Join Debbie as she raves about whole foods, rants about chemicals and generally celebrates cooking and eating with fresh, local, nutritious foods. And sometimes she might get a little feisty….

Let me just say it loud and clear: I’m in no way, shape or form a vegan. I don’t think it’s healthy or appetizing. But my cooking vegan friends around the interweb saved me a few years back, when we found out my son was allergic to eggs and dairy. He has since outgrown these allergies, but some of our favorite dessert treats are still egg and dairy free.

I can also attest to the fact that some vegan desserts simply suck. There’s about nothing less appetizing than wheat germ in a cookie, and some baked treats just need eggs. Then again, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can just add an egg to a vegan cookie recipe and make it come out better. I’ve tried, and I think I upset the balance of the earth on its axis or something, because it completely ruined a perfect cookie recipe.

A perfect vegan cookie recipe, you say? Yes, and I’ll share it with you.

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Before you automatically dismiss these as unsatisfying, gross cookie-pucks that wouldn’t be appetizing to anyone normal, open your mind and read me out. Owen seems to be having trouble with white sugar lately (a wee bit of an understatement), so we’ve got the kid detoxing. We actually don’t eat white sugar in our house, but the birthday parties and end of the school year celebrations have gotten the better of us.

We were headed to yet another party, and Owen needed a treat and I wanted to try a new recipe. There aren’t a whole lot of sugar-free cookie recipes out there that are also healthy (honey doesn’t count as sugar-free — it digests like a white sugar — and artificial sweeteners aren’t actually edible).

So how good does the combination of peanut butter, oatmeal and banana sound? Yeah, it wasn’t good enough for me, either, so I switched a few ingredients, added grain-sweetened chocolate chips and created a cookie masterpiece. These are truly the most delicious sugar-free cookies I’ve made.

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Kymberly Pye, today’s Guest-clacker, lives in Los Angeles with her husband and four-legged children. When she’s not in the kitchen, she’s knitting or crocheting or hiking in the desert. Her favorite food is ketchup. www.kimberlypye.blogspot.com

Often the victim of making rash purchases based on the weirdness of a vegetable, I bought an acorn squash the other day with absolutely no idea what to do with it. I could cook it and mash it up Thanksgiving-style, but that’s hardly a meal for couple like us.

I scoured the Web for recipes, and like that one, everything seemed so Thanksgiving-y. Baked squash. Grilled squash. Stuffed squash. Squash as a centerpiece. But squash soup sounded great! The only problem was that every recipe called for fatty creams, chicken stock (we’re vegetarians), and loads of sugar.

I wanted something healthy and filling, so I studied a few different theories on squash soup and made up my own recipe.

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