Sustainable Me

My newest favorite thing is my Aladdin to-go iced coffee cup. LOVE it! It's getting to be summery in Boston, and thus too hot and muggy for regular coffee. I found this tumbler at Target and I'm definitely obsessed.

(Source)

Now I can stylishly take iced coffee with me everywhere! No more reused Starbucks cold cups for me! I'm decreasing my environmental impact, while increasing my caffeine intake (slightly). M and I are huge fans of the travel mug: we have about a billion hot mugs, and this tumbler is a wonderful addition to our mug cabinet.

Lazy Paleo Cookies

I call the following endeavor "Lazy Paleo Cookies" for the following reasons:

1. I used a vegan recipe from Eat Me Delicious, but replaced some ingredients I didn't have with ingredients I did have, because I was too lazy to go grocery shopping.
2. The cookies are not really "paleo" cookies, because they have maple syrup and honey in them...which are better than regular, white sugar, but some paleo sticklers will say that any sweetener is no good.
   
3. The finished product was not actually a "cookie" per se...mostly because I was too lazy to grind my almond flour fine enough...
   

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup almond meal
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
• 1/4 cup pumpkin seeds
  
• 1/4 cup dried cranberries
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• 1 Tbsp maple syrup
• 2 tbsp almond milk
• 1 tsp raw honey
• 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 3 tbsp coconut oil
  

I mixed all of the dry ingredients into a bowl and stirred to combine.

My coarsely ground almond flour

The rest of the ingredients went into another bowl. The recipe called for flax meal, but when I tried to grind my flax seeds, they just kind of spun around in the food processor...and I was lazy, so I just added some kinda-broken-flax seeds to the mix.

I combined the wet and dry ingredients and stirred until they were just barely mixed together...


Plopped about 1 Tbsp of "batter" onto an ungreased cookie sheet and cooked for 10 minutes at
350.


The result was more of a granola than a cookie. I have a feeling that the cookies crumbled because the almond flour was too coarse, and because there was no flax meal. The next time I attempt this recipe, I will make sure to be diligent with my almond flour, and maybe add an egg to keep everything together. Granola is fine. Granola is great! Something for M to put on his oatmeals in the morning.

Have you ever had a recipe turn out differently than you...err....expected?

An Extravagant Brunch

Last Saturday, I decided to make a delicious brunch. I was inspired by yet another gifty from IIN, gluten-free, wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free blueberry maple muffin mix from Purely Elizabeth.


All I needed to add was maple syrup (I used 1/2 of the recommended amount), olive oil, blueberries and vanilla. Easy-peasy. I stuck some blackberries in with the blueberries to make them a little more exotic and I thought about using coconut oil instead of olive oil, but I really wanted the brunch to be niiiiice, so I followed the recipe...

I popped the mini muffins into my ancient oven. (You can't really tell from this picture, but there are no numbers on the burner dials...they have two settings: inferno and gas leak).

The mini muffins came out perfectly!

Some glamour shots:

To round out our brunch, I made some scrambled eggs (two eggs, two whites each), and bacon, because, as we know, no brunch is complete without bacon! I also sliced up a peach I had lying around.

It was a protein packed, blueberry muffin-y brunch! The muffins were great: they had a very unique taste-- maybe it was the chia seeds and millet flour. I used to be some sort of muffin freak (I would eat a dunkin' donuts reduced fat blueberry muffin every morning before work in the olden days), and I really liked these! I'm not sure if I would buy the mix myself, but I definitely plan on using it as a model for my own healthy blueberry muffins.