This is a repeat after me post

Unlike people who repeat themselves, names of things that repeat themselves are pretty awesome.  And fun to say.  I’m convinced that the only reason people actually wear MuuMuus is because you get to say it twice.  Think about it,  would you want to wear a Muu?  Or would you be excited to go to a Chinese restaurant and order a “Pu” platter?  Nope.  You want the PuPu platter and I’m guessing you giggle a little when you place the order…

Why do you think that people chant “TOGA TOGA TOGA TOGA!” at frat parties?  because repeating a word makes it doubly awesome.  Which (truth be told) is one of the reasons I was initially drawn to trying a “Lomi Lomi” salad when in Hawaii a few years ago with my fam.  It combines two of my favorite things in the world:  salmon (raw salmon to boot!) and a name that (like me after a few cocktails) repeats itself.  I love the simplicity of Lomi Lomi.  On a Sunday night, after a weekend of mostly PG rated debauchery, the husband and I love to have Lomi Lomi, a light salad and a few handfuls of baked potato chip.  It truly is the bees knees (words that rhyme with each other come in a close second to words that repeat.  I’m not the only one who thinks so–just look at a Jamba Juice menu).

One thing to note:  I really like to bastardize recipes.  Sometimes I’ll tear them down to the studs and start almost from scratch.  Sometimes I’ll change something tiny and rename it.  I’m allowed to do that, right?  Even if I’m not; I have with this recipe.  This is a cross between a true lomi lomi and a ceviche.  I’d call it a “ceviche lomi” but then we lose the appeal of the double name, not to mention the whole premise for my post and I’d be back at square uno looking for some sort of quirky intro.

This is how we do Lomi Lomi (ceviche style)

  • 1 lb boneless salmon, skin removed, cut into 1/2″ chunks.  Use a real sharp knife to do this otherwise you’ll end up with shredded fish and thats just gross.
  • 3 green onions, finely chopped (stalks trimmed to that only about2 inches of the green are left intact)
  • 4 inches of an English cucumber, chopped into 1/4″ chunks.  Peel on.
  • Juice of 1 lemon
  • A squiggle and a squeeze of Sriracha hot sauce (yes, that is a scientific term)
  • Soy sauce to taste

Do this:

Then do this:

And mix everything together, grab a handful of potato chips and go to town.  Or Bora Bora.

Really it’s that simple.  Now go make some lomi lomi and your own list of awesome things that have repeating names.

 

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OMG! Bacon Cupcakes!!!

Yes, these actually exist. AND I got to eat one (OK 3 but who’s counting). Puja didn’t want to post this deliciousness yet because she thinks the recipe isn’t good enough yet. But I just had to brag (I mean share).

As for not being ‘good enough’ yet, I don’t know what she’s talkin about cause just looking at this photo is making me drool.

Egg, gooey mozzarella and some tangy tomatillo sauce all wrapped up in a crispy ham/bacon cup. mmmmm…

Stay tuned. Recipe coming soon.

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Bucket List Item #43

Everyone has a bucket list right?  That list of things that you want to do before you, well, kick the bucket.  I’ve got a running list of things that I simply cannot leave this world without doing, experiencing, or saying that I achieved.  I want to skydive (but not bungee jump).  I want to go to the Aspen Food & Wine Classic.  I want to say that I introduced two people who fell in love and got married.  As a side note, there is a certain follower of this blog who is stalling on letting me achieve this last one.  You know who you are.  And yes, your impending happy future is all about me.

I also want to have something named after me.  I’m not talking about my tea cup at work being called “Puja’s mug” or a restaurant amongst friends being affectionately referred to as “Puja’s favorite place to eat.”  I’m talking evil villain big.  Pujaville.  Puja Industries.  The McPuja.  Not too much for a girl to ask, right?

But naming things after yourself is kind of beyond narcissistic so when it came time to name a new pasta dish I’ve been working on, I decided to go for the obvious and name it after it’s biggest fan–my friend Megu.  She’s tiny, adorable and can drink more wine than possibly anyone else I know.  And that feat in itself merits some sort of prize.  It might have been the wine, but the first time I made this dish Megu almost fell over.  In fact at one point in the evening she might have hit me to show just how much she loved the pasta.  I should have taken a picture of the bruise.  When Megu and her husband Chad came over yesterday so the boys could geek out over Game of Thrones it was a no brainer that I’d make “Megu Pasta” for everyone to enjoy.

Here’s how we do Megu Pasta:

(Serves 4)

  • 12 oz pasta
  • 1/2 pound pancetta (cut into 1/4 inch pieces)
  • 1 bunch spinach (ends trimmed and chopped into 3″ pieces)
  • 2 ginormous heirloom tomatoes (cut in 1/2 inch chunks)
  • 1/2 tsp balsamic vinegar
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 2 tbsp flour
  • zest of 1/2 a lemon
  • salt and pepper to taste
  1. Preheat the oven to 350.
  2. Set pasta water to boil.  Salt heavily.
  3. Mix heirlooms with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a sprinkle of salt and a few grinds of pepper.  Stick these babies in the oven for 10 minutes.  After 10 minutes are up, turn off the oven and let them marinate in their own deliciousness until you’re ready to use them.
  4. Get out a 5 quart saucier, set it over medium heat and cook those pancetta pieces till crispy crispy brown. You kind of want it to look like it’s almost about to burn.  Why?  Because these suckers are going to stew in the sauce for a bit so you want them to retain as much crisp as possible.  Depending on how powerful your stove is, they’ll probably take about 10-15 minutes to crisp up.
  5. After the pancetta is thoroughly crisped, reduce the heat to low, add in the flour and stir to incorporate into the rendered fat from the pancetta.  It’ll bubble. Remember when you made a bechamel for the mac n cheese the other day?  It’s kind of the same concept.  The flour is a thickening agent for the sauce.  You’re going to want to let this go for about 5-7 minutes, stirring pretty frequently.
  6. Add tomatoes to the flour and pancetta mixture.  Again, more bubbles.  Bubbles are good.  Stir in to full incorporate the tomatoes.
  7. Add in the spinach.  Cover with lid so the spinach can wilt.
  8. And now, my friend, is your lesson in multi-tasking.  Your pasta water should be boiling by now.  Add in the pasta noodles and par cook.  If you bite into a noodle you should see a paper thin white ring in the center of the noodle, indicating that it’s not ready for consumption, but perfect for the next step of Megu pasta.
  9. Using a straining ladle, remove the par boiled pasta from the pot and add pasta to the saucier with tomatoes, pancetta, and spinach .  And then add in about a half a cup of the pasta water. The pasta water is quite literally what makes the special sauce of this pasta.
  10. Stir everything together, add in the lemon zest, cover with the lid and let the pasta finish cooking in its sauce.  About 5 minutes.

Sprinkle with a wee bit of parmesean cheese and you’re ready to pay homage to Megu.  Or me.  Or the McPuja.  Take your pick.

 

 

 

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Beautiful Mistakes

Most of the time we try to hide our mistakes.  Sweep ‘em under the rug so no one can see what we did wrong.  Right?  Having worked in education for over 10 years, I’m really good at celebrating the whoopsies that kids make and helping them turn those mistakes into learning opportunities.  But for us adults?  Not so easy.

Case in point:  while working on a new recipe for juicer marmalade (making marmalade out of the orange pulp that’s leftover)  I found this recipe that literally made me drool.  Seriously, I had to wipe the corner of my mouth.  I hope that’s not TMI.  As a kid, my dad was obsessed with Fortnum & Mason’s Seville Orange Marmalade, .  A crumpet swimming in butter with a globbing spoonful of marmalade?  S-W-O-O-N.

So I re-imagined the juicer marmalade recipe to include a stick of cinnamon, a few cardamom pods and agave nectar instead of sugar….and YIKES.  I have no idea where I went wrong.  All I know is that what I ended up with looked like poop and tasted (I imagine) even worse.  I thought about mixing it with some butter cream to try and make a cake filling that would mellow out the bitter, yet oddly bland, flavor but then realized all I’d be doing is wasting some perfectly good butter. I was devastated.  I’m supposed to be good at this!

There’s no recipe with this post.  Nor is there a picture (I took one, but you’re better off not having to see it.  You’re welcome).  It’s merely a reminder to me and to all of you that it’s okay that things don’t turn out right on the first try.  Some of the bestest foods have become a-ha’s from uh-oh’s.  The important part of effing up is understanding what went wrong.  And the perseverance to try again.

So, my fudie peeps, keep on truckin’ through those beautiful mistakes.  I’m not going to try that marmalade recipe again this week, but may do so sometime in the near future.  I’ll keep you posted.

 

Better than Exra’s Beautiful Mistake.  A perfect song for this post.

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Smell no evil

Okay, most people are afraid to talk about bodily functions.  Not me.  My husband and I have long conversation about things that do and do not agree with our bodies.  In fact he recently bought me a shirt that says “Yo homes, smell you later!” I think it’s hilarious.  Others think it’s gross.  So I promise I won’t get into detail when I tell you that dairy is not my friend.  It’s really not pretty.  It’s to the point where… well, you get the picture based on the title of this post.  So when I swore off dairy for myself I relinquished the ability to order dessert at restaurants.  And for a while I lost motivation to make dairy free sweets at home.

But then I bought a juicer.  You’re probably wondering what a juicer has to do with dessert, right?  I didn’t think there could be a connection either, but it’s frickin’ rad.  I mean, almost totally tubular what you can do with a juicer.  After wondering what the heck to do with all the leftover pulp with the carrots I juiced, I Googled “what to do with juicer pulp.”  Just those words and a little elbow grease digging through a zillion recipes that led me to the pearly gates of vegan dessert heaven.  Over the past few weeks I’ve experimented with this recipe so many times it could probably be a sorority girl on Girls Gone Wild.

What I’ve come up with should pretty much belong in the welcome basket to hippie heaven.  Moist, rich, dense, and most important, dairy free.

This is how we do Vegan Carrot and Beet cake:

  • 2 cups shredded carrots (I use the carrot pulp from my juicer, but you could finely grate it)
  • 1 cup shredded raw beets (Again, I use pulp from my juicer, but a fine shred is a-ok)
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 cups whole wheat flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 2 tsp cinnamon (I HIGHLY recommend you grate or spice grind your own)
  • 1/4 cup fresh pressed apple cider
  • 1/4 cup orange juice
  • 3/4 cup canola oil

Sweet Sweet Vegan cream cheese frosting

  • 1 container tofu cream cheese
  • 1 tsp vegan butter
  • 1/2 tsp orange zest
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (or even better, the inside scrapings of 1/4 of a vanilla bean)
  • 2/3 cup powdered sugar

For the cake

  1. Preheat your oven to 350
  2. In a big bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon
  3. Add in the shredded beets, shredded carrots, oil and mix into the dry ingredients.  Want to know a secret?  This works best if you mix it all together with your hands.  That’s right, get all up in there, let it squish between your fingers, feeling the decadent healthiness of it all massage your palms.  It should have the consistency of cooked pumpkin when its good to go
  4. Add in the apple and orange juice.  Once again, it’s time to get up close and personal with the batter.  It feels kind of good, right?
  5. Take a 10″ x 10″ sheet pan and spray it down with PAM or some other type of cooking spray and dump the batter in.  This is no cupcake batter–you’re going to have to work to smooth it down into the pan
  6. Bake for 40-45 minutes, until you stick a toothpick in it and it comes out clean
  7. Let it cool for at least an hour.  I know, it’s torture.  But like bacon vodka, this is a labor of love.
  8. After the cake has cooled, I like to cut it into little squares and decorate a plate with all the pretty little squares.  They really are quite pretty, aren’t they?

To make the sweet sweet frosting:

  1. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix thoroughly.  The powdered sugar might throw you for a loop because it likes to hide in clumps where you can’t see it, surprising you when you least expect it.  You could even go a little crazy and use a stand mixer to incorporate it all together.  This won’t be as thick and creamy looking as a dairy cream cheese frosting and that’s okay.  We’re choosing to go vegan here for a reason, right?
  2. Put the frosting in a ziploc bag and snip off a corner to make a poor-man’s piping bag.
  3. Go.  To.  Town.  Seriously, make zig zags on the cake with frosting.  Draw stars and unicorns and narwhals.  Write the initials of your elementary school crush inside a heart in the cream cheese goodness.  Arrange some of  the squares to look like the Millennium Falcon and frost the rest to look like Chewbacca.  The world is your vegan cake.

So now here you are.  With a plate of vegan dessert in front of you that tastes so rich that you feel like you’re in lactose heaven.  You can eat an entire plate of these guilt free knowing that you’re putting healthy things like carrots, beets and tofu into that sassy little body of yours.

And here I am, on the other side of your computer screen enjoying these little morsels of goodness too and I’m so proud that we’ve been able to share this moment together without any of my, erm, bodily functions to distract you out.

So in the infamous words of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (and my newly acquired t-shirt), “Yo homes, smell you later!”

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Knock knock…

(Now you say, “Who’s there?”)

…Disguise

(Now you say, “Disguise who?”)

Disguise in the kitchen making the best mac n cheese you’ll ever eat!

I’m known for my corny jokes.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I have this disease.  My jokes are so cheesy that people often hang their heads to hide their wincing faces, masking the pain that my attempts at humor bring them.

But like my childhood idol, Ameila Bedelia, I always find a delicious way to make up for my wrongdoings.

Case in point:  Whenever I know the husband is mad at me, all I need to do is make a tray of his favorite mac n cheese and within minutes of him smelling the bacon frying, he’s back by my side, cooing lovingly to get a bacon bit, a pinch of cheese and a kiss.  My mac n cheese is that dang good.

Here’s how we do make-up mac n’ cheese:

  • 12 oz pasta.  I like this kind because the shape is fun and holds the sauce inside as well as outside
  • 4 oz shredded mozzerella
  • 4 oz shredded goat’s milk cheddar
  • 4 oz shredded gouda (I prefer smoked, but use what you can get your hands on)
  • Fresh Parmesan cheese, grated (for sprinkling on top)
  • 1 lb bacon (cut into 1″ pieces and pan fried)
  • 1 tbsp bacon fat
  • 3 tbsp butter
  • 4 tbsp all purpose flour
  • 3 cups 2% milk (at room temperature)
  • 2 tsp dijon mustard
  • 1/2 tsp nutmeg
  • 1/2 cup finely crushed salt and pepper potato Kettle chips.
  • PAM cooking spray
  • salt and pepper
  • 6 oz red wine (in a wine glass, for you.  You’re welcome.)
  1. Preheat oven to 400
  2. Bring 4 quarts of water to a rolling boil with a big handful of salt.
  3. In a 6 quart (or larger) saucepan, combine butter and bacon fat over medium low heat and let it melt.  Add in flour and (using a wooden spoon) combine until it looks like the kind of paste the weird kids in kindergarten used to eat.  Add in the nutmeg, mustard, a few grinds of your pepper mill and a small pinch of salt.  Stir all together for 3-5 minutes.  The mustard will make some bubbles, but don’t be worried. You’re on your way to chewy cheesy goodness.
  4. Slowly add in a few ounces of milk at a time.  The first one to two cups will sploosh and splatter a little.  At this point I’d recommend switching to a whisk to incorporate the milk into the flour mixture better.  Continue to add the milk into the flour mixture until it’s all incorporated, whisking continuously.  Aaaand…  Congrats!  You, my friend, have just made a bechamel sauce.  You’re not just a chef, you’re a fancy FRENCH chef making things with fancy French names.  Swig some wine, light a cigarette and say something in a French accent, like “Croissant!  or “Perrier!” or “”Nicolas Sarkozy!”
  5. This version of a bechamel will be pretty watery, but that’s okay.  We’re about to make magic happen in just a few minutes with this milky goodness.  Bring the milk up to a simmer, then turn off the heat and add in your mozzarella, cheddar, and gouda.  Stir until all is incorporated and put this baby aside for a few minutes.
  6. Let’s turn our attention over to the pot of boiling water.  Toss your pasta into the water and let ‘er boil for 4-5 minutes less time than the instructions on the box tell you.
  7. Drain the pasta (reserving about a cup of the pasta water) and combine the pasta with your bechamel.  Stir throughly so the sauce coats every single nook and cranny of your beautiful partially cooked pasta.  The sauce should be loose and pool a bit around your pasta.  If it doesn’t, add a bit of the pasta water you reserved until it reaches the consistency of thick whipping cream and covers the pasta.
  8. Now the grand daddy moment:  Stir.  In.  The.  Bacon.  Get it all up in everywhere.
  9. Spray down a 9″ x12″ baking dish with some PAM and dump this gooey goodness into the baking dish, top with the potato chip crumbles and parmesan cheese, give it one last shot of PAM spray across the top, shove this bad boy in the oven and now you can spend the next 25 minutes practicing your French (now that you’ve mastered how to make a french sauce).  Here is a phrase I recommend you learn:

     “Veuillez m’excuser un moment mais passer cette fois avec vous m’a fait se rend compte combien de temps il a été depuis que j’ai eu un poo vraiment grand.”

After you pull this gooey oozy pyrex full of deliciousness out of the oven, you’ll notice that the cheesiness of the sauce has soaked into the pasta (hence letting it remain undercooked so the flavors of the bechamel could seep in), creating a much thicker sauce.

At this point you’re probably doing the tinkle dance waiting to dig into this gooey gob of goodness so I’ll leave you be.  Just remember me and this cheesy goodness the next time you hear a terrible joke and be a little forgiving to the joke telling offender.

 


 

 

 

 

(Obligatory bacon photo)

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Be still my bleating heart

Lambs bleat, right?  I know they make the “baaaaaaa” sound, but I’m pretty sure that’s called bleating.

Any which way, I bleat for lamb.  Up until about 2006 I had a strict “no nose” policy.  I didn’t eat any animal that had a nose.  It wasn’t until a friend’s graduation party where his girlfriend at the time started grilling up some flank steak that I had my first whiff of red meat that kind of made me swoon.  Okay, it really made me swoon.  I talked incessantly about how good it smelled for about two hours at the party until my manpanion finally grew tired of my blabbering and shoved a piece of the steak in my mouth.

And then came the dreams.  I seriously had about 3 dreams the following week about that steak.  While wrestling with my internal guilt of jumping back on the nose wagon, the manpanion convinced me to buy a steak, cook it at home and see if my fantasy would be as good as the reality.  So I did.  And it was.  Steak was my gateway meat.

And now I type here before you today:  My name is Puja and I’m a red meat-o-holic.  Steak led to burgers, which led to bacon everything (see post below) which led to goat which led to lamb which led to me consuming any and every nosed animal that I could get my grubby little chef hands on.  And here we are.  Me, you, a computer screen and a pound of lamb stewing away in my pressure cooker into a stew full of warm tummy goodness just waiting to be gobbled down.

It’s stewing away with the goodness of carrots and rosemary and red red wine.  As a side note, I encourage you to find recipes that include wine in them and make them often.  It’s a really good excuse to pour yourself a glass after the bottle has been opened.  Remember how I told you that you deserve a cocktail in the post below?  Well, I meant it.  And I still do.

I’ve adapted this recipe from one that I really like for braised lamb shanks.  On a weekday night when I don’t have time to braise, I pressure cook.

Here’s how we do lamb stew:

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil (just to coat the bottom of the pressure cooker)
  • 1 lb lamb stew meat (from your butcher, cut into one inch chunks)
  • 2 carrots, cut lengthwise and then chopped into one inch pieces
  • 3 oz trumpet mushrooms, cleaned and left whole
  • 1 medium sized potato, cubed into .5″ pieces
  • one medium onion chopped into large chunks
  • 1 tsp dried thyme
  • 2 tablespoons fresh finely chopped rosemary
  • 12 oz dry red wine
  • 12 oz canned tomatoes (whole or chopped)
  • 1 tablespoon salt plus salt and pepper to taste
  1. Put your lamb meat in a bowl and lightly salt and pepper (don’t overdo it here because you’ll be adding more in later).
  2. Heat olive oil over medium high heat, once it starts to glisten, toss in your seasoned lamb and get a nice golden brown on them.
  3. Add onion and carrot and potato and salt.  Stir to make sure that the oil and whatever fat has rendered off the lamb coats the veggies.  Cook for about 3-4 minutes, until onions start to get a bit translucent, but are still firm.
  4. Toss in the wine and make sure you use the wine to deglaze the pan (scrape up all the brown crusties that are deliciously sticking to the bottom of the pan).
  5. Add tomatoes, mushrooms, rosemary and thyme (unlike the Simon and Garfunkel song we will not need any parsley or sage).
  6. Lock and load the lid to your pressure cooker.  Pressure cook to the highest temp and let it whistle at that temp for about 5 minutes.  Turn it off and wait for the pressure to fully drop (depending on the type of cooker you have this could take anywhere from 15-35 minutes). Obligatory note: read the instructions on how to use your pressure cooker.  If used wrong you could kind of kill your face.
  7. Unlock the lid, stir, and turn the heat on medium low and bring stew to a simmer.  Let it simmer (so sauce can thicken up) for about 5-10 minutes.

Serve this baby over rice, Israeli couscous, polenta or even just in a big bowl by itself with a piece of bread to greedily sop up all the leftover juices.  And you, too, will be bleating for more.

 

 

 

 

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And they call it piggy love…

Okay, so I really don’t want my reputation to start out as someone who rides the hippie and non-hippie ends of the spectrum, but I just had to share tonight’s culinary expedition with you.  Which is pretty much the opposite of my last one.

I love bacon.  I mean, it’s kind of unhealthy how much I love bacon.  People who know me buy me bacon things—folders, dolls, car fresheners, salt.  In fact, on my desk at work I have a bacon doll clutching a pig.  I know, it’s sick and twisted, but it fills me with love and joy every time I look at it.  I have Ziploc bags full of bacon bits, strips of bacon, and bacon fat in my freezer.  And I would go to the ends of the earth to include bacon in everything that I love.  So it was a no brainer when I asked myself what would happen if I combined two of my favorite things:  bacon and vodka.

Say whaaaaaa?!  That’s right.  Bacon.  Vodka.  In fact, just get rid of that period between the two of them because there is NO full stop between these two items mating and making a delicious alcoholic baby.

This is a labor of love—one that lasts about a month, but will tingle your tastebuds and haunt your dreams for months (perhaps years) to come.

Here’s how we do bacon vodka:

  • 1 handle vodka, minus about 6-8 ounces (go ahead, mix yourself a cocktail or four with that sweet booziness that you remove—you deserve it)
  • 1 pound high quality applewood smoked bacon, cooked to beautiful crispy goodness.  It’s pretty important to use the good stuff, because cheap bacons tend to use artificial smoke flavorings to give the meat a smokey flavor (and the hippie in me doesn’t approve of liquid smoke).  Keep the fat.  That’s the good stuff.
  • Cool the bacon and dump the fried bits and all the fat into the handle of vodka.  See picture below for how disgustingly beautiful this is.

  • Shelf in a cool, dark place for about 3 weeks.  Yes, three weeks.  No matter how tempting it might be, you must wait.  And DON’T stick your finger in the bottle to try and get a taste.  You’ll regret it.  Believe me, fatty bacon vodka finger is not a good thing.
  • After three weeks, take your handle of bacon and stick it in the freezer overnight.  Why, you ask?  Because booze is genius.  The fat will solidify, but the booze won’t freeze.  So when you strain it all you’re left with is pure bacon infused love.
  • To strain:  Take a regular kitchen funnel, insert into the empty bottle you’ll store the bacon vodka in and place a regular old coffee filter into the funnel.  Pour about 3-4 ounces in at a time.  Wait for that amount to fully strain through and then repeat.  You will probably need to change the filter 3-4 times.  Please note, you may also use this as an excuse to consume an additional bottle of vodka so you have a clean receptacle for the newly infused bacon juice.

So…  what does one do with bacon vodka?

The best bloody mary you’ll ever consume.  Duh.

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I’m a hippie

I think I’ve officially become a hippie.  And here are the top five reasons why:

  1. I’ve given up bulk buying at the big box stores for buying from bulk bins at the hippie grocery store
  2. Our Costco garbage bags have been replaced by biodegradable bags because I can’t stand the thought of contributing to Plastic Island.
  3. I juice.  Daily.  Things like kale and beets and spinach.  And I like it.  So does my non-hippie husband.
  4. I compost.  Maybe not super hippie-ish for the Bay Area, but it still rides the line, right?
  5. I made milk today.  Yup.  I think this is kind of like the culinary equivalent of making it rain at a strip club, it’s that awesome.  I made fresh almond milk that tastes better than almost any dairy or non dairy product I’ve ever consumed.  I sweetened it with cinnamon and dates, not sugar.  AND I’m making vegan crackers with the almond meal left over.  If that doesn’t scream hippie, I don’ t know what does.

The recipe is simple and amazingly delicious.

  • 1 pound almonds (soaked overnight, skin on)
  • 5 dates (pitted)
  • one whole cinnamon stick

Drain the almonds and combine with four cups of water, dates and cinnamon in a blender and let ‘er blend for at least one full minute (depending on how strong your blender is).  Drain this through at least two layers of cheesecloth or one of these (works MUCH better than cheesecloth in my opinion).  And yes, now you’ve got milk.  And what’s leftover is almond meal and you can make these amazingly delicious vegan hippie awesome crackers.

Really, it’s that simple.  Go home and make this immediately.

Now I’m off to go dread my armpit hair.  Or hang out at a Golden Gate Park drum circle.

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Inaugural Entry

In an ideal world the first post of my food blog would be something full of mind blowing recipes and quirky commentary relaying a story of how I backpacked through Europe and learned my schnitzel recipe from a German barkeep who taught me more than just how to fry meat.

In an ideal world, there would be pictures of me wearing bright red lisptick, a retro apron holding a dry martini (three olives) in front of a vintage Wedgewood oven marveling over my latest molecular gastronomy creation (you know, that cool juxtaposition between new and old).

In an ideal world I would not have spent the last week curled up in my bathroom with the stomach flu.  I wouldn’t have been feasting on toast with fake butter, plain rice and liters of Diet 7-Up.

I would have spent the last week preparing pages of beautiful food photos of all the things I spent my time cooking, finding interesting links answering the world’s culinary conundrums.

Instead, all I have for you is this humble welcome to my corner of the internet.  I am excited for you to embark on this food journey with me.

So, welcome.  I’m very glad to see you here.

Ingredients: Blog | 2 Comments