Do you ever notice how certain tastes change as you get older? Certain things you may have loved as a child you wouldn’t eat now if someone paid you.

When I was a kid if you had said to me, one day you’re going to LOVE brussel sprouts, I would have thought you were drunk. Pizza buns, Kraft dinner and frozen shepherd’s pie were staples in my life. Another fave was chicken fries, but what are chicken fries you ask? Well let me tell you, they were in the frozen food aisle of the grocery store, and they looked like fries only they had this mysterious shell like coating. Are you drooling yet?AND when you bit into them it was more like a cardboard foam ass texture and I LOVED them.

Funny thing is these “healthy” eating habits started pretty early on in life, when I was in kindergarten I wrote a story called “Why I love my MOM…”

The story went a little like this… I love my mom because she makes the best mayonnaise sandwiches. THE END. PS there was more to these sandwiches than just mayo, don’t want all you mommy’s out there thinking i was eating mayo on white bread, but in my eyes, mayonnaise sandwiches.

Luckily with time I have changed my ways and my eating habits. Truth… I would actually like to take a moment and thank celiac disease because before “gluten free” I could barely boil water, now I think I could give Bobby Flay a run for his money.

But I’m not going to lie, I often find myself wondering, if I ever came across a gluten free version of chicken fries would I buy them?

You know for old time sake.

And now we bake Figgy Newtons, sorry to all the readers out there that were expecting a tutorial on foam ass fries.

Filling

Ingredients:

1 cup of organic dried figs

(take my advice and get the sun-dried unsulfured ones, because who wants sulfur filled cookies)

4 tbsp unsweetened apple sauce

1 tsp cinnamon

This is another one of those super easy come together recipes; the hard part is not eating every single cookie on the tray when you’re done.

First make sure to remove any stems from your dried figs and toss them in your food processor along with the applesauce and cinnamon. Process until smooth and set aside.

Dough

Ingredients:

3 cups almond meal
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup avocado oil
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 350

In a medium size bowl toss in all your ingredients and mix until combined, then wrap up your dough nice and tight and refrigerate for one hour. Talk about the longest hour of life when you know that cookie time is at the end of this 60 minutes. Once your dough has had a chance to chill divide into 4 equal parts, believe me when I say this you’re going to want to do all of your dough work on a piece of parchment paper unless you want to play a game I like to call more dough on my hands then in my cookies.

While I was working with each section I had the rest of the dough in the fridge, much easier to work with if it stays cool.
In between a piece of folded over parchment paper you are going to roll out your dough into a rectangular shape about 10 inches long and about 4 inches wide. Make sure you don’t roll it too thin or else trouble will be in your fig newton future.

Place a quarter of the filling in the middle of your rolled out dough and gentle spread down the middle.

Once you have your filling spread out, using your parchment paper simply fold over both sides of the dough until the figgy filling is covered up like a perfect little present.
Repeat with the remaining 3 sections of dough.

On a baking sheet lined with parchment paper place all four logs in a row. I found the easiest way to do this was one by one as I finished I would (using the parchment paper) transfer the fig newton log over to the baking sheet, no hands just a little dance between me and the parchment paper.

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes or until the dough starts to brown slightly.

Once you pull the cookies from the oven allow them to cool on the baking sheet, and yes I’m going to make you wait at least another half an hour before you can cut each log into 5 cookies.

Don’t worry I promise all this waiting will be worth it when you take your first bite. Pretty sure I was making audible noises when I polished off my first two.