"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.

What's for Breakfast?

“What does he eat?”

This is, without a doubt, the question I get asked most often about Bodybuilder Hubby.

Over the years, his diet has been tweaked and changed, and sometimes has varied greatly from off-season to training time.  But his typical breakfast has probably stayed the most consistent: eggs, oatmeal, and meat.  All together.  In a bowl.

Eggs:   Bodybuilder Hubby eats a lot of eggs (mostly the whites), probably something like thirty kajillion each week.  More than once I’ve had grocery store clerks comment on how many eggs I bought at a time, about how we must have such a large family.  At the time, it was just me and Bodybuilder Hubby.  And I rarely ate eggs.   I’ve always thought it was quite convenient that most of Bodybuilder Hubby’s contests have been in the spring.  Eggs always go on sale for Easter.

Oatmeal:  Bodybuilder Hubby buys rolled oats in 25-pound bags.  He puts oats and a little water in a bowl and microwaves it so that it comes out in a semi-solid disk.  Most often, he crumbles the disk into the bowl of scrambled egg.

Once he tried to turn the oatmeal disk into a mini pizza, topping it with tomato sauce and shredded mozzarella.  I haven’t seen him do that again, though, so it must not have worked very well.

Meat:  Most of Bodybuilder Hubby’s meals include some sort of lean meat.  He goes through massive quantities of chicken breast.  He’s figured out some good ways to get discount prices, including finding out what time the butcher block sections of the grocery stores close so he can show up at exactly the right time to get end-of-day specials.

He sometimes chooses ground turkey instead, or lean ground beef which he drains and rinses to make even leaner.  He cooks the meat in large quantities once or twice a week to make it easier to throw together individual meals.

Flavor:  “Healthy” meals without much, if any, fat or salt aren’t exactly known for tasting very good.  For a long time, Bodybuilder Hubby added flavor with this amino acid stuff.  He said it tasted like soy sauce, but, oh my, the smell… I refused to eat in the same room when he used it.

Now he relies on one of his favorite food ingredients: hot sauce.  When we were dating, we frequented a burrito restaurant that had a “Wall of Fire,” shelf after shelf of different varieties of hot sauce.  In his mind, a good meal is one that burns enough to make his eyes water.

So that’s it: eggs, oatmeal, meat and hot sauce.  All together.  In a bowl.

The breakfast of this champion.