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!).

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]

I don't like pants. I don't like to wear pants that cover my calves. Simply do not like the feeling of cloth on my shins, particularly in the less-sensitive spots (voluntarily wearing short pants in single-degree temperatures growing up did that).  Leggings don't count as pants since they're borderline between tights and pants, and I like tights/stockings/knee highs/socks in general. The temperature has been hovering in the single digits Fahrenheit. I must be getting old because I rolled down my pants to go for a walk on Thursday.

From the mountaintop of the juice fast, everything is clearer. I assert no moral superiority based on the supposed "purity" of my diet. I revisited the  Porrij Bread  from June 2013 for a different audience, with different porrij, different leavening, and different music. Funny, I spoke about fasting in that post and that's what I'm doing now. I wrote about my playlists and I considered highlighting the absurdity of my current one (including Shiny Toy Guns, Celine Dion, London Symphony Orchestra, Combichrist, and Electric Six). This time 'round I'm making this on request (more like demand) for more bread like  Mile-High Cinnamon Roll Bread .

They really do. I served over 250 squares of cacao goji hemp protein bars on Wednesday for Foodie Call. This week's theme was Whole Body, the supplements department. I modified this superfood bar from Earthsprout , having bookmarked the idea when Eleanor included it in her newsletter earlier this year.

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!

This recipe has been on my recipe bucket list for over a year. Ownie Mom has had this recipe in her pile of recipes to make for about the same amount of time. She beat me to the punch—or roll, in this case—on New Year’s Eve by making these for brunch.

Take a seat; there’s a sermon in here somewhere. Last week, I read Isaiah 24:16 before going to bed: “For the treacherous deal treacherously/ The treacherous deal very treacherously.” (NRSV) Treacherous cat is treacherous.

Slow down or be slowed down.  Prophetess of doom that I am, I’ve learned this one a few times during this time of year the hard way (November-February).   At age 22, I’m sick of making myself sick by trying to raise my energy to the wrong vibration for winter.  For the past eight years, I’ve had midterms or finals in January during the rush-rush madness of the Thanksgiving to St Valentine's Day gauntlet, meaning I did a bunch of concentrative, intense, mentally loud work when the energy around me was quite expansive, hushed, and contemplative.  I ended up out-of-phase, out of sorts, and out of breath.

It's gratitude season, folks. I am grateful for greens and the wonderful people who grow them, especially the farmers at the farmers market.

Nostalgia...comes in many flavours.  Nostalgia also features ellipses, and sometimes tissues, and, for the VGF among us, carbs. While tackling the rolls my grandmother makes for Thanksgiving to make them vegan and gluten-free will probably never yield a perfectly white piece of bread, I can make a bread that’s pretty darn close to the rolls served at the now-defunct chain restaurant Steak and Ale .  (By the way, you should donate to Wikipedia.  It’s worth your while to support the free sharing of knowledge.)  The molasses and buckwheat flour colour these rolls a pumpernickel brown, while I’m sure it was caramel colour and a heck of a lot more sweetener that gave the Steak and Ale bread its dark sweetness.

The cookie recipe I present to you today included in its description the instruction to “[e]njoy with a glass of cold soymilk and dunk away without guilt [emphasis mine].”

You can burn peanut butter.  I was melting peanut butter for the granola I made last weekend and while assembling the rest of the granola, I had it on the burner over high heat, and I burned it.  Oh well, char adds flavour!  Besides, the peanut butter was showing its true Goth nature by showing up to the granola party wearing black.

You may notice some changes around here.   It was time for a title change since “Screwfoot Q” means a lot to me, but it’s not an obvious name for a vegan, gluten-free cooking blog with a shot of shadow-side-of-life perspective.   “Gothic Granola” is also a personal reference (is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me? ).   Two labels that I would be fine having are “gothic” and “granola.”   Further explanation of these shall come when I re-do the “About” tab.   In the meantime, have a cookie.

For a gift for a friend’s birthday, I halved the original recipe for Ranger Cookies.