Last night I baked a couple of the dumpling squash that we grew in the garden this summer.  As eating squash they have a dry and meaty flesh which works beautifully with spicy dishes and a nice fluffy rice pilaf.  Oh, and they also taste like candy: incredibly, almost cloyingly, sweet; so much so that the leftovers had to be showcased in a dessert-designated treat.  This recipe, therefore, is a crunchified-remake of the pumpkin oatmeal cookies from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s first book, Vegan with a Vengeance.  They’re nice to nosh on alongside a cup of hot tea mid-afternoon.  Or to feed a toddler at breakfast without too much guilt.

Yield: 4 dozen cookies

What you need:

• 2 cups whole spelt or whole wheat flour
• 1 1/3 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground mace
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1/3 cup sunflower oil
• 2 tablespoons blackstrap molasses (if you go organic on nothing else in the recipe, at least try and do so here)
• 1 cup puréed squash (dumpling or kabocha works best; you may need to add some water to the cooked squash and then blender it all together if the flesh is too dry, you need a thick and creamy purée here.  If using pumpkin or a squash that isn’t very sweet rather than those suggested, you may want to add an extra 1/4 cup of Sucanat or coconut sugar to the batter)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)
• 1-1/2 tablespoons ground flaxseeds
• 1 cup chopped walnuts (or other nut, pecans are particularly decadent)
• 1/2 cup raisins (oh, and insert that same note about the organic  from the blackstrap molasses here)

What you do:

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.
2. In a large bowl, mi the flour, oats, soda, salt, cinnamon and mace.
3. In a smaller bowl, whisk together all the ingredients except for the walnuts and raisins.
4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones and mix.  Fold the raisins and walnuts in.
5. Drop by the tablespoonful onto parchment or sil-pat lined pans.  Flatten them a little as necessary to get a spiffy-looking cookie.
6. Bake for 12 minutes, rotating pans half-way if baking more than one (and multi-level) at a time.
7. Let cool in the pan a wee bit and then transfer to wire racks.