Gothic Granola

If a recipe has a superlative adjective in the title, I raise my eyebrows.  Calling something the "best," "last you'll ever need," "fudgiest," etc., is a matter of opinion. Crustuli delectamentissimus sunt. That photo couldn't be more staged if I tried (and I tried to take a neat photo for once!).

Ice cream cake is simple: cookie crumbles, ice cream, and syrup and/or preserves. Remember when cookie used to be spelled "cooky?"  I wasn't alive then, but I read my mom's copy of Ginny's Baby-sitting Business (Catherine Woolley, 1969) in 2001, and there it was, "cooky" instead of cookie.

There are some cookies that just get down on their knees and beg to be rewritten.  Not such a tough cookie now, are you?! [caption id="attachment_5007" align="aligncenter" width="225"] MINE, says Poppet bun.[/caption]

Ginger Orange Booze Cookies, that is.  While I had real ginger in the house, and could have coloured them orange with real turmeric root, I followed TC's suggestion and made a ginger liqueur and triple sec chocolate chip cookie.  Sweetened with agave, vegan, gluten-free, slow-food, housemade, local... No, I'm not trying to up my SEO. I'm being ironic.    

 I found this recipe years ago (2010) soon after becoming vegan. I brought home some agave nectar from the Whole Earth Center in Princeton since I had switched to natural and vegan sweeteners. The picture on the source website looks nothing like the finished product. Although, I suppose if you used the full 1/2 cup of canola oil, the cookies would spread. Did I mention I was also hypersensitive (mentally) about using too much fat in recipes in 2010, too?

Not much is new around here. Last weekend we hiked at my husband's stepfather's family property and we just returned from camping at said property this weekend. Pants and Pomely had fun!

National Chocolate Chip Day is another one of those made-up holidays that must have been made just for bloggers. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's been around since before the Internet since most sites about it seem to reference the original chocolate chip cookie . NCCD is 15 May, and my post is a day late. I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road on Thursday (the other day I usually blog) and didn't decide what to bake for NCCD until yesterday afternoon.

Vegans go to some extreme lengths to make food that resembles animal products. Just challenge someone to go vegan or give up alcohol and you will see the deep emotional bonds humans form with certain food preparations (goat cheese! applewood-smoked bacon! craft beer! mom's apple pie!).    This is some kind of chicken? Or sausage? According to my family, it was tasty...for dead flesh. /vegansnark

These cookies are foundation, fundamental to a world of delicious vegan and gluten-free "vanilla dough and stuff" cookies, not base as in immoral.    

Finally, finally, I have been able to rescue some pictures from my broken WD MyBook external hard drive, and I've reposted several posts from 2012 with pictures this time. I'm not buying WD products anymore due to lack of durability; Seagate HQ is a few miles away, so I can get "local" hard drives from Best Try, LOL. Enough meta-discussion. This is another no-recipe post. Lately, I've been making other people's recipes, and I guess it's a derivative work if I veganise/deglutenise them, but I'm not going to post the full recipes. I made peanut butter cookies and chai shortbread from  Vegan Cookies Invade your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. The PB cookies were for TC and I gave away most of the chai shortbread.

I'm not a fan of baking with protein powder, for the record. The " Shakeology Cookies " I made this time last year tasted odd and sharply fake-sweet. The stevia and other low-calorie sweeteners in most protein powders just don't set well with me either raw (by themselves) or baked. These brownies are good, in theory, when you're looking for a substantial but sweet snack, and the texture became almost cheesecake-like. I haven't been impressed with the vanilla blended Sun Warrior protein powder, and it's still pretty gross in brownie form, too. So use whatever protein powder, preferably chocolate, that you already like. Since I used vanilla powder, the brownies were not as chocolate-coloured as they could be.  

National Cookie Day is 4 December, which also happens to be an important date in the novel I've been writing since 2006. If you know me in person, you know that I like vampires: old-school, bloodsucking, remorseless, Dracula, Carmilla, The Vampire Lestat type of vampires. None of this Twilight wishy-washy stuff, a little Charlaine Harris (haven't read much of her work, but from what I hear...). Some Hemlock Grove as well, though that book (and excellent Netflix series) is about werewolves, which are cool, too. Back to the point. We need food for the brain as much as we do food for the body. Creativity for me (writing, beading, recipe R&D) feeds me, too. And I like vampires.

My friend Potter said the above years ago. I blogged about it without stating it in 2011 . Join me in a thought experiment. Nota bene that this thought experiment is in the setting of 20th-21st Century Western Hemisphere society.  

We do. We need some kind of handheld snack to eat while playing with (aka: sorting) our latest LEGO horde, courtesy of TC's dad.

"...Not that I believe in it." What is it these days with people and belief? I've noticed this attitude particularly amongst my peers; religion or spirituality is an uber-private facet of one's life. If you mention it, goddess forbid you offend someone by simply saying, "Bless you," when they sneeze. Sure, there are plenty of alternatives, but I didn't invoke my higher power by name!  You  can't  believe in anything. 

Fluffy Bunny, Curse Reversed "For what has been, thanks! For what shall be--yes!"  --Dag Hammerskjold What doors are you going to keep open, once opened? Premise: I don't like marshmallows.

Happy Almost-Halloween! Let's begin with a product review. Finding these tortillas was a treat. I half-assedly put "tortillas" on my shopping list since the Engine 2 brown rice tortillas had gone mouldy in my fridge (I bought them in September; what did I expect of 'natural' food?). I digress. These La Tortilla Factory Smart & Delicious Wraps are made from tapioca, teff, and millet flours, among the other fabulous ingredients present in most industrially-produced foods. They're not vegan since they contain honey. Honey is one of my two exceptions to veganism, one that I really ought to give up since it gives me the same kind of crash as white sugar. I digress again.

I get my kicks by deconstructing and rebuilding Betty Crocker recipes. My spiritual mother Vicki gave me this snickerdoodles recipe from one of the classic Betty Crocker books and I remade it since I had a hankering for 1) cookies and 2) cinnamon on Thursday. As I'm satisfied with my pumpkin cookie game , I remembered I had this recipe and, as a classic recipe, it would be fit for sharing.

Rather than quote a lot of Shakespeare, or speak in meta-voice about how much I struggled to write this post (I didn't...I just began writing), I begin at the beginning. What is in a name? As I served this dessert that met the  Health Starts Here  standards for Wednesday's Foodie Call, I refined my description. "Sweet hommos" was a turn-off to a lot of people. Come on, foodies, you'd try garlic ice cream, right? Roasted garlic ice cream would actually be pretty tasty, methinks. "Cookie Dough" confused many people into thinking it was actually raw dough. Nope, it's the flavour. Kind of like "Birthday Cake" ice cream from Coldstone Creamery. It ain't cake; it tastes reminiscent of the real deal. I could go on, and I don't intend to insult the patrons' intelligence. I'll pacify myself with the platitude, "genius is usually misunderstood," wink wink. Anyway, I didn't scale up the dates enough when I used an ent...

This morning as I ran to the farmers market, I noticed my freshly-loaded iPod shuffle was set on alphabetical sort by song title. Yeh, I didn’t think “Amame” followed “All Because of You.” I prefer to listen to albums in whole chunks with the songs in the artist’s intended order. Having the device on shuffle versus loop would make little difference. I could react in a few ways: 1)     Stay pissed off and complain about it. Take out earbuds in disgust. 2)     Accept it and see how the experience of random alphabetical order sounds. 3)     Change it!