Sitrep: I have a goal now. [g] Mt Helena on Saturday or Bust!
So yesterday was the monthly grocery shopping day. It's still going surprisingly well, using the typed list on the fridge and going only once for the main stuff, and 2 weeks later the other store for the meats (monthly supply again). Last night I came in at $4.84 over my budget. Because of a book, naturally. :) And this was also one of those monthly trips where I had to restock flour, sugar, shortening...all those baking goods I buy infrequently. And miracle of miracles, I actually made it out of the store without any chocolate, cookies, ice cream or pizza/tomato items. Which is saying a lot since a) I was really hungry and b) I was PMS-ing.
Then I ruined it by making oatmeal cookies at 9pm and inhaling several cookies worth of the dough. Not to mention the finished product. They're supposed to be for tomorrow's trip to Butte, America with my little and her family. At least that's what I told myself as I was baking them. (But we all know it's because I wanted the dough.)
Every so often I get these strange cravings or spells where I only want to eat one thing. Usually it's my favorite lime pasta dish, or egg salad sandwiches, or biscuits with eggs and gravy...lately it's been Oatmeal Cookies. This was my third batch in the last 2 weeks. All eaten by yours truly. Although one batch was an oatmeal cake (try it sometime. It's pretty good with coffee for breakfast). Interestingly enough, did you realize that you can (without adjusting the other ingredients)
1) Use less flour than called for
2) Use less shortening than called for
3) Use butter 1 for 1 instead of shortening
4) Use a mix of butter & shortening
5) Eliminate the eggs entirely
6) Don't add vanilla (I wanna know who closed the bottle last. It's un-openable!)
And the cookies will still turn out pretty decent? You can even do a multiple of the above in the same batch and the cookies are still edible.
And if you're using the recipe from the New Better Homes & Garden Cookbook (the same one my Mom's had since I can remember), you can substitute regular milk for the buttermilk, change nothing else in the recipe, and bake it in a cake pan? It's kinda like a cornbread, only oatmeal. With sugar. Yum. (It only works with the above cookbook's recipe. At least, that's the only one that's worked for me so far!)
But you absolutely, positively, can not use less oats than the recipe calls for without reducing all the other ingredients first. Because it just does not taste like oatmeal cookies. It tastes like a brown sugar flour cinnamon cookie. Which I suppose is okay. Just not when you're craving oatmeal cookies.
Not that that stopped me from eating a handful for breakfast.
