Perfect recipe for an over-ripe pear

Sometimes, I’ll keep a pear or two out on my vegetable/fruit plate, pushing into it slightly with my finger to check for ripeness each day. Well, this time, I forgot about my precious pears for a few days, and when I noticed them again, they felt over-ripe. I put them in my fridge until I could figure out what to do with them.

I didn’t want a whole cake or pie, but something in a ramekin, individually-sized. Something like this: chocolate pear cakes.
Perfect.

Instead of butter, I used 3 tbsp of coconut oil, melted until liquid. I did use 2 tbsp brown sugar, but could have easily used agave nectar instead.

Instead of cow’s milk, I used oat milk. It also took 40 minutes to bake, instead of the 20 minutes that the original recipe called for. For the topping, I used a left-over mix of crumble topping that I had made a while ago, and figured this would be a good time to use some of it up. Served with vanilla ice cream, and you’ve got yourself a delicious dessert.

Herb roasted red potatoes

I love this time of the year. Some leaves are already changing colors and the temperature is just perfect when the sun is out. This is also the perfect time for going to the Tuesday market, where it is much less crowded than at the Saturday market, and the amount of fresh choices are terrific.

I picked up a good amount of concord grapes, as they are finally ripe and irresistible. These grapes are probably my favorite, and having them only once a year (this is only my second year ever having them!) makes them a special seasonal treat. I also picked up a few red potatoes, a bag of field greens, a new (to me) variety of apples, and the brightest red pepper I have ever seen.

It had been a while since the last time I roasted some herbed potatoes, and decided to make some for dinner earlier tonight.

I also cut up about a half a yellow onion into large chunks, adding olive oil, garlic powder, dill, parsley, oregano, salt, and pepper, mixing well to make sure the potato pieces were thoroughly coated.

I baked them for about 40 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees, and served them on a plate next to some locally-grown field greens with carrots, tomato, red onion, and tempeh, the latter which Cameron had prepared while I prepared the salad.

The onion chunks shrunk a fair amount and had a sweet taste after roasting them, so perhaps next time I’ll use a different variety of onion or just use onion powder. Nonetheless, everything was still quite delicious.

Peanut butter cookies, a table full of vegetables and stuffed squash

My favorite peanut butter cookie recipe! Dairy free and delicious. The only change I made was that I used agave nectar instead of maple syrup. They definitely go well with a glass of milk, but I have recently quit dairy (so hard to do!). I made these at around noon and they keep well for days.

Then at 4 I headed over to do some garden work for two hours in which I harvested these in return for my hard sweaty work:

There was more, but that was all that I could manage to fit in the bag I brought. I can’t figure out what kind of squash the really long and curvy one is at the bottom, but I’m sure it can be cooked like a zucchini. Anyway, I was so excited!! I haven’t harvested my own food since last summer, so it was nice to be able to do that again.

Mmmm.. just look at all those zucchinis! What am I going to do with them all? Well, I gave a few to my neighbor.. and will be shredding the very large ones to freeze for later to make zucchini muffins. One thing I would love to do is grill zucchinis, but of course, I do not own a grill. I’ll be on the lookout for someone that does though.

But tonight I couldn’t resist making stuffed squash

I cooked up a cup of israeli couscous and sauteed onions (with leftovers that didn’t fit into the squash), and added that to a mix of tomato, garlic, spices, and some of the innards of the sunburst squash.
I boiled the two squash for 5 minutes to soften them and scooped them out with a melon baller.
Cameron had added cheese to his squash (Oh… it was so hard to resist putting cheese on mine too) before I baked them at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. I served them on a bed of greens and home-sprouted mung beans.

It was my first time eating sunburst squash and israeli couscous, and it definitely won’t be my last.

Nutty butter balls

First of all, I am so tired of fruit flies in this house and I don’t know where their breeding ground is. I have set up two contraptions: 1) a glass bottle with strawberry tops, sealed with saran wrap with a few holes poked in and 2) a glass jar with apple cider vinegar and a few drops of dish soap with a funnel on top. Neither are working, though I forced two into the acv mix myself. I couldn’t even leave my leftovers out last night to cool before storing them without guarding them from those nasty drosophilas.

And man, oh man, it is HOT outside!!

But on to the good stuff.
Last night I made a delicious snack? Dessert? It’s hard for me to give them a name, as they are a mix of so many ingredients. This is an estimate of what I put in them.
1/4 c chopped walnuts
1/4 c chopped pecans
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tbsp cinnamon
in one bowl
1/3 c of raisins and goji berries
used a small blender to blend into an almost, but not quite, puree mixture, then added that into the bowl of nuts/spices
1/4 c almond butter
1/4 c peanut butter
1 tbsp honey
some raw shredded coconut
mixed well, and rolled into balls.
I chopped up a few raw cacao beans and rolled a few balls in the chopped cacao beans.

this made about 8 two-inch sized balls, that i stuck in the fridge to store. The process is really messy, but they are delicious and totally guilt-free. Plus, I have heard great things about raw cacao beans, so when I make these again, I will add some chopped pieces to the actual mix. These are also incredibly versatile, and ingredients can either be omitted or added, along with adjusting the amount of nut butter/honey to keep the mixture roll-able.

and, because I can’t get over how cute Lucy is:

It’s berry season!

Two weekends ago my mom came down to visit from around the Seattle area. We went to an organic u-pick blueberry farm. It was also the weekend of the country fair (which I decided to skip out on this year) so I had to figure out an alternative route to get to West Eugene.

When we got there, we saw so many cars parked on the side of the road, and I was worried it was going to be really crowded. But, it wasn’t too bad, though there were a lot of little kids running around. We both carried around provided buckets and filled them up in a couple of hours.

And apparently, you’re not supposed to wash them until you are about to eat them. I didn’t know that, and I washed about half of them to store in the fridge. Then I read that tidbit online, and stored the other half in the freezer, unwashed. Cameron and I will need to go picking again, as we’re almost out!

The other afternoon I made some blueberry bran muffins. I usually make blueberry muffins with whole wheat pastry flour, but wanted to try something different this time. I didn’t like the bran muffins nearly as much as I liked the other ones that I usually make. Oh well. the batch made 15 muffins, too much for us, so I’ll be giving some to my neighbor.

It’s also blackberry season! Himalayan blackberries are an invasive species around here, and they grow like crazy here, though mostly near water. Every day for the past week, I’ve gone out to pick some around my block. Spiders have begun to spin webs in front of some really ripe blackberries, so I have to be careful. Though the other day I was at school and felt something tickle my arm, so I looked down and a spider was climbing up a single strand of web attached to my arm…

Anyway, two days ago Cameron and I took a bike ride on a path with more blackberry bushes than you can imagine. We found a good spot and picked a nice amount, some of which we would make blackberry cobbler out of. There are a lot of fruits that are still green, or not fully ripe yet, but there are still plenty that are.

I’ve also noticed that black walnuts are coming along… but I’ve heard that they are nearly impossible to break open, but are well worth the task. There are plenty of walnut trees around Eugene, so I plan on collecting some in a few months.

fresh out of the oven… you can see the steam coming off of them.

recipe from here: baby bran muffins

Homemade croutons

I know… it’s been a while. 

But as I started chopping up an old loaf french bread (that has been sitting in the pantry, rock hard, for way too long), I thought about how I haven’t posted on here in quite some time, and decided to grab my camera and tripod. 

I melted some butter and tossed the “cubes”, adding some olive oil to make sure they were fully coated. I realized I only had one garlic clove, but chopped it up anyway and added it in. I added some onion powder (garlic powder would have been nice too, as the garlic pieces didn’t really stick on very well), pepper, and either thyme or oregano (no label).

baked it for 350F until they browned a bit, 10-15 minutes.

Kale chips, eclairs, knit hats and a cat

Throughout the past week I’ve cooked, baked, knitted, and visited my mom’s house where one of my cats takes up residence.

I made these about a week ago..
a little bit of apple cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper.
Really make sure to lay them flat or the entire piece won’t get crispy. They truly do melt in your mouth,
but don’t let them overbake.

Friday, March 20th was both my boyfriend and my birthday. I was at my mom’s for a few days and wanted to make him something special. He loves eclairs, and I have been meaning to make him one for a while now, so I decided it was no better time than for his birthday.
The first recipe I used was horrible. I kept stirring over the heat and the dough never dried out so I had to trash it. Then I used this recipe and it worked out well. It does take quite a while to get the dough to form one ball and separate.. actually, I’m not sure if it works, because I was too tired and still had to finish knitting something, so I didn’t want until it formed one ball. Maybe I should have though.. the dough was very dense.

The recipe said it would make about 10, but it only made 4 for me, but that’s probably because I made them pretty large. I actually forgot to set a timer so I had to use one of them as a tester.

10 seconds after I took them out of the oven, they deflated. The cream I made didn’t work out, it curdled.. So I used heavy whipping cream to just make a simple whipped cream since I had no time to try the thicker cream again.
I used 2oz bittersweet chocolate, melted it with a bit of butter and spread it on.

I also knit a squirrel for Cameron, since he thinks they are the cutest animals ever. I used a penguin pattern because I couldn’t find a free squirrel pattern that I liked. But of course I altered the penguin pattern to make it more squirrel-like, using the penguin pattern as more of a guideline. I was actually up until 2 a.m. two nights working on it. I didn’t have any black round beads at my mom’s, nor did I have time to knit on hands and feet but I’ll be doing that soon.

I finished another hat this weekend with some beautiful yarn called manos del uruguay, as well as knit some ears on an ear-flap hat made from alpaca (sooo soft!).

And an extra photo of my kitty at my mom’s.

Hamantaschens

So.. I’m not really into religion, but I do like having an excuse to make something new. Since today is Purim, and yesterday I went to a Pre-Purim festival because I was invited to hang up some of my photos, I decided to go along and bake something tonight.

I tried searching for an already-tried agave hamantaschen recipe, but the only ones I found were gluten free too. And although I’m all for gluten free, I didn’t have the right flour substitutes. So I used this recipe for the dough. I only used a third of each ingredient, replaced the sugar with agave, and lowered the oven temp 25 degrees. I melted the butter in the microwave for 20 seconds, and mixed it with the agave and egg before adding the dry ingredients. I came out with 8 hamantaschens about 3.5 inches in diameter, and one baby hamantaschen about 2 inches in diameter. 

I decided to use two fillings: poppy seed and Crofter’s Super Fruit Spread (Cam’s favorite with peanut butter sandwiches).
With the poppy seed filling, I halved the recipe and used 2% milk.

I used a pint glass to cut out the circles, but ended up flattening them even more with the palm of my hand… Apparently that wasn’t even flat enough (not for my likings anyway).

I couldn’t grind up the poppy seeds very much in the mortar and pestle, but it turned out fine without grinding.

Though it was a bit runny, and could have used something to thicken it up.


I put the dough in the fridge while I was making the poppy seed filling, and then put the filling in the fridge to cool down while I did some dishes. When I took everything out, the dough was a bit dry and stiff, so I wet my fingers with water while folding the sides… but the dough kept cracking. Luckily it wasn’t too hard to seal up.

I kept them in the oven for 10 minutes, turning the baking sheet around halfway through.

They came out nicely. Kind of cakey, and they reminded Cameron of breakfast scones. I think it’s hard to make anything crispy/crunchy with agave. I had made 3 with the Super Fruit jam filling and the rest with the poppy seed filling and still had some filling left over. Cam favored the jam hamantaschens, and even put some more on.

notes for next time:
use less milk in the poppy seed filling
if using heat with the poppy seed filling, do it before making the dough so it cools down when the dough is ready
roll out dough thinner
bigger variety of fillings

Butternut squash with browned butter and thyme + banana bread

so delicious and simple. (made this yesterday)

i had half a leftover butternut squash from making a casserole dish the other day (that did not come out that well.. it called for greek plain yogurt.. way too sour. uck). i’ve had this squash since september! ah, storage vegetable indeed.

today i made banana bread. adapted from: http://www.seasaltwithfood.com/2009/02/banana-bread.html

i used 3 large bananas, 1/2c butter, a little more than 1/2c agave instead of brown sugar, lowered the temp 25 degrees, and added walnuts

Baked yams and boiled bagels

I’ve never baked or cooked with yams, so I decided to give it a try. I used about 2/3 of a large yam. To get them ready for the oven, I put them in a bowl with sunflower oil, salt and pepper, making sure all the pieces were coated. Baked them at 375F for 40 minutes. After the first 20 minutes I spread them around flipped them order so all the sides would bake evenly.

They get cold quickly, so eat them within the first 10 minutes out of the oven.

Adapted from: http://smittenkitchen.com/2007/09/bronx-worthy-bagels/

I changed the recipe in the following ways: used whole wheat pastry flour instead of bread flour (couldn’t find any at the local grocery), added 1tbsp of wheat gluten per cup of pastry flour, halved the recipe, made them mini-bagels, and used an egg wash in order to get the toppings to stay on. Unfortunately, the onion pieces had a difficult time staying put on the bagel..

the next morning i boiled them for 1 min 30 sec on each side, and put them in the oven to bake for 10 minutes, halfway through i turned the baking sheet 180 deg. and lowered the temp 25 deg. They did not grow in size, like they should have.. and I assume that it’s from using pastry flour instead of bread flour. They’re still tasty though!