Eat Your Fruits & Veggies

You would likely have to eat a whole lot of the cookies from the past few weeks to meet the minimum daily requirement of 5 servings of fruits & vegetables.  But in a perfect world, the cookies can at least contribute in a small way to the ever elusive 'healthy lifestyle.'  They managed to rank on the health meter because they contained things like fresh cherries, bananas, and even zucchini; healthy nuts and whole grains, whoo hoo - I'll take two!

So, ok, they also had flour and butter and sugar, and one could argue that it kind of offset the healthy ingredients, but it's not all bad.  There's more to a cookie than it's contents.  It's the combination of ingredients that makes for great flavors - the lemon AND the zucchini AND cornmeal (actually it was 'polenta' a finer grind of cornmeal), the banana AND the peanut butter - with a nod to Elvis for the Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal 
Cookies - at least there was oatmeal - and it wasn't fried! And there were fresh cherries AND the almonds in the tea cakes.  You know the pairing of ingredients can beat each one individually - like chocolate & peanut butter, or chocolate & pretzels, or chocolate & orange - ok, chocolate on it's own probably trumps just about everything, but you get the idea! I know for a fact it was the lemon that gave the Lemon-Zucchini Cornmeal Cookies their flavor - I thought the zucchini was undetectable but while the lemon gave it flavor it was the cornmeal that gave it texture - I think the zucchini added a little color and honestly, little else. But hopefully, better than what goes into a cookie is what you get out of it - a little enjoyment and 3 or 4 bites of wonder and escape and with any luck you're in good company - that's what makes a cookie great!

To wrap up the cookie talk for that past two weeks, I can say that other than the ice cream sandwich cookies earlier this summer, The Cherry Almond Tea Cakes and the slightly less nutritious (ok, they had a little bit of butter), Salted Peanut Cookie Brittle were my first official departures from regular 'cookies.' Since the tea cakes were baked in mini muffin tins and the brittle cookies were actually a bar cookie.  Have to admit that bar cookie thing is alright - definitely cuts down on the oven time, something that is very welcomed in this heat wave of a summer..and just like that, I'm caught up for a day ... just in time to figure out what I'm going to bake on Tuesday.