Helpful Kitchen Tip of the Day

Today, I'm thankful...

...that for whatever reason, magical or otherwise, running your fingers across a stainless steel surface under running water gets rid of garlic and onion smells.  


This is a trick I learned recently from another blog that I read.  I got my first "real" job when I was 16 at Little Caesars.  If only I had known that trick then.  Oh, the onions I sliced.  Hundreds of them.  Oh, the way my hands always smelled.  (Maybe that's why I always had difficulty hanging on to a boyfriend!)

November

Mini-Goal - Week

Major-Goal - Month

	Floss my Teeth	Meditation/Visualization Exercises
November 8	Done	Done – “Focusing & Performing your Best”
November 9	Done	Done – “Healing & Recovering Quickly”
November 10	Done	-
November 11	Done	-
November 12	Done	-
November 13	Done	Done – “Affirmations”
November  14	Done	Done – “Breathing”

It's the end of week 2 and November goals are sailing smoothly.  I missed a few meditation days, but I'm okay with that.  Since my new expectation is to complete the action more days than not, I'm still on target.  I'm very happy about flossing every day and feel like it's back in my routine as a daily habit.  (I had gotten out of the habit.)  Next week's mini-goal is to exercise every day.  That *definitely* needs to become a habit again.

French Toast Baked Tofu - Vegan MoFo Recipe #3

Today, I'm thankful for...

...French Toast Baked Tofu.  I got the recipe from Tina's Carrots 'n Cake blog and made it today.  If you want to see pretty pictures of all the steps, visit her blog.  Warning:  You need a *LOT* of prep time for this.  I had intended for this to be my breakfast, but it turned out to be lunch instead.  Guess I should read through the recipes first before deciding when to make them.  


The ingredients:

a package of extra firm tofu

a cup of vanilla soy milk

1-1/2 Tbsp. vanilla extract

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. ginger

1/8 tsp. nutmeg

1/4 cup brown sugar

1-1/2 cups shredded coconut (unsweetened)

(in lieu of the 3 spices...I used 1 tsp. pumpkin pie spice)

Press water from tofu for about an hour.  (HUH?  I had to google "press water from tofu for an hour" to figure out how to do this.  If you need to learn like I did, click here.  I used a 5-pound weight.)

Then, cut it into cubes and marinate in a mixture of soy milk, vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg for two hours.  Yep.  Two hours.

When half your day is gone and the tofu is done marinating, preheat the oven to 375 degrees, spoon the cubes out with a slotted spoon and put in a bowl with the coconut and brown sugar.  Toss to coat.  Bake for 15 minutes, then stir, and bake for 15 minutes more.

After it cooled off a bit, I ate it as is.  It was super yummy - the perfect amount of sweetness and the tofu cubes actually did resemble bread a bit.  You could dress it up a little with maple syrup or fruit toppings or something else yummy.

If you make it, I hope you like it.  Let me know...

Cuckoo for Cookbooks

A couple of days ago, I talked about writing prompts and how we used them in the creative writing workshop I took at Squam.  For one of the exercises, Lizzy, our instructor gave us a minute to think of a common object in our homes and then gave us about 20 minutes to write about it.  The rules were 1) don't think about what you're writing, just write whatever comes to your mind, and 2) don't censor yourself.

Here's what I came up with:

My cookbooks sit on a shelf arranged in no particular order.  Various sorts of tags stick out from the tops and sides of the pages all down the row.  Each style of tag represents a separate session of combing through each book and selecting the group of recipes that I'd try next.

Some are yellow post-it notes.  Some are long, thin strips of paper that I tore off from a scrap sheet of paper.  And some are plastic strips with arrows pointing to the marked sections.

All these recipes, none ever made.  The organizing is the easy part, the follow-through requires more effort.

My mom's dinner rotation consisted of Shepherd's Pie, Tacos, Curry, Chili, Spaghetti, repeat.  My dad bought cookbooks for her to encourage her to mix it up a bit.  The bindings stayed in tact.  The only time they were opened was when my dad threw them in a fit of rage, weary of eating the same five meals over and over.  Cookbooks lay splayed across the floor displaying exotic dishes we'd never taste.

I have a collection of Asian cookbooks bought during the time I discovered Asian food.  When I was a vegetarian for a year and a half, I bought a copy of every vegetarian cookbook I could find.  My years at Weight Watchers produced a growth in the diet cookbook section.

I have a few of my mother's old cookbooks, too, but I haven't made anything out of them.  Although I do frequently refer to mom's Betty Crocker cookbook to remind myself how many minutes it takes to hard boil an egg.  For some reason, I can never remember.

I learned three things from this exercise and the workshop in general:

1)  Free writing, when you don't censor yourself and you write down whatever comes to mind, even if you don't want to, is a really, really good way to figure out why you do the things you do.

2)  I constantly think about food!

3)  I constantly think about food!!  (Did I mention before, I took a sewing workshop here as well and made.... an apron.)

I had lunch today with my good friends Linda and Jan.  Linda did use one of her recipes and made fabulous Black Bean Burgers with Mango Salsa and Sweet Potato Fries.  Dessert was Sugar-Free Ice Cream with fruit toppings and some sugary things of which I did not partake.  (But to be completely honest so that I can sleep tonight... she had some trail mix out, I took some, and when I saw the mini chocolate pieces in it, rather than moving them aside, I ate them.  So...technically, I had sugar today.  But psychologically, I haven't.  Does that make sense?  I don't feel guilty about it or feel like I failed.)

Linda and Jan.  True Blue Friends.  I'm grateful for our lunches together.

(Naturally) Sweet Dreams!