Raw Vegan Breakfast Cookie Coffee

Week two hundred. I don't track the weeks—Sister Aisha or someone at RecipeSpinoff does—but when I learned it was two hundred I sat with that for a moment. Two hundred weeks of whatever this blog is. Two hundred Mondays since March 2016, which means two hundred weeks of Loretta Simms cooking and living and losing and finding again. Not every week was a good week. Some of them were the hardest weeks I have ever had. But they were all weeks. They were all here. I was here for all of them. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

I wrote a post this week about what it means to keep showing up. Not in the motivational-poster sense—I don't write in the motivational-poster sense, Bernice would have found that offensive—but in the specific, practical sense of: when the grief is large and the kitchen is cold and you are not ready, you keep showing up anyway because the people who need to eat are still hungry, and your readiness is not the condition of their need, and you start with what you can do rather than what you can't. You make coffee. You heat up what someone else made. You put the pot on even if you don't know what will go in it yet. You are in the kitchen. The kitchen is on. That's where you start.

Martin Luther King Day is today and the city is observing it the way Birmingham observes it—with weight, with memory, with the specific Alabama understanding that civil rights is not history, it is the ongoing project of being alive in this state and this country as a Black person, as a person who knows exactly where the 16th Street Baptist Church is and what it smells like when you stand inside it and look at the memorial window and understand what the word sacrifice means. I went to the memorial service this afternoon. I stood in the church and I thought about Bernice, who knew the mothers. I brought her with me. She comes everywhere I go.

I said it in the post and I meant it: you start with coffee. Not as metaphor — as literal first instruction. The kitchen is cold, you are not ready, and the coffee goes on. This raw vegan breakfast cookie coffee is exactly the recipe for that kind of morning: no oven, no fuss, no performance of having it together. You blend what you have, you pour it, and you sit down with it. I made it the morning of the memorial service, before I drove to 16th Street, and I held that cup with both hands the way Bernice used to hold hers — like it was the one thing keeping her tethered to the day. Two hundred weeks. We start here.

Prep Time: 5 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 5 minutes | Servings: 1

Ingredients

1 cup cold brewed coffee or chilled strong-brewed coffee
1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk (or oat milk)
2 tablespoons rolled oats
1 tablespoon almond butter or cashew butter
1 tablespoon raisins
1 tablespoon maple syrup or pitted medjool date (1 date)
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of sea salt
1/2 cup ice

Instructions

Combine. Add the cold brew, almond milk, rolled oats, almond butter, raisins, maple syrup, cinnamon, vanilla extract, and sea salt to a blender.
Blend. Blend on high for 45–60 seconds until completely smooth and the oats and raisins are fully incorporated.
Add ice and blend again. Add the ice and blend for another 20–30 seconds until thick, creamy, and cold.
Pour and sit down with it. Pour into a tall glass or a wide mug. No garnish required. Drink it slowly, with both hands if you need to.

Nutrition (per serving)

Raw Vegan Breakfast Cookie Coffee — Two Hundred Weeks, and You Start with Coffee