I think one of my favorite aspects of cooking food from scratch is that you can make your food as hardworking as you want.  By that, I mean you can usually find a way to include a ton of delicious but incredibly healthy ingredients in one quick little recipe…and then eat the entire batch in the safety of your home. (This may or may not have happened after I made this recipe.)

I love incorporating coconut flakes into my diet for a lot of reasons.  For one, they have an amazing composition of healthy fats, protein, and fiber.  Not only does this combination of macronutrients help keep you full longer after meals (which also helps prevent unhealthy snacking you weren’t actually intending), but fueling your body with such balanced caloric intake is really, amazingly good for the hormonal system (especially when you’re talking about Adrenal Fatigue and its relationship to the sex hormones!).

Additionally, the fatty acids found in coconut products directly play a role in healthy hormone synthesis so their presence in the diet greatly increases the success of all your other hormone-helping interventions; after all, it makes intuitive sense that if you don’t have the building blocks to create hormones, no amount of adjunctive therapies are going to help your cause in the long term.

The spices found in this recipe work through a variety of mechanisms to help the endocrine and adrenal system along.  Since glucose metabolism is a huge problem in people with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal dysfunction (which is often simply referred to as “adrenal fatigue” but is actually an incredibly limited way to look at the problem since it encompasses so much more than the adrenals…no wonder people have a hard time treating it on their own!), the cayenne, turmeric, and cinnamon are in here to help with the proper use and balance of sugar in the body.

As a big added bonus, cayenne pepper and turmeric are incredibly effective in tempering the inflammatory response in the body due to stress, high glucose levels, and underlying hormonal imbalances (see how they all work off each other??), incorporating these spices into meals regularly can be really helpful.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups coconut flakes
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• ¼ teaspoon ground turmeric
• ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 tablespoon ghee (replace with coconut oil if you can’t tolerate dairy products)
• 1.5 tablespoons honey

Steps:

1. Preheat your oven to 300 degrees.
2. Place your coconut flakes into a medium-sized mixing bowl.
3. Add in the cayenne pepper, ground turmeric, and ground cinnamon to the coconut flakes and stir well so that all the spices are well distributed (trust me when I say that you do not want a big bite of cayenne pepper down the line).
4. Place the tablespoon of ghee (or coconut oil) into a small bowl and microwave it until the ghee has melted.
5. Add the honey and vanilla extract to your melted ghee and mix them all together.
6. Slowly pour your honey, ghee, and vanilla extract mixture of the spice-dusted coconut flakes. Mix it all together until everything is evenly distributed.
7. Line a baking sheet with wax paper and evenly spread your coconut flake mixture over the entire area. You don’t want big clumps so take a few moments to spread it all out over the entire baking sheet.
8. Bake in the oven for 5-7 minutes.
9. Take out and let cool.
10. I stored mine in a glass tupperware container.