"Healthy" Cookies?

Cookies may seem like an odd topic for a blog about bodybuilding, but getting to eat them is the advantage I have being the wife and not the actual bodybuilder.

I love to bake.  I love fresh-from-the-oven baked goods.  I love trying new recipes.  And I love trying to come up with ways to make cookies and muffins and cakes as healthy as they can be (while still tasting good.)

I’ve been baking a lot this fall, partly to celebrate the cooling weather and partly because I tend to bake when I’m feeling stressed.  When I was in grad school, I baked constantly.    In one day I made 20 loaves of quick breads: zucchini, banana, pumpkin.  If you lived within a five mile radius of my house, you probably got bread from me that Christmas.

Now I get the bonus of using baking as an activity to share with my kids.  They sit on the counter on either side of the mixing bowl, “helping.”  They taste and smell most of the ingredients, at least until the egg is added.  They’ve been well trained that once the raw egg goes in, there’s no more tasting.  Just say no to Salmonella!

This morning was beautiful and crisp and chilly, and practically screaming for molasses cookies.

I have a recipe for molasses cookies that I love, and that is decently healthy.  It came out of a fitness magazine years ago.  My only complaint is that is calls for ½ cup of oil, an ingredient I refuse to bake with.  (Baked goods should not make your fingertips glisten with oil, according to me.)

I usually substitute butter, which has the added benefit of tasting better, but today I couldn’t find any in the fridge.

I often use milk as a substitute for oil in muffin recipes, so I decided it was the perfect chance to play with the cookie recipe a little and see if I could make it even better for us. 

The fact that I’ve already eaten four of them should say something about how they turned out.

My New “Healthy-ish” Molasses Cookie Recipe:

½ cup milk (I used whole milk because that’s all we tend to have in the house – for the kiddos.)

¼ cup molasses

½ cup brown sugar

1 egg

1½ cups all-purpose flour

½ cup whole wheat flour

2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ginger

¼ tsp cloves

Roll the dough into balls a little over an 1 inch in size.   The dough is sticky.  The original recipe called for chilling the dough for two hours, but I don’t have the patience for that.

Instead, use two spoons to scoop out and drop a blop of dough into a small bowl of white sugar.  Use the spoons to form the ball and roll it in sugar.

Use the bottom of a drinking glass to flatten the dough balls a little on the cookie sheet.  (Without fat added, they won’t spread or flatten much on their own.)

Bake at 375⁰ for 8-10 minutes.

Mmmmm…..

What's for Dinner?

During the early years of our marriage, I often (lovingly) referred to Bodybuilder Hubby as “The Human Garbage Disposal.”

Because this boy can eat.

When Bodybuilder Hubby is training for a contest, his diet is very regimented.  But for many years, the off-season meant being able to eat whatever he wanted. Dinner out with friends might involve finishing his own plate and then seven more tacos or whatever else was too much for his friends to finish.  He would complain when, on a busy day, he was only able to eat five meals.  (He still complains about this on most days, actually…)  He’d stand on the scale in the morning and be all excited when he’d gained a couple of pounds.  I’d try really hard not to smack him.

He would make these huge pans of what he called “lasagna” but which tasted like flavorless ground beef with noodles.   Then he’d finish it all in a matter of days.

I’ve watched himself gorge himself at a restaurant hours after a contest was over, then wake up the next morning so swollen from the salt and grease that his fingers looked like messed up sausages.

Contest prep time was completely different.  I helped Bodybuilder Hubby prepare his meals back in those early days, back when it was a novelty.  (He’s on his own now.)  He would cook ten pounds of chicken breast meat at a time and a big pot of white rice.  (He had to teach me how to use a rice cooker, something I’d never even seen before.)  Then he would stand at the kitchen counter with a box of sandwich baggies and a food scale and divide the food up into portions for each meal: dozens of bags of diced chicken, rice and frozen green beans.  He bought a small freezer that we kept in the garage, solely for storing his prepped meals.

Bodybuilder Hubby’s approach to food has changed over the years.  He doesn’t let himself go as much during the off season, though he still puts on a fair amount of weight.   He eats “clean” most of the time: little salt and fat, very few processed foods. 

One thing that seems to surprise people is that Bodybuilder Hubby prefers real butter to processed “healthier” spreads.  Butter has one ingredient: butter.  Many of those spreads have long lists of ingredients, including artificial colors and flavors.  And, let’s be honest.  Those spreads taste like crap.  According to me, real butter on a fresh slice of homemade multigrain bread is the epitome of yumminess.  Mmmmm….

For years I didn’t have to worry about cooking dinner every night.  Bodybuilder Hubby did his thing, and I did mine.  (Lean Cuisine frozen meals, anyone?)  Now that we have kids, I’m trying to figure out how to do things like plan meals in advance and, basically, how to cook.  But we still rarely eat all together as a family, something I’m hoping we’ll figure out how to do better as our kids get older.

We did actually sit down to a family dinner last week: breaded baked chicken and zucchini.  Everybody ate it, and it tasted really good.  Doesn’t get much better than that.

Contest Poster Story

A few weeks ago…

Bodybuilder Hubby:  Hey, do you think that this weekend you could make up a mini version of the 2011 contest poster for me to use on some promotional stuff?

What I Thought:  The contest poster?  You mean the poster that last year took me four weeks to finish?  The one that I have set aside the entire month of November to work on?  That poster?

What I Said:   Um, sure.  I think I can do that.

Normally I really enjoy projects like this.  It’s fun to create something visual, to see what new tricks I can learn to use.  When there’s a time crunch, however, or when I don’t have a clear picture in my head of what I want, then it’s not as much fun.

Sometimes the best ideas come from looking at what others have done and thinking of changes or improvements to come up with something new and better.  So I started by Googling “bodybuilding contest poster” to see what other people were using.

I was a little surprised to recognize Bodybuilder Hubby’s body on one of the posters that came up in the search.  Not surprised that he was on a poster, but surprised that I recognized his headless body on a thumbnail image.  I wonder if most people would be able to recognize a picture of their spouse’s body; something about that just seems sort of odd to me.

Many contest posters include pictures from the previous year’s contest.  So I started by looking through last year’s pictures and selecting my favorites of each Overall and Pro winner.

Photoshop is my friend.   It’s lots of fun to play with and does some great things.  For example, when I’m making a family Christmas card, I don’t need one picture that’s good of all of us, I just need one good picture of each person in the same setting and lighting.  And the holiday picture of extended family from a few years back where I suddenly looked about 10 pounds thinner?  The Photoshop Diet!

For the pictures of the competition winners, I take out the background so that I have just their images to use on the poster.  This is a fairly easy process, but sort of a weird one.  In some cases, like when the background color is similar to the color of the shadow on a leg, I have to zoom in and clean up the lines.   Once I was working on a picture while I was on an airplane.  I was zoomed in really close on a competitor’s suit so that I could digitally remove the badge with the number on it.  I realized after I’d been working on it for a minute or two that it probably looked really strange to the people around me that I was working so intently zoomed in on a pair of briefs. 

This year’s poster actually came together really quickly.  In the Google search, I’d found a couple of posters with some black and white and some color pictures, so I stole that idea.  I already knew that I wanted to use a bright green color, especially since most of the other posters I saw were blue or red.   My latest favorite Photoshop trick is to use bevels and “strokes” to accent lettering, so I used a lot of both. 

I was really pleased with the end result, which only took a total of about four hours.    I showed Bodybuilder Hubby as soon as I printed a copy.  He smiled when he saw it, which is usually a good sign.  Then he had one comment:  “Are you sure you want to use green?”

Yes, I am.

The poster isn’t finished.  By contest time next spring, there will likely be more than 25 different versions, as we add sponsors and finalize the decision about the dates and times.  We may change some of the pictures.  I really like the pictures that I chose of last year’s Figure winners, but neither is in a “traditional” Figure pose.  Not sure if that matters.

But for now, it’s good.  According to me.  And the best part?  Maybe now I can use the month of November to work on some projects of my own…