Holiday Snacking

One thing often leads to another. In the case of holiday shopping, something many of us are no doubt preparing for if we haven’t already begun, it can lead to extra excuses for holiday snacking.

Who doesn’t love the idea of stopping for a steaming hot chocolate in between shopping excursions, or taking a break at the mall with one of those gooey chocolate chip cookies or a huge pretzel dusted with sea salt or a cinnamon sweet roll? It’s the holidays. We’re entitled, right?

Then there is the desire to cram in all those talked about get-togethers with friends we’ve been intending to make time for all year. We simply must see them during the holidays. How do we usually do that? Over lunch or coffee, what else?

My point is that it’s really easy to fall into the food trap this time of year and it has nothing to do with holiday parties. Finding ourselves out and about shopping more, we also find ourselves nearer to snack food kiosks, mall food courts, or fast food places while heading from one store to another. It can wreck months of hard work we’ve done if we’re not careful. I’m not saying don’t do these things, I’m suggesting you be mindful of how much of them you’re doing. There is, after all, a reason many New Year’s resolutions are about food and dieting. You want to be sure that warm-up suit or pretty nightgown and robe set you get for Christmas doesn’t have to be exchanged for a larger size. Go out, enjoy the shopping experience, enjoy meeting friends, but try to make them the focal point, not the food.

Holiday Portions

Portion control, that’s what so much of calorie counting is all about. During the next three months, the challenge for many of us will be to keep our portions under control, especially when it comes to those luscious cakes and pies that we or others will be baking and bringing to parties and family gatherings. That’s why I like cupcakes and cookies. When it comes to cutting slices of cake or pie, or even scooping out servings of cobblers and crisps, our eyes are sometimes bigger than our stomachs, as my parents used to say. Of course, it’s not that we can’t eat that much, it’s that we shouldn’t. While a typical layer cake is intended to be sliced into about 12 servings, sometimes we end up cutting larger slices and getting only about 8 or 10 out of it.

If you’ve decided to bake a cake for an upcoming Halloween party, why not make cupcakes instead? The same amount of batter for a 2 layer cake will make 24 cupcakes. Since cupcakes aren’t filled and iced like a layer cake, you save calories on frosting as well. They’re also a lot of fun to decorate, are easier for children to handle, and they can be frozen for later if you have any left and don’t want all of them sitting around. The Betty Crocker website, http://www.bettycrocker.com/ has Halloween ideas for cupcakes along with the nutrition information for their recipes.


Cookies are also great for keeping portions under control as long as you don’t eat more than a recommended serving amount, usually 1 or 2, and make them all about the same size. This is also wise for getting evenly baked cookies. So if you have a recipe that says you’re supposed to get 24 cookies out of it, try to make sure you do. As you portion out the dough to get that recommended amount, you may also see a much smaller cookie than you had expected. That’s OK. You’ll at least know what to expect from that recipe next time and you’ll know exactly how many calories you’re getting every time you take a bite! Hey, holidays are meant to be enjoyed and food is part of that. But you don't want to associate them with over-indulgence and end up dreading them each year.

The 400+ Calorie Cookie

My computer homepage is a conglomeration of news, health, recipes and humor. Every day the cooking and baking portion of the site, gives several recipe suggestions. Today’s was a link to a wonderful site I already have bookmarked called allrecipes.com. One reason I appreciate this site so much is because it’s not only recipes that have been submitted by home cooks like myself, but most of the time these recipes include the nutrition information for each recipe.

One of today’s featured recipes is for chocolate chip cookies. They are probably one of my favorite cookies, especially if they’re chewy, which this recipe assures they are. They sounded wonderful! But when I read down to the nutrition information I was startled. The recipe yields one dozen cookies and under 'calories' it said: “411.” Now, I couldn’t imagine that each cookie was 411 calories! But then neither could I imagine that 411 was the total for the whole dozen, either. So I got out my calculator and went to figuring for myself. Well, I was right. The 411 wasn’t correct. No, the actual number was 411.6! And since anything over .5 should be rounded UP we could say each chocolate chip cookie is 412 calories! Oh-my-gosh, for one cookie??

I would expect that of those face-sized cookies you find at bookstore coffee shops, but these? Not having actually mixed them up and divided the dough into the recommended dozen portions, I can only hope that these are huge cookies, too. But if I make them, I’ll have to portion them out to 24 cookies to make them reasonable. But even then, each one will be worth about 206 calories. And who can eat just one chocolate chip cookie when they come hot out of the oven? I have to ask myself, is it really worth it? I’m not so sure. As much as I love homemade cookies, and I DO love to bake, store bought cookies are more controlled calorie-wise, and to be honest, they’re not so good that I can’t close up the package and walk away after giving myself the suggested serving amount.

If you like to bake, do go to the trouble of figuring the calories. This recipe albeit delicious sounding, is made up of the same things any others could be: butter, eggs, flour, sugar, but the proportions of ingredients make all the difference. Don’t assume what you’re eating contains a reasonable or 'average' amount of calories. Figure it up for yourself so you know for sure. You’ll be glad you did.