Thank you, Heidi. Thank you for having a friend like Nikki. Thank you for visiting Nikki recently and discovering this beautiful recipe for her healthy cookies. Thank you for sharing it on your beautiful site, 101 Cookbooks, last week.

To make a long story short, I’m going through one of those phases. How can I describe it? Hmm.

Well, I just started exercising four times per week with a trainer who mocks me with her heavy weights and complaints about my hip strength. (I mean, who knew I had no hip strength?)

And after years learning about food, ingredients, and the details behind everything I put in my mouth, I’m actually starting to eat healthier, preferring a pile of gently-braised collards, kale and swiss chard over a pound of butter-soaked mashed potatoes. (No offense, potatoes. You’re yummy, but a pound of you soaked in butter does my body no good.)

On top of all that, I’ve become a huge fan of local foods and organic ingredients. My most complicated food dilemma involves deciding whether to eat the local ground cherries that I picked myself or the sweet, sexy, plump organic figs that someone flew in from California. Really, I struggle over these types of decisions daily, as I truly want to put my money where my mouth is, but when you’re invited to a luciously extravagant meal at the latest hip Boston restaurant, you can’t beat yourself up about how that sweet, raw fish is flown in from Japan, daily. I try not to cry over the environmental impact and the fact that our north shores have some of the best fish in the world. Alas, fresh Gloucester fish is not covered in foie gras and truffles and homemade potato chips and gently-braised garlic and sea urchin and… oh, never mind. You get my point.

So to make a long story long, I’m going through one of those phases where I worry about food and exercise and our environment on a daily basis. And when I worry, I crave sweet stuff. And when I crave sweet stuff, I usually want chocolate. Not super healthy dark chocolate, but super sugary milk chocolate. The stuff that puts weight on my oh-so-not-strong hips.

Heidi’s web site has become a beacon of hope for me in this troubling food world we live in. She reinterprets traditional comfort food into healthy, vegetarian, sometimes-vegan delights. I heart Heidi, and am not an ounce jealous that she gets to whip up foodie miracles as a full-time job. Not. Jealous. One. Bit.

So, thank you, Heidi. (I hope I get to say that in person some day, at some food festival or one of my trips out west, and perhaps interview her for this site someday.) These cookies, packed with healthy rolled oats, unsweetened coconut, almond meal, mushy bananas, coconut oil and some other fine stuff, is just the sort of thing I needed this morning when my cold is apt to get the better of me and compel me to feed it. (Feed a cold, right?)

I did opt to substitute the dark chocolate with organic milk chocolate chips. I did this just because I could. I had expensive Swiss dark chocolate in front of me, but reached for the milk chocolate instead. I figured a few chips won’t hurt, right, my fabulous, sweet, gorgeous trainer? These healthy cookies are delicious, moist and have just a touch of sweetness from the bananas. If I had kids who didn’t like healthy-tasting foods, I might add a spell of maple syrup to sweeten it up a bit more.

Oh, and one final note, don’t get discouraged when you can’t find unsweetened coconut in any mainstream supermarket. Mainstream supermarkets simply don’t care about sugar content; they care about putting good deals in front of customers and good deals often involve processed, unhealthy grossness. I ended up getting mine at Whole Foods. It was fairly affordable too, go figure.

Related posts:

1. Shared Love for Brussels Sprouts
2. Recipe: Peanut Butter Cookies
3. Blogger Recipe: Hazelnut & Chard Ravioli Salad Recipe
4. ‘Blood Orange’ Blogger Recipes
5. Recipe: Molasses Cookies