Cut The Fat!

It's June!

That means summer and swimming and wearing swim suits! If you're anything like me, you're still wearing your winter padding. I don't want to put on a swim suit with my extra roll, or two, or three, Ok, so I won't be wearing a swim suit BUT if I was going to - I would need to be more careful what I eat. I admit, I have a sweet tooth and it's hard to completely cut out sweets so I decided to post a recipe for cookies with less fat. I've made cookies using applesauce instead of shortening and they're OK but you can still taste the applesauce in them and they're flatter than the other cookies. Now I use white beans! You can substitue the beans for all the fat if you want but I like to do half and half.

First, open the can and with the lid covering the beans, pour off as much liquid as you can. That still leaves some liquid in the beans and that's what you want.

Pour the beans into a blender and blend until smooth, about the consistency of shortening. Word to the wise, don't put your rubber scraper in the blender while blending. Turn the blender off then stir. (I think I still have a few pieces of plastic in my cookies...just don't tell my family. That will be the secret ingredient in this recipe!)

Now you're ready to use it in your recipe. I use half a cup in the cookies and the other half cup left in the blender is put in a baggie and placed in the freezer for future use.

Here's the recipe with my "low-er fat ingredients in parenthesis:
1/2 cup butter or margarine
1/2 cup shortening (pureed white beans)
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 eggs (I used 3 egg whites - a little less fat)
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. soda
3 cups flour ( I like to use half whole wheat and half white. In the recipe today, I used only white)
1 1/2 cups choc chips
Mix butter and beans together until smooth. Add sugars and blend well. Add eggs and vanilla. Stir in dry ingredients. Add chocolate chips. (I used half chocolate and half cherry chips) Mix well.

Place on baking sheet (perhaps you can find better looking baking sheets than mine. I'm sure it won't be hard to do) and bake at 350 degrees for 11-13 minutes. Makes about 4 dozen cookies.

Let cool then eat! Or don't even let them cool, just eat them. Now be careful, don't think just because there's less fat, you can eat more. You can share these cookies or bag them up and put in the freezer for later.

By the way, I baked these cookies for 14 minutes. Too long!
I don't have the nutritional value of each cookie but using the beans instead of shortening and egg whites instead of the eggs, you cut the fat content of the entire recipe by 99 grams. Not a big whoop - but it's a start. Does anyone have ice cream to go with these cookies?