Branching out, trying something new

One of my goals is to try new things, whether it be experiences, food, or styles. I am a very conservative person and have not experienced much because I’ve always been afraid to try something different. This is true in my diet, my music, my hobbies, and even my interactions with other people.

An easy way for me to branch out without too much risk is our food. Our menus are very limited and we get bored eating the same things day after day. My culinary repertoire is mostly Mexican and Italian dishes. I thought it would be fun to attempt apple butter today.

First I peeled the apples and quartered them. All the apples went into the Crock Pot with some vanilla. Then it cooked for eight hours.

After three hours, my apples were already starting to liquefy.

After eight hours of cooking, I added cinnamon, cloves, brown sugar, and white sugar. I stirred it all up and then let it cook for another two hours. The final product in my lovely recycled Classico jars:


I haven’t tried it yet. I was waiting for it to cool off and now I’m ready to eat a piece of homemade Amish bread with my homemade apple butter. I hope it turned out well!

I used this recipe for inspiration. I halved the recipe and didn’t cook it as long as the recipe called for because the apple butter was starting to turn dark brown and stick to the sides of the Crock Pot. Hopefully I made the right decision to end the cooking early. If not, I’ll just have to try again with a full recipe.

Kitchen doings

What a great success. For the first time since we were given it a year ago, I opened the box and used my new Crock Pot. I filled a pot with water and soaked black beans overnight. This morning, I rinsed the beans, pulled out a couple bad ones, and covered them with water in the Crock Pot. I cooked them for eight hours and they tasted really good! I wasn’t sure how to long to cook the beans or how much water to use, so I searched the internet and found A Year of Slowcooking‘s recipe for cooking dried beans. What a great website! I’m drooling over a few of the recipes and have already determined to make apple butter this weekend if I can find a deal on apples.I also made homemade tortillas and rice. We really wanted to make enchiladas but the tortillas are too small for me to roll and then bake. Instead, we filled them with black beans and rice (plus sour cream for me) and then poured hot enchilada sauce over the top. We ended up eating them with a fork. If I can wean myself off the sour cream (or switch to vegan sour cream) and find a homemade enchilada sauce recipe, we’ll have ourselves a very healthy meal! Between the black beans, tortilla shells, and amish bread baked this morning, I had a very productive day in the kitchen! 

Work, work, and … cookies

Today has been all about work. I had intentions of getting my ironing caught up but ended up with five hours of contract work instead. Praise the Lord! I’m hoping for another great paycheck this month.

I baked peanut butter cookies this afternoon, though I’m not sure I want to recommend the recipe. I didn’t realize until I started mixing the ingredients just how fattening this particular recipe is! All that margarine, sugar, and peanut butter. I don’t even want to know the fat and calorie content of a single cookie. I haven’t tried the cookies yet; I’m waiting until hubby returns home from work before tasting them.

Speaking of cookies, this is the first recipe that I’ve managed to bake as many cookies as the recipe claims it yields. Usually, a recipe says it will bake 24 cookies but I’m lucky if I end up with 18. I guess I make each cookie too big, though it seems like they are normal sized. Oh well!

Vegan Pumpkin Pancakes

I found and adapted a great recipe for pumpkin pancakes. It’s almost the season for pumpkin but I was impatient and couldn’t wait until October.

Ingredients

2 cups flour
3 tablespoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups soy milk (will probably work with rice milk)
1 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
1/2 cup applesauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons vanilla

Directions

1. In a large bowl, mix the soy milk, pumpkin, applesauce, oil, and vanilla until smooth.

2. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, allspice, and salt.

3. Add the flour mixture to the pumpkin and stir well. Batter will be very thick; do not thin with additional milk.

4. Let the bowl sit for 5 minutes. Do not stir.

5. Spray a frying pan with olive oil and heat to medium low. Use almost 1/2 cup batter for each pancake. Spread batter on pan with a spoon, but don’t spread too thin.

6. Cook both sides until brown and serve.

Keeper recipe

I made the Vegan Soba and Mushroom Soup last night. It was really good! I was a little bit worried because there are only four ingredients but it was really tasty.

I’m going to need to play with the recipe a bit. The recipe didn’t specify how much noodles to include and I put in way too many. The dish ended up being pasta instead of soup. Next time, I’m going to decrease the noodles slightly, add an entire package of mushrooms instead of half, and use two cans of vegetable broth. The amount of tofu was fine. I also think it needed some green veggies, either spinach or broccoli.

We’ll be making this again!

Links

I want to share some great links I’ve been saving. My open tabs (67 of them!) are spiraling out of control and my browser is crawling. I tried to upload a picture of my crazy tabs but everything runs together in a giant blob.

The Ugly-Beautiful Story – I love this story. “Because, somewhere, underneath the grime of this broken world, everything has the radiant fingerprints of God on it. With Jesus eyes, we have the astonishing opportunity to daily love the unlovely into loveliness.” I want to love like Jesus does. I want to see the fingerprints of God on every human being. If I could learn to love like God does, if everyone could learn to truly love, this world would be beautiful.

Dark Waters – An encouraging post about persevering life’s trials.

Free mini-workouts – These mini workouts with Jillian Michaels are sure to be good. I probably shouldn’t be posting links to workouts I haven’t yet tried, but Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred DVD is fantastic.

66 All-Natural Cleaning Solutions – One of my goals this year is to switch over to natural cleaning. I despise the chemicals in commercial cleaning solutions. As we finish each of our current cleaning products, I’m going to switch over to more natural solutions.

Refried Beans recipe – I tested and discarded four recipes before finding this one. The beans were actually the consistency of refried beans, though they tasted a bit different that store bought (I actually like canned refried beans). Now that I have the consistency down, I need to find the right balance of spices to make them taste good!

Homemade tortillas

Back to the homemaking topics… 😉

Hubby and I have been on again, off again vegans for our entire marriage. One of these days, we’ll make a permanent change in either direction. Maybe. When we eat out, we tend to eat dairy. However, I prefer to cook vegan foods at home.

I found an awesome vegan blog. I’ve browsed through some of the recipes and found a few I’d like to try. The tortillas were a huge hit. It took me awhile to figure out how to make them round, but they are tasty!

Next on the list are the Vegan Patties. I have yet to try my own patties but these sound delicious.

When hubby or I get a job (whichever comes first), we’re going to be eating like kings. We’ve had such simple, cheap food for the past three months, we’re ready for some more complex (IE more expensive) dishes! I think our orange chicken style tofu recipe will be first on the list.

New pancake recipe

Seeing how we’re out of applesauce, I had to find a new pancake recipe for breakfast this morning. These are a far cry from healthy, but they turned out really fluffy and tasty. I wonder if part of the white flour could be substituted for wheat.

2 1/2 c. all purpose flour
2 T. sugar
2 T. baking powder
1 T. olive oil
1 t. salt
2 1/2 c. rice milk

Carefully mix all ingredients in a large bowl (batter should be lumpy); let rise for 10 minutes. Gently fold down and then let rise for another 10 minutes. Gently stir the batter one last time and then cook 1/2 cup batter on an oiled skillet at medium heat. Immediately after pouring the batter in the skillet, gently break apart any flour clumps.

I thought for sure that my pancakes would come out with flour chunks, but they didn’t. Yum!

Baking day

Today was all about baking. Well, mostly. I baked two loaves of Amish White Bread and one loaf of banana bread. I was going to make two loaves of banana bread, but then I realized that the recipe called for three bananas per loaf instead of two and I only had four total.

I really like my banana bread recipe. It’s very simple and pretty healthy in that it’s dairy free and low fat.

3 ripe bananas, mashed
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup white flour
1 cup wheat flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup walnuts (optional)
1/2 cup shredded coconut (optional)

Mix bananas and applesauce together. Fold in dry ingredients. Add walnuts and coconut. Bake in greased pan for 50 minutes at 350 degrees.

The only disappointment today was that I realized two of my bread pans are rusted. I had to throw them out. I’m not sure how safe rust is, but I really didn’t feel like eating it. During the week, I usually hand wash all of my dishes. But over the weekend, I let dirty dishes pile up and then ran the dishwasher. Now my bread pans are ruined.

Pizza!

I finally combined a great vegan pizza crust and sauce. I found a great pizza sauce recipe several months ago, but didn’t like any of the crust recipes I tried. Everything turned out flat, flat, flat. I wanted a thick crust.

This Thick Sicilian Crust Pizza Dough was perfect! It tastes good, rises great, and makes a big pizza. I could only eat two slices.

Combine that crust with the perfect sauce and we have a new favorite meal! The sauce is great because all the veggies are diced, sauteed, and then added into the tomato sauce. For some reason, I actually like this method better than creating a regular tomato sauce and adding sliced veggies as toppings.

Next, I’m going to test a few whole wheat pizza crust recipes and see if we can find something a bit healthier. I’m also looking for a vegan variation of this Spinach Pizza Crust.