eruthros

For my own reference, or yours if you have a waffle maker, a great waffle recipe that is nutritious AND tasty:

( mmm waffle )

I had them with yogurt and raspberry sauce, made with frozen raspberries. Which I have leftovers of, clearly requiring me to purchase vanilla ice cream.

( raspberry sauce )

1. Whole wheat bread, toasted.
2. Brie, ripe. ¹
3. Heaping spoonfuls of Frog Hollow Farm's amazing nectarine conserve, which really is like eating nectarines out of a jar. ²

Layer brie and conserve on bread.
Eat.
Smile.

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This has been an excellent food weekend, actually, because yesterday I made an omlette that flipped just right, and the new coffee roast I picked out at my co-op because they were out of my usual turned out to be quite good for stovetop espresso. Also, Friday night, I made a ridiculous quantity of potato-leek soup and also some tofu-with-kale, both local and seasonal even out of the nearly-frozen ground here. So now I have dinner for a week! \o/

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1) Or, if you live in the Bay Area or have more disposable income than I do (the shipping is priiiicey), one of Cowgirl Creamery's aged soft cheeses. Mmm.
2) My sister bought me a Frog Hollow gift pack for Christmas. I have only eaten some of the nectarine conserve with a spoon. I'm declaring that a win. Anyway, I cannot use the word "amazing" enough for this conserve, which is lovely on vanilla ice cream and on bread and, clearly, on brie. YUM.

I shall coin a new saying: my eyes are bigger than my biceps.

Then I shall chant it to myself when I'm shopping on foot.

There's the trick where you only take a basket, but that doesn't really work; then you undershoot, because you can carry more on your back than dangling from one hand by two wire handles. And I was taking the bus, so I only had to walk two blocks at time on either end, so I could carry a lot more than if I was walking.

And yet! And yet. I nearly collapsed when I picked up my canvas bags after checkout.

It wasn't all my fault! I was shopping for heavy things to start with, like soy milk and chicken broth, and then the shop only had huge sizes of many things. Like, I only wanted a few carrots, but it was five pounds or nothing. Pah.

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Today, on Grossest Food Stuff Ever: this menu item from Google's cafeteria.

An awesome recipe for next fall: pumpkin pickles. From the excellent Syllabub: Words on Food blog.

Also, Chockylit's moved her cupcake blog and did a cupcake round up of about sixty cupcake recipes from readers. m_shell and I made some of her cupcakes with lemon curd once and got nothing but compliments; I doubt that all of the submitted recipes are quite that good, but down along the left-hand side of the page are links to her cupcakes by category. She's got a pomegranate grapefruit cupcake, and a thai iced tea cupcake, and a chocolate bread pudding cupcake with toasted walnuts, toffee, and cream: I'm gonna have to make some of those for a potluck soon. Mmmm.

This is a sparking hibiscus cooler "recipe" that I like to make to use up refrigerated remnants of hibiscus tea, though of course you can make the tea with the end goal of hibiscus cooler instead. The basic flavor is like unto the old Saturn Cafe hibiscus cooler (before they stopped doing agave sweetening, the bums).

1/2 cup dried hibiscus
4 cups water (approx. 1 L)
1 L sparking water
2 TB raw agave nectar (I get mine at my co-op; you can make it with honey if you can't find agave)
1-2 lemons (optional)

1. Bring the water to a boil. Put the dried hibiscus in an open container that will let the water move (like a pitcher or a teapot). Pour boiling water over the hibiscus and steep at least five minutes.

1a (optional). Strain and drink some tea hot, with honey; it's excellent for sore throats.

2. Strain remaining hibiscus tea. Chill.

3. Prepare hibiscus cooler: 1 part tea to 1 part sparkling water. If you didn't drink any, that's about 1 L of sparkling water to the 4 cups of tea. Add raw agave, a half tablespoon at a time, stirring continuously and tasting for sweetness. If you like your hibiscus cooler even tarter than that, squeeze in the juice of a lemon and decorate with lemon slices.

You may like your drinks sweeter than I do; if so, keep adding agave until you're happy with the balance.

Other things you can try: use sliced limes or oranges in addition to or instead of lemons, serve over crushed ice or blended with ice to make a hibiscus granitaish thing, or put sliced or pureed ginger in with the dry hibiscus when you're making the tea (it'll strain out with the hibiscus).

Hibiscus is tart, bright bright red, high in vitamin c, and excellent hot or cold for sore throats.

I went to the Farmer's Market today with three friends, and discovered a no-spray farmer selling half-bushels of tomatoes for $12. To recap: standard weight-per-bushel of tomatoes in the US is about fifty-four pounds. A half-bushel of tomatoes is about twenty-seven pounds. That means that I paid about forty-five cents per pound of tomatoes. Of course, now I have to roast them all for tomato sauce, but whatever. It'll be worth it.

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Is there anyone who can see a recipe on this page? I can't see it at all, due to some sort of bug, and I know it was excellent, and I want to cook it tomorrow: woe! If anyone can see a recipe, please copy it and email it to me or something? Or, hey, maybe it's in one of her cookbooks, too. But I don't have Moosewood or Enchanted Broccoli Forest here.

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Also, I was ridiculously and dorkily excited today, when I could answer a flister's question about an lj problem. Involving IE, which I haven't opened in months. Apparently I do remember the things I read on lj_releases. I was all "ooh! me! I know that!" Yes, I am a dork.