Strawberry Cheesecake Cookies

Pretty and tasty, make strawberry cheesecake cookies for a sweet treat

Last week, I decided to make these cookies, using the half package of cream cheese (8-ounce package) left over from frosting I had made for cinnamon rolls. (I only put a dollop of frosting on cinnamon rolls.) 

I hurriedly mixed the cookie batter, just before I was planning to leave the house, and only had time to bake one dozen. I used a teaspoon to drop the cookies onto the baking sheet. Of course, I had to try one immediately out of the oven, and it was very tasty. I put the remaining batter into the fridge.

Two days later, I baked another dozen cookies from the refrigerated batter. The previous dozen had all disappeared. My daughter told me she liked these even better than my lemon cookies. That's saying something, because sometimes all seven dozen from my lemon cookies recipe will disappear a in a week. (The recipe for the lemon cookies can be found on my Sweets and Treats page.)

On the third day, I took the remaining batter and baked another dozen cookies. Some of the cookies in this batch were a little larger than the other two batches I had previously baked. I decided I liked the cookies a little larger. 

When I bake these cookies again, I plan to double the recipe and drop the batter with a tablespoon for a slightly larger cookies. These cookies are so good with coffee. 

Hint: I had frozen strawberries on hand, and that's what I used. The berries are so much easier to chop while frozen or slightly frozen. I let them thaw just a bit. If using fresh strawberries, I would suggest washing and capping them, and then putting them into the freezer until firm. Otherwise, the berries may be watery and messy from chopping/slicing.

Ingredients:

4 ounces cream cheese, softened

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, softened (Do not melt butter. Let soften at room temperature.)

2/3 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup strawberries, sliced into small pieces

 (I filled a cup with small/medium strawberries and then sliced them.)

Heat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, mix together cream cheese, butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla extract; beat until creamy. In a separate bowl, combine flour and baking powder, blending well. Add flour mixture to the wet ingredients and stir together. Fold in strawberries. With a tablespoon or teaspoon, drop dough onto baking sheet, lined with parchment paper. Bake for about 14 minutes or until edges of cookies are slightly brown. Yield: 24 cookies dropped from a tablespoon and 36 cookies dropped from a teaspoon.

Nutrition info for batch of 24 cookies: one cookie, 97 calories; total fat, 5.7g: saturated fat, 3.5g; cholesterol, 23.5 mg; sodium, 21 mg; total carbs, 10.8g; fiber, 0.1g; sugar, 5.7g; protein, 1.5g.

Nutrition info for batch of 36 cookies: one cookie, 65 calories; total fat, 3.8g; saturated fat, 2.3g; cholesterol, 15.6 mg; sodium, 14 mg; total carbs, 7.2g; fiber, 0.1g; sugars, 3.8g; protein, 1g.

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Scones and soup

When I began making these scones

Top right photo shows scones baked, using Method 1.

Bottom right scones were baked, using Method 2.

last fall, I thought they would add a hearty side to a bowl of soup, especially to one of the thinner soups.

Since most soups are usually under 200 calories per serving, these scones, at around 130 calories each, won't break the lunch or supper budget in calories.

Depending upon the method of baking, each scone will also provide around 100-150 mg. of calcium. There are two methods of baking the scones, and I like them both. My family prefers the crispy and thin scones from Method 2. 

From each batch, I serve half the recipe and freeze the other half. Either way the scones are baked, they freeze well. I reheat them in the oven at 300 degrees to keep them crispy.

Spinach Scones with Feta Cheese

 Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups self-rising flour

1 teaspoon sugar

1/3 cup butter

1 cup chopped frozen spinach, thawed

3/4 cup feta cheese

3/4 cup whole milk

2 tablespoons whole milk

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. 

In a large bowl, cut butter into flour until mixture is crumbly. Stir in feta cheese and spinach. Add 3/4 cup milk and stir until all the ingredients are moistened. Next, proceed to either Method 1 or 2. 

Method 1

Turn dough onto lightly floured wax paper. Pat dough down and shape into two rounds about eight-inches each. Place each round on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Cut each round into eight wedges and slightly separate the wedges . Brush tops with the 2 tablespoons milk. Bake 15-18 minutes or until golden. 

Method 2

Turn dough onto lightly floured wax paper. Pat dough with flour and shape into two rounds. With a rolling pin, roll out each round of dough and cut with a biscuit or cookie cutter. Each round will yield 10-12 scones, depending on the size of the cutter used. (I use a diamond-shape cookie cutter.) Place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Brush tops with the 2 tablespoons milk. Bake 12-15 minutes or until golden. These scones will be thinner and crispier.

Nutritional info for Method 1 with 16 servings: Each serving, 128 calories; total fat, 5.7g: saturated fat, 3.7g: cholesterol, 18 mg: sodium, 324.6 mg: total carbs, 15.4 g: fiber, 0.8g: sugars, 1.1g: protein, 3.5g.

Nutritional info for Method 2 with 24 servings: Each serving, 85 calories: total fat, 3.8g: saturated fat, 2.5g: cholesterol, 12 mg: sodium, 216.4 mg: total carbs, 10.2g: fiber, 0.5g: sugars, 0.7g: protein, 2.4g.

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One more thing ..... I don't feel guilty           about ANYTHING I eat

From time to time, I come across recipes with a lure, "eat this without guilt," or something similar to that.

I don't feel guilty about anything I eat...not even if I go over my daily calorie allowance. That doesn't happen often, but it does occasionally. First of all, when that happens, I know when and how much I'm over. Daily tracking keeps me on track. At the end of the day, I know how many calories I'm over or under and that the adjustment will come from the days I'm under my daily allowance.

I don't feel guilty over my indulgences, because I've learned to plan for them. Usually, I know when I'm going to eat out, and I will "save up" for the calories. If I plan to have dessert with the meal, I will abstain from added sugar at home that day. When it comes to sweets, I watch the "added sugar" even more closely than the calories. If I eat out and order dessert, I enjoy it without any guilt. And if I go over the recommended daily amount of added sugar on a particular day, I don't get upset over it. It's still much, much better than it was before I started tracking.

It's the same for sodium. Most days, my sodium intake is well within the guidelines. But the days I eat out, it does go over. In fact, one meal eaten out may contain more than the day's allowance for sodium, Since my sodium intake is no longer unbridled on a daily basis, the few days it goes over are not a great concern.

Although I don't eat white bread as much now and have cut back on using white flour, I still make biscuits and breads a few times a month and enjoy them very much. I do eat whole wheat or whole grain bread every day.

For me, consistent tracking on a daily basis just takes care of the "off days" and eliminates any guilt.

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Rethinking calorie counting

“Lose five pounds or more in a week. Never count calories again. Eat these foods and drop pounds without dieting. Eliminate these foods from your diet and drop pounds. Get rid of inches with these exercises and don’t worry about the pounds.”

We have all heard the spills from ads for diet program memberships, supplements and exercise programs, all promising great results, while sparing us from the dreaded and detested  calorie-counting.

I bought the memberships for weight-loss programs, fitness center membership and for a while worked out with a personal trainer in a group setting. For all the money and effort, the most I ever lost was 12 pounds, and the longest I ever kept those pounds off was about six months. Within a few weeks, I would reach a plateau, get discouraged and quit.

Counting calories was the last thing I wanted to do, but it was also my last hope in reaching any kind of substantial weight loss and maintaining it. I wanted something slow and sure. I didn't want to do this for a few months and return to old habits. I wanted to establish new habits.

Determined Decision

When I awoke on the morning of Oct. 17, 2012, the first thing I was aware of was the pain in both my legs. It wasn’t a pain that kept me from sleeping, but for the past three weeks, it was the first thing I had noticed upon waking and walking.  On this morning, the pain was much more intense. Not only did the pain have my attention, but now I was concerned.

 What was causing this pain?

After hobbling into the kitchen and taking a blood pressure pill, I remembered that the night before I had taken my last cholesterol capsule. I reached for the empty bottle and started toward the kitchen phone to call in the refill. It was then that a “light” came on. It was three weeks ago that I had gone back on my three weeks on and two weeks off schedule of taking the cholesterol medicine.

 I knew that this was a modified dosage schedule used sometimes for patients who had side effects from the medication, but I used it because of the cost of the medication which wasn’t covered by my insurance. It had worked fine in keeping my cholesterol down, while saving money. I also knew that leg pain was a side effect of the medication, but for some reason, I had just now made the connection.

What was I going to do? Obviously, the modified dosing schedule wasn’t an option. Before going on the medication, I had tried a low-fat diet. All that accomplished was lowering the good cholesterol: the bad cholesterol never budged. I had tried exercise. I had gone to fitness classes for years and had even spent a few months working out under a trainer. Under the trainer’s guidance, I could do 100 jumping jacks, 50 push-ups, 200 crunches, and many other fitness feats, but the lab numbers for cholesterol never improved. In addition to the low-fat diet and exercise, I had tried other weight-loss programs with modest and temporal results. The most weight I had lost was 12 pounds and the longest length of time of keeping it off was about six months. Losing eight pounds wasn’t that hard, but losing more than that was hard and keeping it off even harder.

I had to do something. I thought back to the days when my cholesterol levels were normal. If I could just get back to or even close to what I weighed then, surely the numbers would change. I remembered that in those days, most of my exercise came from walking. Walking four miles a day several days a week. Over the past 15 years or so, I had put on about 40 pounds. I wondered how much I needed to lose to affect the cholesterol numbers. Obviously, I needed to lose at least half of that.

An app make it easy

Seven weeks into my weight-loss journey, I discovered the free Lose It app on the new phone I had just received for my birthday.

Not only did this app make logging food daily much easier, but it also enabled me to track essential nutrients and projected realistic dates for achieving my goals. It took a few weeks to set up all the foods and recipes for my meals, but once this info was in the data base, my daily logging was a breeze.

Daily food entries can also be logged online at Lose It instead of/or in addition to using the phone app.

I briefly downloaded another weight-loss app that supposedly tracked some additional nutrients and had a larger data base of restaurants.  This app required more personal information just to sign up, and it was personal information that did not pertain to any fitness goals. After I completed the sign-up and set the app up for use, I saw that it had allotted me over 200 less daily calories than Lose It. At the time, I had already lost 38 pounds, so I promptly deleted the other app. I had planned to use this app along with Lose It, but decided it wasn’t worth the memory use on my phone. Apparently, the default was set to accommodate all metabolism levels.

Lose It has a default set to age 35, but it is changed when you entered your own age. It can be changed again if you find your own age does not accurately respond to your true metabolism.  Lose It has a help section, where it explains how activity levels are computed to arrive at daily calorie allocations and how these can be changed to accommodate more or less activity.

 I use the free version of the app, but a premium version is available that allows users to sync the app with other devices to track fitness and health programs.  The free version has an extensive data base of brand foods and restaurant foods that is very helpful and is constantly expanding during updates.

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No applause needed

 Anticlimax: something that is much less exciting or dramatic than it was expected to be: a dull or disappointing ending or result.

When I was in college, a professor cautioned those of us in his writing class about the possibility of“anticlimax” in talking about our personal writing projects. 

“Many people plan to write a book, but few ever do,” he said. “One of the reasons their books are never written is due to anticlimax. In talking about the book they are planning to write, they experience the climax before it’s ever written. After they have experienced this climax, the actual writing of the book becomes a dull endeavor.”

I never forgot this relevance to writing, and as a consequence, and for that reason, I rarely talk about any personal writing projects that are still in the works.

I believe this analogy can be applied to many goals, and it exhorts me to begin working on goals without fanfare, and then talk about the results. Unfortunately, I don't always do that. Sometimes, I do make announcements at the beginning of my projects and undertakings, and so often have short-term results. Those warm and fuzzy feelings can quickly leave after stepping into the commitment.

 How many times have we noted someone announcing on social media their intentions to follow a certain diet or exercise program and then receiving heaping amounts of praise, just for the declaration? Rarely are any results announced, and most of these are immediate results. Some might say that encouragement is needed at this point. Real encouragement is not praise for an accomplishment that is yet to be realized. Receiving praise for “intentions” can lead to climax before any progress has been reached, much less the goal.