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!).

Much like my sourdough recipes, this recipe's usefulness is limited by the equipment you have on hand.  However, you could very well make this outside of a bread machine.  For the first time in three years, I don't have a gas stove, and a countertop bread machine bakes better bread than an electric oven.   The bread machine doesn't warm the apartment like the oven does, though!

Hey, it's my birthday! I'm going to revel in my Early Onset Grumpiness . via GIPHY  

It's only seventy-four days until Halloween/my birthday, and it's not too early for pumpkin muffins.  Snow is appearing on the mountains and it snowed (briefly, no accumulation) at 11,500 feet last weekend.  

My original favourite banana muffin is cornflake banana muffins , but VGF cornflakes are a treat at USD $7.99 a 26.4 ounce bag.  The below muffins I used to make all the time for my student job folks in a myriad of variations, including using apple butter, more or less banana, various types of nuts and dried fruit, in bars or in muffins.

Hello from 9,000 feet (2,743 meters) above sea level! In between this post and last post , I moved house from the Front Range to the Western Slope.  All TC wanted was muffins once we were in our new place, so I made these blueberry muffins, complete with crunchy sugar on top.

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

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.    

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

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).

 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.

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.

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.

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

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!! 

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 . 

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.  

These peanut butter oatmeal protein balls have been taking over the interwebs. I put my own twist on the recipes found in Dr. Phoenyx's Instagram and Gimme Some Oven .  

Cake and smoothies, cake and smoothies...they're all I seem to have posted about lately, and they are amongst what I eat, pretty much every day.  Let's get real about energy drinks. While all the B vitamins, taurine, caffeine, and sugar in Monster give you a temporary boost (and a serious crash), energy drinks don't address the real issue(s) underlying fatigue. Don't want to go to sleep? Or do you just not want to wake up because of X, Y, Z happening the next day? Feeling powerless to solve a problem and so you can't sleep but lie awake worrying about it? Daily tasks not challenging enough so you have excess energy? Think about that the next time you find yourself reaching for that fourth cup of coffee or that Red Bull. Constricting your blood vessels with caffeine probably isn't the long-term solution to why you're feeling tired. I'm not you, so I don't know what's going on in your life. You know your life best; you have the power to adjust thin...