A test of Patience

This ball of yarn may not seem like much but it represents a big win for me. This was over 1400 yards of tangled mess after I dyed it with Kool-aid. It has taken many many hours to untangle but I am now glad I resisted the urge to give up. I win! I am so close to finishing the sleeves of my black cardigan that I decided to sit down after work today and finish untangling. Once I got past the last knotty area it was smooth sailing and only took about a half hour. YES! Now to wind it into equal balls and cast on for a new shall. This makes me happy. But now you see why I had no blog material for quite some time.

In other news I've been on somewhat of a health kick (I use this term liberally) lately. You see, sometime last year I went to turn on a burner on our stove and screws fell out. Luckily it didn't turn on, but it never worked again. Shortly there after another one began to randomly shut off. So we bit the bullet and got some new appliances. We now have a fancy (to me) new convection oven. We didn't set out to get a convection oven but it just happened to be a feature of the type of stove we wanted. I love to bake. Well, I love to eat baked goods and will pretty much do anything necessary to do so. This oven can bake several trays of cookies, muffins, etc at once to perfection. I've used it several times a week since we got it. So baking is super easy now which is a problem to my expanding waistline. So in order to indulge and achieve my goal of being able to eat cookies everyday I set out to find healthy recipes. I used this recipe for muffins but used 1c whole wheat flour, 1/2c cake flour, only 1c oat bran, and no oil. I also added cinnamon and nutmeg. I don't think I subbed the eggs with flax seed but I've done it before and it really works. Unfortunately I only had 3/4c of applesauce. They were so good! Had I had the whole cup of applesauce they would have been even more moist. I suggest adding berries for more interest I just didn't have any. I was going to make them again today but forgot to stop for fruit. Bummer.

I also tried this recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies but cut the white sugar out (my husband and I agree they would have been way too sweet with it) used whole wheat flour with a touch of cake flour, and cut the salt by half. Next time I'll try subbing some of the butter and maybe the eggs but these are really good cookies. I'm not too concerned with cholesterol since my husband is a vegetarian so eliminating eggs isn't a major concern. Since I freeze some scoops of each batch of raw dough on a cookie sheet and bag for later use I may pop a few in the oven right now... Man I love cookies. It took me awhile to discover freezing but I am glad, fresh baked cookies after a long day are awesome. Last tip, chill the dough, it really helps the flavor. Ok, that's all. Thanks for letting me blab on about yummy treats :)