Weigh-in Wednesday

These cookies . . .

. . . were not good to me this week.

At least according to my still-possibly-horribly-inaccurate scale. (I swear I've been scale shopping. Just haven't found one that comes with a lying function.) So I can pray that the scale was not in its sweet spot, but I have a feeling these cookies brought back the 2 pounds I said good-bye to last week.

Bummer.

But, listen. Do I wish I hadn't gained 2 pounds? Of course. But were those cookies some of the best to ever cross my lips? Oh, my, yes. (I've never understood that saying, "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels." I'm like, "She must not be eating what I'm eating.")

That said, I sure do want to wear some of the pretty clothes in my closet again, so I've been trying to reflect on the bad weeks, not beat myself up too badly, and figure out what happened that I can learn from. This week, we know what happened. Chocolate chip cookies happened. However, trying to see the positives here, I have to give myself props for a) making these vegan cookies from scratch, and b) screwing them up.

I do hope that one of these days, I'll be able to eat fewer than 9 cookies at a sitting, so I'm sharing my "mistake" here with you. It's no secret that I'm not exactly a whiz in the kitchen, and because of that, I'm afraid to ever stray from a recipe. I just don't have enough creative slant or faith in my ability.

So when Paul saw me getting out all the ingredients for the cookies, and said, "Oh, you're using sea salt?" I hesitated for a moment because I know his culinary skills put mine to shame. But then I thought, doesn't the salt, even big chunky sea salt, just get dissolved in the batter anyway? And tossed it in.

Well, it didn't. Even as I was forming dough balls on the cookie sheet, I could see little salt pellets here and there. But the dough tasted okay to me, so I kept going.

The end result? Have you ever had those sea salt caramels? Yeah. Like that.
You get a hit of sweet and salty at the same time, and it's really heavenly.
After about cookie #11, I said to Paul, "I think it's the salt." And he agreed. He told me they're among the best chocolate chip cookies he's ever had. (They're vegan!!) And this man is a connoisseur of chocolate chip cookies. I take his compliment seriously.

Yeah, odd that I'm singing the praises of chocolate chip cookies in the same post that I am lamenting my weight gain. But I'm a giver. I want you to experience cookie bliss at some point, too. Maybe you'll want to wait until you're in a better place. I get that. I'll be waiting awhile before I try to co-habitate with them again, I'll tell you.

But one of these days, sea-salt-chocolate-chip cookies, I'll let you back into my life. Right now, I think I need to see other foods. Whenever you're around, I take you for granted. Neither of us wants that kind of relationship, right? It's not you. It's me.