Peanut butter to the rescue

Maybe T is right. Maybe I have turned into a grown-up. He made that comment after finding a stack of O (as in Oprah) magazines scattered across the coffee table.

"Why did you take out all your old magazines?" he asked me.

"I was looking for recipes," I said. A perfectly normal answer... for a 42-year old mom.

I'm kind of joking. I think I'm secure enough about myself not to get too worked up about the sometimes middle-agey things I do; the things that I never thought I'd be doing myself. Still, it can be disconcerting, especially when called out by someone else, to realize that I am living out an adult life.

Anyway, I was looking for recipes because my dumb (and by dumb, I mean really awesome) doctor told me that he would recommend the South Beach diet and exercise if I wanted to kick-start my, um, system into working properly again. This because of the double digit weight gain I've put on over the last year and a half or so. Lest you think I am divulging too much personal information, keep in mind: I'm telling everyone I know.

Here's the thing about the South Beach diet, and I'm not going to devote this post to its intricacies or why I decided to actually take the challenge my doctor posed to me: it's really hard. I have to spend two weeks eating no starches, no sugars, no fruit, basically none of the things I count on to make eating fun. No rice for my beans, no taco shell for my ground beef, no pasta for my cheese and no bread or jelly for my peanut butter. And no brownies. Or alcohol.

That leaves pretty much four categories of food: (some) veggies, (low-fat) cheese, (fake) meat and eggs. Plus nuts and spices and stuff. I'm on day five and generally pissed about it.

But not tonight. Tonight I tried a recipe that I discovered while surfing for ideas on my lunch hour. And I want to share it with all lovers of peanut butter, because, for anyone who has ever longed for cookies whilst being too lazy to actually bake them, this one is worth trying out. Contrary to my expectations, though possibly because I haven't eaten a single simple carbohydrate in nearly a week, they turned out delicious!

South Beach Peanut Butter Cookies (supposedly good for all phases)

Ingredients

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup Splenda granular (sugar substitute)

1 egg

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degres. Mix the three ingredients thoroughly. Drop by spoonfuls on a cookie sheet. Dip a fork in Splenda and press gently on top of cookie.
2. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from pan carefully after cooling slightly. Enjoy!