Gothic Granola

Some very good vibes in the kitchen today on the last day of 2011.  I made Bonobo Bread (also known as Cinnamon Pull-Apart Bread), pumpkin quiche, and chocolate cake.  The  quiche  and the  cake  recipes are those previously mentioned on this blog.

A lovely dessert for all occasions, chocolate mousse makes passing good vice cream when frozen, too. You guessed it--no pictures! Just cats.

After a long search for a vegan pizzelle recipe last year, and a pile of fail at de-glutenizing them this spring, I present to you a recipe that passes muster.

Remember that old New Jersey tourism slogan, “New Jersey and You: Perfect Together”?  Can you be a tourist this holiday, observing but not being of them?  Granted, there’s also the tourist philosophy of, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”  My family’s not from Rome (Naples and Sicily, thank you very much).

Whew!  I feel like I’ve been putting my life on hold.  It’s still on hold 'til I write one more final tomorrow.  Until I can answer the call, though, here’s a recipe, which I ate with pumpkin bread.

No pictures, again! Greetings.  Busy week, but what can I say.  The going-to-class part of the semester is almost over and done with.  Exams, however, will not conclude until the end of January.  Great Scot!  My undergrad years better be the last time I go to a school that has exams after winter break.

Hey y’all.  When I first saw this recipe, I ran to my aunt and said, “I can make that.”  So I made it for Thanksgiving.

The title of this post is not intentionally misleading.  The pie itself is time-consuming, as is all pie, but I managed to have time to bake it and read forty or so pages of American literature for class tomorrow.  Now I’m writing this and listening to the strange turn my Rammstein channel on Pandora has taken, featuring classical arrangements of alternative songs.  I may eat this pie for breakfast since I have yet to make lunch and breakfast for tomorrow.

Have a piece of my heart.  Or tear my heart to pieces, can do that, too.

I understand, it is expected that I should post something about Thanksgiving food, since the American holiday is next week.  But I’m not going to.  Maybe next week.   Defying expectations, that’s what we’re good at.

If I had a Polish grandmother, she would be rolling over in her grave right now, or wondering why I would mess with someone’s time-honoured recipe.  I was bored?  Not at all; I have too much schoolwork, applications, and reading material to be bored. 

I have a few lists and piles: there’s a pile of scrap paper with topics and scribbles about poems that I want to write, subjects upon which I want to discourse, discuss, disgust, disguise.  To the cover of my notebook, I binder-clipped a list of places I’d like to visit, activities I’d like to do, and objects I’d like to own.  I also carry a list of food projects I’d like to attempt.  By attempt, I mean throw caution to the wall, throttle it until it turns blue, and release it in disgust that I ever had any truck with it, and just do whatever I was about to do. Squirrel in my parents' backyard from 2011

Chococat says, "All this pumpkin cheezecake for me?!"

Hello from Alexandria!   I have been having a wonder-filled fall break back in the D.C. metro area.  After making excellent time from NJ (3.5 hours!) last Thursday, I made a pumpkin pie as soon as I arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house.

I’ve referenced this cornbread recipe too much not to post it, finally.  This is my “I need food now” bread for weekend mornings. It's similar to this cornbread , but it's not the same.

Speaking of flesh, my mom and I made chilli side-by-side last year, she making carnivorous chili and I making vegan chilli.  Chilli is one of those dishes that I think people can get really up-in-arms about since everyone knows someone who makes a good one.  Or they make a good one themselves.  I offer a chilli recipe that’s been adapted for the dorm.  I found a recipe on the interwebs sometime last April and neglected to bookmark it.   I have no pictures of the chilli so all food pictures have been replaced with cats.

Brainless...brains...brainsssssssss

Another dish I used  made in order to avoid schoolwork. But hey, making healthy food and eating your greens is better than sitting in Firestone all day, no?

I hadn't intended to post today, but then this seemed ready to go.  In my head, I read "quiche" as "kwish."  Q for Quiche!

Happy National Coming Out Day.

Lastly (are you tired yet?  It’s past my bed time): come to the dark side…we have cake.

I’m not going to tell you how to make oatmeal.  This was today’s breakfast when I assembled it on Wednesday night.  I like to make my oatmeal ahead of time and eat it all cold and stuff the next morning.  I used a little too much water, as you can see, and it almost flooded the bowl.  I was urging my oatmeal (and pear, flaxseed, and peanut butter) to absorb more water, yelling—SUCK IT!  SUCK IT UP!

College food!  Burn-your-face-off greens.

I had a smoothie on Sunday that was just a wonderfully kickass way to begin my Sunday ritual of reading in the library, attending the Princeton Buddhist Meditation Group, and doing life work for the rest of the day (i.e., walking, working on poetry, and cooking).  This is my basic formula for a single serving smoothie:  1 cup non-dairy yoghurt or milk 1 scoop protein powder (optional; I use  Garden of Life's RAW protein  or  Manitoba Harvest's Hemp PRO 50 ) 2 tablespoons ground flaxseed 2 cups greens/frozen greens cubes (blend greens and freeze in cubes for thicker smoothies; optional but recommended) 1 piece or 1 cup fruit (fresh/frozen) 1 tablespoon nut butter Spices to taste Ice (optional) Blend the beejeebes out of it.

Dear ones, Gee, we need to open on a positive note.  I made some excellent cake and a delightful pasta pie a few days ago.  I also have not been able to get Evanescence’s “Lithium” out of my head.  Before you make me hand over my Goth card to shred it, let me just say that I only began listening to Evanescence about a month ago during Irene when I uploaded a bunch of my aunt and uncle’s compact disks to my computer.  I’d heard of Evanescence, so I figured I’d give them a shot.  This song is particularly mind-sticky.

I’m back at school.  My room is double the square footage of last year’s 87-square-foot closet.   The kitchen is in the same building, which is convenient.  The oven in this kitchen does not have a timer.  Tell me that’s not a safety hazard in a dorm of absent-minded undergraduates.  Go on, tell me people are responsible.

For the first time in a long time (OK, maybe four years), I had a holiday weekend where I could come back to work and say, ZOMG, I had an awesome holiday weekend! if anyone cared to ask.  Usually when you say you had a better-than-average one, people don’t want to listen (or they don't have time).

We survived hurricane Irene.  I’d like to think this pie had something to do with our survival, but that would be an egotistical fiction since we did not lose power for more than two or three hours on Saturday night.  Nevertheless, this chocolate pie improved my aunt and uncle’s and my morale once they returned from golf on Saturday afternoon.  I baked this on Friday after work because I figured pie would be tastier than unbaked piecrust and straight up silken tofu if we lost power.

Long time, no blog.  My supper today was an updated or healthified version of a dish floating around in my family, called Hot Dogs, Peppers, Potatoes, and Onions.  The original’s basically all of those ingredients, sautéed and steamed and served with catsup.  I’m not a fan of two taste sensations—salty and oily—and my modifications do away with the oil and extra salt, instead replacing those with spice.  The curry powder I recently purchased is spicy, and of course, you are free to spice or not spice to your palate’s preference.  Sweet potatoes are a good source of vitamin A (tell me that’s common knowledge, eh?).

Then for dessert on that epic Saturday (actually, Sunday won the title of epic day of that weekend, but that’s another story), I made a blueberry pie. My aunt asked me if I could make a vegan, gluten-free blueberry pie since blueberries were on sale, and I said, “Sure!  I can figure it out.” Yarrr, blueberry hands!

My mom used to make these pasta nests for Christmas Eve dinner.  I made a tahini soup without garlic and onion earlier this summer, and its lemony flavour reminded me of pasta nests.  Seeing as how the original pasta nest recipe was glutinous, cheesy, and eggy, I took a stab at making it fit my nutritional and ethical specifications.  Since the lemon juice curdles the tofu, the cheezy sauce has an eggy texture.  I think my updated version tastes similar, if not better, than the original. Fighting words, I know.

Doing the teaser is tough.  The teaser, in case you’ve never tried Pilates, is a move where a person balances on hir sacrum, legs and arms up at a forty-five-degree angle, and spine-rolls up and down to complete that pose using the powerhouse/core/abdominal muscles only.  I was better at it when I was recovering from surgery almost a year ago (T-minus four days, in fact, from today) since all I was allowed to do was Pilates and other stationary exercises. Hey look, I match my towels!

Here is a brownie recipe I made and brought to work this week; it is a mash-up of several recipes since I couldn’t find one to make what I wanted: moist brownies, not fudge, not sheet cake. The above picture is actually of zucchini brownies, but the base recipes are the same.

After intern work on Friday, I metro’d to Trader Joe’s on the way to my brother’s apartment and bought dinner and dessert ingredients.  My parents are in the area, visiting my brother and me.  We ended up going out to dinner, which meant two OK salads for me and cider for dessert. At least I had time to make some sweet cornbread to sneak with me, for edible grains and solid dessert purposes.  

Sugar-Coated Escapism, for your reading pleasure. Well, I’m out of the dorm for the summer and am living near the big city!  For a person from the northwest corner of nowhere, this is a big deal.

Hi. My name is Q. --Hi, Q. I have a dorm, --bad dorm! lots of cats, and mad form, and I work --Where do you work? in a manuscript library.