Gothic Granola

If you have ever read any Buddhist sutras translated to English, you will recognize the title structure:  "Thus I have heard..."

Nightshades: source of aggravated post-workout soreness and nightmares, for some people.  Pseudo-science or fact ? [caption id="attachment_4486" align="aligncenter" width="225"] Jessica the Dawn chases Little Bill the Halfpenny doll.[/caption] Leftover mashed potatoes happen?!   Yes, yes they do.  Using my stand mixer to whip the boiled red potatoes made short work of the mashercizing process.   

TC wanted these blueberry muffins .  So I remade these cranberry ones instead.

I did it.  Finally, I have made vegan and gluten-free version of Cream Cheese Cutouts that tastes good, rolls properly, and bakes up soft and slightly puffy, just like I remembered.  Why the spelling differences?  Mine are Cream Cheeze Cutouts due to fake animal products; Ownie Mom's are Cream Cheese Cutouts, since hers are traditional wheat flour, egg, and dairy, etc.

Another guest post by the ever-knowledgeable Ela Mirowski, creator of the naturally-scented, biodegradable Ticklepaks shoe deodorizers. Check out her site: Ticklepaks.com .  See her previous guest post here .   Source Diagnosis: Eosinophilic esophagitis Treatment:?   The matriarchal side of my family has been plagued with hereditary gastrointestinal (GI) issues. My grandmother died of an unknown GI disease (this was back in Poland around 1986). My mother was plagued with years of heartburn and then eventually the inability to swallow food as a result of her esophagus shrinking. By the time she had these severe symptoms, my mother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and died when she was 65…this was 10 years ago.

Fun news in my life: I got food poisoning and have been having some ongoing nausea for the last week and a half, hence no blog posts. Digestive turmoil aside, other things I have been doing include working (open enrollment season! Aaagh!), listening to "new to me" music, instagramming my Halloween socks , following P90X Plus, sorting Legos, and writing. New Lego Halloween Monsters in some kind of metal music video setup that TC made:   These are not Breast Cancer Awareness Month cookies.  They just...I'm just going to stop here.  TC asked for maraschino sugar cookies and this is what I found.

For those times when you don't want to spend $4.99 (and up) for vegan mac and cheeze from a box, DIY.

This post may be best placed on my other blog, Cemetery Spelunking , but it bears mention here. [caption id="attachment_4359" align="aligncenter" width="169"] Stained glass window next to the front door in the narthex of Arlington Metaphysical Chapel; view from the basement stairs.[/caption] When TC and I went mountain bike camping a few weeks ago, one night we hung out with this older gentleman and his dog since they were the only other people at this remote camping spot.  The old man kept playing classic rock and folk that neither TC or I knew (I like Pink Floyd and that's about the extent of my classic rock knowledge).  He kept saying, I want them to play this song at my funeral, playing songs by Cat Stevens , JJ Cale, Jim Crochee, and Lobo. I don't know what song I want played at my funeral, but I did hear this song recently on Pandora, " Without Faith " by ThouShaltNot.  It's perfect for a scene where I plan to kill off a major...

A fully cooked sweet potato pie! For once I didn't eat plain leftover roasted sweet potatoes. Instead, I baked with them and made a sweet potato pie.  I'm not Southern , so I made a maple-sweetened pumpkin pie with sweet potatoes instead of pumpkin and 1/4 cup of maple syrup instead of organic sugar.  Besides being out of organic sugar and coconut sugar, I'm running low on "white" flours; I used half buckwheat flour in the crust recipe from this pecan pie post .

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.    

This is the first ever guest post hosted on my blog, by Ela Mirowski, the creator of the naturally-scented, biodegradable Ticklepaks shoe deodorizers. Check out her site: Ticklepaks.com . [caption id="attachment_2892" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Chia seeds in oatmeal[/caption]

When life gives you potatoes and failed curry, make curried mashed potatoes. (Yes, you can mess up making curry, even when you make it all the time.)

Two tarts, one easier to make than the other. I made mini apple pie tarts week before last on request.  The crust was the double crust recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky and the filling was a stovetop version of my roasted apple pie filling.

...Because 99.9% of the food produced in this household befits the adjective "mysterious," to the uninitiated.

Faux Pho: a TC special instead of going out to eat Yes, I know that "pho," the Vietnamese noodle soup, does not rhyme with "faux." This recipe is also hardly authentic. Sue me. A trip to Lucky's to get ingredients (and special Beyond Meat grilled chicken-free strips ) was easier than going to Kim's Food to Go in Boulder. It's my favourite place to eat in Boulder-land.

Tiny Carrot! All the kale is gone from the garden; it got eaten by bugs. And now the apartment is filled with ladybugs--where were you a few weeks ago? I also pulled up some tiny beets; clearly the root veggies need more time underground.

If you have some Italian in your heritage and you have two X chromosomes, you should know how to make sauce. And pizzelles...you should know how to make pizzelles , tiramisu , and cannoli.

Continuing the theme of "so basic it shouldn't need a recipe and I'd rather be writing" posts, here is the vegan and gluten-free fried rice recipe TC makes for me when we have leftover fried rice.

This is not a coffee cake in the sense of something that's covered in streusel. Sorry. This is a coffee cake in the sense of a cake that's not quite sweet enough for dessert but is perfect for a mid-morning or mid-afternoon caffeine break. Not sorry. I don't even drink coffee. I have no clue if this will "go" with coffee or not. Pairing sourdough with sour coffee doesn't make sense to me, but I don't make the rules, I just follow them . This is my first time participating in one of these link-ups.

This is not a coffee cake in the sense of something that's covered in streusel. Sorry. This is a coffee cake in the sense of a cake that's not quite sweet enough for dessert but is perfect for a mid-morning or mid-afternoon caffeine break. Not sorry. I don't even drink coffee. I have no clue if this will "go" with coffee or not. Pairing sourdough with sour coffee doesn't make sense to me, but I don't make the rules, I just follow them . This is my first time participating in one of these link-ups.

Ordering at Chinese Restaurants when you're Gluten-Free Pro Tip: Order the dish you desire without soy sauce or any sauce at all (steamed, you're even safer.) Do a little research, figure out how the dish is made. Understanding how certain dishes are prepared helps you understand possible sources of gluten-containing products. Finally, if you don't care about cooking, heaven help you if you're gluten-free. Or Maybe Not The continual availability of new gluten-free products hasn't ceased to amaze me. People with actual Coeliac disease make up less than 1% of the US population , yet the GF foods market is valued at >$10.5 billion (in 2013) . Since I pinpointed my gluten sensitivity in May 2011, I went from barely being able to find sorghum flour at ShopRite to being able to buy GF (and vegan) bread at Trader Joe's, Whole Foods (duh), Sprouts, and Safeway.

OMG! It's a hippie lentil loaf! Miriam at Mouthwatering Vegan created this Epic Veggie Loaf . I have nothing to add other than my substitutions:

Regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is not vegan and gluten-free. HOWEVER, Van's makes a reasonably close VGF alternative, Cinnamon Heaven . I reviewed this cereal last year. TC challenged me to make a coffee cake with cinnamon toast crunch. Pinterest yielded several recipes, precious few from scratch. For my junior paper on diets and religion, I picked up a series of essays on women and food, and I recall one that was elaborating on why women in the '50s felt pressured to "do it all": keeping the perfect house, dressing neatly, managing the children, and making dinners with all the new electric gadgets and convenience foods. That drive to use convenience foods is why I find some 1950's cookbooks gross (et tu, ridiculous Sunset cookbook in my grandparents' home library). I think the essay was from this book?

More strawberries and chocolate chips this week. My harshest critic was in town and TC asked me to make him a "moist" baked good (AKA: my other father-in-law, Bandit the dog's owner).

When Greek yoghurt became popular a few years ago (or to use my husband's phrase, it "blew up"), naturally bakers of all stripes put it in their products. Three tablespoons, though, is superfluous. It's not enough to add flavor or a preponderance of acidity to make a cake rise, especially when the leavening agent is baking powder, not the basic (as in pH, for all of you who failed chemistry) baking soda ( Na HCO 3 ). But I may just be an old vegan codger. Greek yoghurt does make good traditional cheesecake, and I used to eat a lot of it before I became lactose-intolerant. Anyway, strawberries were on sale at Lucky's.

 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?

Today's quote: "The ghosts you chase you never catch." --John Malkovich Source In looking for an image suited for this quote (or one of those pin-able quote images"), I found a metal song by the same name . Go watch it and support an emerging band with your views.

Every vegan and their mom has a recipe for a berry tart. Because vegan desserts have to be fruit and plant-based, right? Nope. By the way, I learned about this crust recipe from my mother, so there. She made it in December 2012 for a holiday desserts presentation I did for Lawrence Library . My mom made the same crust again as berry mini-pies in for Fourth of July in 2013. These are my fresh berry tarts.  

Mmm, this dessert made me realise how much I miss bread pudding-type desserts! I haven't made any "pain perdu" situations in a while because I have rarely had leftover baked goods, if TC has had any say. Father-in-law gave me two small bottles of Limoncello and said to make something. TC presented it to me as an Iron Chef Challenge. Evaluating what we had on hand, I quickly made a batch of vanilla cupcakes and set some cashews to soaking. Lemon Tiramisu it would be!

The second paleo recipe of late...what is this madness?! One of my neighbors gave me an entire bag of Nutiva coconut flour, and this was the first thing I made with it. The Wednesday farmers market is usually a little thin on goods, but one vendor offers an "all you can fit" bag for $10. I used zucchini in this recipe from the farmers market.

If you're vegan or vegetarian, you've probably stared at a plate like this often: cooked grain, beans, and greens. Videre licet , lentils and rice.  Nota bene the rice was cooked with cumin and saffron.

It certainly has been a busy month! Only one post this June. Lookit the kalez from the garden!

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!

The "recipe of the week" is another Meowlex request. I was watching the episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats where AB makes cinnamon rolls, a citrus ginger ring, and monkey bread. TC asked for monkey bread, aka: monkey brains, bubble bread, or pull apart bread.  

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

  Here's an article I saw this week about the dearth of Omega-3's and overabundance of Omega-6's in the American diet. Hence, we have more than double the linoleic acid in our body fat as do our parents' generation, and fatty acid turnover in adipose tissue can take years. So you may feel the health effects of your diet from the past year or two, even if you switch to a healthier diet. Besides the importance of supplementing with Omega-3's ( preferably eating Omega-3 rich foods before turning to supplements), the point about the "delay" in your healthier habits taking hold reinforces the idea that you just have to give things time. The body doesn't repair itself overnight. Major health changes through behaviour change are not easy, and the rewards don't come quickly, but they will pay off with consistent effort over time. How about some Omega-3 Powerhouse Muffins?

TC kept quoting this line from  The Venture Bros. when I said I would make muffins on Saturday and ended up making them on Sunday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE8J413choE

What you label wheat flour in a half-GF household: POISON!

Because we are Gothic Granola, we go to concerts for Goth, Industrial, Synthpop, Alternative, Electronic, and more, as the entertainment budget allows. That's a royal "we." On Tuesday we went to see Covenant at Casselman's in Denver, hosted by Club Sanctuary . We rode on sportbike to Denver, and having seen few practical posts for wearing makeup under a full-face helmet, I decided to experiment. As I said in this post , I don't wear makeup often and I don't think it adds anything to my appearance. Most message boards I read for female riders focused on the hair, and I happen to like helmet hair (I also have short hair and a low-maintenance deathhawk, so there's not much to "ruin"). 

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.

This is going to be one of those self-absorbed posts wherein I talk about what I did and not about what I've made. Week before last, TC's mentor asked him to come to DC to work on his house, and TC insisted that I accompany him. We both worked, a lot. While I pulled days in the office with significant overtime, TC put his mentor's house back together (not a small exaggeration there).   Before we left, we saw these two kitties in a dusty window on Main Street.  

The Biotics from Mass Effect 2 say, "Take your probiotics!"  Art modified from  Andersoncathy on Deviant Art .  TC and I couldn't find our usual non-dairy probiotics at Sprouts this week, and he's been playing through Mass Effect 1 again, hence this picture. Today's recipe has nothing to do with Mass Effect, unless I said it was some ancient Asari cake recipe. LOL.

Chococat stays chocolatey with lots of chocolate protein powder! One day he will be able to lift the protein powder jar. For now, he can only scoop.   Mmmm, back to the delicious Raw Proteins from Garden of Life .

VNV Nation is the official dishwashing music of Gothic Granola.   There's nothing particular about Ronan Harris and Mark Jackson's synthpop that makes me want to wash dishes; their music has a way of keeping up my momentum. I don't have any issues with dishwashing motivation, but I like music while I work.

  This town has become progressively buried under snow. Despite it being Colorado, high elevation, blah blah blah, northwestern New Jersey still has more snow and colder temperatures. "I like winter/ I like snow/ I like icy winds that blow." NAME THAT CHILDREN'S BOOK!*

Whatever genius came up with this "cooking hack," it's now common knowledge. No less than four blogs (and many more than that) list the same darn recipe, and so, four sources = common knowledge = no need to cite. CAULIFLOWER CARNAGE!! 

Like last post , this post also contains two variations on the same recipe. My grandparents helped TC and me get a nice waffle iron, "one that flips," as TC specified. Previous waffle recipes I have made did not turn out well. There were mitigating factors: too much liquid, not enough liquid, the dynamics of small pans, the problems of converting traditional recipes to vegan and gluten-free. Also, the iron I had until I moved West was drenched with a peculiar sadness; it was never truly "mine." Nevertheless, waffles, with all their nooks and crannies, hold memories. Ownie Mom made chocolate waffles on various occasions and gave us a bag of "chocolate waffle mix" for when my cousins and I went to the OBX with our grandparents. I remember my grandmother soldiering through making vegan waffles for me when I became vegan (the recipe isn't even listed here, it was that terrible and goopy of a recipe I pulled from some website).  My grandparents also introdu...

Cornbread, cornbread, always will be mine... Yeah, that was an attempt to play on And One's " Military Fashion Show ." "Girlfriend's girlfriends never could be mine," girlfriend = GF, GF also = gluten-free, get it? I made so much cornbread (like, a batch a week) when I first became gluten-free in 2011. My recipe then was heavily fruit-based , though I've made other variations since, including applesauce-really-fast , basil-beer , and blueberry .