Interesting Nutritional Discovery in My Hot Cocoa

Santa brought me a Keurig single cup coffee maker (on sale for $44 at Walmart but I got Futureshop to price match it because the buggers were always out of stock.) Would-be environmentalists have been critical of my acquisitions, but in truth, my purchase has  been a boon for the environment, and my belly.

My habit of the last two years has been to go to McDonald's or Tim Horton's (a popular Canadian doughnut chain) and get me a fix of extra large coffee with lots of cream and sugar (I'm still a bit of a virgin coffee drinker.) Being a fat-body, of course I added things to my order: A breakfast sandwich, usually. Then there's the gas. Those restaurants are relatively close but there's sometimes a fifteen minute wait in line, idling the mini-van. This habit cost me calories and carbon emissions (including flatulence after the meal.) What a waste of time, money and pollution!

Thankfully, and unexpectedly, my Keurig cured me of that bad habit (or at least downsized the habit, depending on how you look at it.) I found the perfect coffee K-cup for me (the Donut House K-cup), used some filtered water, bought some coffee cream and I'm set. Furthermore, I'm enjoying a single, normal sized cup to start my day and not the giant XL cups from the stores (and their wasteful containers.) (Yes, I'm aware that K-cups produce waste in their lined plastic little cups, but surly it's less than my trips to the store.)

My breakfast consists of more modest, higher fibre (and therefore more slowly digesting) breakfast fares at home. I'm saving a fortune. With gas, it must have been at least a $6/day habit. That's nasty. When the kids tagged along on the weekends for some doughnut holes, it got more expensive.

Having said that, my trips out for coffee constituted some quality James Time. Usually, I was alone and in the relative peace and quiet of my vehicle (no screaming kids within earshot.) But now my James Time is on the couch with my coffee.

My Cocoa Discovery

We keep some hot cocoa K-cups around for a treat (a lazy treat.) I was surprised that each cup of Green Mountain Hot Cocoa K-cups are only 60 calories. More surprisingly to me, they contain 3 grams of fibre per cup.

It's hard to find a non-fruit/vegetable that has that much fibre in a 60 calorie snack. Even harder to find one that does something to satisfy one's chocolate cravings. However, it's got 3.5 grams of fat and it's all saturated!

I couldn't find much info on the Net but the cocoa industry seems to be including part of the cocoa husk to up the fibre in their products and therefore make them more appealing to health-conscious consumers.

Vices: Chips and Dip

This is the first post in a series about the foods that got me into trouble over the years. I hope to explain my relationship with these foods so I can better understand why I binged on them.

I can't remember the first time I ate chips and dip but I imagine it may have been at one of the many parties my parents and the three neighbours they had on their short street hosted. It was the seventies when I was a kid and neighbours liked to party with neighbours.

There were lots of New Year's Eve parties, wedding anniversaries and "it's a hot night, you should come over" parties. Many of them included chips and dip as the central, if not only snack. Perhaps I associate chips and dip with happiness, happy people, or, more likely, happy parents. But that's a whole other blog post, or a whole other blog. Or perhaps a book I have yet to write.

Philadelphia cream cheese dips by Kraft were all the rage. Onion was my favourite, but just about any flavour got my happy-endorphins flowing when the creamy paste hit my taste buds. A salty, fatty potato chip alone is enough to make that happen, adding a creamy high-fat dip to the mix became drug-like.

Chips and dip eventually found its way into our home on non-party occasions. It may have been used as a treat for me when I was left alone, babysat by my older brothers. Or on Christmas Day and other holidays as a family treat, often consumed mostly by me. It became my favourite "food" in the whole world.

Soon I devised ways to get this heavenly treat all by myself by taking in pop bottles for refunds or convincing my parents to buy it at the grocery store every once in a while.

Both my parents worked and my neighbours were very close to my family so I'd spend a lot of time with them. One evening, when over playing with another kid, I was treated to home-made chip dip, made with whipped cream cheese, a splash of milk and chopped onions from the garden. I had never tasted anything so good. The kid whose mother made it got to use her fingers to clean out the bowl at the end. I was envious.

This image looks to me as a favorite drink might to an alcoholic.

I quickly moved to making my own dips based on this recipe, sometimes with onion but mostly without any added flavouring. When I could get my hands on a block of cream cheese and a bag of potato chips, and had the house to myself, it was a party of one. It was an intimate, sensuous session of freedom and gluttony. I was probably only nine years old but the recipe and the habit has followed me to this day. I've even decided as recently as a couple years ago that chips and dip would make a fine meal to be consumed alone in my car in a grocery store parking lot.

I usually serve chips and dip when entertaining. In the last decade I've combined flavoured cream cheese such a chive and onion with a little milk and whipped it up with an electric mixer, sometimes adding a little sour cream or mayo. It's very good and without exception has received rave reviews from my guests. You can't go wrong serving chips and dip, I always say.

Yet I somehow rarely allowed myself to have chips and dip in the last fifteen years. If I was entertaining, that was one exception, or if I was at someone else's house. But, like Peanut Buster Parfaits at DQ and chocolate milkshakes, it was forbidden by me. Still, so many other things weren't that should have been. I'll talk about those in future posts in the coming weeks and months.

But a kid whipping up his own chip dip and consuming the whole thing by himself with a large bag of potato chips was a kid destined to be an obese adult.