Study Schmuddy

Y'all...I am so done with school. Stretched deadlines, stressed profs, my brain straight up going "NOPE" every Saturday morning in response to my waking up in a panic and shortly realizing "hey, it's Saturday! I don't need to wear pants or go to into the clinic...but I can study?"

Here is a stunningly metaphorical NOPE in picture form. 

my clinic biddy Emily fetching me lemon tea from Starbucks to soothe my cough.

Matt's mom makes these crispy, savory pancakes with walnuts.  they are sumptous without any toppings, just hot off the pan.

I had a weak moment and bought coke from a vending machine. I showed my classmates. they snapped photos.

breakfasts with this guy (NOTE THE GEM ON THE LEFT)

my classmates communicate in pictures. 

THOSE HERBS I GREW THEM

Matt asked me to buy lime basil but barely uses it. I chopped some and froze in olive oil

Culver's, a midwestern delicacy 

fried cheese balls? with ranch dipping sauce?

gluten free, but made the mistake of not reading what the pasta was made of: LENTIL FLOUR. Poops--I mean--oops. 

homemade cashew milk getting turned into a homemade frappucino!

Surprise dinner of steak and onions

A grocery store opened up about 5 blocks from the clinic and has a pretty decent salad bar 

found at Miami airport: guava and sweet cheese pie. SO FRAGRANT. 

Grandma with my welcome home meal--that lady, I tell you.

Mom and I at the oyster bar at JTM. Pricey to sit and eat, and the oysters were just ok.

But...I may try it just one more time... 

picking vine leaves for stuffing!

At a family-favorite Italian restaurant, Tre Marie 

crème brulée bread pudding, at a restaurant nearby. Just say no to that fusion shit.

broccoli "breadcrumbs" in meatballs. yes, thank you, I'm a genius.

Sunday

Sundays have got to be my favorite day of the week. They represent relaxation and peace, good meals and family time, its the day where I just take the time to live.

When I was growing up, Sundays were always reserved for family supper, my mom would be making food all day, sometimes a roast or grilled fish with about 10 million sides and a couple dessert to boot. We were very poor when I was very young, before 10-11. I remember sitting around mashed potatoes, and plain macaroni with some carrots, and my mother would act like it was a feast. And it was, because of the time we spent together. As we got older, that's when the roasts and the abundance of food made appearances, and those suppers are memories and life lessons that I cherish. We still meet once every two weeks for a delicious supper between us. Its a beautiful tradition that I am grateful for. It taught me to sit down, eat slowly, and enjoy the people you are with.

This past Sunday, Jeff and I made breakfast for Cecile, Jeff's father in law's mother. Shes like a grandmother to us, in fact, more of a grandmother than Jeff's blood relatives. She also happens to be living downstairs from us. Side note: Ive loved the experience of living in the same house as her, we pass leftovers back and forth, she's teaching me to make a few of her dishes and vice versa. It was her birthday last Friday, and the supper that was made for her by the rest of Jeff's family was a disaster, extremely awkward and frankly, an awful, purposely cruel mess. Relations are very strained between them and us/Cecile right now, so we chose not to take part of the supper, and do our own thing. Thank goodness for that choice because I dont know how I would have reacted had I been downstairs to witness what was done and said to her. Long story short, it became extremyl important to me, to give Cecile a pleasant experience where she could look back and remember something positive. So we chose breakfast.

It was very simple. Jeff made his famous pancakes, we made some bacon and a bowl of hard boiled eggs. A large plate of fresh fruit and everything you could possibly want on pancakes. A simple tablecloth, potted flowers and candles were the tables decorations, along with very simple name tags I quickly made the night before. She had never been to a pyjama party, so we were all in our pjs. \ Just simple food and simple beauty, but it was what she needed to receive and what I needed to give. We chatted for a good two hours or so, and then it was done. When she went back downstairs, she hugged us hard and told me no one had ever done this for her before. Something so simple. People dont need things, they need moments.

summer lovin

I made jerky with some leftover ham last month. And it's still good!

I also have been making some simple fizzy drinks. I still have this one, which had plums, and grapefruit as a secondary fermentation flavourer. I wonder if that's still good...

I eat eggs almost every morning. So over the guilt.

Sam made us her traditional seafood BBQ as a goodbye a couple of weeks ago... sniff, sniff.

Some soup.

My first zucchini harvest!! Last year the squirrels ate all my cucumbers and pumpkin babies. This year I have been using human hair to deter them. Whenever I comb by hair out after a shower, I usually put the loose hairs in the sink, then trash or compost them. So I've been taking them outside and tucking them into the garden. Seems to be working!

cookie contemplation

noms. (GF cookies are one of the easiest transitions to make in baking, in my experience. This is an old, well-beloved recipe for us. It requires no modification other than switching wheat flour for rice flour 1:1. And this batch turned out PERFECT. Do not overbake is the golden rule of GF cookies.)

a dish of shredded cabbage, quinoa, tomatoes and their juice, cheese, and herbs.

I'm reading this amazing wonderful book, Salad for Dinner, from the library. It's gorgeous and educational and inspiring. I highly recommend it.

another spread

he likes using knives.

it makes the food taste better when he does it himself, you see.

Soaked

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Ive been really hanging back on the whole soaked flour thing. Mainly because the idea of leaving flour mixed with buttermilk on a counter overnight at room temp, and then cooking it the next morning kind of creeps me out a bit. It hard to put aside lifelong ideas about the way a certain product should be used (i.e. you do not leave milk on the counter overnight and then eat it). Yes I read about it, yes I understand everything, that doesnt make the instinct go away. Just like how, for the life of me, I just cant do frog legs. I dont care if it tastes like chicken, Im sure it does, I just dont want to eat frogs.

Anyways, I decided to grab the bull by the horns and make a damn woman out of myself, and try this shizzle out. I followed this recipe to the T, which I never do, but I didnt want to play around with things I wasnt sure of myself. I made the buttermilk with vinegar and milk. I set it on the counter and went to bed, and I literally prayed that I wouldnt poison myself out of foolishness.

Next morning, Im taking my sweet ass time to delay going to look at the bowl full of counter-pancake mixture. I finally got the courage to edge my way, took a deep breath, prayed once more that I wouldnt see a bug infested, lumpy soured milk thing that would smell 'comme le yawb' as we say in real good quebecois. Looked down and saw this:

Ok, no bugs, no weird colored growth, and when I smelled it, it didnt smell off. Very surprising, and reassuring. Time to see if these babies can actually be cooked:

Nce and bubbly, like real pancakes. This was going pretty good, nothing jumped at me from the mixture so far, so I was gaining confidence. What I didnt realize was that regular pancakes seemed to have a much shorter cooking time than soaked pancakes, so right off the bat I got either really burnt pancakes, or thick, still uncooked inside pancakes.

Sad burnt pancake face. So after readjusting my pouring sizes, after a few scrap batches of trial and error, I finally got these beautifully cooked pancakes which I immediately stacked and poured a goodly amount of our provincial treasure aka maple syrup. Time to try these babies out! Well, end result is, they tasted pretty much the same as the regular ww pancakes. The difference was how my belly felt after eating them. I think they were noticeably easier to digest, and I didnt feel bloated like I sometimes do when I eat pancakes. Of course, like a dodo head, I forgot to take a picture of the end result. Just imagine a delicious stack of pancakes. Totally sold.

Oh hi picture uploader!

These are the donuts. Ugh, they were as awesome as they look. Totally crumbly and stuff. The boys ate them within reason. Only sharing because Sam is making me (geeky face).

Carob millet milk popsicles... they weren't that good actually. Ah well. I am really enjoying a new flavour, not included in the post - beet, pineapple and banana! First you get the tropical banana-pineapple explosion, which then fades and allows the beet in. I mostly used beet because I had raw beet puree for cake icing (see below) and it's just so colourful, I thought it would look nice in popsicles. Ambrose doesn't love these ones to be honest, but I very honestly do, and before we started getting a produce basket, with beets I had to figure out how to eat, I really wasn't a beet person. I genuinely like them now. Yum!

Red kale is so gorgeous. Really all kale is gorgeous. Kale is probably my favourite vegetable. Or maybe collards.

Whipping the cream cheese frosting (as per this recipe, but with a tablespoon of raw beet puree and some butter because I added too much maple and it got too thin - you DO NOT taste the beets at all! For more info on why it has to be raw beets, this post about the chemistry of beets is very informative.)

I actually also played with the cake recipe, adding a full cup of butter, if I recall correctly. I think they rose too much actually, so I am going to tweak it a little more before I publish an updated version on that (notice the steam cracks in the top)

Ambrose was a big fan. Making the icing pink makes the cake 100% more delicious :)

I've been trying to sprout beans regularly before cooking, for Tony's tummy. That is pretty simple and low-effort. However, I then skin them as much as I can, which is more time-consuming, as apparently it's the skins that have a lot of the indigestble bits (I read that in A Taste of Lebanon, not 100% sure how true it is but it makes enough sense that I'm trying it out.)

Look at all those skins in the sink!

I bought chicken feet to make stock with. Ewww, kind of! You have to cut off the nails. Ahh! They add lots of collagen or whatever.

Tony is trying GF now too, so I made him two pans of breakfast casseroles, which yielded 8 portions each. The total count was 24 eggs, about 1 lb cheddar, 5-6 medium potatoes, cooked, about 4 tomatoes and 3 spring onions, lightly cooked, and some fresh basil, and salt & pepper. I froze the portions all individually.

I've been working on opting for veganish choices if using cruelty-free animal products isn't feasible for a particular recipe, so I made coconut ice cream - two bars like this (1.45 each), 800 mL water, 1 c sugar, 1 vanilla bean, sliced, one pinch of salt, and I also added 1 tbsp dried mint - it wasn't quite enough to taste. Anyways it was nice, cooked and processed, though dry coconut bars have meat and I didn't strain, so there's definitely that flaky coconut texture. Still delicous.

Cabbage is so beautiful. ... making pork & cabbage rolls for company last week.