Monday, August 04, 2008

A Few Meals A Few Books and a little knitting

Here we have some basic comfort food, Golden Cheaze Sauce with fried onion, a packet of Boca crumbles all simmered together with 5 C of pasta. And our yellow beans that were so sweet and good, I just served them plain. Blanched them (froze the rest) and then nuked them the rest of the way before supper (like, 3m). I used kidney beans in the sauce, with only 1/4 C nutritional yeast and 1 t yellow prepared mustard.

Golden Cheaze Sauce ala me

1 can kidney beans, undrained (4)
1/4 C nutritional yeast
1/4 C pimento pieces (half of a small jar)
1 t lemon juice (I just used the bottled kind)
1 t onion powder
1 t yellow mustard
1/2 t salt

Blend until smooth.

And this was another supper from this weekend, and we found a winner!! Grandma's Cornbread Made Vegan. Soooo super good. I forgot the ener-g egg replacer (which I find ridiculous anyway) and it was totally fine. Next to it you see refried beans and a seitan taco thingy- I took my ribz I made and sliced them thin in the food processor and added taco seasonings and sauteed onion. Kinda wierd.

Grandma's Cornbread Made Vegan

1 C cornmeal (4)
1 C flour (8)
1 C soymilk (2) (I used silk vanilla, this was fine)
1/2 C sugar (8)
1/3 C canola oil (18)
1 T baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 T oil (for oiling skillet) (4)

44 points total, divided into 8ths, 5 points a slice


Preheat oven 375 degrees, placing cast iron skillet oiled with 1 T canola oil on center rack.
In large bowl, mix cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
Pour in soymilk and oil and mix until just combined.
Carefully remove skillet with potholders from oven and pour in batter. Tilt so batter is evenly spread. Bake 25m or until it tests done.

Seriously, if you have a cast iron skillet, go make this now. Surely you will find an accompaniment to go with it.

Well, I have been on a reading rampage.
Read "Cell" by Stephen King- I found this forum topic on amazon about post-apocalypse book recommendations and I think someone recommended this. Anyway, I liked it. I wanted to get "The Stand" but the library didn't have it. Surely my father-in-law owns it.
I found King's stance on guns and SUV's to be interestingly paired with his protaganists prayers. I think I can see King's popularity- he writes clearly (unlike the next book I read) and he appeals to our better natures. Anyway, Cell is about zombies so !WIN!. A totally fun read. Plus if you look at the cover it's like, there's blood cells, plus the zombies who SPOILER work as a cell in a larger organism and a cell phone!! It's like a pun on the cover!! Hee hee!

Okay, and then I read "The Pesthouse", again another post-apocalyptic book (why do I have such a hard time writing that word?!) and it really reminded my of "Ethan Frome". Love story, man-child dude, them against the world... anyway, I found the writing style hard to get into. When the reviews praise the author as 'original' and so forth, you know you're in trouble, am I right? I totally understand the desire to write a post-apocalypse book in a new way, so kudos for that, but he never really gets into what happened or why, which are, like, big questions. We want to see our excesses villlified so we can cathartically purge them from our systems and slough off some of our guilt!! That's why we read post-apocolyptic books, folks!! At least there's SPOILER a happy ending, so there's that. If it would have been otherwise I'd be really trashing this book.

Next up "All the Names".

Tried a new way of working the old classic baby blanket/afghan knitting pattern 'Feather and Fan' and it biased. Duh. Will try to remedy that and then see if it looks cool enough to work it with the resulting extra rows.