Sesame Cleared Up My Sun Spots

A few years ago, I noticed that the sun spots that had gradually covered my face except around my eyes over a decade had spontaneously disappeared over a couple of years.  I had made several changes to my diet around that time, and was uncertain what did it.  It now seems likely that sesame did the job.

          At that time, I was eating sesame-oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with cranberries and pecans added.  You can make the same cookies by using the recipe on the Quaker oatmeal box and substituting sesame seeds for 1/3 of the oatmeal.   (I prefer white sesame to avoid the occasional moldy seed.)  I also cut the recipe in half and use a bit extra sugar, a bit less flour, and a smallish egg to make crisp, melt-in-the mouth cookies.

I moved on from those to tahini-peanut butter cookies with sesame seed and chocolate chips.  (Tahini is sesame butter; I substituted it for half the peanut butter.)  They were a bit less sweet and had more protein than oatmeal cookies.   Sesame seed is about half highly anti-oxidant oil.  Tahini has considerably less oil, just a half-inch on the top of the jar.  Your best bet for anti-oxidants is to eat the seeds.  For calcium, the butter is more concentrated.

          But my cavities got so bad at one point that I couldn’t eat cookies because the sugar hurt my teeth, and I started making sesame-whole wheat crackers, inspired by a cracker named Ak Mak.  I made them with fresh-ground wheat like my cookies, layered with honey butter and sprinkled with sea salt and raw sugar, to get my calcium and anti-oxidants. 

My teeth got fixed, but the crackers spoiled my taste for cookies and for most other grain-based snack foods: cookies were too sweet; other snacks are too salty or spicy.   Organic wheat made them even tastier.  They are so crispy and delicious that they are addictive, but there is a reason that crackers are not generally made at home: they are highly labor intensive, rolling out dough paper thin and baking it to dryness.  Manufacturers use big machines and ovens as long as a football field to make crackers. 

After a while, I got tired of 5-6 hour weekly cracker-making sessions on Sundays and stopped making them, until I noticed a sun spot forming on my cheek.  I’d found the reason for their disappearance!   I ended up cutting the recipe in half and making them in 3 hour sessions, 2-3 times a week, so I could have both my daily anti-oxidant crackers and my day of rest.  The spot disappeared. 

Eating these crackers is good for me; making them is taking way too much of my time and energy.  I need a partner who is willing to find a cracker maker who will make these crackers under our label:  Grandma Rycke’s Honey-Butter Sesame-Wheat Crisps.  We need to start selling them, so everyone can enjoy the taste and health benefits of sesame in a handy, healthy snack food.