real food ingredients for cookies

Although I try to eat healthy most of the time, I love baking. Or maybe I just love eating the dough. Either way, baking is a part of me. Even though I would not consider cookies to be a healthy everyday food, I still like to use better ingredients when possible. 

Here is a list of some better ingredients to have in your pantry to decrease your exposure to toxins while still enjoying cookies.

White Whole Wheat Flour - This is great to have because it is whole wheat, but a lighter version. The white whole wheat is not as dense as regular whole wheat, so using it in baked goods works out better.  

Grass-fed butter - Happy cows should roam free and eat eat grass. When they are confined, they can develop infections. When they do not eat properly, they may not be at their optimal health (like us, right). Healthy butter comes from pastured, grass-fed cows.  

Chocolate chips - Finding organic chocolate chips has been quite a challenge. I have found chocolate chips with only 2 ingredients. These Enjoy Life Chocolate Morsels are the best I have found so far.

Pastured Eggs - These eggs come from chickens who have been raised outside, in a pasture. They will have more omega-3 fats and more vitamins and minerals.  

Organic sugar & organic brown sugar - Although these are more expensive than regular sugar, I tend to splurge because I try not to eat much sugar regularly. I should admit though that when holidays roll around and I am making tons of cookies and candy, I don't always buy organic because of the cost. 

Organic vanilla extract - you can buy this organic, but an even better option is to buy organic vanilla beans and make your own extract. It is really easy to do and is much less expensive. And with the leftover vanilla beans, you can scrape the vanilla in recipes like shortbread cookies and have wonderful flecks of vanilla. 

Sea salt - Sea salt has minerals in it that are not in regular table sat. Regular salt is stripped of the healthy minerals because if the processing. 

I decided to focus on the ingredients for a basic chocolate chip cookie. If you are doing a fancier cookie, you might have other ingredients not mentioned here. I plan on doing more of these type of posts in the future, so stay tuned.

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linked to kellythekitchenkop.com, sheeats.ca