Cookbook Club – The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen

For our regular August Cookbook Club event, we used The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman. I’d never cooked Native American food before, so I was looking forward to cooking (and eating) from this book that uses indigenous American ingredients – no European staples like wheat flour, dairy products, or sugar. Check out my Cookbook Club site to see how everyone really stepped up to the challenge of sourcing some hard-to-find ingredients. For now – my dish!

I will admit that I chose the Sunflower Cookies partly because they contained ingredients I was sure I could acquire. But I was also very interested to try a cookie made primarily of sunflower seeds and maple syrup.

The first step was to make Sunny Butter, which involved food processing 1 cup unsalted toasted sunflower seeds, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 cup maple syrup until a ball formed. I found, however, that the mixture was too liquid to form a ball. Luckily I had a small amount of leftover sunflower seeds, which I threw in to help thicken the mixture up.

The recipe then called for the Sunny Butter to be stirred together with more maple syrup and a pinch of salt. As the Sunny Butter was already barely thick enough to form into balls, I decided I’d have to forego adding more maple syrup. I did try the Sunny Butter and it was quite tasty, so I figured the cookies might turn out ok.

I used a tablespoon to scoop up balls of the mixture, and rolled them in cornmeal. This was a bit of a nightmare since the Sunny Butter seemed to be much more sticky and runny than it was supposed to be. But I did the best I could, and was able to form some semblance of a ball once the cornmeal coating dried it out a bit.

I placed the balls on a cookie sheet, flattened them slightly with my hand, and baked them at 350 degrees for 8 minutes.

These are not the prettiest cookies, in fact I’d say they’re downright ugly. The picture in the cookbook is deceptive because it appears not to follow the recipe – the cookies aren’t flattened at all and they are rolled in sunflower seeds. But I dressed my sunflower cookies up with some sunflower petals, which actually presented quite nicely. And despite the travails I suffered in the making, the cookies turned out to be really tasty with a nice chewy crunchy texture. I’ll definitely make them again!