kale smoothies and flaxseed kicks

Lately Dano and I have been trying a little bit harder to eat healthy.  A lot of people associate healthy eating with eating less, but we are trying to eat more!  More beans, nuts, grains, etc... And with that we have been trying to make these smoothies a couple times a week along with a fried egg and toast-it's a pretty complete breakfast!

The original recipe to give me the idea is on the Joy the Baker blog

I like to make it however with...

Makes 2 servings:
about 8 frozen blackberries
1 banana
handful of kale
handful of spinach
1/4-1/2 c vanilla unsweetened almond milk
1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed
Lately too I have started throwing in some frozen shelled edamame for protein which is pretty good too!

(It's hard to take an appetizing picture of a kale smoothie...)

I've also been making my own granola and taking a small container of it with an added sprinkle of ground flaxseed to work with some vanilla greek yogurt!  I use this recipe, but majorly scaled down.

Mine turns out to be about:
2 1/2 c oats
3/4 c chopped almonds
1/4 c pumpkin seeds
1/4 c sunflower seeds
1/4 c sesame seeds
1/4 t cinnamon
1/4 c olive oil
1/4 c maple syrup
drizzle of agave nectar
1/8 t sea salt
1 t vanilla
1/2-3/4 c raisins

It's a lot of ingredients and I am lucky to live in hippie-ville and can easily find all these things at an affordable rate with bulk bins at the co-op.   But the plus side of this recipe is that it is healthy and once you have everything it is very easy to make!  The original recipe also calls for rice syrup which I could not find... so I just kind of left it out and added a little more oil and some agave nectar. 

About once a week I grind flaxseed in my blender and keep it in the fridge... then I add it to my granola for lunch and my smoothies! 

Yep, I bought honey just so I could have this bear jar...

Hope you give some of these a try!  

Whoopie!

Last week for bookclub I finally decided to embark on making whoopie pies.  I printed out the recipe from epicurious probably 6 months ago but figured they would be kind of time consuming and continued to put it off.  Well, it really was not very hard and they were totally worth the work!

(sorry my pictures are worse than usual, with the weather being so dismal it's hard without natural light!)
I pretty much followed the recipe as written, but for the filling I used about half shortening and half butter.  A lot of people complained in the reviews about the filling being too messy so I made the filling first and let it sit in a pastry bag upright in the pint glass in the fridge while I made the rest.  The frosting seemed kind of gritty at first but after it sat for a while that totally went away!

I just cut the bottom off of a pastry bag which made filling the pies super simple... it was fun! 

to a healthy 2012?

Hey ya'll,
I haven't posted in a while, hope everyone had a great holiday season!
Now it's back to work and attempting to adhere to our New Year's resolutions....
in honor of those I have a couple healthy ideas to pass on:
#1. roasted red peppers

I love red pepper, but roasted red pepper is especially delicious!  They are super easy to make too, just cut out the stem and seeds & flatten them onto a piece of aluminum foil on the broiler pan.

 I check mine about every 5 minutes and move them around if they aren't blackening evenly.
They should look close to this when they are done.

The entire skin should be wrinkled and mostly blackened.  If you still have smooth red areas, they need to stay in longer.  At this point, use tongs to place the peppers in a ziploc or tight sealing container and let them sit 10-15 minutes.  After being steamed, the skin of the pepper should just slide off and they are ready.  I made wraps for my lunch last week with hummus and my roasted red peppers-yum!

My second recipe is spring rolls.
At the local sushi place, I had honey-Sriracha sauce for the first time and fell in love.... it's dangerously addicting, I should warn you!  So that's what I make first so it can sit and stew for a little bit--simple ingredients:

I put them both in a small saucepan and it's up to you how hot you want it.  When the sauce seemed pretty uniform I transferred it to a bowl while I made the rolls. 
For the spring rolls, I chopped up spearmint, thai basil, and cilantro.  I have made spring rolls before and skipped the mint and basil, they were really bland--you need the herbs!  I slightly boiled some red pepper and carrots strips until they were just softened.

The name of these rice papers cracks me up!  They are really easy to use though, I just fill a pie pan with boiling water and drop them in one at a time.  Transfer the paper to a cutting board and fill them up with your herbs, veggies, cellophane noodles (which after they were cooked I juiced an entire lime over them....), and some bean sprouts!

Needless to say, there were no leftovers!

just in time!

This is a little late notice but it was brought to my attention that I hadn't posted the recipe yet for the mint brownies I made for my friend Mal's going away party.

The recipe for the brownie portion is...

1/3 c brown sugar
1/3 c white sugar
1/3 c butter, melted
1 T water
1 egg
1 t vanilla
1/3 c unsweetened cocoa
3/4 c flour
1/4 t baking powder
1/8 t salt

Mix together the sugar and butter.  Beat in egg, water, and vanilla.  Gradually stir in cocoa.  Lightly mix in flour, baking powder, and salt.
Bake in a greased 8x8 pan at 350 degrees for about 15-20 minutes, a toothpick should come out clean.

Once the brownies are completely cool you can start layering.

1 c confectioners sugar
1/4 c butter, softened
2 t peppermint extract
1 t vanilla extract

Mix ingredients until smooth.  Spread over brownies and chill in fridge until set hard.

3 T butter
1/2 c chocolate chips
1/3 c crushed candy canes

In double boiler, melt chocolate chips and butter until smooth.  Allow to cool slightly and carefully pour over brownie mint layer.  Sprinkle with crushed candy canes.
Cover and chill for at least 1 hour. 

These are really festive and delicious!

Merry Christmas!

Welcome to the holiday season....

Hope everyone had a great thanksgiving!  We had quite a feast over here, I made....

Scones for breakfast
Ciabatta bread
Warm brie with pepper jelly
Candied walnuts
Parker House rolls
Noodle kugel-family recipe
Mashed potatoes
Vegetable pot pie -- I pretty much just eyeball this when I make it, but here is a general recipe
Turkey
Pumpkin pie

On top of that, our guests also brought a couple dishes--it was awesome! 

I just started a new retail job which has been crazy.  It was ambitious of me to decide to host thanksgiving, but on top of that I decided to make everything from scratch.  I don't know what I was thinking!  Looking back it would have been a lot less stressful to just buy a loaf of bread and some rolls at the store... oh well!

We also had a small, but exciting fire when I tried to brown my meringue for the pumpkin pie

Haha!  The best part is that after scraping off the charred part, the pie was amazing so my only advice is to use a culinary torch and nothing else ;)

I also wanted to post that before Thanksgiving, Dano and I made a roasted cauliflower soup that was delicious!  Neither of us even really like cauliflower so I decided to make this soup to use a bunch up from our CSA and we licked our bowls clean!

I used vegetable broth instead of chicken broth and didn't measure the nutmeg, just grated the seed over the cauliflower until it looked well covered.  And I don't buy garlic powder, just chopped some garlic up and added it to the cauliflower when there was only like 10 minutes left for it to roast.

where did the month of October go?!

Now that I am back in the world of modern conveniences, I am hoping to update much more often! 

Fall just might be my favorite season to bake--it's nice to have the oven warming up our apartment and I love baking with pumpkin and apples!  I like to bake with actual pumpkins and I'll do a post on that later but this week was a canned pumpkin kind of week...

I was anxious to get baking once I moved back into our apartment and one of my favorite fall recipes are these pumpkin cookies.  I used half brown sugar and half white sugar and I have been buying whole nutmeg seeds lately and grating them myself.  It adds much more flavor!  With all glaze recipes, be sure to check the consistency of the frosting--it's hard to measure confectioner's sugar accurately so take a spoon and make sure it will adhere and not just drip off.  I added cinnamon to the glaze and made it pretty thick so I could use a cake decorating bag to ice the cookies.

Yum!

food heaven...

Last night I thought I had died and went to food heaven. 

Here's how it all began...

Dano and I's neighbor/friend Mike went to visit a friend at a local farm and brought us back some amazing produce--most notably tomatoes and peppers!  Its hard to get those items here on the coast because it just doesn't get warm enough for them to ripen.  Luckily this farm was pretty far inland with much warmer weather.  As I was flipping through my Martha Stewart magazine I saw this recipe for salsa and got inspired!  I didn't quite follow this recipe, just used what we had which ended up being this-

After roasting...

I let them cool, then peeled the skins off the veggies and whipped them up in the food processor.  I added salt, cumin, chili powder, lime juice (2 limes), and a bunch of chopped cilantro.  After letting it sit in the fridge overnight it was amazing!

The best part is yet to come though! 

The other night I was pondering what to do with an overripe tomato I had up at the cabin and thought of the goat cheese bruschetta Dano's mom introduced me to.  So cut up the tomato with some fresh chopped garlic and let that sit on the counter while I toasted some artisan rolls.  I then slathered the rolls in goat cheese, topped them with the tomato & garlic mixture, then topped that with some of the fresh salsa.... it was so beautiful and delicious!

I've made this bruschetta many times with just store bought pico de gallo but this was so much better! 

The other food-highlight of my week has been the discovery of this pancake mix...

(Yes, I do make pancakes for myself before work...) and it is really easy & tastes great!  It was sort of an impulse buy because it was on sale but now I'm hooked!   It has 8 grams of protein and only 3 grams of sugar (more reason to add chocolate chips ;)

Hope you are having a food-heaven type of week too!