Braised Shortribs with Ridgeline Cabernet Sauvignon — Photo by Mike Lucia, MediaNews Staff

The next time someone starts complaining about how calorie-illiterate people are, about how they don’t know or care how much fat, salt and fiber they put into their mouths, don’t believe it.

Sure, some of us carry a little extra weight. Some of us have a hard time saying no to foods that we know are not good for us. But last week, I got a pretty clear message that people DO care about calories when I ran a recipe for braised shortribs in my weekly Happy Together column.

The recipe, unbeknownst to me, delivered a whopping 1,400 calories per person, according to a computer program that calculates nutrition on all of the recipes we run in the newspaper.

The first email questioning the calorie counts made me laugh. I reasoned with the reader, suggesting that unless she sucked down every ounce of fat in the dish and then licked the plate, she didn’t have to claim all those calories. But when e-mails No. 2 and No. 3 came, I decided I needed answers. It turns out that our nutrition calculator gives ranges of calories — for example, 4 pounds of ribs might be 1,173 calories. Or it might be more like 650 calories. It depends, of course, on how lean the ribs happen to be.

It also turns out that the chef who wrote this particular recipe failed to instruct people to defat the drippings and remove the excess fat from the sauce before serving. Had the chef added this simple, easy step to his recipe, the calorie count per serving in that dish would have been reduced drastically - a full 100 calories for every 1 tablespoon of fat rendered and removed from the dish.

It is my observation that most chefs care about things like aroma, mouthfeel, freshness, complexity and flavor. Rarely does a chef talk about calorie counts. In my opinion, those of us who want to eat well AND be healthy can and should run recipes through our own fat-detectors, then cut fat wherever we can.

– Jolene Thym