What can I say but this week blurred by, mostly due to a higher than normal level of sleep deprivation. Lack of sleep makes me a) tired and b) do crazy shit. As in, this week I managed to throw out my keys. As the mothers who read this blog with undoubtedly understand, when you have a baby, your daily routine hangs in a very delicate balance. Doing something like throwing out your keys is like throwing dynamite into said schedule. It took me the better part of a week to get replacement keys, which I have so far managed not to throw out.
I should invent some sort of gizmo for new mothers, like one of those rave glow sticks, that indicates how little sleep they’d had. That way anyone they interacted with, say, husbands, best friends or mothers, would instantaneously understand what they were dealing with (and do things like check the recycling for their wives house keys). Yes, I recycled my keys.
Yet, as in my favorite column in the magazine The Week, “It wasn’t all bad.” I did manage to bake some good oatmeal cranberry cookies. I do my best to eat a low glycemic diet, which means that I swapped the sugar in this recipe with agave syrup and I highly recommend the results. I adapted this from an excellent Smitten Kitchen Oatmeal Raisin recipe.
Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies (makes 18 medium cookies).
1 stick butter, softened (the softened part is really important — if you use cold butter, it makes your cookies flat…)
Slightly less than 1/2 cup agave
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 cup dried cranberries
Preheat oven to 400 °F.
In a food processor (I use a Cuisinart), cream together the butter, agave, egg and almond extract until smooth. This is usually between 8-10 “pulses” on my Cuisinart. In a separate bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt together. Combine this into the butter/sugar mixture (I usually break it up into four parts and pulse each into the Cuisinart mixture). I then pour this mixture out of the Cuisnart and into a bowl. Stir in the oats and cranberries.
Deb at Smitten Kitchen says “At this point you can either chill the dough for a bit in the fridge and then scoop it, or scoop the cookies onto a sheet and then chill the whole tray before baking them. You could also bake them right away, if you’re impatient, but I do find that they end up slightly less thick.” And I found that chilling them does makes the cookies thicker.
Bake them for 10 to 12 minutes (your baking time will vary, depending on your oven and how cold the cookies were going in), taking them out when golden at the edges but still a little undercooked-looking on top.
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