Pasta is considered to be a healthy thing to eat these days and, in moderation, is part of Weight Watchers menu. But the same ingredients that are used to make pasta - flour, eggs, water - are also used to make cakes and biscuits. Cakes and biscuits are considered to be fattening and calorie laden. What’s the difference between eating flour and eggs as pasta and as cake? If the same quantities are involved why can’t cake be seen as diet food too?
ummm… prolly the sugar and oil involved… and I dont ice many pastas… or serve them with ice cream…
Sugar.
(and no, that isn’t an endearing nickname I have for G. Nome.)
Anyway, cakes also often have icing on them adding to the calorie count. BTW, with Weight Watcher’s current program, (the 1-2-3 program) people can have their cake and eat it too. (Sorry!) They just have to limit their portion, how often they eat it, etc.
Now what I find strange is that two the same ingredients G. Nome mentioned for making pasta and cake can also be used to make glue. Mmmmmm…
Damn simulpost!
Yeah… simulpost my ASS!!! That means you WANT me and you KNOW it Evilbeth! Bwaaahahaha!!! 
you want me covered in icing!
Ok, but I have an American cookbook here which long ago lost its cover but which looks like something Aunt Bea from the Andy Griffith Show might have used. There is a recipe in it for Baking Powder Biscuits which has 2 cups of flour, 3 tsp baking powder, salt, 4 tablespoons of shortening, and three-quarters of a cup of milk. That seems to be the equivalent (near enough) of home-made pasta dough in another book which has 9-10oz of flour, 75ml water, 2 eggs, 1 tbsp olive oil and salt. There is no sugar involved in either recipe. Even if there was a tablespoonful or two it wouldn’t be fat you were adding anyway. So, I still don’t quite get why Weight Watchers don’t allow biscuits (a.k.a scones) as an alternative to pasta. Though I see your point about most cake recipes being more involved than baking powder biscuits.
Well, DUH!!!
How blatant and explicit would you like me to be in expressing my desire and lust for you?
Maybe I’ll just add “I want Whammo!” to my sig line! Would that make you happy?
Well, four tablespoons of shortening are a bit different on the health front than 1 tablespoon of olive oil. When I read your OP, I was assuming since you grouped cakes and biscuits together that when you wrote “biscuits” you were referring to cookies instead of buttermilk-type biscuits. That’s why I mentioned the thing about sugar.
there’s a fair difference between 75ml of water and 3/4 cup of milk calorie-wise too.
Well, addmittedly, I’m not as familiar with the subject of cooking as some others, but I felt I’d point out that how you cook something can have a direct result on how it comes out. However, I don’t know how pasta’s cooked, so I haven’t a clue if the cooking method has anything to do with it in this case.
dear god spoof! please don’t tell me you don’t know how to boil spaghetti! :eek:
::wanders off muttering damply about the youth of today::
Weight Watchers does allow any kind of cakes, cookies, biscuits, etc., that you want to eat. You are supposed to follow the limits on portion size for those items, just as you are supposed to follow the limits for pasta. WW doesn’t actually allow “large” portions of plain pasta, anyway.
Also, think about what you would put on one of those biscuits: they don’t sound any too good to eat completely plain. In fact, they sound pretty dry and tasteless to me, and are probably meant to accompany a nice milk gravy or butter & honey or butter & jam - high-calorie additions, whereas you can eat pasta nearly plain or with many no-fat, low-calorie sauces.
Just looking at the two recipes combined, I can tell that the biscuit recipe has way more calories than the pasta recipe. Flour is quite fattening (biscuit recipe has almost double the amount), 4 tblsps. shortening is quadruple the amount of fat than 1 tbsp. olive oil, ¾ cup milk is more fattening than water. I think all those additional calories are still a lot more than what the two eggs in the pasta recipe are worth.
Umm… I eat cake and pasta all the time, and I’m a rake.
Of course, maybe it’s because I only eat home-made stuff that tastes good. Mmmmmm. Mom’s cooking has nothing on what I do in the kitchen 
But Weight Watchers is just a conspiracy anyway
It’s just that biscuits, scones, simple cakes, pancakes, waffles, crepes, and pasta all seem to have 3 core ingredients, those being flour, eggs and water or milk. If you mixed up 1 cup of flour, 1 egg and some liquid you could be eating any of these things (depending, as Spoofe Bo Diddly says, on how you cook it) but dietitians would only approve of pasta. Are they all puritans? Maybe there are some decadent diets that really work and they’re not telling anybody. I mean, you’d be on a calorie controlled diet if you took a 1200 calorie cheesecake, divided it into 3 portions and ate it for breakfast lunch and dinner wouldn’t you? Throw in a few vitamin pills and it would probably be ok for a few months.
What are you doing here Spoofe Bo Diddly? You’re making me nervous. I’m still worried about my post in the SDMB comic book thread. But, oh well, because I can’t help myself (and because it’s so derivative anyway): I wouldn’t run for the president if I was you Spoofe - it’s just not nice and you could get hurt. It’d just be a workout for his bodyguards.
G.Nome, I’m no dietician, but I can say with all certainty that a cheesecake has many, many more than 1,200 calories. A not-necessarily-huge piece of cheesecake probably has numerous hundreds of calories. Among other reasons, such as the fact that a diet of cheesecake would be essentially a diet of fat and sugar, 1,200 calories worth of cheesecake isn’t enough to fill anyone up for three meals for a sustained period of time.
You also have to consider the method of cooking. Biscuits, scones, cakes, pancakes, waffles, crepes all contain some kind of fat or are usually cooked in some kind of fat. Pasta doesn’t require any fat whatsoever.
You could probably survive for quite a while on a diet of cheesecake only, but it would be very unsound nutritionally. Taking vitamins cannot make up for a no-fiber diet, for one thing. Also, no sensible diet based on the basic food groups touts pasta as a “diet” food - it is allowed in moderation or not at all, on some diets.
“Hmm… Eggs! Eggs are in chocolate cake! And milk! Milk is in chocolate cake! And wheat! THAT’S NUTRITION!”
There’s more than one way to cook pasta.
So, you have the aircore system. I knew it.
Actually, I just fart on it 'til it’s warm. Brings out the TRUE flavor of pasta, I guaran-damn-tee you that!
missbunny said:
Yep, Yep, sounds like the recipe for “drop” biscuits, an old southern favorite that my mom used to make. Start to finish in about a half hour. Called drop biscuits because instead of forming the dough, you drop it by tablespoons onto the baking pan.
Served dry, it takes about a quart of water to down one of those suckers, but cover it with sausage gravy for the main breakfast course or liberally coat with butter and serve with fried chicken and mashed potatos …Ummmm, food fit for the gods.