Chocolate-Covered Chocolate-Mint Cookies

When I was a Girl Scout, I sold more cookies than anyone in my troop. I knew that Friday, payday, was the day to sell in my neighborhood. I would make my rounds on Friday nights and nab dads with fresh cash in their pockets. Now I buy the cookies by the case every year and give them out to the gang in the kitchen. I developed my own versions of Girl Scout cookies for the launch party of a book that the Girl Scouts produced about inspiring women; Barbara Lazaroff, co-owner of Spago, was featured in the book. The chocolate-covered chocolate-mint cookies were always my favorite. Freeze them in the summer.

Excerpted from Desserts by the Yard. Copyright © 2007 by Sherry Yard. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



Ingredients:Makes 72 cookies


1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/4 cups sugar
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
6 ounces (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter , cut into 1/2-inch pieces
2 large egg yolks
1 1/2 tsp. peppermint oil
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 pounds bittersweet chocolate
Place the flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a food processor fitted with the steel blade and pulse a few times to combine the ingredients. Add the butter and pulse to cut the butter into the dry ingredients. Add the egg yolks, peppermint oil, and vanilla and pulse until a dough forms on the blades of the food processor.

Remove the dough from the food processor and shape into a 2-inch-thick log. Wrap in plastic wrap or parchment paper and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or overnight.

Place racks in the middle and lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 350°F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

Why Subtle Action Is a Powerful Tool to Change Your Energy

Subtle action is the most powerful tool we have to change our energy. Deepak Chopra explains how we can change the energy in our daily lives by viewing our bodies as a flowing process guided by energy.
Recently I've been discussing how to change your energy. Many problems—physical and mental—seem to come down to a person's beliefs, habits, lifestyle, moods and emotions. We use the words "positive" and "negative" to describe people we know, yet modern medicine hasn't been able to find the source of these factors. There's plenty of data to prove that people who undergo traumatic events, such as being widowed or losing a job without warning, suffer from lowered immune response. There are countless studies linking stress and poor health.

In my book Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, I suggest that the missing link is energy—a term that appears everywhere in Eastern medicine, from the life energy called Chi in Chinese medicine to Prana in Ayurvedic medicine from India. The important thing, however, is to find out for yourself if you can change your energy. In fact, there are ways that do not depend on esoteric beliefs or aligning yourself with Eastern medicine.

The most powerful tool for changing your energy is subtle action. This is nothing more than having an intention that your body can respond to. When you lift your arm, your body is responding to an intention. We're used to that kind of mind-body link, yet subtle action goes much deeper. Experiments with Tibetan monks who have meditated on the value of compassion have proved that their brains actually change. The area of the prefrontal cortex associated with higher functions, like compassion, light up stronger in these monks than in any other tested subjects.

In daily life, feeling love and sending it to others is a subtle action. Experimenters at Harvard have shown the immediate effect of love on the body. Subjects sat in a room to watch a film of Mother Teresa and her work with abandoned children in Calcutta. The images were deeply moving, and clearly the audience was touched. At the same time, their breathing rates and blood chemistry changed, revealing greater calm and less stress. All these responses are controlled by the brain.

The Ultimate Beauty Morning

Wake up before your alarm clock after seven to eight hours of sleep. You may have to get up a little earlier (or later) than 6 a.m., depending on your particular schedule and lifestyle. Seven or eight hours is the amount of time your body needs to recharge; plus, sleep is the major stimulant for your natural growth hormone, which keeps skin taut and vibrant.

When you wake up, take a few minutes for an inventory of the way your body feels—specifically the minor aches and pains that may subconsciously distract you from the focus of your life. When you wake up, perform a few light stretches. Take just a few minutes to get your blood going, think about your breathing and prepare yourself for your day. While you meditate to the sensations of your body, dream about one big idea you want to pursue today.

Q: Is there a diet I can follow or certain foods I can eat that would help me sleep better?

And if you're over 60, have dark skin or slather on sunscreen every time you step outside, put yourself in the 85 percent zone. That's bad news for your health. Not just because you need D to build strong bones, but because a steady stream of recent research suggests this familiar nutrient is responsible for more good deeds than a string of superheroes put together—including the biggie that it can even help you live longer. Several studies have found that if people take more vitamin D, they have 25 percent less cancer and heart disease.

If you don't? A just-released study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D in their blood are 26 percent more likely to die from any cause (heart disease, cancer, infection, you name it) than folks with respectable amounts.

That's just the beginning. Vitamin D is like the quiet kid in the back of the room who ends up developing the next Google. It's equally underestimated. New benefits of D are being discovered faster than you can say cholecalciferol (that's science-geek speak for the active form of vitamin D, also known as vitamin D3). Here's the latest on how it helps you stay young and healthy.


It cuts your risk of breast and colon cancer.
Many cells love to multiply faster than rabbits in the arugula patch. But out-of-control cell growth can lead to cancer. Enter vitamin D. It keeps a lid on the rate that cells reproduce, and it turns on your DNA spell checker, called the P53 gene. This gene checks your DNA for typos and kills cells—like cancer cells—that have errors. Experts now believe this is why women who live in sunny climates, and thus have plenty of D (your body makes it when sunlight hits your skin), are less likely to develop breast cancer. D has also been linked to lower chances of developing ovarian and lung cancers and better odds of beating colon cancer. Recent research found that colon cancer patients with the highest D levels are the most likely to survive.

It deters diabetes and other serious diseases.
When researchers looked at the link between sun exposure and type 1 diabetes in children, they found fewer cases of diabetes in kids who live closer to the sunny equator (and therefore make more D). And because D improves your ability to produce and use insulin, it may also help protect against type 2 diabetes. The vitamin, which is thought to be an immune system ally, may help prevent autoimmune diseases too, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

It keeps your heart healthy.
Vitamin D helps your ticker by controlling inflammation, moderating blood pressure and keeping your arteries young. That's probably why vitamin D-deficient men are twice as likely to have a heart attack as men with healthy levels—and twice as likely to die from it.

Foods to Help You Sleep Better

Q: Is there a diet I can follow or certain foods I can eat that would help me sleep better?
— Gabriela Vasquez, Bronx, New York

A: You can improve your sleep by eating more plant foods that provide carbohydrates—fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains. These tend to produce a slow, steady rise in blood insulin that helps the amino acid tryptophan enter the brain. Tryptophan is used to make serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps induce sleepiness along with improving your mood (and who knows—it just might stimulate good dreams).

This chemistry explains why the time-honored glass of warm milk before bed may actually do the trick: Milk provides a dose of tryptophan while also inducing a release of insulin. By the way, the supposed sedative effect of the Thanksgiving turkey—which, like many kinds of meat, contains tryptophan—is more likely due to the size of the holiday meal. But while a big meal may make you sleepy, digesting it could make for a very restless night.

Certain foods and drinks can disturb your slumber. The stimulant caffeine—in soda, coffee, some teas, and chocolate—will interfere with sleep if you ingest it within four hours of bedtime. An alcoholic drink can make you drowsy, but metabolizing the sugar can disrupt your shut-eye (some people overheat). Sugary treats eaten just before bed can likewise raise your body temperature and leave you restless.

Your diet can also have an indirect effect on your sleep. Being overweight can lead to the heavy snoring and interrupted breathing of sleep apnea, for example. And eating a lot of simple carbohydrates (sweets) and refined starches (white flour, rice), which continually causes your blood sugar to spike and fall, may throw off the hormones that regulate metabolism. This can derail the body's natural rhythms and cause wakefulness at night.

A Global Guide to Medical Tourism

Bargain hunting for a new television or negotiating a better deal on a car is being a smart consumer. But what about shopping around for the best price on a major, life-altering surgery?

For those who are comfortable with the idea of medical tourism, the savings are enticing. The average cost of heart bypass surgery in the United States, for example, is $70,000. In India, the same surgery costs only $7,000—a whopping 90 percent less. For the 47 million uninsured people in the United States, these prices matter.

Josef Woodman, author of Patients Beyond Borders, has toured more than 140 medical facilities in 22 countries. He estimates that 240,000 Americans traveled for medical procedures in 2009, and the numbers are growing.

While the idea of going under the knife in a foreign country sounds daunting (if not dangerous), the Joint Commission International has given its approval to 240 hospitals around the world. The Joint Commission is the largest and most respected accreditation agency in the United States, Woodman says. To be approved, an international healthcare provider must meet the same rigorous standards as a hospital in the United States.

Hormone mix may cut breast cancer risk

Women in menopause who have symptoms are currently treated with a combination of estrogen plus progestin hormone therapy, however this treatment comes with side effects, including a higher risk of breast cancer caused by the progestin.

Yale researchers sought to determine a better way of administering hormone therapy without the breast cancer risk.

During the study, lead researcher Dr Hugh S. Taylor, professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale, and his colleagues treated breast and endometrial cell lines with either estrogen or estrogen plus one of the SERMs.

They later looked at various markers of cell growth, including proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), one of the best-characterized markers of cell growth.

The team found that PCNA was increased when they stimulated cells with estrogen and decreased when they added a SERM, indicating that the SERM blocked cell growth.

Taylor said that breast and uterine cells won't be stimulated by the estrogen plus SERM combination, so women in menopause get the benefits of estrogen without the risk of progestin.

Progestin is a double-edged sword, Taylor said. It poses a breast cancer risk, but if you use estrogen alone without progestin, there is a higher risk of uterine cancer. Therefore SERMs appear to be a good substitute for progestin.

"In our study, the right combination of estrogen and various SERMs was able to prevent the proliferation of breast and endometrial cells,” said Taylor.

"These preliminary findings could lead to a better way of administering hormone therapy to women in menopause," he added.