Big Disclaimers: 1. Warn the guests that these have peanut butter. 2. Don’t lick the batter off the spoon. The label on my oat flour warns that the flour must NOT be eaten raw. There are warnings about wheat flour nowadays too, that we can’t let the kiddos lick the spoon any more. Apparently, wheat fields are now contaminated by the deer population, as deer have proliferated so much and bring diseases along with.

Recipes for these cookies are all over YouTube, posted by better cooks.

This recipe might work with any kind of potato. At a St. Patrick’s Day party at college 45 years ago, one of our generous warm-hearted fellow students brought rolled “Irish Potato” bites including peeled white potato mashed with condensed milk and coconut cream and a whale of sugar and cinnamon. At the time I didn’t understand, and was too polite to ask, why these delicious treats had a biting astringent metallic aftertaste. Since then I learned that it means the potatoes had developed solanine (boiling doesn’t remove it), and they should have been thrown away. Potatoes can solanize even before they sprout or turn green. If the flavor bites, don’t eat them.

Back to our recipe. Sweet potatoes are sweeter to begin with and apparently they have a gentler glycemic index than white potatoes, so we use those.

Bake the sweet potato, mash it with peanut butter and oat flour, form into cookies, press with a fork, and bake. The cookies don’t rise, so you need not space them apart in the pan.

I used leftover steamed potatoes, peeling off the very outer papery skin. Then I inspected the potatoes carefully, cutting out anything that looked like a potato eye; the eyes are very bitter and not healthy to eat. Then I mashed the potato in the Cuisinart with cinnamon and vanilla first, and turned it into a bowl before adding unsalted creamy peanut butter and just a little dash of honey. I kneaded that well, then mashed in enough oat flour to form a soft dough. You can roll these into flattened balls, place them in a baking pan on parchment paper, use a fork to press in cross-hatch patterns to make them look more like regular peanut butter cookies, and bake.

They came out fine, but at first bite the flavor was a little cloying. Next time I’ll add a pinch of salt to the oat flour, and perhaps use chunky peanut butter. The starch-rich potatoes can carry more flavoring than I thought; a good dash of pumpkin spice would work.

After 25 minutes of baking at 350 F the cookies were still quite soft, so I let them sit in the oven while it cooled down. That improved the texture. My guess is that frozen they will taste even better.

They have a nice dense moist marzipan quality. It would be interesting to try almond butter, almond flour, and almond extract next time. Tahini and some ground sesame seeds with a dash of orange would be worth a try too.