We went to bed last night to the sweet and yeasty smell of our own homemade honey whole wheat flax seed bread (from our breadmaker). We've been making at least one loaf a week and I cut it and freeze it and toast a slice every morning and slather some natural peanut butter on it. Which, by the way, requires the most cumbersome task of stirring the oil that has separated out. Does anybody have a good method for this? Every time I do it, I spill the oil all over the edges and it still takes about 5 minutes of slow, heavy duty stirring. An sometimes the stirring suctions the whole glob of peanut butter up and makes the oil spill out even more! Any suggestions are welcome.
Gabe has had a hankering for Palak Paneer recently (an Indian dish with cubes of cheese and basically creamed spinach), so he decided to make some recently. We made the cheese from scratch from a gallon of milk and lemon juice - cooked it to separate the curds and whey (Little Ms. Muffett would have enjoyed it!). Then you strain the whey through cheesecloth (the first time I've seen that used for its named purpose), and you're left with a big ball of cheese to cut and fry, if desired, and add to the spinach and spices. Not bad!
Also, I recently bought raw almonds by accident; I usually get the roasted Tamari kind, and they didn't taste all that good raw. So I "marinated" them in soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce and then toasted them in our new toaster oven. They were dark and smoky and delicious! I highly recommend experimenting with this.
And, oh, coffee. My best friend. I try to make my own coffee each morning and bring it in a traveler mug so that I don't waste paper cups and use non-fair trade coffee (and if I do end up going to Starbucks, I still use my mug and get a $0.20 discount, and the lady thanks me each time for saving the environment!). We have sufficient gadgets in our kitchen to be able to make any kind of coffee, almost. We have a nice coffee maker for large servings of "normal" coffee, a stovetop espresso maker that I got in Waltham for $1 at a garage sale (the lady didn't even know what it was), 1 small and 1 medium sized Ibrik to make Turkish coffee, individual Vietnamese coffee makers (that go best with sweetened condensed milk!), and my most used coffee companions, 2 French Presses. I use the medium-sized one each morning as I grind my own coffee (often home-roasted as well, thanks to Gabe getting me a coffee roaster last year), and boil water in an electric kettle, and I'm set for the day.
If you're interested in purchasing fair-trade coffee (or reading about what that means), there are many websites at which you can do that, in addition to local options. Mainstream grocery stores pretty much never have it available, gourmet grocery stores like Fresh Market usually only have 1 or 2 kinds (out of the 20ish other kinds they have), and organic or natural food stores usually have more options.
I want to try to make cinnamon caramels next! They have these at Caribou Coffee, which is nowhere to be found in Tampa, so I guess I have no choice. We used to try to make caramels when we were younger, and I think we put them on popsicle sticks. That was probably because it required few ingredients, and ones that many people have in the pantry and don't use (like corn syrup). Oh the creative, homemade snacks we used to enjoy during our summers at home in Altamonte. My personal favorite was Saltine crackers with Hershey's chocolate syrup - sometimes with sprinkles as an added bonus! Anything in the pantry or fridge was fair game. I don't think you can really go too wrong with caramels, but I'll let you know how it goes.
6 comments:
Such nifty appliance you guys have!
When I would get natural peanut butter that had all the oil on top, I used to just dump it out. I figured I was saving calories in the process :) How's that for a solution?
How could I forget about the chocolate syrup-covered Saltines! We would put anything on a Saltine. I used to make bowl of tomato soup just so I could soak piles of Saltines in it. We were quite inventive. Remember the orange juice and lemonade ice cubes? Frozen banana bites? These latter ones must have been Mom's inventions.
I did enjoy your homemade marshmallows. If you ever need a tester, let me know!
Hah! Gabe said to do the same thing w/the peanut butter. But that defeats the whole purpose of softening the PB, and you end up trying to spread a hard, cold clump of PB on a soft, innocent piece of bread.
Soft PB is overrated. So is innocent bread :)
Reminds me of a point in my life when bologna was a gourmet foodstuff and velveeta slices were a luxury in short supply. It's amazing to think now that at one point I probably ate cheap ramen exclusively for weeks on end. Since I was never a coffee person though, I had to save money for coke like a smoker buying cigarettes.
Indian food is the bomb. Now I need to go find some malai kofta damnit. ;)
Ok, so for the PB thing, do you ever think about putting it in the fridge? Mine doesn't seperate when I do this but you might not like itcold?? Anyway, as for my coffee story, my expensive maker with the carafe built in that we got for our wedding broke one little piece and could not be replaced. So, I decided to buy a cheapie until I could replace my "good coffee maker". Well, it worked fine until the catch release got stuck one day, the coffee didn't drip into the carafe and the heat cracked the glass! (Sounds like a similar mess we had in Boston Anna!) So I've been refusing to go buy a new carafe because they cost more than if I was to buy a whole new coffee maker! ARGH!! Well, I finally broke down today and bought one since I realized I was spending more on bad coffee at work-and it didn't fit! Oh well, maybe I'll just get a whole new one.... As for the fair trade thing, I brought Jonathan home some Ben and Jerry's the other night and he was so excited! He got to tell me all about what fair trade was. Cool...
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