Oatmeal Cookies, Oh My!

Since my hubby's been working so hard (and since he's got a long week of grading ahead of him), I figured he needed some brain food for snacking. Otherwise, he'll just chow down on tortilla chips. My friend Brittany made these fabulous oatmeal fruit cookies the last time we were at her house, so I tried to find a similar recipe. Bingo! I used 1 cup of triple berry blend (dried cranberries, cherries, and blueberries) instead of the dates, and left out the coconut (both hubby and I despise the stuff) and the walnuts (because crunchy things do not belong anywhere near my cookies). Did use the called-for 1 cup of raisins. I'm realizing that I really don't follow recipes very often, even though I sure thought I did. It seems I substitute whatever I have on hand for the necessaries and leave out the undesirables.

I made two sheets of cookies, and there was still a hefty amount of dough to be dealt with. This would be a great recipe for a bake sale, I'm thinking. So I pressed the remaining dough into a 9x13 pan to see how this recipe did in bar form. We haven't tasted them yet, being too preoccupied with eating the cookies, but I'll let you know which we preferred.

Update: We definitely preferred the cookies to the bars! I also made the cookies once more with a 7-fruit blend with great success!

While the cookies were in the oven, I looked for a marinade for the pork tenderloin that's been defrosting. I wanted to find something Asian-inspired, and this is what I came up with. Asian Ginger Grill Marinade. I was too lazy to pull out the chopping board to mince garlic, so I used garlic salt as a quick fill-in. Added some crushed red peppers, used 1/2 rice vinegar and 1/2 white wine for the acid, decreased honey to 1 tablespoon (cause, c'mon, 2 tablespoons is a lot of honey!), and viola! Pork is happily hanging out in the fridge till morning, when he'll be browned and dumped into the crock pot.