Category: Cooking

A GOOD friend recently baked me a box of ginger cookies and gave me the recipe. To avoid losing that recipe and pass it on, I am posting it here.

Yum!

Dag’s Ginger Cookies:

Ingredients:

1. 1 cup of flour
2. 1 cup of rolled oats
3. 1 cup of sugar
4. ½ teaspoon of baking powder
5. ¼ teaspoon of salt
6. ¼ cup of oil
7. 1 ½ teaspoons of vanilla extract
8. ½ cup of chopped crystallized ginger
9. 1?3 cup of water

Steps:

1. Preheat an oven to 350° Fahrenheit
2. Mix ingredients #1- #5 in a bowl
3. Add ingredients #6 – #9 to the bowl and mix those ingredients in
4. Put the dough on a baking sheet in cookie sized increments
5. Bake the dough for 15 – 18 minuets
6. Let the cookies cool before removing them from the baking sheet

An extra 200 calories a day is enough to put on 20 lbs of fat over a year. On the positive side 200 fewer calories a day is enough to take off 20 lbs of fat over a year.

200 calories.

1 tablespoon of just about any type of oil is 200 calories.

Many cookbooks I have seen start a recipe with at least 1 – 2 tablespoons of oil. Oil is similar to sugar in that it is almost pure calories with almost no nutrition.

Fortunately most recipes do not require all of the oil that is commonly asked for. Most of the time the oil is used to brown onions/garlic or to activate spices. Many health conscious Indians and Chinese people I know manage to do these things with only 1 teaspoon of oil, finishing the food with little bits of water. That is 1/3 of tablespoon or a mere 33 calories spread over multiple servings.

Lastly, there is a technique I’ve heard low fat zealots talk about:

Steam Frying
( an onion until browned – a typical first step of many recipes )

Here is how you do it:

1. Place a frying pan over medium heat.
2. Then add the ingredients to be cooked.
3. Then add 2 tablespoons of liquid ( water, vegetable broth, juice, wine, etc…)
4. Do not crowd the pan.
5. Increase the heat to high.
6. Using a wooden spatula move the food around to keep it from sticking
7. Add tiny bits of liquid if the original liquid evaporates before your onion browns.

I’ve been looking at a lot of recipes on the web lately and a lot of cookbooks.

There are a couple of things I would like to see more of with both:

1. Nutrition information
2. Serving suggestions

It seems like there is an eternal struggle between tasty cuisine and optimum nutrition.

Sometimes I like to compromise on one or the other. Either way, I like to know what I am eating.

As a cookbook consumer I don’t think I am alone in that regard. It is a nuisance to have to figure out my own nutrition information and serving sizes.

There are a number of cheap and even free nutrition software packages out there that are very easy to use. There isn’t any reason for a professional, like a cookbook author not to use them.