Friends...

[gerisullivan]

...research recipes and make you oatmeal-cherry-cranberry cookies with Sunsweet Lighter Bake in place of the butter so the warm-from-the-oven cookies have just a quarter gram of fat each.

And what are those three grams of fat doing in a half cup of dry oatmeal, anyway? Especially when the recipe calls for 3 cups of the grain?

Many thanks, Elaine! For the cookies, for your presence, and for all of the help these last two weeks. Much appreciated!

Comments

Not a botanist

[onyxlynx]

but I think it has something to do with providing some kind of assistance to the germination process. (Oat being a seed grain.)

[parsleigh.livejournal.com]

I've never seen this before. Does it taste pretty good? And where do you find it. My mom is diabetic and this might be a good option.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

It was on a top corner shelf next to all of the oils and shortening at my grocery store.

lesliet_ma is right. A tablespoon of Sunsweet Lighter Bake has 9 grams of carbs, 5 of them from sugar. I love how the label says "dried plums" to avoid the "ewww, prunes" contingent. It also has dried apples.

The cookies do taste good. They don't have that greasy, buttery goodness that adds so much flavor to oatmeal raisin cookies, but they're chewy and tasty. The dried cherries and cherry-flavored cranberries Elaine used instead of raisins add a nice extra boost of tangy flavor.

[lesliet-ma.livejournal.com]

Oatmeal is a whole grain, so it still has the bran and the the germ, and the germ contains fat. Normally, this isn't so bad, since it's a plant-based, mostly unsaturated, fat, but it does seem sneaky when you're trying to keep your fat consumption to an absolute minimum.

The same is true for flour - whole grain flour will have more fat than refined white flour because the refining removes the bran and germ.

Unfortunately, I don't think I've ever seen refined oatmeal.

parsleigh, I'm not sure the Sunsweet Lighter Bake would be good for a diabetic because it uses prunes to replace the fat and thus I suspect it's high in sugar. You'd need to check the label.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Ah, thank you. That makes considerable sense.

I know there's fat in darned near everything, and have been guesstimating all of those "0 grams fat" servings at being more like 0.49 grams. Even 3 grams is super low for anything with nutritional value beyond sugar.

The way I look at it, a quarter gram of fat certainly beats the 5 grams in a single Keebler Pecan Sandy. There hasn't been a single commercial cookie I've been willing to buy after seeing the grams of fat in them. Four cookies for a gram of fat is a win, and a bit of chewy cookie goodness is ever so welcome right now.

lighter bake

[faanboy.livejournal.com]

I've noticed the phrase dried plums replacing prunes a number of times lately. I don't remember where. I've never seen nor heard of the Sunsweet stuff either. Might your supermarket be a chain also in my neck of the woods [eastern MA]? It sounds natural in nature so perhaps Whole Foods might stock it? Or are there unnatural things in it? And is the stuff dark brown or only the jar containing it?