Gothic Granola

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.  

My dear cousin K8 ( @akateisakate ) forwarded me three Brene Brown TEDx talks today and they were probably the most valuable audio I heard all day.  Vulnerability  and  Critics  and  Shame .  Go, listen. I'll be here when you get back, with hankies.

Call me biased and call me teetering on the fine edge of victim-blaming, but really, one can choose not to be offended in this fairly innocuous trend:  #fitfam and the public celebration of physical fitness. I read this Elite Daily article and wanted to post my meal-prepped box of lunches all the more  (Then I stopped posting. More on that later) . FitFam is about working towards goals that have to do with physical fitness: for improved health, for better quality of healthy life, for competitions, for improved physical appearance.  I can do yoooooga!

The snow has me grounded at my grandparents' house after our Army-Navy game party, and I made breakfast/dessert in my cupcake pan which I left here. Since my grandmother bakes frequently, her pans aren't "safe" for me (years of baked-on grease and wheat flour). Her dessert for our "tailgate" party was the conventional version of cinnamon coffee bars .  Funny story, the last time I wrote about  cheesecake , I had just made  Chocolate-Covered Katie's Deep-Dish Cinnamon Roll Pie . The 2012 pie turned out tough because I was angry and tight. Tonight I made the pie again in cupcake format. The cupcakes baked up properly puddingy because I am happy and chill. There is substance to  Como agua para chocolate !  

Stocking the Freezer: Blueberry Cheezecake Blueberry Un-Blues Part II of III Don't you like my academic-style headings of late? The formula is "Gerund Phrase COLON Nouns Nouns Nouns." Or something like that. Add an "OF" phrase and you have it made. "Gothic Granola: Deconstructing and Rebuilding the Nature of Reality" since 2011. This recipe represents another must-do, like every vegan food blogger out there, to make raw cheezecake at some point, primarily using cashews and fresh fruit. Done and done.

They don't pay me to think anymore, so I tend to think hard anyway. When I'm speeding home from closing shift, downing 800 mL to 1 L of water in order to rehydrate while blasting Rage Against the Machine, my mind runs in high gear. It's time to write. It's difficult to be consistent in other areas of life when one's job is inconsistent. Let us begin with this premise. Being a cashier and having a standing sedentary job is no more healthy than being a desk jockey with a sitting sedentary job. The inconsistent hours, workload, and cast of characters is beginning to wear on me. When a job begins to impact my health negatively, in preventable ways, then it's time to go. This is a job, not my career.

Clearly, I like cheezecake.

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.

Part I of a three-part series about cheese, cheeze, cream cheeze, and cheeze curds. Greetings, Earthlings. It’s been done before: vegans rhapsodising about cheese, missing the taste, texture, ineffability of cultured dairy.  Let’s not do what other people have done before, not reinvent the wheel, as a lot of people say.

Wow!  Thank you to all who attended the “Desserts for the Often-Deserted” talk at the Lawrence Library.  Your willingness to share your stories and ask questions made the event more cozy and like a chat among friends, a dessert circle.

Last week, my mom made chocolate cream cheeze frosting for chocolate cupcakes for my super-sweet sixteen (graduation) party, and the frosting never set.  She used blue-label Tofutti Better than Cream Cheese, which contains partially hydrogenated oils, tastes chalky, and weeps in the fridge.  

Oh yes, very good.  I really like Crazy Richard’s unadulterated peanut butter, though Maranatha’s organic peanut butter is high on my list of “what food would you bring with you to survive the zombie apocalypse?”  I’ve been watching and reading  The Walking Dead  for the past few days.  Wonderful bedtime reading.

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