My Thoughts on Today's Tragedy, and Guilt-Free Friday: Peanut Butter Cookies

I am dropping the ball!  Yikes!  I had a busy day today and for the first time didn’t have a post prepared ahead of time to publish today.  Sorry if I kept everyone waiting for a yummy cookie recipe and wound up disappointing you!  This recipe won’t disappoint though, I promise!  Unfortunately it’s not COMPLETELY guilt-free.  If you’re a diabetic, you’re in luck!  But if you’re counting calories… we might have a little work to do to alter this recipe further to make it TRULY guilt-free.  But rather than the empty calories of refined cane sugar, this recipe uses a healthier alternative: coconut palm sugar.

Unlike cane sugar, palm sugar is lower on the glycemic index, meaning it has less of an impact on blood sugar, making it a safe choice for diabetics and people watching carbs.  Unfortunately, though, it is about equal in calories to cane sugar.  But, like all things that contain ANY kind of sugar, you should probably eat it in moderation anyway…

Another nice thing about palm sugar is that it really is a “healthier” alternative.  It offers several micronutrients such as potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, and vitamin C, which white cane sugar pretty much offers nothing…

For more information, here are a couple good articles:

http://summertomato.com/is-coconut-palm-sugar-a-healthy-sugar-substitute/

http://www.naturalnews.com/028996_palm_sugar_natural_sweetener.html

I think I’m going to take a brief pause in the recipe part of this post and just say that my heart breaks for the victims of the shooting today in Connecticut.  I usually don’t voice my opinion in these circumstances, and rather just have my own “moment of silence” as the grieving period runs its natural course, but I read NBC New’s article and something struck a chord with me.  Amidst all the ranting on Facebook and others’ blogs about better gun control and parents wanting to home school their kids now because of this, I was thinking about the shooter, and what must be so wrong with a person to be driven to do something like this.  I read in the article that the shooter was identified as Adam Lanza, who killed himself after the attack.  His brother, Ryan, was questioned by authorities. “Ryan told police that Adam has a history of mental illness…”

As I recover from postpartum depression and PTSD, I now have a clearer awareness of how important mental healthcare is.  I know uncontrollable anger and how scary it is to feel that way.  I know resentment.  I know worthlessness.  And fortunately, I know the light at the end of the tunnel.  I know how beneficial it is to get good, clean help.  To talk to a professional.  To help the body and mind heal by making healthier lifestyle choices.  I know how good the recovery feels.  But, unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don’t know the beauty of recovery.  Our country is very lacking in this area of healthcare, I believe.  It’s not the gun regulations that are the problem here – it’s the idiots using them.  And most of the time, that “idiot” has some sort of mental disease or illness or condition.  Maybe they were born with it, in which case they should have gotten proper help a long time ago.  Or maybe it was the side-effect of a drug they’ve been on previously (I’m not going to get into it now, but there are a LOT of common pharmaceuticals out there that have side effects that can severely alter the mental state of the one taking the drug, causing, for example, hallucinations, thoughts of suicide, behavioral or mood changes, etc.  Some of these may sound familiar to you from the fast-talking side-effects list in the commercials you commonly see for different drugs… they do to me anyway…).  Either way, obviously proper care for these people is lacking.  Maybe if this guy had gotten better care sooner, he may have been in a healthier mental state and it would have never crossed his mind or heart to do something so terrible as what he did this morning.  I don’t know, I’m no expert, but it seems silly to blame gun regulations for a person’s actions.  There are still going to be mentally unstable people in this world whether guns are controlled or not, and if there is that much anger or insanity inside of them, they’ll find a way to let it out.  We all need to take better care of ourselves, and show better care for the people who are trapped and suffering inside their own minds and bodies, before more crap like this happens.

Done.

So back to those cookies.  I’m glad cookies are a happy subject, hopefully these will shed a little ray of sunshine through a very sad day.  And I hope you try them too!  They’re super easy, since you don’t have to have any of my weird flours on hand to make it, and REALLY really good.  White sugar and palm sugar are interchangeable too, so you can use equal amounts to substitute.  So if you don’t want to bother with palm sugar, you can still use a cup of cane sugar in this recipe without any issues.  Oh, by the way, I originally found this gluten-free, 5-ingredient recipe from the site Shockingly Delicious.  It does call for white sugar, though, so I switched it all up.  Below is my altered recipe.  Enjoy!

 Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

• 1 egg
• 1 cup organic coconut palm sugar
• 1 cup all-natural, no sugar added peanut butter
• 2 tbsp stevia (I added this to add back some sugary-sweetness, which is lost by using all-natural peanut butter, and to balance the richer, darker, caramel/maple flavor of the palm sugar)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• ¼ tsp salt

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Place parchment paper on a baking sheet and set sheet aside.
2. Using electric mixer, blend all ingredients together until a soft dough forms.
3. Use a cookie scoop or spoon to portion tablespoon-sized balls of dough, and place them on parchment-lined baking sheet. Press top of each cookie with fork tines twice crosswise to form that “peanut shell” crosshatch pattern.
4. Bake for 8-10 minutes. Allow cookies to cool on baking pan at least 5 minutes (they are fragile until cooled). Remove to a rack and cool completely.
5. Store in an airtight container.
6. Makes 32 cookies about 2 1/2 inches in diameter each