The World's Healthiest Cookies

Hi, my name is Annie and I'm an addict.


I have a serious milk and cookie habit.  I could live on milk and cookies.  Often, I do. 


I'm pretty sure my youngest daughter was formed almost entirely out of milk and cookies because that's largely what I ate for the nine months I was cooking her.  Forget "bun in the oven" -- she was my "cookie in the oven"!  "Cookie" is one of her nicknames.


I remember lovingly a little friend who's first word was "cookie".  The word served Hilary well in that it also meant "Daddy" and "Katie".  We often interrogated her to determine which she meant.  She had the right idea:  all things cookie!


When I was in high school I came across a recipe for Breakfast Cookies.  They had oatmeal and apples and raisins and cheddar cheese.  They were great and carried a lesser load of guilty than regular cookies.  For some reason, I only made them once.  But they have remained in my mind for the couple of decades since -- always with the thought that I could improve on them in terms of healthiness.


Yesterday, I bought two packs of Oreos (actually, the Walmart Great Value generic called "Twist and Shout" which are just as good).  One package is for the church office (keep in mind that I'm often the only one there!) and one goes in the top drawer of my night stand next to my bed (I must have milk and cookies and bedtime, of course, and sometimes for breakfast too). 


The Oreos made me think though:  I don't need decadent cookies.  Really, I just need the carb hit.  So I could stick some healthy things on the carbs and be much better off while still indulging my weakness.  Why not make it work for me?  I was telling my daughter yesterday that the good thing about addictions in that you can make yourself become addicted to something that is good for you!  So here's my new strategy:  I will devise the healthiest cookie recipe possible and then hope the resulting cookies go as well with V8 juice as they do with milk (because I should only have so much milk).  And then I will cultivate the proper addiction.


A few years ago I got curious and did some independent research on alternative cures for cancer.  I'm not sure I discovered the cure for cancer but I did learn about nitrilosides, Vitamin B17, amygdaline, and laetrile.  Basically, these three substances are different versions of the same thing -- all of which can potentially prevent or destroy cancer cells.  The theory is that cancer is caused by a deficiency of Vitamin B17 just as scurvy is a deficiency of Vitamin C.  I'm not saying that this is 100% fact, but adding some healthy foods into my diet isn't going to hurt anything.  (Here's one reference to an article on the subject: http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james53.htm though I don't vouch for this author or agree with some of this other topics).


Foods that are high in vitamin B17 tend to be traditional foods that have largely fallen out of our diets. In the modern American diet, sugar cane has largely replaced sorghum and wheat has replaced millet.  In the past, our ancestors regularly ate many B17-leaden foods that we no longer eat such as quince, choke cherry, elderberry, huckleberry, gooseberry, alfalfa, cassava, watercress, lentils, beet tops, lima beans.  Thus we seem to be getting much less Vitamin B17 than people did in the past. 


Other foods that contain B17 are fava beans, garbanzo beans (chick peas), mung beans (often used as bean sprouts), black-eyed peas, black beans, squash seeds, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, cranberries, flax seed, buckwheat, millet, sorghum, maize, grasses, linseed, and bitter almonds (http://www.vitaminb17.org/foods.htm).


Always one to go for prevention, I have tried to add Vitamin B17-containing foods into my diet where ever possible.  I start most days with 12-grain toast (containing millet, flax, and buckwheat) with sorghum.  I try to snack on hummus (made from garbanzo beans).  I serve lentils and sweet potatoes more often than most people do.  I add spinach to recipes whenever possible.  Buckwheat pancakes are still pancakes and will be willingly consumed by most children.  And I ADORE gooseberry pie!  It is my very favorite kind of pie.  It's just hard to find goose berries these days!  Have you ever had gooseberry pie?  I'm willing to bet you haven't!


I have worked dilgently at cramming as many healthy things as possible into my cookie recipe.  I'll let you know after I have destroyed my kitchen in a grand endeavor to figure out the proper proportions of the ingredients.  Here's what I have so far:





The World's Healthiest Cookie Recipe Ingredients


oatmeal
walnuts
flax seed
millet
olive oil
applesauce
raisins
honey or sorghum
carrots
zucchini
apples
egg white
whole wheat flour or buckwheat flour




In the course of looking for healthy cookie recipes, I found a really wonderful blog called Sweet Potato Soul (http://www.sweetpotatosoul.com/).  It has wonderful, healthy, colorful recipes that just make me want run to the farmer's market and then to go home and cook until I can't find the counter anymore and there are no more clean dishes in the kitchen!


For now, I have bottle of milk and a piece of multi-berry pie which I almost completely justified above so...


Bon Appetit!