Holiday food abundance

This weekend was cookie making time at my house.  I have many kinds of cookie I like to make but the one I most enjoy is sugar cookies.  I know I should let the kids help when I am in the kitchen -- but I like making them so much and I want them to taste so good, I can't cede control of any part of the process to the girls.

Once the cookies are baked and frosted, they have to sit on the counter to several hours to allow the frosting to dry a little so when I stack them in the bag, they won't smear and end up with green tree frosting on Santa's pink frosted boot. 

Once they were drying on the counter, we packed up and headed out for the day.  By the time we got home in the evening, the whole house smelled like butter cream frosting.  If you are not familiar with homemade frosting, let me enlighten you.  It is everything good in the world -- powdered sugar, milk, vanilla, and butter (real butter -- not margarine).  AND...if you leave a whole batch out all day, your house smells sooooo good.  But, we all know that smell is a powerful trigger to eat.  So the question becomes, "Now what?"

You all know by now that for me putting cookies in the freezer is no kind of deterrent.  Frozen just means better. 

So...the holiday season has started.  All of the wonderful things that are only available for a limited time (so I should eat as much as I can while it is available!!??) is here and what am I going to do about it?  I bagged the cookies up tight.  Washed the counter down really well.  (ate only 2 of them in the process -- but I can tell you that I experienced them more than ate them)

They are in the freezer now.  I have resisted eating any more -- I have to take them to a cookie exchange this weekend (so I can't eat too many or I will show up with only 4 cookies to exchange and that just looks bad).  But here's the thing -- It is 8 December and we still have many days until Christmas is here -- let alone making it all of the way through until the Epiphany when the holiday season officially ends -- What kind of plans do I have in place so I don't go off the deep end -- either with indulging or with denying myself???

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Don't bring things home.  If you have to take something to a potluck/cookie exchange/party/ whatever, give it away or throw it away (or just make less to begin with) so you don't bring it back to your house.  There is going to be plenty of holiday eating, if you made it in the first place, you can make it again at some other time in the future -- don't bring it back.

2. Make less in the first place.  (This is true for everything except the molasses cookies my mom make -- keeping making lots of those!!  There are never enough and they are soooo good frozen).  Everything else -- we don't need whole pieces of pie/cake/cookies-the-size-of-your-head -- make 'em smaller and make fewer of them -- make the treats special with their limited quantity.

3. If you need/want to make your goodies and you (like me) cannot be trusted to have them in the kitchen freezer -- move them into a seal-tight plastic tub (like the ones you keep your ornaments in) and put them in the garage.  If the garage floor is all covered in gross, half melted snow, chances are less you will sneak out there in your socks to get a goodie.

4. Pack them into the goodie baskets you intend on taking.  If you have them nicely arranged and packaged to go, there is less of a chance you will break into the pretty packaging and eat 5 or 6 -- since then you would have to rearrange them and redo the packaging.

5.  If you really, really need that treat, SIT DOWN AND ENJOY IT!!!  Don't just eat it quickly -- shoving it in like a guilty child -- taste it.  Enjoy it.  Appreciate it -- you worked really hard to make something so delicious -- you are eating it and it is going to cost you a certain amount of calories -- get the maximium amount of enjoyment out of it!!  And then walk away happy...don't you dare feel guilty about it!  Life is too short for that.

Ice cream before Dinner

Hi all. I have been on vacation (thus explaining the lack of posting the last couple days) but had an experience I wanted to share.

Yesterday the kids wanted to go get ice cream. After playing on the beach all day and trying to work out a schedule where I could get a shower and prep dinner and make all of that happen so we could walk downtown to get ice cream before the shop closed, I realized I couldn't make it all work.

So we came up with a plan B. Plan B was to have the kids walk downtown to get ice cream before dinner -- dinner would be ready when they got back. Here is what I am thinking....

If the kids eat ice cream before dinner and they get more full, it is more likely they will eat less dinner. If they ate dinner first (when what they really wanted was ice cream) they would eat their normal amount of dinner and then finish all of their ice cream. Thus, eating more calories total.

So what would happen if we ate more like this -- when we were hungry for a sweet, we ate a sweet -- when we were hungry for ribs or a steak or a salad, we ate some of that. Why do we try to trick ourselves with healthier choices first and then end up eating the food we really wanted in the first place.

Sweets

Sweets. I've come to conclude, are the ultimate feel-good, feel-bad food, and as such they're as beguiling as they're exasperating. They inspire stories as rich and deep as an intoxicating love affair. A better understanding of this relationship provides some insight into the meaning we instill in our food and the reasons why we consume it the way we do; it uncovers our pasts, our unspoken beliefs, fears, and desires. It sheds light on the way we view others.

--an excerpt from The Taste of Sweet --our complicated love affair with our favorite treats by Joanne Chen

Exaggeration?? I think not.

What do you get out of your food

...When we are talking about the taste of something, however, we're usually talking about flavor. Flavor is many tastes combined, embellished, and fine-tuned with aroma and texture. It's not merely, say, the spare sensation of sugar or vinegar on the tongue, but the full-blast gustatory experience of lemon pound cake, apple pie, or candied oranges. It's the sense of taste made gorgeous with the senses of smell and touch.

A person's gustatory world becomes whole thanks to a vast network of nerves and receptors on the tongue, in the mouth, up the nose, and in the brain, all assiduously doing their part. When one is not up to snuff, the brightness of a food's flavor dims a little....

A piece of cake, once in the mouth, is a moving target, causing conditions that are difficult to re-create in the lab and making taste especially tricky for scientists to study. The temperature of the food rises or falls until it finds its equilibrium in your warm mouth; its viscosity changes. As you chew, you're not only breaking down the food but also stirring up the air around it; aromatic components rise up as and solids move toward the back of the tongue and are eventually swallowed. The back of the nose catches a whiff, a process known as retronasal olfaction. When it's blocked by congestion from a cold, the flavor of the food becomes muffled and the pleasure is lost....

The Taste of Sweet by Joanne Chen


Are you utilizing all of your gifts to get the most satisfaction in the least amount of calories???