New Year's Resolution

So, I've made a New Year's resolution, and I thought I would use this blog to track it.

I've decided to try a new recipe every week this year. I figure this will shake up our routine, and hopefully out of ~52 recipes, I'll end up with at least a few that I like enough to put into regular rotation.

This reaolution got off to a roaring start with exactly zero recipes tried last week. I didn't *quite* do nothing; I checked out a cookbook based on the show Good Eats, and read through a couple chapters of Mark Brittman's Quick and Easy Recipes from the New York Times. I hope to find something in the former, but I'm a bit dispairing of the latter. Sorry, Mr. Brittman, but with a toddler, carefully watching something under the broiler doesn't count as "easy".

This week I am trying to make up for lost time by making two new things.  Here is the first one.

Recipe 1: Sort of newton-esque cookies

I hadn't intended to bake for my first recipe, but after dithering for a week I thought I had to just pick something. I wanted to do a fig newton style cookie because I had picked up some fancy baby newtons for my son, which he really liked, but which are too expensive to buy regularly.

The Recipe:  http://m.allrecipes.com/recipe/10760/prune-and-raisin-filled-cookies/

To call what I did "following" this recipe would be a stretch. This was the closest thing I could find to what I wanted, but it didn't seem terribly toddler compatible. Instead of prunes and raisins I reduced about 4 cups of frozen strawberries with about 1\2 cup of sugar. I also used 3 cups of whole wheat flour and 3 cups of white flour instead of just white.  I was originally going to cut the recipe in half, then saw that it calls for three eggs, then ended up using flax seed meal instead of eggs. (I look back on this string of decisions and just have to shake my head. Listening to podcasts while cooking is apparently too much for me.) I completely forgot about the lemon zest (which I would have had to use lime or orange zest for anyway), and didn't make a glaze.

So, yeah. What I made was a "riff" on this recipe? Thumbs up?

The results were not bad, really. The strawberries didn't really get enough body to make a satisfying filling, and spread a lot when I put them on the dough. To combat this I rolled two of the sides up to partially contain them, then folded the other two sides up to enclose the top. This made for pretty thick filling-free ends, but otherwise worked well. The end result reads more as sweet bread enfused with strawberry than cookie filled with jam, but the kiddo likes it. Which is good, because I have an infinite amount of it. I'm hoping it freezes well, because there is no way to eat this much pastry before it goes bad.

Okay, the boy is starting to roll around, so I'll end on that note. Tonight I am cooking recipe #2, so I will be back over the weekend or early next week to report on how it went.