Yesterday, I had chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. It was the first time I'd done that in a while (well, four weeks anyway) - and I really couldn't eat nearly as many of them as I usually would. I was wondering if it was the heat was cutting down my sugar/ cocoa tolerance; although if it was the effect is clearly only marginal as I managed to eat more of them later, and a German friend bought me a box of Merci chocolates a couple of days ago and the husband and I were happily munching our way through them in front of the TV last night as well.
However, it is true that eating chocolate even in 'normal' quantities (I'm thinking standard-sized bar, here) can actually make me feel a bit odd. If I go super-size, I often feel really quite odd. At one level, you could argue that's part of the point - but I wonder if that might be how I, eventually, kick the habit. I used to binge-drink, but gradually came to the realisation that it made me feel bad enough that it was a risk that just wasn't worth taking. That took about 18 years, so if I start now, I guess I might have my chocolate consumption under control shortly before my fifty-sixth birthday.
It's cooler now, anyway. There's no tennis on that I actually want to watch, and the evenings are beginning to draw in. I'm thinking of declaring autumn, sometime around the middle of next week.
Showing posts with label Cookies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cookies. Show all posts
3 March 2009
Day 6 - Godlessness
I finally got around to googling Alcoholics Anonymous last night. I didn't exactly spend long on it, but 'not long' threw up an interesting range of accusations that it was a cult, and statistics which show that it only has about a 5% success rate. I also hit the official website, which sets out the 12 steps, and discovered that step 2 is a requirement to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity.
So even if they did do chocolate, I would be one of the 95%.
It was the second time I had come up against God in the course of a single evening - which is kind of unusual. Our paths don't usually cross that often. I had spent an interesting, if slightly odd, couple of hours at a panel discussion at the Royal Society about science and religion. I hasten to add that I didn't do any of the discussing, and hid in the corner at the drinks afterwards as lots of terribly learned looking types kept greeting one another slightly awkwardly (hard to tell whether it was arthritis, autism or problems with bodily hygiene - but quite an interesting dynamic to watch). But it lead me to reflecting on the fact that, despite having done so in the past, I now can't quite summon the energy which I need to believe in a God.
Forster doesn't help. I tend to come back to a quote which I noted down as an undergraduate about 20 years ago. 'He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind'. Conversion isn't religion, but it's close enough for me when I'm free-associating in a room full of professors and priests.
Free association also took me from half-baked minds to cookie dough (it's easily done: I also found myself thinking that the curtains in the lecture room would make an interesting ball gown). My usual cookie recipe is unfortunately specific to chocolate - the dough melts almost flat, and it needs the chocolate to melt with it in order to not produce something with sticky out bits. But I have been thinking that if I upped the flour content a bit and omitted the vanilla essence, it might work with crystallised ginger and dates.
I just haven't tried it today because I bought and ate a large bad of fudge instead. I intended to buy a small bag of kids fudge from Thorntons, but didn't end up anywhere near a Thorntons (which then cost me about 600 calories). So I guess this actually covers day 7 as well.
So even if they did do chocolate, I would be one of the 95%.
It was the second time I had come up against God in the course of a single evening - which is kind of unusual. Our paths don't usually cross that often. I had spent an interesting, if slightly odd, couple of hours at a panel discussion at the Royal Society about science and religion. I hasten to add that I didn't do any of the discussing, and hid in the corner at the drinks afterwards as lots of terribly learned looking types kept greeting one another slightly awkwardly (hard to tell whether it was arthritis, autism or problems with bodily hygiene - but quite an interesting dynamic to watch). But it lead me to reflecting on the fact that, despite having done so in the past, I now can't quite summon the energy which I need to believe in a God.
Forster doesn't help. I tend to come back to a quote which I noted down as an undergraduate about 20 years ago. 'He believed in sudden conversion, a belief which may be right, but which is peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind'. Conversion isn't religion, but it's close enough for me when I'm free-associating in a room full of professors and priests.
Free association also took me from half-baked minds to cookie dough (it's easily done: I also found myself thinking that the curtains in the lecture room would make an interesting ball gown). My usual cookie recipe is unfortunately specific to chocolate - the dough melts almost flat, and it needs the chocolate to melt with it in order to not produce something with sticky out bits. But I have been thinking that if I upped the flour content a bit and omitted the vanilla essence, it might work with crystallised ginger and dates.
I just haven't tried it today because I bought and ate a large bad of fudge instead. I intended to buy a small bag of kids fudge from Thorntons, but didn't end up anywhere near a Thorntons (which then cost me about 600 calories). So I guess this actually covers day 7 as well.
21 February 2009
Upping the Calorie Count
I've just eaten my last batch of pre-Lenten cookies: every time I eat something involving chocolate at the moment it's as if I'm self-administering the last rites by instalments. Has to be said that it neither makes it taste any better, nor makes me feel any better about it - and it doesn't seem to make me less inclined to eat it either.
Cookies have been one of my great comforts of the past year or so. It's partly Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's fault, as it's one of his recipes that I have been using. I have to say that he's not generally my kind of cook - if you find yourself being subjected to the consequences of weird butchery in the wilds of Chiswick, he's almost always to blame - but his cookie recipe is spot on. It makes the kind of cookies which are chewy without being more than a little bit crisp or ever so slightly spongey. I've tried it enough times to know that it works better with 'proper' dark chocolate than it does with anything more anaemic. I've even tried it enough times to know that I prefer it with Green & Black 70% to most other brands (although the Tesco finest 72ish% works OK if I'm feeling poor), and that it chops into about the right size chunks if you chop the little squares into 4, and that it chops most easily in winter weather if it has been in the cupboard near (but not next to) the hot water pipe for a day or two. If I'm using a medium rather than a large egg, I reduce the rest of the ingredients by about 10%. And it doesn't seem to matter much what kind of sugar you use.
I didn't grow up with cookies, although there was plenty of home baking around. Cookies have the attraction of being exotic. I remember very clearly the first time I ate proper home-made chocolate chip cookies: the fact that they remind me of a particular boy at a particular time certainly does nothing to put me off them.
But they also have the advantage of making up into relatively small batches. I have the same problem with cakes and biscuits as I have with chocolate: if they are there, I eat them. The cookie recipe makes about a dozen. Eating a dozen cookies is bad, but nowhere near as catastrophic as eating an entire tray of brownies or a whole, large carrot cake. I just concentrate on not thinking about the fact that making a bar of chocolate into cookies miraculously converts about 550 calories into something more like 4,000.
If I actually manage to do this (the giving up), I intend to spend Easter Sunday morning making cookies.
Cookies have been one of my great comforts of the past year or so. It's partly Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's fault, as it's one of his recipes that I have been using. I have to say that he's not generally my kind of cook - if you find yourself being subjected to the consequences of weird butchery in the wilds of Chiswick, he's almost always to blame - but his cookie recipe is spot on. It makes the kind of cookies which are chewy without being more than a little bit crisp or ever so slightly spongey. I've tried it enough times to know that it works better with 'proper' dark chocolate than it does with anything more anaemic. I've even tried it enough times to know that I prefer it with Green & Black 70% to most other brands (although the Tesco finest 72ish% works OK if I'm feeling poor), and that it chops into about the right size chunks if you chop the little squares into 4, and that it chops most easily in winter weather if it has been in the cupboard near (but not next to) the hot water pipe for a day or two. If I'm using a medium rather than a large egg, I reduce the rest of the ingredients by about 10%. And it doesn't seem to matter much what kind of sugar you use.
I didn't grow up with cookies, although there was plenty of home baking around. Cookies have the attraction of being exotic. I remember very clearly the first time I ate proper home-made chocolate chip cookies: the fact that they remind me of a particular boy at a particular time certainly does nothing to put me off them.
But they also have the advantage of making up into relatively small batches. I have the same problem with cakes and biscuits as I have with chocolate: if they are there, I eat them. The cookie recipe makes about a dozen. Eating a dozen cookies is bad, but nowhere near as catastrophic as eating an entire tray of brownies or a whole, large carrot cake. I just concentrate on not thinking about the fact that making a bar of chocolate into cookies miraculously converts about 550 calories into something more like 4,000.
If I actually manage to do this (the giving up), I intend to spend Easter Sunday morning making cookies.
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