So, I had a muffin from Dunkin’ Donuts this morning. Y’know those huge, family sized ones? Yeah; the ones that can also serve as floatation devices in the event of a water landing. Anyway, it was only after I’d eaten it that I decided to check out the nutritional information at the official website.
I just consumed 580 calories… for BREAKFAST. >:O
Damn. Muffins are sneaky lil’ buggers. I know a certain someone who’s skipping lunch today.
Please feel free to share your own food-related horror stories.
I had the Emo’s Special breakfast sandwich this morning - it’s a 1-egg omelette with cheese, bacon, ham and sausage on a grilled English Muffin. I almost lost the will to live after eating it. 3 hours later, and I’m still regretting it.
I discovered the secret shame of muffins months ago when I started actually paying attention and actively seeking out the caloric content of the stuff I most often eat. Even the allegedly “low-fat” muffins are still high in calories. It’s a pity – there are a few muffins I quite like, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to tear into my daily allowance just for a damn muffin.
Unless it’s a really, really good muffin. And only once in a great while. And I plan on doing a lot of walking anyway.
Even salad dressings that I most favour can be scary as hell. There’s a really nice caesar dressing from Renee’s that I like – except I discovered it’s 90 bloody calories per 15ml. That means on a nice meal-sized salad I could scarf down 300-400 calories just on a salad.
It’s really, really easy to consume too many calories unless you really pay close attention to what goes into you’re eating.
That’s because “muffins” in Dunkin Donuts (and most stores) aren’t “muffins” like the granola freaks in the '70s made them. They’re “cakes”, culinarily speaking, little cakes and you just ate a whole cake for breakfast.
Ya know…now I feel better about the pint of ice cream I had for breakfast. It was lower in calories and wasn’t even low-fat, no sugar added…it was premium stuff.
For those of you looking for at least semi-healthy muffin recipes–the cornbread recipe in the Moosewood cookbook works well for muffins. Mix in some fresh blueberries or raisins (other sorts of additions would probably work well, too) and bake.
There’s some fat there, in the form of butter, but there’s not a ton of it. The yogurt you add could be low-fat. Those of you on low-sodium diets, though, should use featherweight, rather than the baking soda the recipe calls for, and you might want to tone down or eliminate the salt listed in the recipe.
