Strawberry Lemonade Cookies

I hardly ever go to Walmart - it's nowhere near me and I have mixed feelings about doing "real" grocery shopping there, but my dear friend A. offered to take me for some necessities that somehow there's never time to buy during the week (like soap and conditioner). But being hungry and it being Walmart, I wound up buying a whole bunch of snack foods that offered no nutritional value, unless orange cheesy powder counts, but lots of nostalgia.

The healthiest item I bought was a bag of frozen strawberries, which threw me back on the hunt for a strawberry baked good that actually uses fresh strawberries. Ninety-five percent of the recipes on the internet either use strawberry cake mix, strawberry gelatin or strawberry jam to achieve their flavor and signature pink color. Go on, google it. I refused to make any of them and decided to find a good basic cookie recipe and convert it into a strawberry recipe.

The result? Martha Stewart's glazed lemon cookies sans glaze, plus a cup of thawed chopped strawberries. Oh and a little pink food past, just because. Pretty yummy if I do say so myself.

Acorn Squash Tea Bread

I'm a rebel. I bought my first acorn squash - at the end of winter/squash season. I was planning to just heat it and eat it, but while researching cooking methods, I came upon a recipe for Squash Tea Bread. So I, uh, made a cake out of it instead. Hey, it's from EatingWell.com, so it's healthy, right?

Moist, dense and spicy. Yum.

Curry Deviled Eggs

My first deviled eggs. I have some issues with mayonnaise that I need to resolve, because there are a lot of recipes that use it. I just threw a few things together for this filling, including honey mustard, curry powder and sriracha, but no mayo.

Oreos

My day off was a nice relaxing cooking day. I won't say much since this recipe is everywhere online, but they all go back to Smitten Kitchen's blog, and there isn't much variation between recipes. I will say that 1) This is one of the fastest cookie recipes I've done and 2) I need new cocoa powder. My sister reminded me the can I almost finished was from my trip to California 7 years ago -- eeek! In my defense, I didn't cook much back then. It was a sweet tasty cookie, though it lacked that something extra that makes the chocolate wafers in an Oreo so good. Possibly the cocoa Nabisco uses isn't 7 years old. Possibly.