So anyone who knows me knows that in the beginning (of my surgical process) I was a certified, card carrying CARBOPHOBE. Yep…I would not go near starches…was offended at the thought of bread or crackers and cookies??? Are you nuts???

Well today I do a fair amount of starchy stuff. Most of it is Frankenfood specially formulated to fill my body without actually penetrating it. High fiber, low carb, yadda, yadda… I generally tend to stay away from commercial sweets, mostly because I dump but also because I am a notorious label reader and I’ve yet to find a snacky dessert type thing where the numbers won’t ruin an otherwise honest day of RNY eating.

Enter my friend Carrie. She sends me boxes of stuff from time to time, bless her heart (I hope she doesn’t mind me mentioning that…). And usually I LOVE what she sends me. The box that arrived at my office late last week was no exception. It contained some granola, some cereal, some diabetic brown sugar and…some protein cookies.

Protein cookies. In my head this seems like an oxymoron because cookies, at the base, are doctored up flour concoctions right? With the addition of a little fat and some sweetener, right? So in theory any cookie that attempted to reverse that balance, and have more protein than carbs, should taste like cardboard right?

WRONG!

Chef Jay’s Tri-O-Plex Light Bites cookies. Oh. My. MARTHA!!! The things are good! First off they look like a real cookie. They are soft, not hard and of course they are round but they also have that “I just opened a package of cookies” smell (note to my non-op readers…when you eat an abundance of diet food things like a products proximity to the actual food that God sent down to the earth from heaven [and stuff] become monumentally important…which is why I mention this). Then you bite into the thing and it’s chewy. Mmmmmm…I love a chewy cookie.

Carrie sent me oatmeal raisin and peanut butter chocolate chip (cuz she wanna be startin’ somethin’…gotta be startin’ somethin’…). Both tasted amazing. You do get the sugar substitute taste from them a little bit, which surprised me since I have not (knowingly) consumed sucrose in so long that I figured I wouldn’t pick up on that. It was mostly in the oatmeal raisin one. With the peanut butter one…well peanut butter trumps all other flavors so you really don’t get that experience too much.

Anyhoo…let’s talk about usage. Because if any of you are like me, things like this can be DANGEROUS. Because we tell ourselves “it’s protein…and I need protein…” Yes you do, boo-boo, but you don’t need cookies all the time. This is why I usually assign these types of food a very specific place in my life. For this I’d say one of two situations:

# 1 – Dessert. It’s a worthy dessert but please note that dessert? Is a one-time deal. There is no “breakfast w/ dessert,” “lunch w/ dessert” and “dinner with dessert” (at least not in my world)

#2 – Any kind of function where there will be dessert that you can’t/should not have. Please remember my “Theory of Food Choice Equity” – in order to resist temptation, every bad food choice MUST have an equally yummy good food choice.

So to wrap up this “entirely too long” post…if you like cookies, miss cookies, want to eat cookies…give these babies a try. I don’t think you’ll be sorry you did.