Name: Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe (Gluten-free, Grain-free, Vegan, Paleo)
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 20 min
Ingredients: 1/4 cup Earth Balance non-dairy butter substitute; 1/4 cup non-hydrogenated shortening; 1/3 cup coconut palm sugar; 3 tbsp coconut nectar (maple syrup or raw honey); 1 TBS vanilla extract; 1/2 cup blanched almond flour packed down (I use Honeyville no blends); 1/2 cup AP gluten free flour blend OR cassava flour for grain-free version*; 3/4 tsp xanthan gum; 1/4 tsp baking soda; 1/4 tsp sea salt; 1/2 - 2/3 cup allergy-free morsels; *You can also substitute 1/4 cup coconut flour plus 1/4 cup tapioca flour for the cassava flour.; For a paleo version of this cookie (replace the Earth Balance with another 1/4 cup of non-hydrogenated shortening.)

My Free Food Chocolate Chip Cookies leave Toll House in the Stone Ages. I’m talking total yaba daba do time.

That’s how stone age. Cause you don’t need refined sugar, butter, eggs, and wheat to make chocolate chip cookies to taste awesome. Not anymore. The post below, that I originally wrote for Mission Read, for the June 2013 Lifelong Learning through Cooking issue, explains it all. My Free Food Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe was featured at the end of the post. I have tweaked it since then, adding a Grain-free version, and making it even more delicious. Check out the recipe below!

The Cooking School of Gram

It may not have official accreditations. But it should.

It may not be nationally known. Perhaps we can change that.

I started cooking with Gram at six years old. One day, the summer between Kindergarten and first grade, I packed an overnight bag and my Charlie’s Angels lunchbox for an overnight stay with Gram. Like Luke traveling to study with Yoda, I returned home two weeks later.

That first two-week stay launched my culinary school of Gram learning. What could a six year-old and a 59 year-old have in common, you ask? Yoda’s like 800 years old, and I totally would’ve hung out with him, too.

I followed Gram around, well, everywhere, but mostly in the kitchen. That’s where Gram loved to be, and that’s where I loved to be with her. Thirty-five years ago she began to teach me her ways, her secrets, her methods, everything her mother and mother-in-law taught her. From special ways to twist Italian cookies, to seasoning sauce, tricks for homemade pasta, to pies and pot roast: she completed most lessons with, “that’s how we do.”

Four generations of ravioli making. Gram shows Bella, her great-granddaughter, (at 2) how to work the dough just like she showed me. From the left: me (Angela), my brother (Carmen, Gram (Helen), my neice and Gram’s great-granddaughter (Bella), and Dad (Gene).

Gram loved her sweets and she loved to bake. Her Italian cookie towers became legendary, stories of them told near and far. Stacked over a foot high and wide, with Italian candy almonds nestled in between all those cookies, when it entered the room, I think it floated. On its own. It would have had that power. It Jedi’d itself. It was glorious.

The biggest VIP at any wedding, shower, or special event, everyone waited for Gram’s Italian cookie tower. Then, like a gun at the races, people shot off to fill every purse, napkin, or MacGyver’d makeshift doggie bag at the first sighting. I failed to secure one cookie at my own wedding. My fault, too busy chatting it up with guests. Only sad shards of cookie shrapnel remained when I finally got to them.

The first thing Gram taught me to make? God-given, glorious cookies. It’s probably why I developed a somewhat unhealthy attachment to them, a food blankey sort of love. There are worse vices, right? Who doesn’t love a cookie? Maybe someone soulless and wrong. In my family, cookie love is in our blood.

The first cookie I made with Gram: chocolate chip. What is better than a hot, gooey chocolate chip cookie? Not much.

But Gram upgraded me to the next cookie lesson right away, my favorite Italian cookie of all time: Tarralls. I have no clue if that is the real name or how you spell them. That’s how they show up in Gram’s old recipe box. They also are named “5 Egg Cookies” in there, so your guess is as good as mine.

As with most of Gram’s “recipes,” for the ones she even has, they pretty much consist of a list of ingredients. Instructions – you’re on your own. She assumes that if you’re making her food, you know how to cook. If you don’t, good luck. If anything, you may see a line that says, “make like a pie,” or “bake til done.” Hence the need to cook with Gram to learn her food. A never-ending learning that evolved over decades.

The secret to the Tarralls isn’t as much the mixing or the baking. Although Gram will be sure to tell you that if you screw those things up your cookies won’t come out right. It’s the twisting of the dough that keeps them soft, cake like. She first taught me how to do this sometime around 1980. I still make them today.

All Gram’s cooking lessons included more than a recipe and a demonstration. She let me do it. “You gotta get your hands in there, Angela.”

Gram schools me with a scrippele lesson. (Is it one “l” or two? It’s spelled both ways in her “recipes.”) She loved getting her hands in there. Of course, she was yelling at me that day in my kitchen for taking a picture. “Come on, Ange!” I wasn’t cooking with her if I was taking pictures. This is why I have so few pics of Gram and I cooking together!

She showed me how the dough should feel, because ingredients, temperature, and environment may vary. You need to adjust accordingly based on how the food should taste, feel, look, react, and respond. “How’s a recipe gonna teach you that?” she’d furrow her eyebrows and ask.

Without saying a word, just by watching her work, Gram taught me that a love and respect for the food, her joy, somehow made it better. Granted, my hypothesis has yet to make the science journals. Even still, I carry no doubt about the impact of it on Gram’s cooking. If anything, over the years, the importance of this lesson has grown larger. The energy you put into something is the energy you get out. Cooking School of Gram 101. A lifelong lesson that never tires and never gets old.

The passing of this cookie proved so monumental, many of my great-aunts circled around Gram’s long, wooden, kitchen table, watching this lesson take place. They looked so proud, a little Italian in training, who would pass on the family traditions.

Gram and my great-aunts treasured few things more than knowing that the younger generations would carry on their traditions. It kept their life’s work alive. I think it gave them purpose and comfort to know that “how we do” would nourish generations to come – if passed down. Not just the food, but the stories that go along with them. As my culinary Jedi skills grew, I realized that keeping “how we do” alive ran much deeper than the food.

“How We Do” Inspires “How I Do”

Set the DeLorean to 1995. I’m the model Italian granddaughter, learning “how we do,” from a young age, so I can pass on all Gram’s awesome food, our family traditions. (Angels singing on high. Look at me go.)

Along that road, I managed to gain 100 lbs and rack up a bunch of unexplained health issues. Too many chocolate chip cookies? I did consider them a food group at that point in my life.

After 296 doctor’s visits (not really, more like 20), food allergies figure four’d me into a complete diet transformation: no wheat, milk, eggs or sugar.

What Italian can’t eat bread, pasta, cheese, milk, and eggs? Tony Soprano would wack me on general principle. Could I argue with him? And crap, what would Gram say??

Looking for sympathy (totally stupid on my part), I got more of a “Gee Ricky, sorry your Mom blew up last night,” kind of response from Gram. With a confused, “puzzled up” look, she said something like:

“No pasta? Pasta’s good for you. Who can’t eat bread? There must be some kind of pasta and bread you can eat.”

I was busy throwing a “Danger, danger, Will Robinson,” tantrum, and Gram was already thinking about what pasta and bread I could eat.

I told her about the awful food, choking down non-dairy boxed milk, scoffing at dense baked goods, and turning my lip up at flavorless food touted as healthy. “Why does healthy food have to suck,” I complained. Gram said, “So make it better, Angela. You can cook.”

As always, Gram was right. Inspired, I started with food I knew. Gram’s food. Which happens to be the most awesome food. Ever. (I’ll throwdown with anyone who challenges it.)

Me and Gram. My teacher. My mentor. My inspiration. My light. Here we are at her 90th birthday party/Carnivale (February 2009). 30+ of us ate a couple hundred of the ravioli we made in the other picture above. She was so happy that day. Gram, Helen Grace Marinelli, passed the following August.

I swapped wheat, dairy, eggs, and refined sugar for healthier ingredients. I made it my mission to recreate it, not just into food I could eat, but into food anyone would love it eat – food that’s just as good as Gram’s. In the meantime, I lost 100 lbs., and got my health back. Maybe I was onto something?

My confidence in my food comes from my foundation of “how we do” with Culinary Yoda. We cooked together from the time I was six until she passed in 2009. For years Gram and I sat at the table, tasted my recreations, and she gave me feedback. Honest feedback.

The Cooking School of Gram closed in 2009. I am so grateful for the 31 years I attended. Even though I’ve earned formal degrees, I can honestly say, no other education can match my time with Gram. I utilize what she taught me every day. Stuff like:

“Food doesn’t wait, Angela. You do. And it doesn’t rush to get anywhere. You’re on its timetable.”

“No one wants to eat ugly food.”

“Don’t serve food until it’s ready.”

“Make it taste good.”

“Don’t give anyone anything you don’t want to eat.”

“Get your hands in there.”

“Taste it.”

“Know how it should look.”

Just some of the things Gram passed to me. Now, I share it with others. “How we do” lives on Gram, even if some of the ingredients get transformed for a healthier today.

“How We Do” + “How I Do” = a Cookbook

This is how your batter should look just before baking. It should be firm and tacky.

I have hundreds of recreated recipes, many inspired by Gram’s original ones (some written down, some not so much). I’m compiling them into a cookbook, telling the story of how Gram’s food and cooking with her, inspired me to recreate the recipes. Delicious, dairy-free, wheat-free, gluten-free, vegan, and refined sugar-free food. Food just as good as Gram’s!

Years ago when I told Gram I planned to create healthier chocolate chip cookies she tilted her head, pursed her lips, looked a little doubtful, and said, “Ok, Ange, you let me taste them.”

Gram loved her sweets. And she didn’t like you messing with them. But I knew I could win her over. I just needed time to get the recipe right. Very supportive, Gram critiqued countless iterations over the years. Little did I know, however, that it would take 15 years until I was totally happy with this recipe, a year after Gram passed. I know she would love them. I hope you do, too.

Free Food Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

Dairy-free, Egg-free, Gluten-free, Grain-free, Refined Sugar-free, Paleo-friendly, Vegan

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