That’ll show ’em.

If you’re really, really being cheap (and ecologically sound, and all that gaia-conscious claptrap), the amount of power used to bake is  important, too.  It’s particularly important if you don’t want to pay for the cost of, say, reversing the heat gain from a full size oven.  (Read: the cost of the air-conditioning to offset the heat from an oven in the summer can overwhelm any benefit you might get from baking yourself.)

Ingredients:

16 tablespoons peanutbutter  (The bulk kind from Sam’s or Costco is less.)

1 egg

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 tsp vanilla (optional)

Kitchen apparati:

Mixing bowl or casserole, or whatever’s clean and will withstand stirring sugar and peanutbutter

Tablespoon

Toaster Oven

Tin foil

Kitchen timer, if your toaster oven doesn’t have a timer.

Spatula for taking the cookies off of the toaster oven pan.

Turn the thermostat on your toaster oven to about 375 or 400–always add twenty-five to fifty degrees for any toaster oven recipe.  Line the toaster oven pan with tinfoil.  Measure the sugar into a bowl, and crack the egg into the sugar.  Spoon out the peanutbutter, and mix the whole mess with the tablespoon.   Put tablespoon-sized pieces of the batter onto the tinfoil-lined toaster oven pan.  Turn your kitchen timer or toaster oven timer to run for eight minutes.  When the timer goes off, take the pan out of the toaster oven, and let cool for about ten minutes.  These are fragile, like my ego–let them cool before removing them from the pan.

Repeat until the batter is used up.  These are very, very rich.  Eat slowly, savoring your very clever independence.

Cost:  Whatever 1/4 of a Costco peanutbutter tub costs and about 75 cents in power.