Birthday Dinner

A few notes & a cupcake recipe from my birthday:

1. Tuesday night was spent prepping cupcakes to bring to work. I finished this messy task at 10:15pm by splitting a giant-leftover batter-not quite baked through-chocolate chip cupcake topped with a whole lot of icing with the Bup. Yum!

2. It rained on my birthday. All. Day. Long. I went roller blading anyway & barely got wet. I'll show that rain!

3. The Bup left me notes on star shaped Post-Its. My favorite was on the door heading to the garage: "Wait! You forgot your halo!" O:-)

4. All 24 cupcakes disappeared before 5pm. Most were gone before noon. Guess my co-workers like cupcakes! (see below for recipe)

5. We had Zesty Wheat Berry-Black Bean Chili, salad, and bread for dinner, prepared by the Bup. The secret's out, my love, now I know just how well you can cook!

6. After dinner, it was still raining. We went for a walk anyway & got soaked. I think the rain showed us this time.

7. Avocados were on sale for $1, so we made a trip to the store.

8. While we were out, we got ice cream, the perfect birthday treat!

9. There was some pumpkin to puree. Now I have 5 1/2 cups of puree in the fridge to eat! YES!

10. We saw Tangled for the first time & LOVED it. I think the Disney movies have been going downhill since all the Princess classics, but this one was excellent!

11. After all this cake & ice cream, I think I need to go back to green veggies & smoothies for awhile. I even found a great post for a great assortment of go-to healthy foods!

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes!

Chocolate Chip Cupcakes adapted from Can You Stay for Dinner? 

Makes 24 cupcakes

3 c white whole wheat flour

1 ½ c granulated sugar

1 T + 1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

8 T unsalted butter, melted

1/2 c unsweetened applesauce

1 cup reduced fat sour cream

4 T ground flax seed OR 4 T chia seeds, mixed with 3/4 c water* - let set for a few minutes before using

1 T + 1 tsp vanilla extract

2/3 c mini chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350*F. Line two 12 cup standard sized cupcake tin with paper liners.

Using an electric mixer, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add melted butter, applesauce, sour cream, flax/chia eggs, and vanilla. Beat at medium speed until combined, about 30 seconds. Scrape down sides of bowl with rubber spatula and continue to mix until no lumps remain. Stir in chocolate chips by hand.

Evenly divide the batter among the cups in your prepared pan. Bake until cupcake tops are golden and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Remove the cupcakes from the pan carefully and let them cool on a wire rack.

*Note: You can use 4 large eggs instead, but then you lose the health benefits of the flax/chia.

Peanut Butter Icing/Filling

1 T butter, room temperature

1/3 c natural peanut butter

3 c powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2-4 T milk, or more if needed

Using an electric mixer, beat together butter & peanut butter. Add powdered sugar, 1 cup at a time, alternating with vanilla & milk, until you reach desired consistency. It should be spreadable, not runny.

Chocolate Icing

4 T butter

1/2 c cocoa powder

3 c powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2-4 T milk, or more if needed

　

Using an electric mixer, beat butter until smooth. Add cocoa powder & mix in. Add powdered sugar, 1 cup at a time, alternating with vanilla & milk, until you reach desired consistency. It should be spreadable, not runny.

To stuff the cupcakes

Note: You will probably have leftover icing. I had about 1 cup of peanut butter icing left over. You can freeze it to use at another time. Or eat it with a spoon. Your choice, I won't judge! :-)
: Fill a pastry bag with peanut butter icing. Stick the tip into the middle of the top of the cupcake and gently push down. Squeeze out icing as you pull up until you see it peak out the top. Then ice the cupcake with chocolate icing either with the icing bag or using a knife.

 

Celebrating Birthdays!

Happy birthday!

This makes 2 years in a row that I'm posting about baking a cake for Dad's birthday.

It's the same cake, as he requested. Same cake, one year later, and Dad's happy! I'll never forget his birthday, and now because of his birthday, I won't forget when I started blogging.

This is a very special occasion! I can't believe I've been blogging for a year!

He's always super quick to blow out the candles! Sorry for the blur.

 I don't have a fancy camera, so I don't have options for exposure or apperture or any other fancy things. It's point and shoot, adjust the setup and lighting. Repeat. The more I take, the more I learn. Better pictures to celebrate a year of learning.

I hope you can tell the differences as I learn! I feel like I've grown so much in the past year.

I even made some alterations to this cake recipe, and I think this year it was even better!

Carrot Spice Cake
adapted from several recipes from Cooking LightServes 12

Cake:
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup evaporated cane juice (or substitute sugar)
2 tsps. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsps. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
3 T coconut oil, melted
1 large egg
1 T ground flax seed + 1 T water (or substitute 1 egg)
2 cups grated carrot (about 2 large carrots)
1 cup canned crushed pineapple, drained
1/2 cup applesauce
1/2 cup golden raisins

Frosting:
2 T butter, softened
1 (8 oz.) block 1/3 less-fat cream cheese, softened
4 1/2 cups powdered sugar
2 tsps. vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325°. Spray 2 9" round baking pans with cooking spray & dust with flour.
Combine flours, sugar, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a large bowl, stirring well with a whisk. Combine oil and eggs; stir well. Stir egg mixture, grated carrot, pineapple, and applesauce into flour mixture. Pour batter into prepared pans.
Bake at 325° for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let sit in pans for 5 minutes, then invert onto wire racks and cool completely.

For frosting, beat together butter and cream cheese until smooth. Add powdered sugar and vanilla just until mixed. Spread frosting between layers and then over cake.

Homegrown Tomatoes & A Quick Sauce Recipe

Twitter is always teaching me something. Someone that I follow always finds a great article or picture that interests me. I can't get enough of it!

Usually the things I learn are interesting and useful, maybe funny or slightly alarming, but it's rare that I read something that shocks me to the core.

This article about industrial tomatoes by Barry Estabrook from GiltTaste did. It shocked me like reading Skinny Bitch and watching Food, Inc. did. This is the factory farming of vegetables and harmful to all numbers of people. I'm pulling some (okay, a lot) of quotes from the article to share with you so that just in case you don't want to or have time to read it, you still know.

"Of all the fruits and vegetables we eat, none suffers at the hands of factory farming more than a tomato grown in the wintertime fields of Florida."

**I would love if you would read this information with an open mind. But if you don't have time or just aren't interested, there is a recipe at the end, so don't miss that!**



You're eating hard unripened tomatoes and paying for juicy ripe ones. Those lovely green tomatoes that you pick off your vines because you just can't wait another day are forced to turn red and then sold like they're the real deal. Fact: they're not going to drip with juice like the ones you wait for from the garden.

"It takes a tough tomato to stand up to the indignity of such industrial scale farming, so most Florida tomatoes are bred for hardness, picked when still firm and green (the merest trace of pink is taboo), and artificially gassed with ethylene in warehouses until they acquire the rosy red skin tones of a ripe tomato."

Why are we wasting so much money on something that tastes nothing like what it should? We don't buy unbaked brown bread and expect it to taste like a bake loaf. Tomatoes are no different.

"Americans bought $5 billion worth of perfectly round, perfectly red, and, in the opinion of many consumers, perfectly tasteless fresh tomatoes in 2009"

All that money for less nutrients and more sodium. What a deal!

"...fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium."

Just in case it wasn't a good enough deal, they're throwing in plenty of herbicides & pesticides for us, too.

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture has found residues of 35 pesticides on tomatoes destined for supermarkets."
"And although Florida's sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. To get a successful crop, they pump the sand full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness's arsenal."

 Yikes!!

"Florida's tomato fields provide a stark example of what a food system looks like when all elements of sustainability are violated."

If we can get past the horrible taste, the money, and the pesticides, then we're hit with the poor treatment of the workers.

"Paid on a "piece" basis for every bushel-sized basket they gather, tomato pickers are lucky to earn 70 dollars on a good day." And apparently, these "good days" are very rare."

The Civil War was centuries ago. Those men fought and died to set things right in this country. We have no right to go back on that because we want a rock hard, tasteless tomato.

"When I asked Molloy if it was safe to assume that a consumer who has eaten a fresh tomato from a grocery store, fast food restaurant, or food-service company in the winter has eaten a fruit picked by the hand of a slave, he corrected my choice of words. "It's not an assumption. It is a fact.""

The Land of the Free.

"I began to see that the Florida tomato industry constitutes a parallel world unto itself, a place where many of the assumptions I had taken for granted about living in the United States are turned on their heads."

Not only do the companies not pay their workers proper wages & subject them to slave labor, but then this...

"Pesticides, so toxic to humans and so bad for the environment that they are banned outright for most crops, are routinely sprayed on virtually every Florida tomato field, and in too many cases, sprayed directly on workers, despite federally mandated periods when fields are supposed to remain empty after chemical application."

Change this. Of all the big tough decisions in life, it's easy to decide never to buy a grocery store tomato. Such a simple choice.

It is yours.

"...a real tomato's taste is the distilled essence of sun, warm soil, and fine summer days."

If you made it through all that, thank you for reading! This is something that is important to me and I want to be able to share my thoughts with you openly. I'm sure all this serious talk made you hungry (I am!), so I'm offering you a recipe for a quick sauce, easy to throw together after a day at work, especially when company is coming. It's also great for lunch leftovers throughout the week.



Quick Tomato Veggie Pasta
Serves 6-81 large yellow onion, chopped
1 medium patty pan squash, chopped
4 mushrooms, sliced (optional)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/4 c fresh basil, chopped
6 fresh tomatoes, any variety (I used long johns from our garden)
28 oz. canned crushed tomatoes (either home-canned or organic)
1/4 c ricotta cheese (optional)
1 lb. whole wheat rotelle (spiral) noodles

In a large non-stick pan, cook onions over medium-high heat until they begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Add squash and cook 3-5 minutes more. If using mushrooms, add them now. Once squash starts to become translucent, add garlic, salt, pepper, oregano & basil. Stir to combine and then add fresh tomatoes. Cook until the juices from the tomatoes are bubbly. Add canned tomatoes and let simmer while preparing the noodles according to package directions. Stir occasionally. When noodles are done cooking, stir ricotta cheese, if using, into sauce. Drain noodles, combine with sauce and serve.

*Feel free to add other veggies, too. Eggplant or zucchini would be good substitutes for the squash. Bell peppers or hot peppers would be a great addition. Just throw them in with the onions.



Quick Tomato Veggie Pasta

Hummus and Sandwiches

It is entirely possible that nothing is better than homemade bread.

Except maybe when you toast it and add tomato sauce, lettuce & avocado.

And pair it with Up In Smoke Hummus from Gena at Choosing Raw! This stuff is addictive.

Hummus is mostly chickpeas and tahini, so it's full of vitamins, minerals and amino acids. Check out this source for more details!

I liked it best with the celery but the Bup liked it with carrots and Trader Joe's baked blue chips.

We had a little leftover Roasted Winter Vegetable Soup. I think I stretched my stomach last night eating this soup. I was stuffed but it was sooooooooo good! Tonight the Bup decided it was good as a dip, too, and starting dipping veggies and chips into it. I could've made it thinner but really, there's something about eating dip by the spoonful and not feeling guilty cause you know it's healthy. :-)

This loaf of bread looks innocent enough, but it's actually so huge that we had to cut it in half just to fit it into a bag. Even then, I had to use a grocery bag because the gallon size baggie was too small. The recipe was for Crusty Wheat Bread from Food and Wine magazine. It took 24 hours to make and it was worth every minute.

Does anyone else like avocado on their sandwiches? I think it's way better than cheese!

Quick Dinner

See those tomatoes? They're from my garden. It's January! I have 1 left, lonely on my counter, to use for a very special dinner. Any ideas on the best use?

I got lentil burgers and homemade wheat rolls out of the freezer before I went to the gym. After I got home I made a salad and guacamole to go with the burgers. Of course, there was wine during the chopping of veggies. I like having it before the meal and then saving a few sips for during dinner.

I didn't use the non-stick pan and then forgot to spray this one, so they stuck a little and fell apart, but they mashed back together easily. My pan was permanently stained (at least to my scrubbing skills) but after dinner the Bup washed it with steel wool and it's as shiny as new now! I'm sure that won't last... :-)

Mmmm guacamole. With my almost last tomato! And blue chips!

Lentil Burgers
slightly adapted from Amy Dacyczyn
Makes 11 patties

2 c cooked lentil-bulgur mixture (see directions below)
2 c homemade whole wheat bread crumbs (or store-bought)
1 c chopped onion
1/2 c chopped green pepper
4 T Italian seasoning
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 eggs (or 2 T soy flour + 2 T water)
1/2 c milk

To make the lentil-bulgur mixture, bring 3 c water, 3/4 c dried lentils, and 3/4 c bulgur to a boil. Simmer mixture for 45 minutes or until moisture is absorbed.* Mix 2 cups of cooked lentil-bulgur mixture with the next 5 ingredients. Add eggs, stir until combined. Add milk and stir again. Chill for 30 minutes. Form into patties. Cook on a non-stick skillet until heated through, about 5 minutes per side. Freeze any additional patties in a gallon baggie by placing them in layers with wax paper in between. They will thaw in about 30 minutes.

*I made twice this amount and froze the rest for future use. I plan to use it to make burritos by adding taco seasonings.

Baking in the New Year!

From Christmas, full of food, worship, family, cards in the mail, and fun!

To weddings...Congratulations to Mr. & Mrs. Lynch and to Mr. & Mrs. Kraft!

December was a busy month! I'm ready for another year full of joy. Happy New Year!

I'm starting off 2011 the right way. By baking! I love the way the house smells when you walk in after something was in the oven! Walter likes it so much he started fixing the light switch just so he could stick around longer during his lunch break.

We made a resolution for the new year: no trips to the emergency room. Let's pray we can keep this resolution!!

I tried a new bread recipe this morning called Universal Bread. I can't remember where I copied this from, but credit it due to that author. The recipe is really flexible, allowing the baker to make the bread savory, sweet, or more like your standard sandwich bread.

Garlic-Onion Wheat Bread
Yield: 1 loaf & 6 sandwich rolls


1 cup water
1 cup unsweetened almond milk
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/4 cup clover honey
1/4 cup sugar
1 T granulated sea salt

1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
4 tsp yeast
3 cups whole wheat flour
3 cups unbleached white flour
1/2 cup ground flax seed
1/4 cup toasted wheat germ

Mix first 8 ingredients. Heat in microwave until warm, about 45 seconds. Add yeast, stir, and let set 5 minutes or until mixture starts to bubble. Add flour, mixing well. Knead on a flour dusted counter until smooth and elastic. Cover and rise until doubled, about 1 1/2 hours. Shape as desired and place in greased pans. Cover and rise until slightly smaller than you want your finished product. Bake at 375. Rolls bake for 20-25 minutes, loaves for 30-35 minutes.

Of course, I couldn't stop with just bread! I found a great recipe for Doughnut Muffins at multiplydelicious.com and had to try them. The only change I made was to substitute coconut oil for the canola oil, which worked well.