One sister's 'Mmm' is another's 'um, no thanks'

IN the last year I haven’t spent much alone time with my sister, which is no surprise considering she is the mother of a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old. We’ve grabbed a bite or a cup of tea around town, but to hunker down for serious yakking and snacking, no. One reason is we aren’t eating the same things. Phoebe has been vegan on and off for years, and recently, she’s been more on.

So in the last few weeks when a certain cookbook caught my eye, I knew she would be the perfect person with whom to try it. “Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar: 100 Dairy-Free Recipes for Everyone’s Favorite Treats” by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero (Da Capo), was published on Nov. 10.

I can’t say I’ve followed much in the world of vegan literature, but Phoebe has and she owns the other books these women have written, together and separately. Once I read the introductory pages of this one, I was on board. The authors are not preachy or intolerant of heathens like me who eat and drink everything, which made me feel less defensive and more interested in what they had to say.

My pushback on being vegan, or following any rigidly prescribed code of eating, comes from two things, I think: being raised kosher and growing up in the age of Twiggy, to whom I still bear no resemblance. Kosher was an ongoing litany of you-can’t-have-this-with-that. Dieting was a numbers game; if you ate this, you couldn’t eat that. So once I was grown and done with them both, to embrace yet another treaty of denial was out of the question.

Phoebe comes at it differently. For years, she and my mother had stomach troubles. They visited a nutritionist who advised them to eat fewer animal products. Phoebe immediately felt better, she said, more “energetic and clearheaded.”

“You should do it, too,” she told me, when she came over to bake cookies. “You’d feel so much better and clearer and vibrant.”

I told her I actually felt fine and perfectly clear, especially about being free to eat what I want. “I like being told what to eat,” she said. “It’s like wearing a uniform. The less choice you have the easier it is. Today there are too many choices of everything. If you rule out food groups, it makes it more manageable. And you lose weight and do something good for the planet.”

Well, she owns a car and I don’t. The planet and I are square.

As I ate tuna fish and she sipped tea, no honey, we had a truth-telling moment.

“I ate some of the kids’ Halloween candy,” she confided. I shrugged. She wasn’t going to get any fire and brimstone from me.

“There’s a whole emotional content to eating and sometimes kale doesn’t fill it,” she said. “I limit the sugar my kids eat, but I do give them sugar.”

I was glad to hear it since the vegan cookie authors are elastic about granulated white sugar, acknowledging that while some cane sugar can be processed with animal bone char (who knew?), vegan options are available. “It’s also still the cheapest sweetener and easy to use with predictable results,” they write. After discussing both cane and beet sugars they conclude: “But you know, don’t let any of this confuse you. You probably know what sugar is so just go ahead and go read something more important now, like that 800-page biography on Robert Moses.”

Brava. I think humor should be mandatory in every diet.

Phoebe had requested a recipe with chocolate chips and chose Banana Everything Cookies, which included walnuts and rolled oats. I’m not much of a baker, but I do appreciate the magic of butter, eggs and sugar. Without the benefit of the first two ingredients, I found this dough sticking to my hands and repelling the chips. I added more flour, which felt stiff, so I added more oil. With a spoon, I managed to scrape together some flattened mounds and finally got them into the oven.

Phoebe loved them. “Remember when we were growing up and Mommy used to see people coming out of the health food store and say that they had bad color?” she asked, laughing. I nodded but didn’t laugh. To me, the cookies tasted chalky and chewy in a not particularly pleasant way.

She disagreed: “I like the consistency, which is very distinctive. I like the hint of banana. They’re nutty and earthy and yummy.” She later shared them with three friends who agreed; one even requested the recipe.

I wasn’t convinced, but I went back and tried one again. It was better having cooled completely because the outside was crunchy, so it tasted more like a cookie and less like homework. I thought how odd it was for my sister and me to have been raised in the same house, eating the same food and ending up with such different mouths.

I e-mailed her to ask if her boys enjoyed the cookies. She told me that Ilan, the 5-year-old, took one sniff, then refused to try them.

I always liked that kid.