I like the holidays, but they can be stressful too, eh? Besides running and my new-found love of the show Scandal, one of my favorite ways to de-stress is to spend some time in the kitchen. Before I left NYC for a few days in Buffalo for Christmas, my friend Jo and I baked some serious cookies using my favorite recipe with one of the best ingredients ever – Nutella.
We drank some wine, made dozens upon dozens of cookies and caught up on our lives. It was glorious, relaxing and delicious. I don’t really think Christmas cookies should be “healthy” so to speak, but we did use whole wheat flour and Earth Balance vegan butter (love baking with this stuff) because they are the ingredients we usually have on-hand. We’re two RDs, after all! But don’t get me wrong, no Nutella was skimped on in the making of these cookies.
Nutella Cookies with Sea Salt Sprinkles
- 1-2 bottles of colored sprinkles (around 1/2 cup), 1-2 tbsp sea salt
- 1 cup Nutella
- 2 tablespoons Earth Balance vegan butter
- 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 1 tbsp vanilla extract
- 2 large eggs
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
Heat the oven to 375 degrees F. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper. Stir the sprinkles and salt in a shallow dish; set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, mix the butter, Nutella and sugar until mixed well. Add the eggs and vanilla and stir until combined. In the same bowl, add the baking powder and salt. Add the flour, 1/2 cup at at time, until mixed well.
Roll the dough into 1 1/4 inch balls, then roll each ball in the sprinkle/salt mixture to coat completely. Place two inches apart on prepared cookie sheets and bake 10-12 minutes. Allow to cool 2 minutes before removing from cookie sheets and set onto wire racks to cool completely.
broken streak
If I stress in some areas of life (holidays, student loans), I think it’s easier for me to stress about other things, like this damn Runner’s World Run Streak. It sounded like a fun challenge in November, but the past week or so I’ve been feeling tired, sore and kind of cranky. My heart rate was kind of high on Saturday night and I couldn’t sleep (stress or overtraining??), and had an early flight to Buffalo in the morning. I had set my alarm at an un-Godly hour for a Sunday (even for me), in order to get a run in and keep the streak alive. But as I was staring at the ceiling and thinking about it, I realized that I didn’t have to do it. Duh. No one cares if I stick to this stupid streak but me, and why am I doing this anyways? The last thing I want to happen is to get injured from some pointless running streak. So, I re-set my alarm and did not run a step on Sunday. Do I regret it? Not one little bit.
I did run every day while in Buffalo, one of which was in semi-heavy snowfall and the another in 3 degree weather. All runs felt so much better and were awesome in their own way, even if the ladder had tiny icicles forming on my eyelashes so much so that I couldn’t see by the time I got back to my Dad’s house. Has that every happened to you before??
Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!