[As for butter, how do you bake cookies without margarine or Crisco (yuck!)
or something like it?  My sons love to snack - about every 15 minutes - so
I try to make them lots of cookie/muffin type things that will fill them
up.  I can bake anything without a butter substitute - except cookies.
Advice and recipes (especially wheat/egg free too) gladly accepted.]

I have a friend who uses olive oil or another healthy oil in place of
margarine in her peanut butter cookies and oatmeal cookies.  The peanut
butter cookies are pretty flat but the taste is very good.  She also uses
pure maple syrup in place of the sugar.  The oatmeal cookies hold together
much better.  I never thought much about using margarine until a nutritionist
told this same friend that margarine is one molecule away from being plastic!
 Yuck!  I use the Spectrum canola spread on toast, baked potatoes, etc.  It
is non-hydrogenated and non-dairy.  I believe she has experimented with rice
and potato starch flour in this recipe too.

Rory Vanlandingham, a fellow unschooler