I love oatmeal raisin cookies, but I have one son who doesn’t like raisins.  For some reason, this son does like chocolate covered raisins, and though I’m not one to tend towards accommodating picky eaters, I did wonder if he’d like oatmeal cookies with chocolate covered raisins.  So, I decided to give it a try.  Mission successful!

I’ve had a oatmeal cookie recipe for a while that I use, but I’ve made a lot of adaptations to it over the years.  I will share the resulting recipe, with chocolate covered raisins included.  The reason I put the word healthy in quotations is because I think anything that calls for shortening is questionable in terms of its health benefits.  But I have done some things like lower the amount of sugar the basic recipe calls for, added flaxseed meal for an extra punch of nutrition, and replaced the eggs with applesauce.  The final adjustment actually happened on accident because I was out of eggs when I made this (a surprise when I opened the fridge and found out that boy #2 made the rest of the eggs for his breakfast that morning), so I substituted the applesauce instead.  The result was great, and maybe even slightly more healthy than real eggs.

As for the chocolate covered raisins, I’m sure you could add them to any oatmeal cookie recipe with great results.  They are obviously a more expensive alternative to raisins, but I buy mine in bulk from Sam’s, which is the only reason I’m willing to offer this luxury to my family. (:  As a little tip for making these cookies with regular raisins instead, I started soaking my raisins for 5-10 minutes in water before adding them to my oatmeal cookie dough (to clarify, not the chocolate covered raisins, the normal raisins!) just to make them extra plump and juicy.  If you decide to use regular raisins in this recipe instead, I’d suggest upping the amount of brown sugar from 3/4 cup to 1 cup, as the chocolate actually helps keep the cookies sweet enough with the lowered amount of sugar, but that’s just what I would do.

Oatmeal Chocolate Covered Raisin Cookies

• 1 cup shortening (I’m sure butter or margarine would work too, with a slightly different outcome in texture)
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup apple sauce (or two large eggs)
• 2 cups all purpose flour (I use half white, half whole wheat)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 cups rolled oats
• 5 tablespoons water
• 1 tablespoon flaxseed meal
• 1 cup chocolate covered raisins

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Cream together shortening and sugar and beat in the applesauce.  Mix the flour, salt and baking soda together and beat into the creamed mixture.  In a separate bowl, mix together the dry oatmeal and the flaxseed meal.  Add the water to the dry ingredients and stir till wet throughout.  Then stir the oatmeal mixture and chocolate covered raisins into the creamed mixture till blended.  Put heaping tablespoons of the mixture onto cookie sheets and bake for 13-15 minutes.