Book Review: Dollar Tree Cookbooks

Ok, so it's confession time... I may have gone to the Dollar Tree today and I may have bought three ridiculously thin cookbooks... but in my defense, they have pictures. 

Gorgeous pictures. 

On every page. 

Honestly, I did look at the recipes themselves before purchasing the books, but to be equally honest, the pictures were a deciding factor. I'm a very visual person, and to be able to see a picture of what a recipe makes really does help.

Well played, Dollar Tree... well played.

Anyway, these three little cookbooks really did have a number of delicious- sounding recipes I am excited to try. The books on salads and smoothies are probably going to be the most helpful; Any way I can motivate myself to actually eat leafy greens is a good thing, and if I can disguise them in a smoothie, then so much the better!

The smoothie book has a good variety of smoothie recipes, ranging from dessert smoothies to breakfast smoothies, to protein smoothies and green smoothies. There are only 11 recipes, but they are diverse enough to make quite a useful little collection.

The appetizer book is probably the least useful to me, but I bought it because, like the other two, it has a good variety of recipes... and it had recipes for Baked Crab Dip and Spinach Artichoke Dip, both of which I greatly enjoy eating, but haven't tried making yet. Later in the summer if we have a good pea harvest, I want to try the Green Pea Hummus recipe. It sounds quite interesting.

Each book also has one of these helpful measurement equivalents pages

As I have mentioned, the third book I purchased contains salad recipes. Like the others, it also has only 11 recipes, but very diverse ones. For example, the book starts out with a Chili Lime Southwest Chicken Salad (reminiscent of the one I love to get at Panera), but also contains a recipe for Fruit Salad, several pasta salad recipes, and a yummy-looking Lentil Salad recipe.

Lots of bang for your buck... and maybe not such a bad impulse purchase after all!

To find these books, you can go to the Dollar Tree website here to find location near you, or you could order online... they only let you buy a case of 36, though...

Oh, and I was reminded as I looked these up on the website --there's also one about grilling.

Healthy Pumpkin Spice Cookies

This morning I tried a recipe from Pinterest that used banannas, peanut butter, applesauce, and quick oats to make a fairly balanced breakfast cookie. They turned out to be quite delicious, but had a strong bananna taste, which I did not particularly care for. One of the comments on the recipe mentioned using pumpkin instead of bananna, so I decided to try that. I added some spices, some chopped walnuts, and some crystallized ginger. In spite of not having any sugar except the ginger, these turned out quite well. If they are not quite sweet enough for your taste, you could add some honey to the batter, or just drizzle some on top of the baked cookies.



Pumpkin-Oat Cookies:

1 small can pumpkin
1/3 cup peanut butter
2/3 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 1/2 cups quick oats (uncooked)
1 tsp. ground cloves
2 tsp. cinnamon
4 medium-sized chunks of crystallized ginger, chopped
1/3 cup chopped nuts

Preheat oven to 350.
Combine all ingredients in a medium-sized mixing bowl. Mix well, then let rest for 10 minutes. (This allows the oats to soften.) Then drop by spoonfuls onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and flatten into circles.

Bake for 20-30 minutes, until cookies have reached desired consistancy.

Enjoy!