Luscious Lemon Bars

So I am blogging this while eating handfuls of chocolate chips. Sad, but true. I have this super healthy week of whole-food eating planned, including an amazing Vegan Summer Squash, Sweet Potato, Carrot and Ginger Soup tonight, and I cannot stop craving chocolate and sugary stuff. Sheesh, hormones, what is your problem today? I think this sugar craving began earlier this week when I was trying to figure out how to use up my gorgeous lemons from my Bountiful Basket this week...and then, inspiration and a whole lot of excitement hit me. LEMON BARS.

Hold on to your hats, kids. These lemon bars are delectable and the perfect balance of sweet and tart. You will never need another lemon bar recipe. Full disclosure: I adore lemon desserts. Lemon bars, lemon tarts, lemon meringue pie, lemon ricotta cookies, lemon-flavored sugar cookies. There is no end to my love for lemon. My wedding cake (yeah, I was that crazy girl who made her own wedding cake. Thank heavens I had a dear friend to take over decorating it for me so I didn't have a meltdown the day before my wedding) was a lemon pound cake with an amazing lemon curd filling. Suffice it to say, I have made a few lemon bar recipes before, but never really committed to one. I continued playing the field, and then discovered my Prince Charming with this beautiful concoction. Full disclosure, part two-my lemon bars are a modification of Deb's over at Smitten Kitchen, and hers is a modification of a recipe from Ina Garten, of Barefoot Contessa fame. These are easy to make, a snap to cut and dust with powdered sugar, and sure to make everyone you share them with smile from ear to ear.

Perfect Cinnamon Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

We have been overcast and rainy for a few days out here in good old Utah, and when it gets cloudy, all I want to do is bake. So today I baked, and I hope you will make these cookies the next time you are hankering for a treat. They are so delicious. Rich, textured oatmeal, a perfect balance of cinnamon and brown sugar, indulgent buttery flavor, and a sweet shot of chocolate in each bite. Perfection.

I first made these cookies about 10 years ago when I was in high school, and made them regularly for a long time. They were my "go-to" cookie recipe when I needed a large batch for my students. Then, in the midst of trying a million new recipes, I forgot about them. I haven't made these in at least four years. Last week I had to whip up some treats for kids at my church, and the memory of these fragrant cookies popped into my head. I made them immediately. They were every bit as good as I remembered.

Sigh. Again, these are not healthy, but in sticking with my "homemade is better" philosophy, they are for sure better than anything you can buy at the store. Simple ingredients of butter, flour, sugars, vanilla, cinnamon, chocolate and oatmeal are so much better than high-fructose corn syrup and Red Dye No. 5. Just make them and share them with a lot of people and you'll be fine.

Meyer Lemon Meringues

I love to bake and cook. It is a passion so intense that lately I question my decision to become a teacher and wonder why I never went to culinary school. Being a complete amateur and self-taught cook gives me lots of room to make culinary mistakes though, and for that I am grateful. The cookies that I am posting about today are anything but a mistake. They are a delicious, relatively guilt-free, home-run of a treat. That's great for my recipe binder, and even better for my ample hips. A quick, pre-recipe note. I love to eat healthily. I have made a lot of changes to my diet over the past three years and for the most part, we eat a really balanced, whole foods diet in our home. Sometimes, this conflicts with my intense, long-standing love affair with all things butter and sugar and yeasty deliciousness. I have reconciled some of my guilt by realizing that anything I make at home, from scratch, with quality ingredients, is a bazillion times better for me than something from the store out of a preservative-laden box. So I bake. And I use sugar. And butter. And eggs. And I sample the batter along the way, and eat giant slices of cake. Yup. As long as I know what's in it and I make the choice to consume those things, it's okay. So you will see a variety of delicious, healthy recipes on here, and also some major indulgences-or rather, foodulgences.