Surviving the Hard Times

I was at the library today and saw the Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook -- Feasting with your Slow Cooker. So I checked it out. Now tonight, I'm looking at it to see if there is a chance to work my way through it. Pages 5-15 look like a primer on how to gain weight via application of cheese dip to hips, thighs and belly. I did see a bit of hope when I looked at the Breakfast Foods section. Any recipe (in this case Welsh Rarebit) that begins with 12-oz can beer can't be all that bad. Unless of course, you're looking to cut down on the calorie intake.

The more I look at the Fix-IT and Forget-It Cookbook, the more I think it's not the cookbook I want to cook from. The appetizer section has multiple versions of cheese dip. There's no calorie information in the book but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that eating a lot of these recipes isn't going to do wonders for my waistline.

Next stop, Cooking Thin with Chef Kathleen. You may remember Kathleen Daelemans from her Cooking Thin television show. It's not a bad book. It does drive me a little crazy that there's no calorie information. She says she doesn't keep track of all the numbers and thus doesn't include that information on the recipes. But then on the other hand, she talks about her "calorie bank account" where she keeps a running track of her calorie range. Does she not realize that it would be much easier for ME to keep track of MY calorie range if calorie and nutritional information were included with the recipes? Sigh. I guess I can alway enter all the ingredients into FitDay or another website to get a rough calorie count for 20 servings of Crunchy Granola. Then hoping the calculator on my computer behaves, I should be able to get a rough idea of the calorie count on any given recipe. Thanks for the extra work, Kathleen.

Now are there 8 cups of rolled oats in the house? I keep eyeing that 25-lb bag of oats at WinCo. But I don't have any food safe buckets available for storage of the leftovers. Still, homemade granola is very, very yummy. I think I've found my first recipe.