Friday, March 11, 2011

Recent Kitchen Projects!

I've been trying some new recipes and projects around here recently:

I've been wanting to try homemade bagels for quite some time, and several weeks ago I finally got around to trying it! I tried the recipe from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. They were really quite simple and turned out delicious! I've made them several times since, although I now make them with half whole wheat flour, to make them healthier. I usually make half of them with cinnamon and raisins, which are especially good!

I enjoy making fruit & yogurt smoothies for part of an easy breakfast or lunch, and the other day we decided to try making them with spinach for extra nutrition. I was a little leary of how good they would be, but was pleasantly surprised when we couldn't taste the spinach! This is a great way to get an extra serving of veggies, even for breakfast!

Seth was out recently and he had a delicious smoothie that was made with almond milk, and he thought that we should try making our own almond milk to add to smoothies. We tried this recipe, which was really easy. I didn't have dates or plain agave, so I used two tablespoons of the Maple/Agave syrup blend I had (I used less since it's fairly sweet). It tasted pretty good, although it seemed slightly watery. Some recipes we saw said to use three cups of water instead of four, so if I were making it to drink plain, I would probably try that. It has worked really well for the smoothies we've made and adds a nice flavor. I'm hoping to add the almond meal that was left over to some cookies or something, just so it doesn't go to waste!


Not a very exciting project, but one that will come in pretty handy is my bags of chopped onions that I put in the freezer. So many recipes I make call for chopped onion, so having lots of onion already chopped up for me to just grab and dump in will help simplify meal making for me!


And last but not least, my homemade vanilla has been sitting for about a month now, with five more to go. I'm excited to see how it turns out!

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