Hello friends, Amy here with a baked good I made last week. I wanted to bring treats to share with my friends, something we could nibble while we passed the break table. And if no one had to wash plates, forks or spoons, that was a bonus. My people truly delight in cooking, hadn’t had anything mesquite in ages, and I wanted to impress. After considering my options for a month, I suddenly realized… that’s this afternoon!!!

Drought makes for patchy harvesting, but I had a stash of pods. The trick to making HOME grinding work, especially in humid weather, is to toast the pods RIGHT before grinding. No community mesquite pod milling event near you? Need that mesquite meal TODAY? No problem!

I baked in a thin layer at about 275 degrees F with convection for maybe 5 minutes. Try longer if you don’t use or have a fan. It should smell sweeeeet. I opted to not develop any golden color, but that’s an option!

After cooling JUST enough to handle easily, I tossed the pods into a high powered blender. A regular blender or food process does not suffice. Without the last minute toasting, grinding makes a paste in there. This of course is an issue with any mesquite meal grinding method, but expecially for the blender or stone tools.

Unbelievablly, it only takes a few pulses.

Any fine sieve or a flour sifter can remove the meal form the hard bits of unground pod and seed. Any grinding method will require this step, even hammer mills.

Sifting is even faster than grinding, depending on the size of the holes and quanity of mesquite meal needed.

To show off this flour, I impulsively chose a simple recipe from this small out of print book. However, you can purchase the huge current edition!

Chocolate chip cookies! I had a half bag of chocolate chips and pecans on hand, and chocolate with mesquite is classic. In case my butter spent too much time in the freezer, I doubled the vanilla. No brown sugar in sight, but a gallon of mollassas to use up.

I love making my notes in hard copy cookbooks, and reading the kitchen culture from long gone relatives in their books. And the bookmarks that are labels from my friends’ gifted food creations are my kind of treasures.

I baked these chocolate chip oatmeal mesquite pecan cookies until just barely set, let them finish cooling in transit, and served them chewy with the chocolate still melted. I’m sure they would not tolerate stacking. Some were full sized, the others bit sized. None were leftover.

Happy autumn!