Farm Spotlight: Prairie Pantry

Anita Eccles’ Prairie Pantry is lined with shelves of preserved fruit and filled with smells of maple and vanilla from recently baked cookies. After retiring as a mining engineer, Anita started researching ways to create tasty treats with healthy, gluten-free, and allergen-free ingredients!

Anita and her husband cleaned out a storage room in their basement and put in a commercial kitchen! Thus was born Prairie Pantry and all the goodies that it produces!

Maple Pecan was the first NeedaCookie® flavor that Anita developed at Prairie Pantry.

Pure dates account for more than half of the sweetness in this granola-style cookie. Added sweeteners include local honey and organic Maple Valley Co-op maple syrup. Only the good stuff!

To develop her NeedaCookie® recipes, Anita makes small, one-cookie batches, slightly altering the weights of each ingredient to test the results. She developed a spreadsheet to calculate nutrition facts to make sure each recipe is healthy and satisfying as well as delicious. She is a true engineer turned baker!

The Prairie Pantry kitchen is a gluten-free, peanut-free facility. All recipes are also dairy-free and egg-free. The NeedaCookie® flavors include vegan, paleo, and nut-free options.

Anita preserves produce from her garden including plums, cherries, grapes, raspberries, salsa, tomato sauce, hot pickled peppers, apple sauce, and apple butter!

Jars of plum sauce and apple butter in the LINC Box this week were handcrafted at Prairie Pantry, using their own organically grown plums and apples.

Add NeedaCookies®, Spiced Apple Butter, or Plum Puree to your LINC Box through the LINC Box Store! You can also choose Prairie Pantry Gourmet Granola as an add-on for your Winter LINC Box!

Find a list of local businesses that carry Prairie Pantry NeedaCookies® and granolas on needacookie.com and prairiepantryllc.com.