The Cookie Review

 I'll start with background and a story.

The background -- I used to weigh less. I was more than a bit chonky in high school (all pizza and no girls makes Dan a fat boy) but I worked hard for the last year so that I could go to college and wear a pair of jeans like a normal person. For 4 years, I kept myself relatively slim, or even, dare I say, "svelte."

By the time I got hitched I was rocking a totally reasonable body. Then it all went to hell, but that's just because hell has a really excellent pizzeria. So I started packing on the el bee ess and went back to the primordial pleasantly plump. After the children came out I decided that I wanted to find a way to get back down to fighting weight. I anticipated fighting with the children, it seems. That might not have been the best attitude, but dagnabit, I am what I am. Usually.

I looked in to many different approaches to diet and settled on the one that made the least sense -- an Atkins-esque, low carb diet. And I stuck with it sort of for 20 plus years. Sometimes I was stricter on it than others, and I got time off for good behavior during vacations and holidays (and when I felt weak). But I always came back to it as my standard because, truth is, it has worked. I can get myself back to something around the lower end of my weight journey if I stick with the plan. Eat a cow everyday but god forbid I taste a single pretzel. There are rules about this.

A real deficiency is junk food. There are fake sweeteners and such but making stuff with them isn't easy. And fake flour? even harder. But I do it occasionally because a man's got to eat cookies sometimes. There have been attempts over the year but either they compromised on some necessary element of "food" or I compromised on my bottom line standards of what I was willing to eat. So when I found these "weighless cookies" that boasted zero net carbs, I was hooked. I bought a box and, that evening, scarfed them down like they were my business and thought, "well that was passable...I'll buy them again." So I go back to the store the next week and see them. Ever the optimist, I put two more boxes in my cart and went to check out. I get the sum and it seems way hi, so I look through the receipt and see that each of the boxes of cookies (6 each of three "flavors" with each cookie looking like a thicker quarter) is $25. Yeah. Well, I couldn't put them back so I figured I would save them for a special occasion and eat them slowly and deliberately. That was a mistake on every level.

Well, I ate another box recently but this time I took notes so I present to you my review:

I took a bite of the first group of cookies (the three flavors are "chocolate chip," "vanilla," and "marble." The last flavor was most authentic because you could really taste the marbles. After a bite or two, my mouth felt like it was engaged in 5 or 7 different allergic reactions at the same time. There was a weird bitterness and I'm not sure that cookies like this are supposed to be spicy. But it was a cookie so I persevered and ate all of them.

There are 18 cookies -- if that doesn't scream "single serving" then I don't know what does. Some of the bitterness was reduced by putting the cookies in the microwave (and turning the microwave on) for about 20 seconds. More bitterness can be removed by putting all the cookies in the garbage, forever.

As I continued to eat, the cookies became unpleasantly spicy and not in the good way. When I left them in the microwave for 30 seconds, they acquired a burnt flavor which was, considering the alternative, almost welcome. I kept eating, dreading each bite. Eventually, I took them out of the microwave and doused them with very low carb chocolate syrup. As delivery agents for the syrup, they were not complete failures. After finishing them all I realized that the three flavors are actually "painful," "Silly-Putty," and "angst." 

Anyone want a $25 box of cookies?