A Special Kind of Cookie Failure

So the other night I decided to make cookies! Because M and I have just decided to completely and totally ignore any pretense of a New Year's unspoken resolution to lose weight (cuz you know if you say it, it will NEVER happen. Apparently not saying got the same results) So I got out a new cookbook and tried their recipe for chocolate chip cookies instead of the recipe that is included on the back of bag of chocolate chips... it called for shortening. This is something I kept from my husband knowing he would be totally against using it, butI wanted to try it. So I used the shortening. I'm not sure if shortening goes bad or not, because this stuff was several years old... something else I will not tell my husband if I can help it. So I made the first batch and they tasted like CRAP. Seriously... crap. M took a bite of one and promptly spit it into the sink. I tried it and could barely manage to swallow it - it looked really good but wasn't sweet at all... so I threw two cookie sheets' worth - which was really painful because once you go through the trouble of making cookies, you don't want to just throw away a lot of them. I then added an entire stick of butter and several scoops of sugar and baked another sheet's worth - sucess! I then realized that its entirely possible that I forgot to add half the sugar I was supposed to and that that most likely contributed to the awful taste.