It builds the tension.

What We Had For Dinner Last Night

Curried Butternut Squash and Wild Rice Soup based off of this recipe

1 2 1/2 lb butternut squash, seeded, peeled and cubed
1 C wild rice
3 C water
2 T onion soup mix
1/2 C orange juice
2 T maple syrup
2 T Earth Balance margarine
1 med onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 T curry powder
1/2 t salt

In a medium sized saucepan, bring the three cups water and 1 C wild rice to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 45 minutes.
While rice is simmering, peel, seed and chop up your butternut squash. If you're feeling really ambitious/thrifty, bake up those seeds for a snack.
In a large, heavy bottomed pot, place the squash and just cover with water. Bring to a boil and then lower heat, simmering for up to 15m, until squash is tender. Place squash into blender using a slotted spoon, then pour in water from pot (carefully!) and blend.
In the now empty large pot, saute your onions and garlic in the margarine. Add onion soup mix, salt and curry powder and mix well. Pour in orange juice and maple syrup. Pour in the squash mixture and mix well.
Mix in the wild rice and allow the flavors to meld a little (haha, 'meld'. or just serve it right up, I say!).

Yumm! This was a great, hearty soup, so healthy I felt eating it! The maple syrup adds just the right amount of sweetness. It went really well with the Easy Vegan Wheat Bread I made Sunday (that bread has molasses and is a little sweet).

Still reading "The Doomsday Book". Apparently there really was a Domesday Book- in the book, the main character calls her journal a 'domesday book'. So good so far. Pacing is a little slow, but it builds the tension.

So many things to do today... must get going.

Tomato Jam!

Well, I was quite the busy beaver this weekend! It was just so nice to be home, you know, and not, say, traveling...
I read up on Cranberry Beans and found out more about them!! Aren't they beautiful? It was fun to eat fresh beans cooked up so nicely. I guess they are often used in Italian cooking and the US is a primary exporter of them to Italy!

Friday I knew D. was going to be getting home late and I didn't want to be in the kitchen at the end of the day, so I made Summer Squash and Bean Soup loosely based off of this recipe...

Crockpot Cranberry Bean and Yellow Squash Soup

1 C cranberry beans, fresh
4 C water
3 8" yellow squash, chopped
1 small carrot, sliced into rounds
2 T olive oil
1 T Earth Balance margarine
1 T soy sauce
1/2 Walla walla onion, diced fine
1 clove garlic, minced
1 t Italian seasoning, crushed between fingers
1/2 t yellow prepared mustard
1/2 t onion powder
1/2 t sugar
1/4 t garlic powder
1/4 t thyme, crushed between fingers
1/4 t parsley, crushed between fingers
1/4 t celery powder
1/8 t rosemary, crushed between fingers
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper to taste

Place everything in the crockpot in the morning, set it on high and let it go. Add water throughout if neccessary.

Look how the beans turned pink!! This was the best way to make the beans, I think, because they turned out so soft and lovely. I was particularly pleased with this soup because I didn't use prepackaged vegetable broth!

Oooooh, and Saturday morning I made aebleskiver! Vegan aebleskiver, people!! Aghlaghlaghl... (that's the sound of me, drooling). Yo, this was so good. Get your hands on an aebleskiver pan and make these puppies up!! Ah gah-roun-tee you will have a new family tradition on your hands!!

Vegan Aebleskiver

1 1/4 C flour
1 T baking powder
2 T sugar
1/2 t salt

1 C soymilk + 1 t apple cider vinegar
2 T canola oil
1 t vanilla

1 T Earth Balance margarine, softened
4 T jam, divided
1t water
2 T powdered sugar

Pour out your soymilk and add 1 t apple cider vinegar to 'sour' it (vegan equivalent of buttermilk).

Sift your dry ingredients into a large bowl. Add the soymilk mixture, canola oil and vanilla and mix until just moistened. DO NOT OVERMIX. Let sit for 10m or so. Stir it again and let sit.

Heat up your aebleskiver pan real hot. Add tiny bits of butter to each 'hole' and then fill halfway with the dough. Add a bit of jam and push it into the dough. Top with a little dough to cover jam. Check for doneness by sticking a toothpick along the edge between the pan and the dough. If brown, use 2 toothpicks to flip the aebleskiver over. Maybe some dough will ooze out, or even some jam. It's okay. That powdered sugar at the end? Covers a multitude of errors.

Allow the other side to cook and carefully remove to a plate to await it's happy brothers and sisters. Repeat this last step 6 more times and then make a couple more batches.

Sift some powdered sugar over the top and drizzle with some jam mixed with a little water to make a syrup.

Makes roughly 21 aebleskiver.



For Saturday lunch, I made Gallo Pinto. I'd made the black beans from dried last week and then the rice that day. It was arguably the best black beans and rice dish I've had. Usually I find black beans and rice to be bland, but this was not. Perhaps it was all the spices... haha. Oh, and I'm sure I destroyed some food rule by using HP sauce, but, c'mon! it was good! (I promise to use Salsa Lizano next time if you send me some!!).

Gallo Pinto

2 T canola oil
1 med onion, chopped fine
1 clove garlic, minced
3 C cooked rice (1 C uncooked)
2 C black beans/1 can black beans, undrained
1 t cumin
1 t coriander
1/2 ginger
2-3 T HP sauce
1 t salt
pepper to taste
1 bunch fresh cilantro, stemmed and chopped

Saute onion, garlic. Add HP sauce, spices, mix well. Add cilantro and beans, mix well. Add rice, mix well and serve.

Notes;
To cook the rice, you can saute it with the onion, garlic, a sweet pepper and some cilantro and the spices, then add 2 C broth and bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer 20-35m until the rice is done.


Here we have Saturday's supper. Above, Crash Hot Potatoes made with purple potatoes (they turned out dry! wah! maybe I didn't use enough olive oil). And below, cranberry beans with kale. Soooo good!!
Finally, Sunday I got a bee in my bonnet to make Tomato Jam. I doubled the recipe and !still! got 1 pint. Used one of the hot red peppers from our salsa pack from the CSA and got some juice under my fingernails, everytime I gripped something last night, the skin under my nails burned!! So I was kind of worried- would it be Hot Jam instead of Tomato Jam? Oh, no- it was good.


Above you see it on the stove and below you see the final product. So. seriously. good.
Tomato Jam

3 pounds tomatoes
2 C sugar
4 T sumac juice
1 T Trader Joe's ginger paste
2 t ground cumin
1/4 t cardamom
1/4 t nutmeg
1/4 t cloves
2 t salt
1 small red pepper stemmed, seeded and minced

Put it all in a heavy bottomed big pot, bring to a boil, stir for a while and then reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally until it's jam* (you should be able to see the bottom of the pot when you scrape the spoon along it). Cool and refrigerate.

*this took a long time, folks, like, hours.
Easy Vegan Wheat Bread for the jam, both tomato and sumac-elderberry. This makes huge loaves, btw. Below you see the wonder that is sumac-elderberry jam. Behold. And, lo, it was good.
Read "World Made By Hand"- really fun, great characters, post-apocolyptic... what could be better! It was like Garrison Keillor meets the end of the world!

Started "The Doomsday Book" by Connie Willis, another apocolyptic book. Pretty good, engaging.

No knitting.

Jam, man!

What We Had For Dinner Last Night;

Roasted Eggplant and Lentil Soup based off of this recipe...

1 large eggplant, quartered lengthwise
3 T olive oil
1/2 C French lentils
1/2 C moong dal
14 large sage leaves
2 C water
1/2 t onion powder
1/4 t garlic powder

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place eggplant on a rimmed baking sheet and drizzle with 1 T olive oil. Season with salt. Bake 30m or until very tender.

Meanwhile, in a med saucepan, cover the lentils with 2" water, salt with 1/2 t salt and add 2 sage leaves. Bring to boil, lower heat and simmer 20m. Blend in blender with 1 C water and pour into soup pot.

Remove eggplant from oven, scrape flesh into blender and blend with 1 C water. Add to lentils in pot. Season with garlic and onion powder, salt and pepper. Stir in 1 T olive oil.

Fry the sage leaves in 1 T olive oil on high, 30s per side. Garnish soup with fried sage.

This was pretty good, if you haven't fried sage before, you really should, it's quite good!


The above is what I hovered over seemingly all day as I tried to make Sumac Elderberry Jam. I did persevere and We Have Jam!! More pics later. I think it's very good, I suppose I would. The idea is that the tartness of the sumac is supposed to heighten the flavor of the elderberries and I think they are a good combination.

Sumac Elderberry Jam

2 C sumac extract*
2 C elderberry juice**
4 C sugar
1 package Pomona's Universal Pectin

Boil up your sugar, sumac and elderberry. Add your pectin as per instructions on the package. Boil until it thickens and pour into jam jars. Boom! You've got jam!

*place 4-5 heads sumac in tea towel, tied up, cover with water and soak overnight
**pick 2 C worth of elderberries, cover with water and boil. Mash through strainer and reserve juice. Add water if needed to make 2 C juice.

I think if I do this next year, I'll use regular pectin and I'll not soak as many sumac heads as I did (I soaked an entire pot full and so now I've got sumac extract in the fridge). I also will perhaps leave the elderberry skins and seeds in to see if there's enough pectin in them to set without adding pectin. Must google this.

Purple Viking potatoes


melon! so refreshing!
shell beans- I'm using these in soup today, excited to see what it will be like...
fresh sage! used in soup above
tatsoi- bigger this time!

Think Of The Blanket

What We Had For Dinner-
Spicy Peanut Spaghetti w/ Thai Basil

1/2 lb spaghetti (12)
1/4 C thai basil, packed
1/4 C oil (16)
2 T creamy peanut butter (5)
1 T peanut oil (4)
1 T soysauce
1 large clove garlic, roughly chopped
2 t sugar
1/2 t salt
1/2 t cumin
1/8 t chili garlic sauce

Boil pasta.
Blend all ingredients (except pasta) in food processor.
Drain pasta (you don't have to drain it super thoroughly).
Mix and eat. Yum!

This recipe came about because I didn't want to make pesto yet again and I was too lazy/didn't have the ingredients for the recipe our CSA sent this week for Thai basil. Said recipe did use peanuts etc and it kind of reminded me of a spicy peanut spaghetti recipe I'd made before, so I just subbed in peanut butter and blended it all up and added cumin for some reason and voila! It was really tasty. You should try it!

Next up is the first steps toward making Elderberry Sumac Jam. Eldermac Jam? Suberry Jam? Let's just call it good. Above you see the humble Elderberry. We had a bush of these in our yard growing up and I loved eating them. So, it was kind of tedious removing all the berries into the measuring cups to make 2 C, but it was also sort of zen. Don't eat any unripe berries, they're toxic.
Here you see my giant pot. Inside is all of the sumac, wrapped up in two tea towels, soaking away for the night. Some recipes call for mashing up the sumac (or even blending it!) and boiling it and then straining it etc. but that seemed messy and unsanitary or something (never mind me) so I just soaked them in the cloths. Maybe I only soaked out the tannins or something and not the malic acid, who knows. I think it will serve the purpose. As you can see below, it turned the cloths red-brown. I mixed a teaspoon of the sumac juice, a teaspoon of the elderberry juice and a teaspoon of sugar together this morning and it tasted really good. I'm excited. Today I will procure the canning supplies (I'm a cannin' virgin!) and then "Canning, ho!".

I typed out my lace pattern and saved it, so I can go back to it if I ever want to knit an entire blanket out of it or whatever. Now I'm kind of at a loss for the cabin blanket, I should grab some of my stash yarn and start working on it. Oh, and figure out if I have enough. Oh, and here's the real deal on that, my husband will kill me (this is a personal joke between us- I always rip out my work and reuse the yarn for whatever next catches my fancy), because I want to use the blue and green yarn that I bought for Samus and I just checked on Ravelry and I DO have enough to knit the blanket I think and this is so typically me- I start a project in the Fall, specifically a sweater project, vowing that this is the year that I will knit a sweater and then I stall and then I eventually rip it out. Yep- 8 months later and I'm bailing. But it's for a good cause, really! Think of the blanket, dear!

No reading; planning the next Great American Novel- will get back to you on this...

Sumac.

What We Had Last Night;
Boiled Red Potatoes Fried Up in the Skillet with Oregano From Our Backyard (and lots of olive oil and some salt)
Easy Macaroni and "Cheeze"

This is sumac. I got it from my in-laws yard (thereby eliminating the risk of it's being sprayed with chemicals). Those hairs? The red stuff? Is malic acid, which is very tart. It dissolves in water. If my neighbor lets me pick some elderberries out of her hedge, I'm going to try my hand at Elderberry Sumac Jam.

See, the original idea was to make sumac, the spice, but I just can't figure out how to get those little hairs off of the seeds!! Maybe if I tumbled them about in a sealed container with some rock salt?!? But then there's all this other stuff you can't see tucked in between the branches and the stem, this brown stuff? That I don't think you're supposed to eat? I'm stumped.
So I'm going to make jam. Apparently, you can also make lemonade.
Isn't it pretty?

Aebleskiver, aebleskiver, aebleskiver.

Wow! What a weekend!! We. did. a. ton. of. stuff...
We went blueberry AND apple picking at Cain's Orchard! This was the best. I mean, check out that view below! The blueberry bushes and the apple trees were right within walking distance of each other, and they were both packed with blueberries and apples!! So bounteous!


We got to ride out on the tractor, which was such a seminal experience for D. when he was a child, we tried to pass it on to the girls last year when we went to an orchard near our home to pick apples, but THERE WAS NO TRACTOR! Bah. This was so, so much cooler. Also, the apple trees you can pick from are not in the parking lot. Also, there are no semi trucks bringing in all the apples you see already bagged up in the store (the owner outed an orchard near our home, the one we went to last year, actually, and told us that they sell apples from another orchard- SCANDAL!).
This, my friend, is a bushel of apples.

Oh, I also got an aebleskiver pan at the store at Cain's. Whoah- there was so much kitcheny goodness there I almost peed! Seriously. I'm kicking myself for not picking up another set of measuring spoons... Anyway, I'm really excited about the aebelskiver pan because you can use it to, duh, make aebleskiver, but also Poffertjes, appam and takoyaki. It was totally serendipitous that, after seeing this post on aebleskiver pans, I went to Cain's and saw one there! Can't wait to try it out (although wikipedia tells me I got the pan for a gas stove, not an electric, d'oh!)!

We also had another experience of Wisconsin's beauty! We went on a hike with some friends to Wildcat Mound. Let me tell you, we are going back there when the leaves have turned!!! Gorgeous views of rolling hills, sandstone bluffs, beautiful pines... incredible! It was deserted on a Sunday morning and we and the kids had fun clambering up rocks, tasting pine nut seeds, playing in the sand, picking up rocks and acorns and playing with sticks.

So I finished up Eragon, started the next one (can you believe it?).

No knitting.

Damning Faint Praise

Mmmm, 'Cheesy' Zucchini and Corn Casserole... turned out great and used lots of zucchini!! We'll be making this again, I can tell you!

5 8" zucchini or the equivalent therof, chopped
1 large onion, chopped (we had walla walla's- sweet!)
1 large clove garlic, minced
1 T olive oil (4)
1 can corn, undrained (3)
1 T 'chicken' flavor buillion
1 t oregano, crushed
dash chili garlic sauce or chili powder or cayenne for heat

2 T cornstarch mixed in 1/4 C cold water
1/2 C nutritional yeast
1 t Dijon mustard
1/2 t onion granules
dash salt, pepper to taste
dash turmeric for color

1/2 C breadcrumbs (4) or crushed Ritz

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9" casserole.
Saute onion, garlic, then add zucchini and corn. Stir in oregano and buillion. Cover and simmer until tender, about 20m.
Drain zucchini in a mesh strainer over a bowl, pressing out as much of the liquid as you can. Pour liquid into 2 C measuring cup and top up to make 2 C water (I did not have to add any water).
Set aside drained zucchini in a large bowl.
Pour liquid into a medium sized pot and bring to a boil. Lower heat and add cornstarch, whisking all the while. Let sauce simmer and thicken until it is very thick, about 10m.
Add nutritional yeast, Dijon mustard, onion powder and salt and pepper to taste.
Pour over zucchini and mix well.
Pour into greased casserole, top with bread crumbs and bake 20-30m until bubbling and browned.
Here is some Thai basil, we are going to grandpa and grandmas for the weekend, so I should have painstakingly removed each leaf into a ziploc or something, but I just cut the stems, set them in a glass of water and topped it with a ziploc 'dome' over all. This seems to work well for all my herbs and I'm so glad I found this tip! Otherwise all my herbs just wilted away...
Here are some rutabegas, what to do? Our CSA newsletter had a recipe for rutabega pudding, but of course it had eggs in it. We'll see. They keep, so I'll have plenty of time to ponder this.
And we got another salsa pack which I disassembled (what to do with those tomatillos?). Corn! Kale (I will cook it right away this time)! More zucchini! More cucumbers! More green peppers! More paprika peppers! Garlic and onions (which I can never have too many of)! A giant eggplant! More dragon tongue beans!

Still reading Eragon. I'm going to do my review before I finish because I don't think there will be any suprises and I know that this is a series and it always irritates me when the book doesn't wrap up. So I'll do this now. Here is what I truly think. I could not write a book like this. No, wait, that didn't come out like I wanted. I certainly couldn't write a novel, and Christopher Paolini did. I will accept the parts that smack of LOTR as tributes to the master, Tolkein. And I was engaged enough with the protagonist to keep reading, which was enough. So there you have it.

No knitting. Brainstorming about the big red blanket.

Bah.

The above was a tasty lunch from yesterday. 1 C small tricolor pasta boiled up, with 2 small yellow squash quartered and sauteed in butter with a dash of garlic salt. Mix it all up and yum!
I also made bread yesterday! A new recipe. Found a link to it somewhere yesterday surfing and can't for the life of me find it again! So, sorry! vegan person who inspired me to try this bread and now I can't give credit where credit is due!
The taste was not as good as our other bread recipe, I don't think, but it was a nice change and there were a few techniques that I tried and liked! For example, you just scoop up rounded cupfuls of flour, so much easier than scooping spoonfuls of flour into the cup measure and then leveling it. I feel so free! So laissez-faire, oh, wait, that's not how to use that expression, my bad! So footloose and fancy free! Also I baked it in a cold oven without preheating! Woo! Another time saving step! Overall, this recipe was super easy and got good results, I'm going to tinker with it and add some vital wheat gluten and maybe some more yeast, although I do like the small amount of yeast it does use... not that yeast is THAT expensive...

I also made some soup and I must tell you truly- do not use a lot of lemon thyme to flavor anything. Whoah. Srsly. The whole soup tasted sour. Boo. In other news, however, I felt like having spices in the backyard was great and plan to plant more next year. The only drawback is that they'll die now, it seems like such a waste. Maybe I will venture to bring them inside, but that seems like a lot of hassle.

Did I tell you the refrigerator pickles were yummy? Yes they were and are. And, the pickle jar sealed itself, isn't that wierd? I am counting it as a good thing.

No knitting, no reading. Bah.

Big Red Blanket

Yesterday was E.'s birthday, so we had a little celebration. I made Paprikash with Dumplings and Super Moist Chocolate Cake for the occasion. They both turned out well. Oh, and I made some kale, but it was pretty sad- many days in the refrigerator* made it pretty tough and I think it was kinda old to begin with. Shoulda made it straightaway.

*I found out from Mallika why I want to spell refrigerator refridgerator- it must be the anglophile in me- that's how they spell it across the pond.

Once I entitled a post 'Scooters Are Emasculating'. Well, that has been amended. If you are an elderly farmer type man who is riding a scooter smoking a briar pipe, then you are pretty cool. We saw this on our way up north on Friday. He rocked.

Well, I haven't posted about reading or knitting for a while.
I started "The Sum of All Fears", channeling my masculinity, I guess. And masculinity is the word! So far all of the characters are hard, tough men with brains. Kind of stalled on that one.
And I went back to Eragon. I guess I just can't leave any halfhearted attempt at fantasy alone. So far I have not stalled out when I've hit some contrived/copycat aspects of the book. Hey guess what? They're on a long journey right now. They're riding as fast as they can. Oh, and now there's an elf. I know you're suprised. Oh, but wait, it's totally different, there are dragons, my bad.

No knitting, but the drive to make something is reasserting itself. When I'm not making any progress in reality (read; cleaning up messes), knitting really helps. Back to the blanket. Actually, I must get started on a big, red blanket for our someday cabin!

Make It Today!

Good morning! Well, we are back from our weekend of camping, it's E.'s first day of her second year of preschool and it's E.'s birthday! Whew! I sent her off to preschool this morning with her !new! pink! backpack.
The above is a picture of some flowers growing down near the dock up on our land. Can you believe we saw a hummingbird up there!! I always associate hummingbirds with the tropics somehow, so seeing one in the northern woods of Minnesota makes me grin.
Here is a lunch spread- I managed to get one picture of food while camping which is one more than last time! You can see Ziploc bags of soup (pea and lentil from the coop) there up front behind the baby food, sippy cups and mugs. Then to the left are the pitas and crackers with the dips (from front to back; lentil walnut dip, black olive tapenade aka poor man's tapenade, and some leftover teradot- which was sooo good btw- from the felafels from the night before) lined up in the center and the hummus away off to the side on the left.
That was our lunch for two out of three days (we 'went into town' one day for lunch), plus these dips, crackers and pitas served as lunches on the way up and back when we stopped at rest areas.

The camping food was a great success and the thing I'm the proudest of was the maple syrup dumplings! Whee! It worked! I made the dough for the dumplings at home, even up to the part where I cut the margarine in, and put that in a Ziplock. Then I put the maple syrup in a Nalgene container (1 C roughly) and it all traveled well!

Maple Syrup Dumplings with Blueberries

1 C flour
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
2 T Earth Balance
1/2 C water
1 C maple syrup
2 C water
1 pint blueberries

Before camping, sift the flour, salt and baking powder together into a bowl. Cut in the margarine until the mixture is like meal. Place into a Ziploc bag.
Pack your maple syrup into a well sealed container. Put a Ziploc around this (you don't want this leaking all over your cooler).
Pack your bag of flour, the maple syrup and a pint of blueberries into the cooler.
At camp;
Pour the maple syrup into your pot, add two cups of water and bring it to a low boil.
Meanwhile, mix the dough in a bowl with 1/2 C water. Divide into 8ths.
Form the dough into dumplings and drop into the simmering water and maple syrup, cover and let simmer for 20m.
Remove the dumplings back to your bowl and set aside.
Dump the blueberries into the maple syrup and water and simmer, uncovered, until thick.
Serve the syrup over the dumplings. Yum!!

Truly, I enjoyed this dish. You should make it today! Aglaglagl, the sauce was sooooo good!

The rest of the pictures are from our CSA. In addition to the below, we got tomatoes, summer squash, dragon tongue beans, peppers (bell and paprika), garlic and onions!
Kale! My favorite.
Sweet corn! It was so good, we boiled it right up!
This is a salsa pack, I disassembled it and used the component parts seperately.
Here are three pretty little cabbages, I wonder what to do with them...

Here you can see the purple potatoes we got, pretty cool! Now with extra antioxidants!! And below are the glads we were sad to leave behind.The End.

A Dinner Made Out Of Sin

Refrigerator pickles! You know how we got that 'pickle pack' from our CSA? Well, yesterday I was looking in the refrigerator and realizing that I'd better use all that up before we left for the long weekend and I remembered that you can make refrigerator pickles! And that sounded good to me as I didn't have the time nor experience to do all the hot water stuff...

I made it pretty much the same, except I used 1/4 t celery seed powder and 1/4 t dill in place of the celery seeds and I didn't use crushed red pepper, I used those yellow paprika peppers! I also topped it off a little with vinegar and water, I hope that's okay. We'll see in 4 days! Notice I improvised and used the pickle jars we had in the refrigerator already. We had 2 jars of Milwaukee's Best Kosher Baby Dill Pickles and I dumped those out and washed the jars and used them for my pickles. Hah! Take that Milwaukee's Best! (They had been in there forever, really. No, I don't feel guilty for dumping out perfectly good pickles. Really, I don't. Really.).

Next up, a supper made from sin*. No, wait, that's not what I meant. A supper made from a mistake I made when trying to make burgers for our camping trip. See, you're supposed to chop up the walnuts in your food processor, then the rice, and then mix in everything else. Well, I had this brain wave to mix it all in the food processor. "Mix it all in the food processor!" I said to myself. Warning; error. So it turned into ?a puree? and I stuck it in the refrigerator (why do I keep wanting to spell that with a d as in refridgerator?!? argh!) in disgust. Later I thought, I'll make them into patties and bake them for supper. And then I thought they were 40 points and so I thought I'd make 40. So I did. I was really in the zen zone, rolling and patting and placing and scooping and rolling...
They turned out good! But my husband kept thinking they were ginger cookies. Next time I will make them bigger. And they were only 30 points.

*that's the last of the Artisan Bread in Five. It gets soggier as you go. More moist and tastier. And that's a bunch of CSA beans that I had to use before we left this weekend. If you're interested. Did you know that when you boil up the purple beans they just turn yellow? True fact.

Oh! Oh! AND I got to use my new HP sauce, straight from Canada that a friend brought me! Woo! I think it really makes this recipe. Frankly, I'm going to add it to any burger recipe I make.

Walnut Burgers

1 C walnuts (20)
1 1/2 C cooked rice (6)
1/4 C vital wheat gluten (2)
2 T Bacos
2 T water
1 T olive oil (4)
1 T HP sauce
1 t salt
1 t onion powder
1/2 t garlic powder
1/2 t browning sauce

Process until smooth. Make into 10 patties. Bake at 350 degrees for 20m or until browned.
Conversely, you can LIGHTLY process the walnuts, remove to a bowl, then the rice, remove to the bowl, then stir in by hand the rest of the ingredients and make more appealing burgers. Unless you want everyone to think they're cookies.

And here is a shot of some granola bars. Yumm. The time before last that we went up to our land up by Ely, the friends that we went with brought these. Well, I don't know if exactly these, I didn't get the recipe, but I think it's pretty much the same. She said it had wheat germ in it. My 'mix ins' were 1/2 C chopped cashews, 1/2 C chocolate chips, 1 C craisins. I can't wait to try them!! I have to say, if you make these, use a mixer. That is all.

So I've been kind of nuts running around making stuff for the camping trip. On today's docket: make Morning Glory Muffins and bake them, bake the felafel, make pitas and bake them and roll out flax seed crackers and bake them. The baking of the flax seed crackers will hopefully be accomplished on the grill as well as the pitas- can you put a pizza stone on the grill? We'll see. Tomorrow; prep flatbread ingredients, prep red lentil curry, prep desserts.

So, Eragon is not holding my attention. When surfing for 'camping dessert' is more interesting than your book, you know you're in trouble.

No knitting.

My Yarn Smells of Mothballs

Well, well, well. Here is a supper for you. It is a sort of curry thing I winged. It was pretty okay, the spicing didn't go with the potato I didn't think, and the spicing itself was sort of ?bitter? somehow? Yah wow, I'm really selling you on this one, huh? But it was filling, hot and pretty good.

Spinach, Potato and Pea Curry

1 pkg frozen spinach
9 small potatoes
1 C frozen peas
1 T oil
1/2 onion, diced small
1 clove garlic, minced
1 T (heaping) garam masala
1 T brown sugar
1 T 'chicken' broth powder
1 t salt
2 T chickpea flour + 1/4 C water
2 C water

Nuke your spinach in a microwave safe dish for 5m, leave it in there to thaw.
Boil your potatoes until they are done, drain and let cool.
Fry up your onion and garlic, add garam masala, sugar, broth powder, salt and mix well.
Add water, mix well, add spinach, mix well.
Stir chickpea flour together with water and pour this in, mixing well.
Crank up heat and bring to boil.
Cut up your cooled potatoes and add them.
Add your peas, lower heat and simmer until thick.
Serve over rice.

Still reading Eragon, Erawhatever. Here's the beef; the bad guys are Shades? His taciturn, reticent, mysterious, convenient, older, wiser person that helps him has !really! no similarities to Strider. I actually heaved a sigh of relief when the author came up with an original thought?
Maybe I am just LOTR obsessed and can't see the forest for the trees. I will try and read this with fresh eyes. It has a dragon. That's cool. It's totally different. Even though it had a map in the front of the book.

No knitting. My yarn smells of mothballs.

Magical Item Protagonist Doesn't Know What To Do With?

Well, I thought I had a hit here, but alas, D. is not a big fan of either eggplant or tomato, so the combination of both, even if it was a paprikash, was just too much. I really liked it, and it would have been even better had I remembered the liquid smoke (dur). Doesn't it look gorgeous?
This recipe was from Susan at Fat Free Vegan- Eggplant Paprikash.

So, I must embarrassedly confess that I made a huge mistake and the part that kills me is that I kinda knew at the time, but I didn't listen to myself trying to warn myself. Does that ever happen to you? There I was, loading ingredients into the blender for the sauce and when I came to the tahini I thought to myself, "Wow, Susan, you're really going for the gusto, there! Oh well, I guess the other ingredients are pretty low fat/cal." and added the 1/2 C tahini. Then I'm blending away and scraping away and thinking to myself, gee, I should add some water or something to make this blend a little better, but no, I'll stick to the recipe. Maybe it's supposed to be this thick...
I decided to leave the sauce seperately to add as desired and I'm not sure when I realized that the recipe read 1/2 T instead of 1/2 C, but it was somewhere before actually serving it! But really, when I mixed it all up on my plate and ate it, it was WONDERFUL! In fact, it turned the paprikash into a sort of paprikashy-baba ghanoushy deal. And, as you'll see, I did redeem the rest of the sauce later...

Here is a shot of some pitas on the grill- it worked wonderfully! Note; do not try to grill the pita on the rack that's right over the flame. The best part? The house did not get all stinkin' hot! No bending over and into a 500 degree oven! The pitas were so easy to place on the racks! I am inspired to try* more grilled bread recipes.
*scroll down the the video section.
And, I made the tahini/tofu 'sour cream' from Susan's Paprikash into baba ghanoush! I took my 2 pingtung eggplant and sliced them longways into 3rds, then broiled those for 6-8m after oiling my baking sheet and the eggplant slices well with olive oil. Then I dumped the 'sour cream' into the food processor along with a large clove garlic, chopped, the eggplant scraped out of it's skin, some salt and onion granules and 1 t of cumin and some liquid smoke. It was good, but I think I'll skip the liquid smoke next time.

Well, I finished the Bean Trees, can't say I was a huge fan, although I wanted to be. The love story in this was weak and unbelieveable. There, I said it.

Started "Whiteout" which is fun/funny to read. I mean, it's pretty fluffy and the things he adds to the plot as means to the end are pretty patent. Can't think of a good example, but you'd be reading along and come across some item or incident and think, "I'll be seeing THAT again, won't I?". Like, bam, it was just planted there. Why was I not more gripped by a story about !flesh eating viruses! I don't know...

Started "Eragon", had high hopes but I'm getting some "Sword of Shannara" flashbacks... we'll see. Feisty, innocent (read; unknowing), male protagonist, check! Small village flanked by evil forest and encroaching baddies, check! Magical item protagonist doesn't know what to do with, check!

Worked some more on the baby lacey blanket. Tightened up some decreases by making them approprieately left leaning or right leaning decreases. Did not rip back the whole blanket to start over with the new change, aren't you proud?!? Must knit a few repeats of this to see if it gives the effect I want.