Lily Collins's Favorite Vegan Cookies Have a Surprise Ingredient
By Alyse Whitney. Photo by: Getty Images.
Lily Collins makes a really good quinoa chocolate chip cookie. They're vegan, gluten-free, and made with an excessive amount of chocolate—but that's all Collins will tell us while chatting about her new show The Last Tycoon{: rel=nofollow} (based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished final novel, now streaming on Amazon).
She will say that recipe is based off a friend's version that she loved. "It was like a puzzle. A lot of tinkering, quinoa flour everywhere," she joked. "When I didn't burn them and they tasted great, I was pumped."
Collins battled an eating disorder for a number of years, which always made her hesitant to get in the kitchen. But once she made it to recovery, she was eager to learn to cook. "I see food as fuel now, and not punishment. No matter how cheesy it sounds, when you cook with excitement, love, real care, and attention, it tastes better," she says. "I want to live in the world of having experiences and memories, not remembering what I did or didn't eat."
In her recent memoir, Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me{: rel=nofollow}, Collins details how, when she was 24 and in recovery, she surprised her mom with a dinner she cooked entirely by herself: miso-agave foil-packet-cooked salmon, a colorful "pico de gallo-type" quinoa salad, guacamole, and her now-signature quinoa cookies. Although she was nervous that she'd mess something up, everything went off without a hitch, and her mom was shocked and overjoyed. The meal was an early version of her cooking style today: light and fresh with lots of kick and spice.
Collins still doesn't often cook for herself. "At the end of a long work day, it's the last thing I want to do," she admits. "I love cooking for a communal thing, but I won't be doing the daily meal at home until I have kids."
When she is in the kitchen, she experiments with vegan and gluten-free ingredients, even though she isn't strictly vegan or gluten-free herself. "It's a fun challenge to see what things work," she says. "Will this dough rise with rice flour? Will it combine with everything, or be a total failure? There are so many factors that go into it."
For Collins, the most rewarding part is the happiness her food brings others. "I was most proud when my little brother had gluten-free, vegan cookies. He was like, 'It's not real chocolate! I don't want it!' but then when he took a bite, his face lit up and he ate the whole thing," she says. "I love when something tastes good, but it's even more fun when you can say 'I told you so.'"
This story originally appeared on Bon Appetit.
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