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I made two batches of nut/seed milks, which came out ok. The resulting leftover pulp was used for raw cookies and crackers. Batch of cookies #1 had shredded raw carrots and dried cranberries added to it, and it was ok. Chewy, with a nice mellow flavor. W, however, asked if they could be made with chocolate chips. (Of course!) So Batch #2 had brown sugar, flax seeds and chocolate chips in it, and were excellent! I will definitely be making them again. The crackers were very tasty, if fragile. I added lemon pepper, garlic powder, flax seeds and Italian seasoning to the mix, and dried them until they were crisp. They kept well for the couple of days it took to make them. I'll need to find out how to make them a little less delicate. I did some reading up on raw foods, and the recipes I found were amazing. Unfortunately, most would be rather expensive to make, so I will keep reading and see what I can find that is more practical. I would like to try raw bread, and a few other things. At least if I should have to go on a raw diet for health reasons, I'll be semi-prepared!
The month of Frugal Living is almost over. Except for one expenditure for eating out (We had free coupons, which did not, however, cover W's chicken strips and fries, cost $3.99) we stuck to our guns and didn't buy anything except necessities, food and gas. LOTS of coupons got used, and I am once again trying the library. Being back on the school schedule should make it a bit easier to get the books back on time, since I have to pick up W from school several times a week. While we would like to do this every other month, it'll have to wait until January, since the next month would be November, and I do my holiday shopping then. Yes, I COULD do it in October, or December, but there are several reasons I won't, the main one being that I use my earnings from surveys for the majority of it, and the closer I get to December, the more I will have saved up. We won't be going hog-wild in three days. There are a couple of things I want to get, and after seeing how much we were blowing on Half-Price Books, eating out and other stuff, we realized that it's not that hard to trim down our expenses and put the money in savings. We would like to be mostly debt free in 10 years, and we are halfway through Year 1. So far so good!
So, I'm cruising around the Net looking for homemade almond milk recipes, when I notice something in common with all of them: leftover almond pulp. Not being one to waste a food item, I set out to find something to do with all that pulp I would soon be producing. Lots of people suggested using it in baking, or soups, or several other good ideas. Then I stumbled across a raw foods site that talked about using the leftover nut pulp from milk making to make things like raw cookies. So I made up my first batch of nut milk (a huge success!), took my leftover pulp, mixed it with shredded carrots, coconut, dried cranberries and honey, formed it into cookie shapes, put it in my trusty food dehydrator, and out came raw cookies! No, they don't taste like a fresh baked Tollhouse, but they are a nice snack, and (hopefully!) a bit healthier. Being intrigued with the whole raw thing, I'll be doing some experimenting in the coming weeks to see just what can be made with raw food, and more importantly, how does it taste.
So, I'm sitting here being a bit bored, don't feel like doing much of anything till the coffee kicks in, so I decided to type in "vegans are stupid" in my search engine. Oh, my, the things I read (and laughed over) this morning! Try it and see what comes up. LOTS of self-righeous vegans trying to convince the rest of the world that humans are not physically evolved to eat meat. (Um, hello, CANINE TEETH!) One poster on a blog comment remarked how the Kzini (a fictional bipedial feline race created by sci-fi author Larry Niven) referred to vegans as Prey. Nice. I look at diet the same as I look at religon: if you want to do it, fine by me, but don't try to force it on me, or you will regret it for a veeeery long time. Don't lecture me, because you won't win. Get over yourself and keep your lifestyle where it belongs, in YOUR life. ;)
OK, so I admit it, I really got into soy a few years ago. When food prices started heading north, I looked around for a cheap meat substitute, and found soy products. All the veggie websites were FULL of recipes using this stuff, so I gave a few a try. With much experimenting and tweaking, I found some of them to be rather good. Then the bad news hit....SOY IS BAD FOR YOU! Oh my! And here I thought I'd been doing something good for my family. I was crushed. So I did alot of research, and turns out that most soy products are fairly new, and heavily processed, so they are just now finding out what the long term affects are. Damn. So, once the soy products I have in the fridge and pantry are gone, no more for us. Whaa. On the lighter side, I have been experimenting with more good old grown-in-the-ground veggies, and have been happily surprised that most of the soy recipes can be made with regular old veggies. Yay!
Update on the sun butter experiment, it was a success! The recipe does need a bit of tweaking tho. I used roasted salted seeds, which turned out WAY too salty. Mixed it half and half with roasted unsalted almonds, still salty, but edible. I will look and see if I can find unsalted roasted, or I might have to dry roast raw ones myself. Other than that, the butter was great, nutty and very tasty. At about .75/cup to make, this is definitely a keeper!
Over the last couple of years I've noticed a trend in online postings, referring to someones husband as DH, meaning Dear Husband. It seems to have caught on almost everywhere I look. Personally, I think this is rather stupid. I also don't see anyone posting "DW", as in Dear Wife. Could it be that these women using this term are stuck in the Leave It To Beaver era? Or is this just some stupid fad that will pass. I don't know, but it irritates the fuck out of me!
Having volunteered to work at the school this year, I was put in charge of the beautifying the campus grounds section, i.e. grunt labor for the pitiful excuse of gardens. Now, it's not the gardens' faults that they've been ignored or neglected. The staff does what they can, but with the budget cuts plus the craptacular "standardized testing" bullshit, they can barely keep up with what they are supposed to be doing. So S and I decided to take a hand this year and do some of the work. We were met by grateful and enthusiastic staff and faculty where ever we turned. Many people have offered plants out of their own gardens, or promises of materials. Labor would be nice, but we'll take what we can get at this point.
OK, so I've seen this product in the stores, but never paid much attention to it until now-SunButter, a "nut" butter made from sunflower seeds. W is getting very tired of the same old PB sandwiches for lunch every day, and I've been checking out different boards to find ideas for him. SunButter is being used by many people who have peanut allergies, and is supposed to be as good tasting as PB. So, I'm going to whip up a batch and give it a try, more on the results later.
Even though we've been practicing frugal living for several years now, it occurred to me that we could be doing better. I started keeping track of things we were spending money on, like once a week trips to Starbucks, and once or twice a week eating out. When it comes down to it, it all adds up. So for the month of September, we are living very frugally. Instead of buying Teddy Grahams for the boys lunches, I spent a good part of Sunday in the kitchen, baking dried fruit and nut filled cookies. We also are resurrecting Meatless Nights, where once or twice a week we have a meat-free supper. (Last night was millet/chickpea patties, very tasty!) Something else we're doing is spending no money this month on anything except necessities. No trips to Half-Price Books, no eating out, no buying anything except food, medical stuff, and gasoline until October. This also includes no going out, unless it's to a free event, and then we take our own food and water, since we can't buy anything there. So far none of the free events have been anything we've been interested in, but hope springs eternal. The first week hasn't been too bad, except for S's trip to the game store to watch the new 40K rollout, but he managed to restrain himself from buying anything. (Way to go S!)Three and a half more weeks to go, then we can see how much cash we have at the end of the month, which will be put into savings. If it goes well, we're going to try doing it at least one month out of every three.
This might seem to be counter to what any diet guru will tell you, but food is not only my life, but my passion. I have watched cooking shows all my life, since I was 6 years old. I started with the Galloping Gourmet and Julia Childs, dreaming of being able to create beautiful dishes when i got a bit older. I later found The Frugal Gourmet, and my cooking (which was fine already) really took off. I was always a foodie, and a slow food person, altho I didn't know it until a couple of years ago, when it because vogue to eschew fast food and restaurants, and grow/cook for oneself. My German grandmother taught me the basics of cooking, those techniques that she learned from her relatives from the Old Country, like slow roasting, cooking grains from scratch, pots of spaghetti gravy simmering day-long on the back of the stove, and oh, the baked goods! Cakes and cookies and pies, oh my! Nothing could be better! When I was a young adult, I was dirt poor, and fell into poor eating habits fostered by the American (and I use the term loosely!) food industry. I bought Hamburger Helper, and boxed mac and cheese, all those things which now have been termed "edible food-like substances" by food author Michael Pollan. I was calling it Plastic Food 20 years ago, guess I was ahead of my time once again! Having a food-challenged child has been an exercise in stealth. A couple of years ago I discovered smoothies, that blended concoction of juice and fruit. This year, I began incorporating veggies in the mix, starting with carrots, and graduating to raw greens such as spinach, and raw cucumber. W either hasn't noticed, or had decided that they taste OK anyway, but he does drink them, which is the whole goal. I was totally amused at the two authors who came out the the 'hidden food' cookbooks, mothers like me have been doing this for decades, we just never bothered to write books about it. Oh well, another money-making opportunity missed!
It's that time of year again, the start of school. Both the spouse and the son started school last week, and both seem to be doing fine. (I put my return to school off until the spring semester)It's going to be a long semester, with S taking classes in the evenings, Monday thru Thursday, we seldom see him except for a few minutes after he staggers in the door and checks his email before falling into bed. I will be volunteering at my son's school this year, for the first time in three years. I was a substitute teacher during that time, and it totally sucked! The pay was crap, and what the subs have to put up with was unbelieveable. I'd much rather do it for free, that way if I don't like a kid, I don't have to deal with him/her. Healthy lunches have been a bit more difficult to come up with, since we are limiting processed foods. This means more work for me in the kitchen, altho I don't mind, since I love to cook. S's lunches are usually whatever is leftover from supper the night before, but coming up with healthy selections for W's lunch box was a bit more challenging, since as an Aspie, he has major problems with texture and colors of any new foods.
Welcome to my blog! After certain peeps complained about no rss feed, I decided to go ahead and join the masses on Blogger. I hope you will enjoy reading my varied random thoughts, musings, rants and interests. So sit back, grab a drink and a snack, and enjoy the ride!
