Coconut Macaroons

One thing I'm definitely not is a cook. I'm a 5-minute cook, meaning if I can't make or prepare for the oven in 5 minutes, I don't cook it unless it's something I really want to try, but I'm am decent at some foods in those 5 minutes.

And I'm definitely not a baker by any stretch since that takes far more than 5 minutes to do almost anything baking, but I'll often try somethings once, as long as it doesn't use wheat or other grains which I can't eat anymore.

To that end I scoured as many of the non-wheat brands of cookies and settled on coconut macaroons as a mainstay desert, and found only one brand, All But Gluten (a Canadian company) makes decent ones. The problem was finding stores that carried them consistently.

And that turned out to be Safeway, but only one in a 10+ mile radius of home, the local one, and even though they run out of them long before all the other All But Gluten foods, they don't reorder just them, which I learned why.

The local Safeway stores don't do their own ordering of many products. Because the information about all products sold are transmitted (like all restaurants and stores do now) to regional or main offices in real-time, and those office do the order for the stores.

This means the employees in the bakery department at Safeway don't know what has been ordered and when it will arrive. This does not include wholesale companies who supply and stock the shelves of Safeway stores independent of Safeway, such as breads, chips, beverages, etc.

So after they ran out two weeks ago and hearing the same story, "They're on order." for over a week I bought all the ingredients to make my own coconut macacroons, all 5 of them of which I already had 4, only missing shredded coconut.

Then I learned to make them using this recipe which takes about an hour start to finish, including browning the coconut first, and even cleaning the dishes and utensils. The photo above is the second batch I made today, and they are great, chewy and full of taste.

That said, I doubt I'll buy store coconut macaroons except for the times I'm lazy because these really show how much homemade is different and better with a little practice, even for a lazy cook like me. It's not that hard and you don't need any fancy appliances, just your mind and your hands.