Positively Healthy Memories

Good memories can be great motivators and give us a clearer picture of ourselves. Having that clearer picture can free our minds of stress and give us new direction. As I have said before a lot of my memories revolve around food and my love of baking. I put a lot of love into the things I bake and sharing those items spread my love around to those closest to me. These shared moments are what memories are made of.

If you ask my friends and family they will tell you that cookies are my specialty. These same people can tell if the cookies on a plate were baked by me even if they don’t see me deliver them. Now I know this may sound silly but I have seen it happen. Remember the wedding invitation from my East Indian friend in the messy desk blog. For one of the pre-wedding parties she asked if I would make cookies. I made about 20 dozen cookies and had them on platters with the rest of the food. A short time after putting out the cookies I saw a young man who I had worked with in the past sitting at one of the tables. He came running up to me, gave me a hug and said, “I knew those were your cookies!”

 One of my favorite cookies recipes came from a friend, Sara Magnusson, many years ago when our daughters were in kindergarten. Sara and I were the room moms and we decided it would be fun to have the children decorate valentine sugar cookies for the class party. Now these were no ordinary sugar cookies they were very large cookies. Take a good look at your hand and imagine heart shaped cookies that big. The children had a wonderful and fun time decorating the cookies. These same valentine cookies have been made every year since then for friends and family.

These cookies are the best sugar cookies I have ever made. One of the great things about the recipe is that you can roll the dough out again and again. They are easy to make, delightful to eat and your kids can help. With this recipe you have several choices. They can be left plain, glazed or frosted. If you have small children I would recommend glazing the cookies as this is where they can be very helpful. Make the glaze right before you bake the cookies so it is ready to go. As soon as the cookies come out of the oven have your children start painting them with the glaze using a pastry brush. Let the cookies finish cooling and they are ready to eat. DO NOT use this method with older children!

Now I’m sure many of you are wondering why something so simple should not be done with older children. Let me tell you a story. One Easter when my boys were I high school I made sugar cookies. Several of their friends were over, or as I call them my other children, and helped glaze the cookies. Things went pretty smooth until they decided that they should splatter paint the cookies. When they were done I had glaze all over my dining room walls and ceilings. Months later I would find some spot on the wall and realize that it was glaze left from that eventful day. So please take my advice and choose frosting if you have older children.

This sugar cookie recipe has served me well over the years and created many memories. I am sharing this special recipe with you in hopes that it will create as many memories for you as it has for me. What memories did you make today? Creating great memories are some of the most positively healthy choices everyday that you can make!

Cut Out Cookies

Cream   ½ cup butter

                1 cup sugar   
     
                1 egg

Add        ½ teaspoon salt

                2 teaspoons baking power

                2 cups flour

                ½ teaspoon vanilla -optional      

Mix until dough sticks together. Dough should be sticky. Flour and roll out. Combine scraps and roll out again. Don’t roll to thin. Bake at 400 degrees for 8-10 minutes on ungreased cookie sheets. Do not over bake. Glaze while warm or frost with butter cream frosting.

Glaze     ¾ cup powdered sugar

                3-4 teaspoons water

                A few drops food coloring - optional

Mix together.

Helpful hints:

Use parchment paper on your cookie sheets. When the cookies are done you can just slide the paper and cookies off the cookie sheet in one move. I use the same couple of sheets of parchment over and over if I am making multiple batches. Plus, if you are glazing it gives you a paper to protect the table.

Be careful not to over bake these cookies. They should look white with only a small amount of light brown on the edge if any. I would cook the first batch the minimum time, take one cookie off, turn it over and look at the bottom. While these cookies don’t look done on the top they will look done on the bottom.

Remember that cookies keep cooking from their own heat when removed from the cookie sheet. If you keep cooking them until they look done the cookies will be over done by time they finish cooling.

In a hurry, roll the dough in 1 to 1 ½ balls, roll the balls in sugar, place on cookie sheet, flatten with the bottom of a glass dipped in sugar and you are ready to bake.                                                         

A positively scary number!

If you are like most people, especially women, the scariest number in the world is on the bathroom scale. We weigh ourselves in the morning, before breakfast without clothes hoping for the smallest number possible. We stare at the number in disbelieve and wonder where did such a large number came from. I would be lying if I said I didn’t fall into that category.  At my last doctor’s visit I got the lecture about that horrible number. “Susan, your weigh is creeping”, she said.

Unfortunately since I have reached the second half of my life it has been harder and harder to control that number. It is not that I don’t know what to do it is just that I have already done all the easy things. I rarely drink soda and when I do it is diet. There is no sugar in my tea or coffee. I eat breakfast. Most of the meat I eat is broiled. I drink lots of water. I don’t bake nearly as often as I would like and when I do bake the bake goods find a new home very quickly. On any given day my diet is fairly well rounded with foods from the five food groups. So what is left is the hard realization that I must eat less.

Eat less, eat less I tell myself. Are you really hungry or are you eating just to eat? Now my plight would be easy if I really only ate when I was hungry but I don’t. I love food and I love cooking. Being hungry has never been part of the food equation for me. Let's be honest I love to eat and eating or food is a big part of everything I do. No matter where I am going with friends my biggest question is always, "Where are we going for lunch?" All my great adventures always have a food equation with some of the best memories being the resturant and the food that was eaten. It is finding that balance between what I love and what I must do to be healthy.


The portion size of food in the United States has grown rapidly since the 1960’s. That hamburger and fries you got back in those days would look like the kid’s meal today. When was the last time you ordered anything resembling the size of a kid’s meal on the menu? If you are like most of us the answer is probably, “When I was a kid.” To help control my portion size I am going to implement a motto I used many years ago. Only eat half of what you think you want. Now many of you would just cut out a food or food group or follow some fad diet. Not me! I know that all foods belong in a balanced diet, even those cookies I ate yeaterday, because there are no bad foods just bad quantities. When you add lots of those bad quantities together a large scary number appears on the bathroom scale.

This year I am making positively healthy choices everyday by learning to count backwards using my bathroom scale. To make counting backwards happen there are other numbers that I need to increase. Exercise and eating more fruits and vegetables are among those. Numbers are everywhere in our lives and many times those very numbers define how healthy we are. Do you have scary numbers in your life? What would it take to make those numbers positively healthy?

Positively Healthy Gratitude

Saying thank you and graciously receiving a thank you or praise seem to be getting lost these days. Now I’m not talking about the everyday thank you that you make your child say when you hand them something or when the cashier says thank you after a purchase. I am talking about the out of the blue thank  you or praise given to a co-worker or to the barista at the local coffee shop or some stranger. In the January 1, 2012 issue of Parade Magazine John Kralik wrote a wonderful article  about expressing gratitude to those around us entitled "Up Your Gratitude". In the article he talked about how he started writing thank you notes at a time when he thought he had very little to be thankful for and how that simple act has now transformed his life. Since 2008 he has written 860 thank you notes.

Now I must admit that I am pretty good in the thank you and praise department. I may not write very many notes but thank you are two of the words I say often. When I get good service somewhere I don't just thank or praise that person I tell the manager. If the service was above and beyond I call the corperate office. Nothing is more pleasant than talking to someone at a corperate office and telling them you have a nicegram you would like to give someone. This is so out of the ordinary they hardly know what to do. By calling the corperate office good things flow downhill. This type of thank you and praise goes down the corperate ladder from manager to manager until it finally reaches the spot where the good service started. Just think of all the people you have made smile from just one thank you.

What I am not good at is excepting a thank you or praise graciously. I will come up with every excuse in the book as to why what I did was not important. The problem with this behavior is that it not only belittles what I did but also belittles the person giving it. Simplify your life by just saying your welcome and nothing more. Do you see yourself in this picture? How often do you except a thank you or praise graciously?

What are you thankful for in your life? Is there someone you should thank for that? Dust off that old box of thank you notes and join me by starting to write those notes today. It only needs to be a few lines but will bring a big smile to the receiver and I think you will be surprised at how much brighter it makes your day. Remember to be gracious the next time someone says thank you or gives you praise  and don’t make excuses or dismiss the act with “It was nothing.” Just say “You're welcome” and know that you are practicing positively healthy gratitude.


Here is the link to the wonderful article by John Kralik http://www.parade.com/news/2012/01/up-your-gratitude.html

The positively messy desk…

Somewhere I read that clutter and mess can be the death of you. It can zap your energy and cause great stress. If this is the truth my desk is in dire need of help and so am I.  You see I am a pile person. Now make no mistake I can always find the things I am looking for but in a small house if does not take much to look overwhelming. But today is the day to tackle the DESK!

I brought over the recycling bin and the garbage can then set to work. First there was the sorting. Papers that need to be filed, things that needed a new home and then there is always the what am I going to with it pile. I pitched and recycled, and pitched and recycled. I was making progress; you could almost see the top of the desk. Then came the hard part, dealing with the what am I going to do with you pile. The pile had assorted things from several wedding I had attended, old racing numbers and a few recipes waiting to be tried.

I looked at the wedding mementos and remembered those special days. One was the invitation to an East Indian friend’s wedding. It was so beautiful in red and gold. It had been hand delivered with a special box of traditional cookies, which is the custom in India. I remembered all the wedding activities and how fun it had been. But the wedding had been two years ago so I took one last look and into the garbage it went. I told myself that it was alright because soon her sister would be getting married and there would be another beautiful invitation to take its place.

Next in the pile was a wedding favor of special music a different bride and groom had put together for their guests. Again I remembered the special day. The wedding had been in San Luis Obispo at a charming outdoor location. She was so beautiful and so was the wedding. I had never seen her happier. It had been a great weekend of site seeing and exploring a city I had never been to. I had yet to listen to the CD so into the car it went for future listening.

The rest went fast. The racing numbers were put into plastic sleeves and into a binder. I already had a binder for recipes so into that they went. I took a look and it was there for all to see, the top of my desk! Now I make no promises as to how long this will last but hopefully it will be long enough for me to tackle one of my other messy places.

Do you have messes cluttering up your life? Where in your life would a good cleaning make things more positive? Let's all get started making positively healthy choices everyday by reducing what is cluttering up our lives.

If you can vision it you can achieve it!

To help move forward on my new goals this year I decided to make a vision board. Now I have watched these things work for many people and they are the new in thing to do to help you stay motive. It plays on the idea that in order to achieve something you really need to see it, remember the fat pictures we use to put on the front of the refrigerator to remind of us our diet. It is sort of like that but on a much grander scale.

There are lots of websites dedicated to vision boards and a whole new industry of professionals to help you along the way if you so choose. One of my favorite friends, Bonnie Kelly, has one of these businesses. She is young, very pretty and very motivated. For someone in her twenties she is already a very successful realtor, motivational speaker, business owner and spinner instructor. I’m not sure that there is anyone else in the world as hard working and motivated as she.

Hoping to find some of that motivation I went searching. After looking at a lot of websites and studying the subject I embarked on the journey. The basic idea is to gather lots of pictures and phrases out of magazines about what you want to achieve and make a big collage. Once that is completed you need to plan out small goals to achieve the larger goals and track them.
 

Rather than getting a board that would have to stay at home I decided to do something smaller that would be more portable. So I opened up a word document and set to work creating something with clip art. First I added some pictures about the things I wanted to improve on and then a few more. It was the usual diet, exercise and getting my finances in order. Then it was time to add some motivational sayings. I gave this a lot of thought as I was looking for something general but specific. I added one and then another. In the end I settled on just one that could be my everyday mantra and put it nice and big at the top. To track those small goals leading to the bigger goals I am using small post-it notes. I am all for simple, easy and fast. Plus they are easy to change and inexpensive to reproduce if your goals change.

I now have vision boards everywhere because with a word document you are only a click and a printer away. There are small ones, big ones, ones at work, ones at home. You can even make them small enough to carry in your wallet or purse.

Out of this process came this blog. I thought to really vision what I wanted to achieve this year I needed to share those small positively healthy choices with as many people as possible. What is your vision for the coming year and how can you succeed in making it one filled with positively healthy choices everyday?

The beginning ....

Welcome to the journey to positively healthy choices everyday! I have started on this journey to take a hard look at all the choices I make every day and how they affect me and those around me. This is not just about healthy eating and exercise it is about the total mind, body and soul that lives within us. We all make thousands of small choices everyday and these small choices when added together become a big choice that shapes our lives. It is these very small choices that can change the direction in our lives for either better or worse and those are what I will be focus on.

I will apologize up front to my many friends and family as I will be sharing many of the wonderful times we spend together plus stories from the past and how those small positively healthy choices have impacted my life. By journaling these choices I am hoping to make the light within me shine brighter and all those around me.

Here’s hoping that you join me making positively healthy choices everyday and share those choices so that everyone will shine brighter in their life.