Another Fail

I've been trying some new recipes lately with most of them coming out, well...crappy, inedible, flavorless, just plain old yucky. Maybe it's because the books that I'm using are the cheap how to save money on groceries books? I don't know, but I tried one out of the new book I got last week, the 5.00 dinner book, and it sounded good in print, but was definitely not good on our forks.

The recipe was for baked chicken with acorn squash, very easy to fix, just put bone in chicken breasts in a baking pan with some orange juice, rosemary, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Then you peel and chop up an acorn squash, put it in the pan, sprinkle with a little brown sugar, and bake it alongside the chicken for an hour or so. The chicken tasted like chicken, nothing special, but the acorn squash was absolutely inedible. Something about putting it in orange juice made it taste really bitter and tart. So that recipe was a total bust.

I did make some really good cookies, though. I got a bag of whole wheat flour and there was a recipe on the bag for whole wheat chocolate chip cookies. I didn't have any chocolate chips but did have a bag of white 'chocolate' chips so used those instead, and used splenda instead of the sugar, and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter sticks instead of real butter, the calories in the fake butter is the same as real butter but the fat content is about half. So with whole wheat flour and splenda we can pretend that these cookies are really healthy!

Here's the recipe:

3/4 cup granulated sugar (or splenda)
3/4 cup packed brown sugar ( or splenda brown sugar blend)
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 bag (12 oz) chocolate chips (2 cups)- I think I only used 1 cup of the white chips and the cookies are plenty chippy, just put in however many of whatever you want. M&M's would probably taste good, too. Or butterscotch chips. Or whatever.

1/ Heat oven to 375. In large bowl, stir sugars, butter, vanilla, and egg until well blended. Stir in flour, baking soda and salt (dough will be stiff). Stir in chocolate chips.
2/ On ungreased cookie sheets, drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls about 2" apart.
3/ Bake 8-10 minutes or until light brown (centers will be soft). Cool slightly, remove from cookie sheets to cooling racks.
Makes 3 dozen.

I don't know what got into me to actually make cookies yesterday, but I was in a kitchen kind of mood and had been in there cleaning after I had gone to the grocery store. And cookies sounded good. And they were.