our neighborhood

Our neighborhood is pretty great. This past Sunday, while Chris was running, I walked around the corner to our local tea shop & vegan cafe to read a bit while sipping on an iced organic peach white tea.

 
On my two-minute walk back, I spotted the flower market and decided to get myself a pretty bouquet for our apartment. The sun was shining, the breeze was unseasonably warm and it was just enough to shake me out of my winter blues for the day.

Later on, we opted against creating a bunch of dirty dishes for ourselves and made the familiar trek to one of our most favorite restaurants, the Mexican joint just a few blocks away. We feasted and, on the walk home, wondered how many times we had made that exact trip. How many times we had walked through our neighborhood with bellies full of enchiladas and tortilla chips. We calculated... many times.

Whenever we move out of this 'hood, I'll surely miss it like crazy. 

On the other hand, it will be nice to not start every morning in a panic because I've forgotten where I parked my car last night. Really, every morning I stand on my stoop and feverishly try to remember where I parked that thing. A driveway would be a really good thing for someone like me. Less room in which to lose a car.

Updated: A few more photos of our 'hood here.

carrot & raisin whole grain muffins

Wander on over to the Potluck blog for a Carrot & Raisin Whole Grain Muffin recipe, adapted from a rad Good Housekeeping cookbook. I changed around some proportions and steps and added in a bit of ground flaxseed and some chopped walnuts. Get the recipe here.

cheese-free mac & cheese?

I tried my hand at a vegan mac & cheese recipe a little while ago. That's right, a cheese-free mac & cheese. We're still eating dairy, big time, but we no longer regularly buy cow's milk or even cream for our coffee. We do, however, eat a bit of cheese. And yogurt. And we eat eggs. So I've been experimenting with using a bit less cheese in my diet-- having completely dairy-free meals and also just scaling back in certain recipes. I found this recipe in a Whole Living daily challenge email and was curious.

I've found plenty of promising dairy-free mac & cheese recipes. What I liked about this particular recipe was that it didn't call for Daiya soy cheese. I should admit that I've only tried Daiya once, but I found it woefully lacking in all areas. The recipe I followed used cashews for creaminess and nutritional yeast and tahini for flavor. I also added in a bit of mustard and paprika to spice it up.

The verdict? Pretty damn good. It's not going to fool anyone into believing that it is real mac & cheese, but I found it to be a nice creamy, thick, comfort food substitute. The tahini and lemon juice give it a tangy bite, the cashews impart a perfect creaminess and the nutritional yeast adds in its nutty, almost-cheesy flavor. (Not familiar nutritional yeast? Learn more about it in the inaugural episode of the From Scratch Club podcast! Subscribe via iTunes here.)

Cheese-less mac & cheese. It's possible. It's not that bad. It's a fine vegan comfort food. It certainly doesn't taste like your mama's delicious homemade mac & cheese casserole, but it will do in a dairy-free pinch. Non-vegans... don't burn me at the stake for attempting a cheese-free mac & cheese recipe. Vegans or dairy-free folks, send me your tips! (I should note that last night, we made a very cheesy lasagna and, together, ate almost half of it in one sitting. Sigh.)

the podcast!

I am giddy to announce the first episode of the FROM SCRATCH CLUB PODCAST! Eek! What?! Woot woot! We've had this little secret project in the works for awhile now and today, on Leap Day, we are proud to release Episode 01: New Beginnings.

Head over to this post to listen to our very first episode and to get the link to our new podcast blog. We are waiting for approval from iTunes and once we have that, you'll be able to subscribe to the podcast right in iTunes and sync it to your iPod!

Update: The podcast is on iTunes! Check it out here.

Happy listening :)

drink vermont

We are on a mission. A mission to visit as many of the fine Vermont breweries as we can. We've already hit quite a few, but now we have our Vermont Brewery Challenge Passports, ready to be stamped at brewing establishments throughout the Green Mountain State. Last week we both had a day off so we decided to tool around Southern VT, making stops in Bennington and Brattleboro to visit the Madison Brewing Company and McNeill's Brewery, respectively.
 

Fun! Delicious! We also got to stop in at Bennington Potters, so it was an awesome day. At Madison's, I tried the Buck's Honey Wheat- "An American Wheat Beer brewed with real Vermont honey,"- and Chris ordered the Crowtown Pale Ale- "Dry hopped with a load of Cascade hops grown in the Pacific Northwest. Amber-Copper in color with a pleasant malt flavor." At McNeill's, I tried the Champ Ale: "A West Coast style pale ale that is somewhat citrusy with notes of concord grapes both in the flavor and the nose. Made from a blend of British and domestic malts, it has a light red or pale rose color and very high drinkability." Chris opted for the Professor Brewhead's Brown Ale at McNeill's: "This beer goes back to the American style. A full brown color, it is made from domestic and German malt, with some spicy citrus notes and a touch of chocolate."

We snacked all along the way and grabbed a wood-fired pizza and coffees before heading back. By this point the gray, gloomy weather had already turned to pouring rain and then to an incredibly unpleasant snow/freezing rain mix. So that was a fun drive home on the winding VT roads. Once safely home, I put on my pjs and promptly started catching up on the few episodes I'd missed of Downton Abbey. Like the rest of the world, I'm completely obsessed. 

water kefir: another fizzy, fermented drink

Make room for one more jar of mystery blobs and a few more bottles of fizzing, fermented-but-sweet beverages to the fridge: I've now started making my own water kefir. I received water kefir grains (which aren't really grains, but another form of SCOBY or symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) from a food swap and was so pumped for another new-to-me, weird kitchen experiment. The grains are a strange, gelatinous substance, but I think they are less gross than a kombucha scoby.

I researched a gazillion methods for brewing water kefir, and then I cobbled them all together on my frist batch to make one bad-tasting beverage. I let it ferment for way too long, put way too many different fruits in it and basically ended up with a vinegary, raisin-y flat drink. I poured it down the drain and started anew, this time making simplicity the theme.

In a quart-sized mason jar, I added 1/4 cup organic white sugar and filled the jar up almost to the top with cool, filtered water. Every water kefir recipe is different-- some swear that you absolutely should not use chlorinated tap water, some argue that using carbon-filtered water (like from a Brita) depletes the minerals and renders the water less-than-satisfactory. Maybe just leave a bowl of tap water out for a bit to aerate out the chlorine. I don't know. I used filtered water from our new Bobble jug. With the lid on, I shook the jar around until the sugar was dissolved. Then I plopped in my water kefir grains, secured a coffee filter on the top with a rubber band and tucked it away in a semi-dark spot on a shelf.

Two days later, I had a finished batch of plain water kefir. Technically, it was ready to drink but I don't care much for the plain water kefir. I strained out the kefir grains with a fine mesh strainer and put them in the fridge in a sugar water solution to keep them alive. I could have just immediately started a new batch, but I was skeptical about how this one would turn out so I put the whole process on hold. In the future, I'll be taking the grains out of the finished batch and immediately starting a new batch, so that I'll have a continuous supply. Over time, the grains will multiply so you can give some to a friend or bring them to a swap!

For extra flavor and bubbles, I poured the kefir into a glass bottle with an airtight lid (same as what I store my kombucha in; see top photo) and added about a cup of organic cranberry-blueberry juice to it. I let it sit on the counter another day for its second fermentation. Even without the grains, there are a bunch of probiotics and weird things that will continue to ferment and feed off the sugars in the fruit juice, producing a really nice amount of carbonation. At this point you could also add dried or fresh fruit to it instead of fruit juice. Et voila! Cranberry-blueberry water kefir. Fizzy, sweet & a bit less weird-tasting than kombucha. Move it to the fridge, where it will continue to carbonate in its airtight bottle.

Don't think that I've given up the kombucha though! There's a gallon-sized jar sitting on the floor right next to our stereo speakers, days away from finishing its first fermentation. In fact, there are jars and bottles of things tucked away throughout the apartment filled with fermenting, preserved, aging or otherwise strange contents. It reminds me of visiting my friend Vanessa and finding a sprouted avocado seed in her pantry or a cabinet full of ripening cherry tomatoes. Or of the stashes of homemade extract and pickled things and dehydrated citrus in Christina's cute townhome. I love it. Although, in cases such as these, the importance of labeling and dating cannot be overstated. How many times have I stared at an unmarked jar and, having considered it for hours or even days, admitted that I had no idea what it contained or when it got there? Many times, friends, many times.

This is probably an oversimplified version of the water kefir process, but so many other good folks have written extensively about it so I'll let them do most of the talking. The main points you should know:

1. Water kefir is a dairy-free, lacto-fermented beverage filled with lots of probiotics and healthy yeast & bacteria. 
2. It tastes good. I promise! Especially after a second fermentation, water kefir is a slightly sweet, bubbly little drink. Think of it as a probiotic-filled natural soda.
3. You will need to get your hands on some water kefir grains. You can buy them online (at places like Cultures for Health), find them at a local food swap or ask your kefir-making friends for their extras. If you're local and can wait a little while, I will eventually have extras laying around if I keep brewing away.
4. You can start a continuous cycle of kefir-making so that there is always a bottle about to be ready. When you need a break, just suspend your grains in a sugar water solution and store in the fridge. It should be safe in there for at least a few months. Finished water kefir will keep for, maybe a few weeks in the fridge? The longer fermented beverages sit, the less sweet they become so keep that in mind.

Water Kefir Reources 

• A super-helpful video tutorial and water kefir info, plus a killer FAQ (via Cultures for Health) 
• A Quick Tutorial (via Nourished Kitchen) 
• Water Kefir- The Yeasty Bacterial Elixir of Life (via Crunchy Betty)
• Water kefir as a soda substitute ! (via Nourishing Days)
• A water kefir recipe that uses citrus & dried fruit on the 1st fermentation  (via Homesprout)
• Directions for ginger-flavored water kefir (via Towards Sustainability)

Have I convinced any of you to get into the home lacto-fermentation brewing scene yet? I had a few emails for more instructions about the kombucha, and if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email. There are a ton of resources out there are water kefir, so get out there and experiment.

sunday soup, the women's bean project

We've been loving the combination of fresh bread from our Community Supported Bakery with our classic Sunday Soups. Every Sunday, we go to the store, pick up our specialty loaf and then come home to see what we can make from all of it. Sometimes we make soup. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we make a phone call to order Indian food. You know how it is.

This was a particularly lovely soup, made from a ten bean mix from the Women's Bean Project. The Women's Bean Project is a Colorado-based nonprofit that helps women break the cycle of poverty by teaching job readiness and employment skills in gourmet food production and handmade jewelry manufacturing. The program provides immediate income, support services, job training and a source of newfound confidence and independence to disenfranchised and disempowered women. One of Chris' colleagues gave us a package of Toni's Ten Bean Soup mix for Christmas. We paired it with the toasted almond, green peppercorn & black pepper loaf we got from the bakery.

Have you been making Sunday Soups? Do you have a recipe I should try out? I have a small stack of great soup cookbooks to work through, including Anna Thomas' Love Soup , which I absolutely adore.

happy valentine's day

Happy Valentine's Day from your favorite colonial, revolutionary couple: John & Abigail Adams. Aren't they splendid? I scored these from the Habitat ReStore a month or so ago; at first, I wasn't sure that this was John Adams at all but perhaps a wily George Washington. A bit of online research of the artist confirmed that I had indeed picked up the right gentleman and that I now owned a hilarious set of portraits of one of history's most romantic, practical & brave couples.

Spread the love, today, folks. Spread it around.

cooking rice

It's a rice and beans kind of week. Last night we had a whole mix of beans with sautéed corn, brown rice & a salsa verde-greek yogurt sauce. I've been prepping for a big, all-weekend event with work so we've been keeping dinners quick and simple. We cook a lot of rice 'round these parts. Consequently, I have burned a lot of pots of rice 'round these parts. Especially with the longer cooking time of brown rice, it is absurdly easy to wander off and completely forget about what is on the stove, even if you were ultra vigilant for the first 30 minutes. So when my mom served roasted root vegetables with a pot of brown rice that she made in her new rice cooker, I was blown away. For some reason I thought that rice cookers didn't work as well for brown rice, but I'm totally wrong. You don't even have to time it, the cooker just shuts off when your rice is ready and will even keep it warm for you until you are ready to eat. I was blown away. The rice cooker probably won't be making any appearances in our tiny kitchen, due to the utter lack of counters, but you can bet that it will pop up as soon as we are cooking in a normal-sized space.

Do you have a rice cooker? I've heard from many people that it's really the only way to make rice. Have you made brown rice in it? What about other grains? Is it totally worth it? Speaking of appliances that are totally worth it, stop in at FSC for my {What's New In My Kitchen Wednesday post}, all about my continuing love affair with Mr. Vitamix, the blender of all blenders.