Nudity is Only Skin-Deep

I've made these a couple of times. They're delicious and quite filling. The recipe is based off Chai-Spiced Almond Butter Bites. The recipe yields approximately 15 ~1.25" balls.

I like these as a quick snack before/after a workout. I've had them as part of my breakfast, too.

The recipe is vegan and paleo-friendly, if this matters for you.

1/2 cup shredded coconut
1/2 cup almonds
1 cup pit-free dates
1/4 cup nut butter (I've used peanut butter and almond butter. Both are good.)
2 Tbsp hemp seeds
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp sea salt
1 Tbsp coconut oil

1. Pulse coconut and almonds in food processor until there are no large chunks.
   
2. Add remaining ingredients and pulse until everything is combined to a dough-like consistency.
   
3. Press dough with hands and then roll balls up about 1.25" in diameter.
   
4. Place in an air-tight container and store in the fridge. The cooled coconut oil will firm them up.
   

My friend Mo sent me this link a while back, telling me the pancakes are delicious. It took me a while before I finally made them, but guess what? She's right.

It's gluten-free and egg-free, and super yummy.

The original portions in the recipe are too small, but here's the scaled-up recipe. It serves about three or four.

1 cup buckwheat flour
1 cup steel-cut oats (or grind rolled oats with a blender or food processor)
2 Tbsp ground flax seed
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cup plain or Greek yoghourt
1 1/4 cup milk or milk substitute
2 tsp vanilla
2 Tbsp olive oil or coconut oil
2 sliced ripe bananas

Heat a skillet over medium heat for 3-5 minutes while you prepare the batter.

Whisk together dry ingredients. Add yoghourt, milk, vanilla, and oil. Mix until smooth. Batter should be thick, but you can thin it with a bit more milk, if you like.

Fold in bananas.

Put some oil in the pan, then add about 1/4 cup of batter per pancake. It should sizzle when it hits the pan. Cook until bubbles start to appear throughout, then flip and cook for about two minutes.

Serve 'em warm with all the fixings.

This sounds like it would taste weird, but it doesn't. It's delicious, and it also has the benefit of also being pretty darned good for you. It tastes like a nice, rich chocolate pudding, but contains no sugar beyond what's already in the fruit.

Here goes:

2 ripe bananas
2 ripe avocados
a bunch of cocoa, according to taste (I usually use about 1/3 of a cup)
1 tsp cinnamon

Throw it all in a blender or food processor and process until fully blended. That'll give you a delicious pudding.

If you want to make a milkshake, add coconut milk until you get the right consistency. Scrumptious!

This is a pretty forgiving recipe, and you can add vanilla or other spices if you like. If you have a real sweet tooth, you can add some honey, but if the bananas are nice and ripe, that should be plenty sweet.

I grew up eating a lot of food traditional to my Canadian ancestors. We rarely purchased pre-made baked goods, and my mother baked almost everything from scratch. My family were gatherer/hunters, and much of our food came from our farm or from the wilds. I grew up cooking on wood stoves and over campfires with wood we gathered with our dog or pony teams, so I suspect my understanding of foods differs from that of people from urban, western upbringings. I was once used to cooking and baking in the ways my ancestors did over the past couple of hundred years. Although I now cook with modern implements I find the food tastes quite similar as long as I'm using comparable ingredients.

A while back, I picked up a copy of Dorothy Duncan's Nothing More Comforting: Canada's Heritage Food. It contains a variety of recipes similar to the ones I grew up with. I chose a recipe for honey bread because I had all of the ingredients in my larder already. This recipe was first published in 1896 in Fanny Merritt Farmer's The Boston Cooking School Cook Book. It was only about this time that honey was first listed as an ingredient in recipe books. Before that time, honey was served as an accompaniment to scones, tea, and such.

The recipe is as follows:

2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 cup strained honey
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup milk

Mix and sift dry ingredients. Add others. Beat thoroughly. Bake in loaf or bread stick pans in moderate oven, 350*F. Makes 1 loaf.

These would have been staple ingredients in a Canadian larder around the turn of the 20th century, available from the local grocer. The fresh ingredients such as honey, eggs, and milk, were produced on many farms, and flour was available from grain mills.

If you're familiar with baking, you may notice that a cooking time isn't listed. Neither does it say if the pan should be greased or powdered. I made the guess that I should cook it for about 45 minutes, as that's about how long it takes a gingerbread loaf to cook. I also lightly greased the loaf pan with butter.

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I grew up detesting pea soup. I thought it tasted gross and looked worse. However, this year, when I had a big ol' hambone left over from Christmas dinner, I figured I'd give it another go. I'm glad I did, because what I cooked was delicious. I ate two giant bowls of it, and although I'll spare you a description of the aromatic after effects, I want to make this again!

I adapted the recipe from My Paleo Crockpot. (Split peas, btw, are not considered paleo, because cavemen thought peas were gross). Here's how it goes:

6-quart crockpot

-2 cups dried split peas. I used yellow from a local organic farm.
-1 meaty ham bone, 2 ham hocks or 2 cups diced ham
-3 carrots, diced
-1 small onion, diced
-2 cloves garlic, minced
-1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
-1 bay leaf
-dash salt
-dash pepper
-6 cups vegetable bouillon stock

Layer ingredients in the order listed here, pouring the stock over it all at the end.

Cook on low for 8-10 hours. If you used a ham bone, the meat should be falling off easily.

Dig out the bone and bay leaf, and serve it up. OM NOM NOM.

Time to clear my browser tabs! Here are a few links I've had open for too long. You may enjoy them, too.

School of Thrones: Game of Thrones meets DeGrassi....

Chocolate Cake: Grain-free recipe I want to try out.

Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature’s Most Fantastic Works: Science fiction/fantasy literature course by a professor whose style I enjoy.

675 Free Online Courses from Top Universities: This is how I get my university education, nowadays.

Upsided-Down Pancake with Apricots and Plums: Another tasty-looking grain-free recipe.

Pope Innocent VIII: What a crazy life and death.

I've been making this recipe for years. Time to do it again for Christmas....

If at all possible, use gluten-free flour mix, rather than regular wheat flour. Shortbread based on rice flour is vastly superior to the stuff made from regular flour.

Time: about 90 minutes

1 1/4 cups icing sugar
3/4 cup butter
6 sqs. semi-sweet chocolate, melted and cooled
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup flour
1 cup ground almonds
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup sliced toasted almonds

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Blend in melted chocolate and vanilla. Mix well. Add flour, ground almonds, and salt. Press into a 12"X9"rectangle on an ungreased cookie sheet. Sprinkle with chocolate chips and almonds. Bake at 250 degrees for 45-50 minutes. Cool on the pan on a wire rack. Chill and cut.

I was a member of a farm share this summer, and it got me eating vegetables outside my normal choices. One of the vegetables I received was the tomatillo. I'd never cooked with those before, so I went searching for recipes incorporating them. Mostly, I found salsa recipes, but I didn't want salsa. I wanted a dish, not a condiment. But then I found this recipe for chili verde, I made it, and I was won over. I made some small changes to the method, so I'll post my version, here.

1 1/2 pounds tomatillos
a full bulb of garlic, broken into cloves
2 jalapeños or other hot peppers
1 bunch cilantro leaves, cleaned and chopped
a pork tenderloin cut into 1" cubes
Salt (optional) and freshly ground black pepper
Bacon fat
2 big cooking onions, chopped
2 Tbsp of chopped fresh oregano or 1 Tbsp of dried oregano
2 1/2 cups stock (I've used chicken, turkey, and vegetable stock. They all work)
Pinch of ground cloves

Put your oven onto broiler mode and start peeling the papery husks off the tomatillos. Wash the tomatillos off, slice them in half, and place them onto a large baking sheet with a lip. Put about half the garlic cloves onto the sheet (you can peel them or not. It doesn't matter.) Discard seeds and stems from the peppers, and put the peppers on the baking sheet, too.

Stick the baking sheet into the oven for about 5-7 minutes, until the skins are lightly blackened.

If you haven't already, take the skins off the garlic. Dump the garlic, peppers, and tomatillos into a blender. Toss in the chopped cilantro. Pulse until everything is well blended. You can add some of the stock, if necessary.

Put a tablespoon or so of bacon fat in a large skillet and heat on medium. Season the pork cubes with salt and pepper (I don't bother with salt half of the time, and it still tastes fine to me). Brown the meat in the pan, then dump it into a crock pot.

Mince remaining garlic, and fry that and the chopped onions until soft in the skillet. Dump them into the crock pot.

Pour the tomatillo mixture on top of meat and onions. Add oregano and cloves, then top up with stock and give it a stir. Cook on high until it comes to a boil, then turn to low and let it cook at least 3 hours until the meat is tender.

Delicious!

I have never liked turnip. Or rutabaga. Excuse my ignorance, but the two taste the same to me.

I got a rutabaga in my farm share, though, so I figured I'd better find a way to cook it that might make it palatable. I succeeded. Not only is it palatable, but it's pretty darned tasty. And nutritious, of course!

So here's what I did:

• one rutabaga (or turnip), at least the size of a small bowling ball, peeled and chopped
  
• 1 large onion, sliced in half, then chopped in 1/4" slices
  
• about 2 Tbsp of cooking fat (bacon fat, coconut oil, or whatever)
  
• salt and pepper to taste
  
• about 1/4 cup of apple cider
  
• a few sprigs of fresh parsley

Cover rutabaga with water in a pot, and boil for 10-15 minutes, until tender.
Sauté onions in fat/oil until tender and golden brown.
When rutabaga is cooked, drain and mash. When well mashed, mix in apple cider, onions, and parsley. Ta-da!

And now I have a turnip recipe I like. Yay!

I'm on the Whole30 challenge right now, which cuts dairy, legumes, and grain out of my diet. So when I saw this recipe for Hungarian Mushroom Soup I thought, Damn. That looks mighty tasty.

So today I decided to make it Whole30 friendly.

It was delicious.

Here's what I did:

4 tablespoons coconut oil
2 cups chopped onions
1 pound fresh mushrooms, sliced
2 teaspoons dried dill weed
1 tablespoon paprika
1 tablespoon coconut aminos (basically coconut sap. Takes the place of soy sauce)
2 cups broth (I used homemade turkey stock, but I'm sure veggie or chicken would work, too)
1 cup coconut milk
3 tablespoons ground almonds
ground black pepper to taste
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/2 cup coconut milk

• Melt the coconut oil in a large pot over medium heat.
  
• Sauté onions in this for 5 minutes.
  
• Add mushrooms and sauté another 5 minutes.
  
• Stir in dill, paprika, coconut aminos, and broth. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for 15 minutes.
  
• In a small bowl, mix coconut milk and ground almonds together. Add to soup and stir well to blend. Cover and simmer for 15 more minutes, stirring occasionally.
  
• Stir in ground black pepper, lemon juice, parsley, and the rest of the coconut milk. Mix together and allow to heat through over low heat, about 3 to 5 minutes. Do not boil. Serve immediately.

It was delicious.