Cookies!

I also made chocolate chip cookies from Joy of Cooking's recipe for chocolate chip drop cookies--fantastic!

I was comparing it to the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip bag and, they are pretty similar, but here's what I thought was interesting:

Joy of Cooking said to use 1.125 cups of flour and 1 cup of sugar (the other ingredients aren't important, I just want you to get a feel for how much dough this would make) and said it would make 45 cookies.
Back of Chocolate Chip Bag said to use 2.25 cups flour and 1.5 cups sugar and it said it would make 5 dozen (60) cookies.

So, for double the flour and 1.5 times the sugar, you are only getting a paltry 15 more cookies. You know what this says to me? Portion size. Cookies are bigger now-a-days. This is something I've been becoming more and more aware of in my search for healthy eating habits / healthy food for my family. I could rant for a long time about portion sizes here, and eventually digress into an all-caps post about the evils of fast food, but I am looking to have a more positive outlook than that.

I made a half batch, but only got 20 cookies (partially because I ate some of the heavenly dough, as did my hubby), which tells me I am pretty close to a reasonable cookie size. I think that paying attention to this sort of thing can really help with perspective when making / eating food. I for one, feel guilty about eating a certain number of cookies, regardless of size, so if I intentionally make them smaller, even if I eat 5 and feel guilty, it's still better for me than eating 5 cookies that are each worth a "normal" cookie and a half or more.