Yule Cut Out Sugar Cookies

This time of year always reminds me of when I was a kid and all of the excitement of the impending holidays. But nothing was more exciting than coming home from school to bake cookies with my Mom. I can’t remember what I liked more, the sugar cookie dough or the finished cookies, probably because it is too difficult to choose!

It is interesting when I look back to my childhood and all of “food” that we ate (I use quotations with the word food because of the dubious nature of it’s food-ness). Twinkies, Ding Dongs, candy bars, sugary cereals, and pasteurized milk products…the list can go on but I think that you get the picture. When I think of all of the dead milk, food dyes, artificial flavorings and high fructose corn syrup that I consumed it is no wonder that I was often sick, had frequent headaches and suffered from serious multi-chemical sensitivity.

Although at the time, no one ever thought to link the “food” that we ate to how we felt and even fewer thought that chemical sensitivity existed. Even the homemade baked goods that my Mom made were laced with ingredients that were harmful at worst and not supportive at best.

Take the decorations that adorn most holiday cut out cookies. Yes, they are beautiful and have gotten more so over the years with more vivid colors in the frostings and all of the sprinkles of varying shapes and colors. But beauty at what cost? I ask this question a lot and you will tire of it, I am sure.

But as a culture, we really have a tendency to make the crappiest choices when it comes to esthetics vs. health.

From what we slather on our bodies to what we put in our mouths…if we are going to heal, this has to shift.

If our priority is Health and feeling great, then we need to take a serious look at the choices we make and realize there is a whole wide world of options out there to choose from and we need to start choosing our health first.

Let’s start with food dyes.

This may seem like a simple task but it you have ever read a food label, you will realize that eliminating food dyes can be daunting. Especially if you are still shopping in the regular supermarket and eating processed foods. They are everywhere. Did you know that even Florida oranges are colored with orange food coloring? Also salmon and meats (especially lunch meats) to offset differences in color from storage etc. Artificial food dyes are everywhere even in many pharmaceuticals. Artificial food dyes have been linked by many to ADD and ADHD and the drug that they typically prescribe for these poor misunderstood kids is Ritalin, I find it sickening and ironic that it [Ritalin] is coated in either D & C yellow #10 or FD &C green #3. (FYI: F stands for food, D stands for drug and C stands for cosmetic). The drug also contains lactose, which is milk sugar that most of us cannot digest and can lead to many emotional/behavioral issues. Insane.

So what is a devoted foodie to do? How can we emulate Martha and not use food dyes?

There is a company called India Tree that uses food/plants to manufacture food colorants that are safer to use. I say safer because some people may still be sensitive to ingredients used. Now, like all things, you need to do your homework. I learned the hard way that just because a company makes one product that is a safe alternative does not mean all of their products are safe. This is true in this case. I will only use their products that use natural food dyes, the rest of the sugars and non-pareils are loaded with garbage that should not be consumed.

Let’s Do Organics makes sprinkles and jimmies that use natural colorants and are gluten free. True the colors are not as vivid and intense as regular (cancer causing) dyes but they are pretty and they do the trick.

My daughter loves them and they don’t hurt her. She is also very sensitive and gets extremely irritable and emotional when she eats foods that her body cannot process. Nothing is more important to me than her health; this is why I do what I do.

So, let’s get back to sugar cookies. Who would know that I could go on for so long before getting to the most important part, the recipe! I love a soft sugar cookie so I have adapted an old family recipe to make the cookie soft. It is actually my cousin Cathy’s recipe (thanks Cath!) and the original recipe called for both butter and shortening. Now, many of you probably know that if you want a soft cookie, you usually use shortening because using all butter will make for a crisp cookie. I love the flavor of butter and I will under no circumstances use Crisco so I use organic extra virgin coconut oil. You can also use organic non-hydrogenated palm oil. Both oils are solid at room temperature which makes them a natural substitution for yucky trans-fat shortening. They are also not the villains that they have been portrayed as. We will save that topic for another time.

Yule Cut Out Sugar Cookies

350 Degrees for about 10 minutes. All ingredients listed are organic

½ stick softened butter (use salted or unsalted, your preference)

¼ cup coconut oil

¾ cup evaporated cane juice

2 eggs (preferably from pasture raised hens)

1 t vanilla

2 ½ cups flour (I always use spelt, for this recipe it was white spelt, usually it is half white and half whole spelt)

2-½ t baking powder (aluminum free)

½ t salt (I use Redmond mineral salt)

Mix dry ingredients and set aside. Cream butter and coconut oil with sugar in mixer with paddle attachment. Add eggs and vanilla stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Mix until incorporated. Slowly add dry ingredients and mix until dough comes together. Turn out onto lightly floured surface and cut in half, pat into discs, wrap up and refrigerate until firm at least 4 hours. Take dough from refrigerator and roll out on lightly floured surface to about ¼ inch thickness. You want them to be fairly thick in order to stay soft. Cut into desired shapes and transfer to silpat or parchment lined pan. Take remaining dough scraps and “smear”

them back together to fully incorporate the dough and refrigerate. This method will keep the dough from getting too tough with many re-rollings (like when you are making cookies with a 6 year old!) Bake until edges are just starting to brown, about 10 minutes. Allow to cool completely before icing. If you prefer not to use icing but still want to decorate, you may sprinkle cookies with colored sanding sugars and decorations prior to baking.

Butter Frosting:

6 T Butter

2 T Milk

1 t Vanilla

2 ½ cups powdered sugar

Whip together in a bowl, separate and color with India Tree colorants in desired shades. This is not a flooding type icing but more of a thick butter cream icing. You will need a spatula or butter knife to ice cookies or use pastry bags to pipe icing. We often use colored sugars and the Let’s Do Organics sprinkles to decorate further; I did not buy the India Tree sugars in time to make these cookies but you could color some evaporated cane juice to use instead. I only made green as I am a bit of a minimalist when it comes to cookie decoration unlike my sweet 6-year-old Sofia, see her with her masterpiece(photo above). When she is older, we will play with flooding but honestly, this icing while not fancy just tastes so much better and that is what we like!

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Well, after much hesitation, I finally rented Twilight. I was not planning on seeing the movie, after all, in my forties; I figured I should not be watching movies about teenage vampire love. Then, I remembered 2 things.

1. That I do not believe in “shoulds”

and

2. That I have a thing for tall, pale, gangly English men so I broke down and rented it, well actually, I asked my husband to rent it.

There is so much being written about this movie right now with all the hype surrounding ticket sales and teenybopper screams, everyone seems to be forgetting that this is not an original movie. Or shall I say movie theme. This theme has been getting play in every love story ever written for hundreds of years. Sure, the faces are new and exciting to look at, but it is still the same story.

Let’s recount the themes.

Forbidden love, courtly love, co-dependent love, damsel in distress always needing a rescue from the hero, lover as father figure/protection…

Bella, the heroine, is portrayed as a strong feminine character by the media. Interesting that she is still always in need of a rescue.

This makes me ask the basic question, what in our psyche compels us as women in our world to need rescuing? From whom/ what? Why is it so satisfying on a primordial level to watch this theme being acted out over and over and over again? What, as a culture are we working through? This is what brings me to the computer tonight.

From James Dean to Edward Cullen, the bad boy that we “should” not love but we do.

Symbolically and simply we can look at this in the context of polarity. Good vs. evil or light vs. dark. Religion predictably says that light is good and dark is bad, the light is God and that the dark is the devil.

In the movie, Bella is drawn to Edward who is a dark, mysterious and brooding fella with a piercing stare. He is also drawn to her and while she is not the poster child for light and bubbly, she is a good and gentle soul. Each is drawn to the opposite of themselves, or better yet, the reflection of their shadow selves that they see in the other. Light and dark looking to join with one another for completion.

Many talk of the hero/rescuer in books and movies as being representative of “God” or having god-like qualities. The heroine weakens herself to allow for the rescue and thus reconnects with Spirit. The search for and longing for love is for many, a longing for connection to Spirit. Finding God through relationship is not a new idea but I want to take it a step further and suggest that it is not the masculine God that we are longing for, solely.

In this age, the age of patriarchy, something important has been stolen from us. Hidden away in the deep recesses of our souls, demonized by many religions lies the beauty and force of the Great Mother.

The Goddess.

She is symbolized by the dark, the profound feminine energy of creation. I think that rather than the rescuer/bad boy being the symbolic representation of God and our longing for connection to God, that he is actually the symbolic representation of the Goddess and our deep longing to reconnect with Her, our Divine Mother.

You cannot, after all, be fully connected to only half of a thing, even if that “thing” is God.

If God is the light, where/who is the dark? The devil? The devil as an entity/being was created by religion to scare people into submission and to “demonize” the Goddess. The energy of the devil is just that, energy that lives within all of us. It is interesting to note that the devils actual name is Lucifer, which means light; we can talk about that another time. Let’s get back to the Goddess.

It is fear of the unknown that makes us doubt and question Her existence, but the dark need not be a scary place. In the darkness, we rest, we heal, we create, we gestate. The dark is intuition and the lesson is letting go and trust. The Great Mother calls on us to crawl into her Divine womb and recreate our lives, to nurse at her Divine breast and receive Love and Nurturing. She reminds us that there is no death, just energy and light. Bella, if she were to merge with Edward (Light and Dark, God and Goddess) would “die” and become “immortal “(a vampire). The Great Mother reminds us that it is only our conscious minds that die when Spirit achieves wholeness.

A soul reunited lives forever.

As we move into this new age, with the return to a matriarchal society, I look forward to the return of strong women and men who look to relationship for love, companionship and joy rather than needing a rescue or to feel complete. When we can fully embody all of Spirit, both God and Goddess, we are already complete/whole, there is no battle between good and evil/ light and dark. Rather it is all One and it is all good. Let us all plant this seed of Love in our hearts.

To bring this back around to food, as this is technically a food and healing blog I wish to share a recipe that I am calling Twilight Sangria. Sangria gets its name from sangre or blood, It is made with red wine but the vino and brandy can be omitted entirely, leaving the juice with the fruit as a great party drink for those who are either too young to consume or choose not to. Here’s to a drink that even Edward Cullen would appreciate. Salute!

Twilight Sangria

1 bottle red wine (I suggest Frey as it is organic and sulfite free)

2 cups organic juice (you can use pomegranate, cranberry, orange or apple or a combination of them, if you want it to really look like blood, stick with the pomegranate or cranberry)

1/2 cup brandy (I used chambord, no, it's not organic...)

1/4 to 1/2 cup organic syrup (try raw agave nectar or raw honey and adjust amount to the sweetness that you like, I used 1/4 cup and it was a tad too sweet)

Organic Fruit:

1 apple, cored and thinly sliced

1 orange, in wedges or slices

1 lemon, in slices

1 cup grapes

1/4 cup pomegranate seed

5 limequats (I saw these at the store and they were organic so I could not resist, very tasty!)

First, mix the wine, juice, brandy and syrup together. Next, you will add half of the fruit to the wine mixture. I like the fruit to steep/macerate in the wine/juice/brandy mixture for several hours or overnight. Really pound the fruit to release all of the juices and the oils. Refrigerate. Several hours before serving, strain it and compost the fruit. Then add the second half of the fruit you prepared to the sangria in a lovely pitcher and serve chilled with the fruit in the glass.

Enjoy!