Cookie Chronicles

Looking over the recipe 'Bunny Bites', the first in our new Super Healthy Cookies: 50 Gluten-Free Recipes for Delicious & Nutritious Snacks, I couldn't help myself but to think about one of my own lifetime personal heroes Cookie Monster (right up there with Yogi Bear and Napolean Dynamite among others) and what he's been up to since those old learning-the-alphabet days of "C is for Cookie" ("'C' is also for donut with a little piece cut out!" he says on his album).

It turns out ol' Cookie Monster has been going through some identity transformations along with the rest of culture in the last decade or so, and finds himself recently changing some of his habits – he's gone from the days of shoveling in plate-size cookies as early as a little blue monster-tot ("om, nom, nom, nom, the first time me eat cookie I loved them even then..."),

Baby Cookie Monster on left, mother with cookies on right

to becoming the monster of moderation who now claims that "A cookie is a sometimes food." This has, it turns out, stirred up quite a cultural squabble.  As Cookie has now been seen on the series holding carrot sticks in paw instead of piles of cookies and hanging out with other newly health-seeking puppets,

the letters of complaint have filed in, "why is Cookie Monster holding a carrot stick," asks one deflated father of a daughter...."he's a Cookie Monster for goodness sake.!"  Sesame Street has retorted back that the "popular character would be 'broadening his eating habits' in the future.  We are not putting him on a diet, and we would never take the position of no sugar," said Dr. Rosemarie T Truglio, the show's vice president of research and education, "We're teaching him moderation."  Well, speaking for this cookie family, we will be testing the boundaries that can be found out there in cookie-land between moderation and that old nom, nom, nom 'Cookie' enthusiasm.  Our 'Bunny Bites' recipe, which includes carrots, flaxseed, banana, and brown rice flour, walnuts, and maple syrup, begins with a short paragraph titled "Three Cheers for Carrots!"  Seems like a very good start.