So Kelli and I have been doing pretty good about watching what we eat the last three weeks and exercising pretty regularly. Tonight we both had a huge craving for chocolate chip cookies (known as one of the food staples around our house). As many of you know Kelli makes some of the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. As they say - practice makes perfect. At least a couple of times a week Kelli used to make cookies and we would each eat 6-8 cookies before heading to bed.
I figured that since we have been so good lately we could put the kids to bed, whip up a batch of cookies, and guiltlessly polish off the whole batch. I got out the mixer and asked Kelli to tell me the recipe since she has it memorized. She said, "One cup of shortening" so I grabbed the shortening and then made the mistake of reading the nutritional value label. It said 120 calories per tablespoon. My first thought was that there is no way she meant a cup, she must have meant a tablespoon so I asked her. She confirmed that the recipe called for one full cup of shortening (which just happens to be 16 tablespoons according to my friend Google). At this point I wrote down the recipe, went to the computer, and calculated exactly how many calories we were preparing to consume. 1 batch of Kelli's best = 6650 calories! Each cookie is 222 calories!
I'm happy to report that no cookies were made in our house tonight and I will never be able to look at a chocolate chip cookie again with blissful ignorance of how many minutes on a treadmill each one represents.
7 comments:
You could also have titled this post "Ignorance is Bliss".
How about the applesauce fat-free trick! They won't taste like Kelli's perfect cookies, but they are usually still pretty good!
Kelli and jess,
Your blog is so cute. I haven't seen it for a while and today took the time to update myself! I love it! you are great and we sure miss you and love you!
Uh...thanks. I now hate chocolate chip cookies. (It's okay:) I needed to hate them.)
I haven't been blogging good. It was fun to catch up. You are the cutest family. Hope you are all doing good.
Jess you just have to eat enough cookies so that your fingers are too fat to do those type of calculations. Then Ignorance would be bliss. Plus if you eat those cookies with milk the milk's health qualities will cancell out many of those shortening and sugar calories.
yeah...look where Rich's "calculations" have gotten us! I had to keep a food journal on the computer for 6 weeks for my endocrinologist (fitday.com will calculate all your caloric intake and burning if you just enter what you ate and what you did for exercise--it's great and it's free) and it was pretty eye-opening. That's when I realized that walking 2 miles 3x a week is kind of a joke, so it's 3-4 miles in an hour 6 days a week now and no more mayo, butter, cookies, frosting, etc. I really don't miss that stuff and when I saw how much it was costing me health wise...not a problem. HOWEVER if I'm ever going to indulge, it's gotta be choc chip cookies. They are the only sweet I even like (well, besides a Dove dark chocolate square, but that's only 45 calories)! Keep up the good work!
I just did a google search on tollhouse cookies nutritional value and if you omit the shortening and use margarine or butter, it drops the calories to 108 per cookie. That might be worth it.
That is hilarious! Hey, thanks for ruining my euphoria of cookie bliss!!
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