Oops!

It's been a while since I posted here. I've made a number of things that turned out great that I want to remember, but the two best recipes have both been desserts. Oh, how I love sweet things.

The first was a batch of oatmeal cranberry-orange cookies. They are far, far superior to any oatmeal raisin cookie I've ever eaten.
The recipe came from the Cooking Light Complete Cookbook. This is a really great cookbook, and also contains one of my favorite mac 'n' cheese recipes too. In any case, the recipe is called Oatmeal Cookies with A-Peel. The only changes I made were soaking the dried cranberries a lot longer than they called for since I started them before dinner and then forgot about them for a few hours, and also I zested an entire orange into the batter instead of just the tablespoon or so that they called for. So my cookies turned out super orangey and the fragrance is intoxicating. My Eye-Fi Flash Memory Card needs an update and I can't find the reader, but I'll post pictures later.  They aren't the most beautiful cookies you've ever seen anyway, but holy cow, they are delicious!  And less than 100 calories each! Perfect diet dessert.

The other dessert was from Cooking Light Magazine's August issue.  A lightened up Southern-style banana pudding. It uses roasted bananas, which I recently discovered the appeal of after trying a recipe from 101 Cookbooks (Roast Banana-Pumpkin Breakfast Bread). Roasting the bananas turns them into custardy sugary perfection.  However, while making my pudding, I did discover that if any of the bananas aren't quite ripe, they don't do as well in the oven.  So make sure there is no green left on your bananas before sticking them in the oven.  Roasting the banana brings out so much of the inherent sweetness that you hardly need additional sweetener in your recipe. I recommend it. Pictures of the pudding coming later also.

More recipes coming soon! I just got a couple of new cookbooks I'm excited to try out: Rick Bayless's Mexican Everyday, and Ellie Krieger's So Easy.  Ellie Krieger's recipes look so awesome I'm tempted to only cook out of that one book for the entire week.