I would use peanut butter made without sugar instead of the overly processed kind

No, you really can't muck with baking recipes like that and expect the same results. What's the whole recipe?

Without butter and sugar, but with peanut butter and flour, you'll end up with something like gummy rocks. I think there are much tastier ways to just consume the peanut butter, if that's what's motivating this effort.

Also, I don't use peanut butter with sugar in it at all. It's easy to find peanut butter without sugar. There are two ingredients: peanuts, salt (for the salted kind!) It tastes much better to me, a lot more like...peanut butter.

In general I think making the normal recipe, and just practicing portion control on the ultimate serving size, is a lot better way to go than trying to use all kinds of substitutions that end up making a recipe something other than what it was formulated to be.

But if you really want a peanut butter cookie without butter that's marginally healthier, for a peanut butter cookie, try a recipe that was formulated that way. Here's an oil-shortened peanut butter cookie that uses just a little brown sugar.

The no-bake oatmeal recipes are pretty much direct copies of each other, like they all came from the same Girl Scout manual. They bind because they basically cook 3 cups of oatmeal with 1/2 cup milk and a stick of butter as the only liquid. Without the peanut butter and cocoa, that would be an instant rock. That is why I suspect that they could be subject to some rather radical variations. The sugar, I believe, is not so much added as a sweetener (thus cocoa rather than other bulk chocolate) but for the granular texture further diluting the oatmeal from becoming a fast-setting paper mache paste.

My overall goal is to make something with chocolate and peanut butter, with a binder like oatmeal as opposed to the usual flour-eggs-fat combo.

I've done some monkeying around with the basic no-bake cookie recipe, because these are my favorite kind of cookie. I can offer some insight but probably not as much as you need. No reason not to experiment yourself, though.

Since the recipe calls for baking cocoa, no, you really, really can't leave out the sugar. No matter how sweet the peanut butter is, it can't make up for the amount of cocoa used.

Now, I admit I often use less sugar than is in the recipe if I happen to have pretty sweet peanut butter on hand (I am a philistine, I buy whatever's on sale). You can adjust it that way. But you can't leave it out entirely.

You can add other things that are sweet and leave out a bit of the sugar. For example, I like to add craisins, dried cherries, or chopped up maraschino cherries. (The canonical recipes sometimes call for raisins or chopped nuts.) But the reason these are sweet is because they have sugar in them--not added sucrose (well, the maraschino cherries do), but concentrated fruit sugars.

You can find recipes that use regular chocolate or hot chocolate mix that don't call for sugar, but that's because sugar is already in the chocolate itself. Basically, cocoa is so bitter that you have to have the sweetening to counter it.

I do not know if sugar substitutes would significantly change the texture of the cookies. The sugar is necessary for sweetening; I don't know if it's also necessary for texture.

It's possible that you could get away with using more milk and eliminating the butter. The ingredients aren't *terribly* expensive; it wouldn't hurt to try it once.

The closest things I could find for you were flax oatmeal bars and "amazing chocolate bars."

To make the flax oatmeal bars:

Ingredients:
1/2 cup dried apples
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup dates
1 1/2 cups vanilla soy milk
1 cup rolled oats or oat flakes
3 tablespoons ground flax seeds
1 tablespoon raw cashew butter or peanut butter
Instructions:
Soak apples, raisins, and dates in half the soy milk in refrigerator overnight. Mix oats and ground flaxseeds and soak with other half of soy milk in refrigerator overnight. In the morning, blend the dried fruit mixture in a blender or food processor with the nut butter. Mix the blended fruit with the oat/flaxseed mixture and roll into logs or spread on a baking sheet. Cook in oven at 200 degrees for 30 minutes to dehydrate.

To make the chocolate balls:


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Amazing Chocolate Balls
Momto9

Serves: 6
Preparation Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:
4 coconut-date rolls
2 tablespoons natural non-alkalized cocoa powder
1/2 cup natural peanut butter
1-3 tablespoons soy, hemp or almond milk
3/4 cup rolled oats
Instructions:
In a food processor, blend date rolls, cocoa, peanut butter and milk until smooth (use only enough soy milk to hold the mixture together). Knead in oats with hands or a strong spoon. Roll into 12 balls. These are yummy as is or frozen (they are easier to nibble when frozen!)

Those sound good, bearwife, but I can only vaguely imagine what a cocnut-date roll would be. However, flax is on my list of "gotta try this", so I will probably give that one a whirl after my next check.

Here's what a coconut date roll is. You can probably find them at places cheaper than Whole Paycheck.

Chocolate Peanut-Butter No Bake Cookies

I pretty much followed this recipe as is to see what happens. I substituted 1/4 cup of molasses and 1/2 cup of brown sugar for the 2 cups of sugar, and 1 cup of dark chocolate chips for the cocoa.

Now that I have seen the result, I believe that I can substitute canola oil or peanut oil for the butter, probably 1/4 cup. Also, since I use chocolate chips rather than cocoa, and peanut butter is sweetened anyway, I can forego most of the added sugar. Finally, just because I always have it, half&half instead of regular milk. Further, fresh-ground almond butter from my usual market.

The idea is to get more chocolate and nuts into my diet for their health benefits without a huge increase in calories. Considering that this uses 3 cups of oatmeal (6 regular breakfast size portions), that stretches the fat and sugar out quite a long way.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/cooking-live/chocolate-peanut-butter-no-bake-cookies-recipe/index.html

BTW, for those of you who bake cakes. Prior to the oatmeal going in, that peanut butter & chocolate mix would make one hell of a cake. If I knew eggs & flour quantities, I would be half tempted to try one myself.