Rant Alert!

I love SparkPeople.com. It's a great website for healthy living. I subscribe to their SparkPeople Recipe of the Day, and I've found many great recipes this way. Today's recipe was billed as whole-grain maple cookies. I was interested! Part of the description said " ... it's a great way to incorporate whole grains." It sounded promising! So I clicked on the link to get the full recipe. Now, it is a cookie recipe, so I wasn't surprised to see brown sugar. In fact, I was glad to see maple syrup and honey, too. An egg and some vanilla--good. Then it called for shortening. I wasn't happy about that, because I'm trying to get away from shortening as much as possible, but that's a discussion for another day. Perhaps a pie baking day.

Next came rolled oats or seven grain cereal mix, Bob's Red Mill's mix recommended. Great choices! The next ingredient was all-purpose flour. Why?! This recipe was looking so good! If hard red whole-wheat flour's taste is too strong, why not hard white or soft white whole-wheat flour? Or this recipe looks like oat flour might work.

Of course, I advocate using freshly-ground flour, but those whole-grain wheat flours are readily available in most grocery stores. Locally, Wegmans even sells them under their brand name. You can easily make oat flour from rolled oats in your blender.

So my first complaint is that they could have easily made this recipe really whole-grain. My second--and bigger--complaint is that the recipe is labeled whole-grain and it is not! It contains whole-grains. I see this a lot, where a recipe is labeled as whole-grain and it is only partly whole-grain. I'm not mad at anyone for not using whole-grains or only using them for part of the grain or flour in a recipe. I have plenty of recipes like that. I just ask that they not label them whole-grain if they are not.

Okay. I feel better now.

P.S.--I will save this recipe and try it with different whole-grain flours. I think it will be really good. I'm not sure what to do about the shortening, but I'll investigate the possibilities. If you know of anything, let me know, please!