Breaksert

May 20, 2009February 6, 201524 Comments

Inspired by Hangry Heather, I decided to try my hand at a breakfast sundae this morning.

For the “cone” I put together an overnight breakfast cookie mix of 1/4 cup extra thick rolled oats, 1 tbsp ground flax, 1 tbsp hulled hemp seeds, 1 tbsp goji berries, 1/4 mashed banana, and 1 tbsp Artisana cacao bliss. Rather than flattening the cookie on a plate, I pressed it into a ramekin to make a bowl shape and left it in the fridge overnight. This morning, I popped the cone, ramekin and all, into the freezer because I wanted to be able to extract the cone from the ramekin intact.

For the “ice cream,” I mixed 1/2 cup yogurt with 1 tbsp lucuma powder, 1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder, 1 tsp honey, 1/4 mashed banana, dash vanilla, and a few peanut pieces. That went into the freezer for the 20-stir-20-stir method.

After extracting the cone from its ramekin, I filled it with the ice cream and decorated with berries, cinnamon, more peanuts, coconut, and a plummy gummy 🙂

This was so so fun to eat and a lovely post-gym treat (with my yerba mate on the side, mmm)!

This afternoon, I’m off to a work event. We’re having a “mission retreat” from 12-5, and even though I’m on vacation, it seems like an important thing to attend!

How do you feel about dessert for breakfast?

You’ll never believe it

May 17, 2009February 6, 201515 Comments

I did not get hungry until 7:30 tonight!

Granted, I ate way too much at the party last night (at least an extra day’s worth of food, in my opinion), but I’m so impressed that my appetite also got that message, especially considering the workout I had this morning!

After the gym, I pretty much lazed around all day (have to take advantage while I have the chance) and contented myself with soymilked and honeyed yerba mate:

My dinner (and only meal of the day) consisted of brilliantly crispy roasted brussels sprouts, the rest of my tuna humbangu, and 1/8 chopped avocado:

(It tasted yummy even though it looks sort of swampy …)

See the crisp?

Dessert was a slice of healthy cheesecake, blackberries, and my last UliMana treat: a dark cacao raw truffle.

As usual with UliMana, this truffle was super rich and dark and bittersweet, and I just love that it manages to taste this way while simultaneously being packed with excellent nutrition. Here’s the inside:

Since this is a food-light post, I might as well take the opportunity to show you a couple more UliMana goodies that I realized I forget to blog about when I was mired in papers. Obviously, they were exponentially delicious. I’ll let the pictures do the talking 🙂

Hand-dipped chocolate date roll:

Lemon fig pecan bar (my favorite!):

The whole UliMana family:

Siiiigh, I wish I had more!

Was today food-light or food-heavy for you?

Do it myself?

May 16, 2009February 6, 201519 Comments

Lunch was going to be so easy to talk about … until I got carried away! I had both tahini and chickpeas on hand, and since I already made hummus yesterday, falafel was clearly in order for today!

I loosely used this recipe but of course changed almost everything. I soaked 1/4 cup dry chickpeas in two inches of water overnight. This morning, I drained the chickpeas and then immersion-blended them with the rest of the recipe ingredients. I was making a much smaller batch than what was in the recipe, so I eyeballed/tasted the measurements for everything else. I think I ended up using an overly high ratio of wet things to the chickpeas, so my batter was too wet. I soaked up the extra moisture with about 1/4 cup coarse blue cornmeal:

The resulting mix was still a bit wet, but significantly stickier.

Instead of frying, I decided to bake. I heated the oven to 350 and lined a cookie sheet with parchment. I divided the batter into six balls.

After about 20 minutes in the oven, the balls had flattened somewhat as I had expected they would due to the wet batter.

I let them cool enough to handle and then reformed them into balls, flipped them, and popped them in the oven for another 15 minutes.

And then, for extra measure, I put the falafel under the broiler (minus the parchment paper) for 5 minutes to get them sufficiently crisped.

For the tahini dressing, I mixed the rest of the baby Artisana jar of tahini (about 2 tsp) with 2 tbsp plain yogurt and sprinkles of coriander, cumin, cayenne, and garlic salt & pepper.

I had three of the falafel balls for lunch on a big bed of arugula and topped it with half of the tahini (I’m saving the other half for the other three balls).

They were perfectly crunchy (thanks to the cornmeal) and crisp on the outside and moist on the inside:

It was no Mamoun’s, of course, but it was close!

On the side, I had a mini arugula salad with a couple tbsp tuna humbangu (I was craving that as well) with a dollop of roasted red pepper hummus for color:

Together:

I needed chocolate after this meal, so I went for the other half of my UliMana raw hemp brownie from last night:

I don’t even think brownie is the right word for this. It’s like a solid, perfect, grainy block of dark dark chocolate fudge. Ahhhh. I need to do more research into raw “cooking” and find out how to make this for myself!

I had a few more snacks throughout the afternoon. The rest of my Newman’s spelt pretzels (about 3/4 serving) with 2 more tbsp hummus:

Yerba mate and a plummy gummy:

A raw macaroon:

A hard-boiled egg with pepper:

And a mug of soymilky Numi Emperor’s Puerh tea. Following the instructions on the bag, I brought “regal waters” to a boil and steeped for 3-5 minutes “to capture the full taste of this majestic tea.” Numi describes this black tea as bold and malty, and I certainly needed both of those this evening! I’m still dragging from my restless doggy night last night, and I’m heading out to a birthday party in a few — my goal is to last longer than an hour there. Hopefully, the tea helps. So far, it just tastes like regular black tea. Word is that the party will have food, too, so that’s why I kept my evening eating to a minimum.

What do you want to learn to make for yourself?

Ruuuuuude

May 16, 2009May 21, 201718 Comments

This morning’s breakfast was a powerful breakfast cookie full of all sorts of things to make me healthy and alert.

In the overnight mix: 1/4 cup BRM extra thick rolled oats, 1 tbsp ground flax, the last tbsp (sad) of pineapple-coconut-ginger peanut butter, 1 tbsp goji berries, and 1/3 mashed banana.

In the frosting: 2 tbsp plain yogurt, 1 tsp lucuma power, and 1 tsp Artisana Cacao Bliss.

And on top: small handful blackerries, 1 chopped plummy gummy from my sister’s birthday package, a few more goji berries, and a sprinkle of nutmeg.

This cookie reminded me of the beach — I think it was the goji starfish, the icing sand, and the plate ocean.

And on the side, I had a tall glass of yerba mate.

Breakfast was delicious, and I really needed the power boost since I slept horrendously last night. From about 1:30 to 2:00 in the morning, there were dogs howling sooooo loud outside my bedroom window. I live in Brooklyn (not the wilderness), and this is ridiculous! My bedroom window faces a backyard area that houses the yards of a whole block of apartment buildings, so it’s impossible to know where the noise was coming from, especially in the dark. I almost called the police to make a noise complaint! Not only was it keeping me awake, but it was painful to listen to because one dog was howling/screaming in this hyperventilating, panicked, scared-out-of-its-mind way — it kind of sounded human!

I can’t believe that the owners would just leave him outside and ignore that sad sad pleading … especially in the middle of the night when there are at least 100 people trying to sleep within a 10-foot radius! Again, this is Brooklyn and not a mountain town where no one has neighbors. I closed my window, and it didn’t help at all. The dog moaning eventually stopped, but it kept coming back here and there throughout the rest of the night. And the birds woke me up at 7am! Where the heck am I? Arkansas? I need to get new ear plugs!

Anyway, I think I’m about to go take a nap!

What wakes you in the middle of the night?

Humbangu

May 15, 2009February 6, 201517 Comments

Hummmmmm, what does that title mean?

Wellll, I’ve been wanting to try Bender’s humbecue sauce forEVER, and today seemed as good a time as any! Except, I didn’t have any hummus. What I did have, however, was a serving of collard greens and BBQ baked beans in the freezer from ages ago.

I also had a serving of cauliflower-mangu left, and that’s kind of the texture of hummus, right?

I had initally planned to immersion-blend everything, greens and all … but then one of the greens jumped into my mouth and tasted so good that the rest followed. So, I just blended the BBQ beans and the mangu.

Next, I broke out some fancy tuna in olive oil.

I’ve been noticing this Cole’s brand of tuna (and other fishies) in some gourmet grocery stores lately because the packaging is so pretty. I recently starting liking canned tuna, and I only discovered this from being fed foods that contained it. So I don’t think I’ve ever actually opened a can of tuna myself. Until today.

I was so impressed with the quality of the tuna in this can! It wasn’t mushy at all and was so tightly packed that it flaked apart almost like a piece of tuna steak:

Very promising. I dumped the can of tuna (minus the olive oil, which I drained into a baby Artisana jar for another time because tuna-infused olive oil might come in handy at some point!) into the humbangu sauce:

Since I combined three meals to make this tuna humbangu, I incorporated 1/3 of the total mix into my lunch. Here’s my finished salad on a bed of arugula with the mangu’s hammy bits, some blackberries, the last of the tostones, and a teeny dollop of plain yogurt for presentation’s sake:

It was so so so so tasty!

Eventually, I made my way to the gym for some bicycling (no running!) and arms. When I got home, I decided that I needed to remedy the no-hummus situation. I cooked a bunch of chickpeas from dry and combined about 1/2 cup of them with a piece of roasted red pepper, Italian seasoning, a whole garlic clove, coarse sea salt, and 1/2 a baby jar of Artisana tahini.

After immersion-blending, I fork-mashed another 1/2 cup of chickpeas to mix in because I like it a little bit rough:

To fuel myself through the ever-so-grueling hummus work, I pulled out the rest of the yerba mate that I brewed this morning and left in the fridge. It had gotten even greener!!

Does anyone know how that happened?? You can see how white it was when hot in the previous post, and making it cold completely converted it to this vivid sea foam color. I love it.

I also had the last 1/4 cup of chickpeas that didn’t fit in the hummus:

Anyway, I got around to dinner eventually and mixed about 2 tbsp of my fresh roasted red pepper hummus with a chopped hard-boiled egg (once again, thanks to Eggland’s best for doing the boiling and peeling for me!). I had my egg salad atop a bed of arugula (lots of mushy arugula salads today, right?) with 1/8 chopped avocado, sprinkles of paprika and black pepper, and a few crushed Newman’s spelt pretzels:

For dessert, I had a slice of healthy cheesecake alongside half an Ulimana raw chocolate hemp brownie and 1 tsp pineapple-coconut-ginger peanut butter.

Yes yes yes, absolutely holy-yum worthy! I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Ulimana definitely knows its way around a raw dessert … or any dessert for that matter!

Do you do anything wild with hummus?

Tales of Expansion: Baby Butternut Edition

A Natural(ish) Parenting & Food Blog

Tag: tea

Breaksert

You’ll never believe it

Do it myself?

Ruuuuuude

Humbangu

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