Lucia’s Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

By Lucia Ferrara

This is a recipe many visitors to Precious Blood Renewal Center have asked me about for years. Well, today, I am ready to reveal it for the first time: Lucia’s Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies. The ingredients are listed below. Watch the video to learn how I put it all together.

Ingredients:

• 4 eggs
• 2 cups chunky peanut butter
• 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 cupped of chopped nuts (I like walnuts)
• 2 cups of sugar

Bake in oven at 350⁰ Fahrenheit. Check after 12 minutes. If gooey, bake an additional 3-5 minutes until tops of cookies are set.

Makes about 24 cookies.

How these cookies and feed your soul

These cookies are great with a cup of hot coffee or a cup of hot tea or even hot chocolate. But the best way to eat them is with friends and family.

I wanted to leave you with a little bit of a reflection from this book I’m reading. It’s called Rest Stops for the Soul, and it was written by one of our own Missionaries of the Precious Blood, Fr. Joe Nassal. He writes about visiting a spiritual health in store.

The diet plan is simple, drink as much hope and eat as much humble pie as possible. The intake of hope will circulate through our bodies to break up those clots of compromise and caution that accumulate in our arteries and cause us to be lethargic in listless. The humble pie we eat for dessert has very few calories. It makes us feel small again.

Then he goes on to say several paragraphs later:

The main ingredient in both this hope and this humble pie is found in a natural herb we buy at the health food store, also owned and operated by Isaiah — “a shoot that sprouts from the stump of Jesse” (Isaiah 11:1). In this bud that blooms are the ingredients to make us young, small and childlike again. And the remarkable thing is that it doesn’t matter what age we are. We can always take this medicine, follow this diet and see how God is getting us back in shape for the journey that lies ahead.

In this time of uncertainty in our world and in ourselves, I urge you to take time to sit and have a good chocolate chip cookie. Have it with tea and coffee, either by yourself or with a friend or family member. Sit and rest and feed your soul, not only with good, delicious food and desserts but feed your soul with the humility and that hope that Fr. Joe talks about in his book.

This is a practice that has helped me to sit down and reflect that on my life. I hope it does that for you as well.

Until next time. Ciao.

All the articles and videos in the Cooking and Spirituality Series can be found here.

[Lucia Ferrara, the Director of Hospitality at Precious Blood Renewal Center. Share your thoughts with Lucia or ask her questions using the form below or by sending an email to info@pbrenewalcenter.org.]