I purchased a new Kitchen Toy recently, An electric spice grinder. I have used my mortar and pestal to gently grind up spices for various recipes, but to get the spices ground to powder takes some real effort and often does not work. My kids hate big pieces of hard spices in our food, and so I have been planning to purchase an electric grinder for some time, and finally used it for the first time yesterday.
Here is the grinder I purchased at Vitamin Cottage.


Ben helped me grind up the spices for this cookie recipe:


Before adding Cardamon to the electric mill it is important to get the seeds out of the pods. I used my mortar and pestle to crush the pods and extract the seeds

Cardamon seeds in mortar

Ben with the ground spices – Cardamon (6 pods worth of seeds), one stick of cinnamon, six whole cloves, one tablespoon of whole fennel, one teaspoon of whole anise, and a quarter of a whole nutmeg.

Yesterday I cooked up several things using whole spelt flour mixed with a half a cup of fresh ground golden flax seeds. Here is a picture of the spelt spice cookies baking in the oven with a loaf of spelt bread wrapped around copious amounts of turkey and cheddar cheese and sprinkled with sesame seeds. We had it for supper last night and it was delicious.
Here is the recipe for the Spelt Sugar Spice Cookies
1 C Butter
2 C Brown Sugar
2 Eggs
1 tsp Vanilla
3 1/4 C Fresh Ground Spelt Flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
Spices
3 inch piece of Cinnamon stick
1 Tbs Whole Fennel
1 Tsp Whole Anise
6 Whole Cloves
6 Cardamon Pods
1/4 Whole Nutmeg
Directions:
First – Grind the spelt flour and grind the whole spices
Cream butter with sugar until light and fluffy.
Add in eggs, vanilla, and spices and beat well.
Gradually add in the dry ingredients and mix well.
Refrigerate dough for an hour.
Bake in cookie bar pan for 25 minutes on 350 degrees.
These cookies tasted best hot out of the oven, but I have been munching on them steadily for the past hour while I blogged and they are really good the next day with a cup of mint herbal tea.

Jenny Hatch