Sugar-free Tastalicious

Okay, I'm hardly going to claim to be a healthy eater. I don't necessarily even aspire to be (the chocolate cupcakes with peanut-butter frosting that I have on my kitchen table at the moment should attest to that). Come to think of it, in the last week, Justin and I have made (and eaten) yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting, blueberry muffins with struesel topping, and the afore-mentioned choco-pb cupakes. It's kind of frightening when you actually write that out. Anyway, the other day at the gym, my aerobics instructor was passing out handouts, one of which included a recipe for some healthy lemon-coconut-date bars. Since we've already overloaded our dessert intake, I figured I might as well make these ones as well. It turns out they are very tastey!

If ever you are doing some sort of challenge, or aren't allowed to eat treats or sugar or something like that, this recipe would be a great way to get your dessert fix!

1 cup almonds

1 1/2 -2 cups pitted dates (Medjool or other semi-soft date--I found these in the refrigerated area of the produce section)

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp sea salt (I just realized I forgot to add this, but they are still quite delish!)

Zest of 1 lemon

2 tbsp lemon juice (I just put in the juice of one whole, very juicy lemon)

1 cup shredded coconut

Put it all in a food processor (you may want to start with just the nuts and process them down to a chunky powder) and process until everything is evenly mixed. Then just press the paste (I'm not sure if paste is really the right word) into the bottom of a pan and chill. Then cut into squares. Yum.

These aren't exactly fat free, but they've at least got the healthy/trendy kind of fat from almonds. But there's not a lick of sugar! Enjoy!

Nothing says holiday like Frog's Sugar Cookies

Sometimes you just really need a sugar cookie. When that happens, I always turn to my Aunt Frog's recipe. (You'll have to talk to my mom if you want to know why her sister was referred to as "Frog".) The cookies are soft and delicious similar to these ones, and really not all that hard to make. Here's the recipe:

Sift together (if you do that sort of thing. I always just dump stuff in sans sifting):

3 cups flour

1 tsp soda

1/2 tsp salt

In a separate bowl mix together:

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

1 egg (unbeaten)

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup sour cream

Slowly stir the flour mixture into the wet mixture. Role them out on a floured surface (about 1/4 inch thick). Bake on a greased cookie sheet at 375 F 7-9 minutes (until the bottom just starts looking golden). Makes about 24-30 cookies, depending on the size of your cookie cutters.

Frost with your favorite icing. As for me, I dump in random amounts of butter, powder sugar, vanilla and milk until it looks and tastes how I want it to. This time I added LOTS of green food coloring to make the really bold Christmas trees. And it turns out that sprinkles are a better way to go than frosting tips for the inexperienced cookie maker (such as myself). Yummy! I would seriously recommend you make these this holiday season.

Best Turkey Ever

It turns out that honey smoked turkey is really as good as it sounds. And in honor of our national day of giving thanks, here are the top ten things (not necessarily in order of importance) that came to my mind as I started listing what I am thankful for:

1. Justin. He may be the best husband ever. I don't think I went to the grocery store more than twice in our whole first year of marriage. And he cleans. Enough said.

2. Colton. He may be the best baby ever. I don't know how he turned out so darn cute.

3. Family. I love my parents. I love my siblings.

4. In-Laws. It has recently been brought to my attention that not everyone gets along with their in-laws. I feel pretty lucky to have in-laws that I love spending time with, and they've made me feel loved and welcomed from the first time I met them....such a blessing!

5. The navy. I'm glad that they navy is willing to pay Justin enough money that we can afford to have only one income.

6. Height. I'm glad that I'm tall. It makes it way easier to reach things on high shelves and see in crowds.

7. Church. I love the direction and support it provides in my life.

8. Couches. I still love my red couches. They were by far the best purchase of 2006. They are comfy, stylish, and turn out to be very entertaining to small children.

9. Food. I love anything made out of a potato. I love ice cream (cinnamon is my current fav). I love cookies. Eating good things makes life better.

10. Good friends. I'm glad that I'm still close to the ladies of the L. I'm glad that I had amazing roommates in college. I'm glad that I have great friends out here in Virginia.

Thank you Thanksgiving for encouraging me to spend some time thinking about all my blessings!

Happy Feast of July!

This year we decided to celebrate the 4th of July the way the Pilgrims intended us to--by having an overwhelming feast. I guess technically the Pilgrims didn't celebrate the 4th of July, but I think the Founding Fathers probably would have had a celebratory feast if they hadn't just committed high treason by signing the Declaration, and if the British weren't already attacking.


Anyway, rather than go downtown to some of the many wonderful celebrations taking place here in our nation's capital (I was particularly sad that I missed the made-for-day pyrotechnic display at Mt. Vernon which was scheduled from 12:45 -12:50. It sounds amazing, but the thought of walking around through huge crowds at 8 1/2 months pregnant was, well, exhausting...), we stayed home and smoked an 8 lb pork butt and made all the appropriate side dishes--potato salad, baked beans, coleslaw, and corn-on-the-cob. Top that off with some IBC Root Beer, and our celebration was complete. In hind sight, we probably should have invited some people to join our feast because it turns out that we had a little more than we could eat. Either way, we love America and all the delicious food you can eat here!

Home Canning, Part III

After last's year's inaugural run of home canning, we learned a very important lesson--not all home canned goods are worth the effort. We were trying all sorts of crazy things like pickles, salsa, and spaghetti sauce, all of which we ended up throwing away. This year, we decided that we should just keep it simple.

On Saturday we went to the farmer's market in Old Towne Alexandria, and haggled our way to a great price on heirloom tomatoes and peaches. Okay, haggling might be a bit strong of a word. Really, we asked the farmer if we were to buy a whole box of peaches, if he'd give us a deal--and he said, "Sure. I'll give you 25 lbs. for $20 bucks." In case you haven't priced out peaches lately, that is a very good deal. (They were originally $2.29/lb) We did the same with the tomato dealer--we got 12.5 lbs of tomatoes for a steal!

So this year's canning went much smoother than last year. All we had to do was blanche, peel, and stuff in the can. Easy peasy!

We started by putting all the peaches in the fridge. It looked pretty cool, so I took a picture.

And here are our tomatoes. They look funny because they were grown to taste good (rather than ship well). We have been fully indoctrinated on the importance of buying locally grown food.

So Here I am about to put the peeled tomatoe into the bowl. (Note: I woke up and walked directly out into the kitchen for our canning adventure, so if I don't look quite as beautiful as usual, pray forgive.)

Then Justin took them from the bowl and put them in the cans. He wore his red shirt just in case he spilled. (He has maybe had a few tomato drips down his shirt recently.)


And now it's on to the peaches. Tip: If you cut an "X" into the peach or tomato before blanching, it makes it really easy to peel.

Peeling the peaches is fun to do, fun to do, to do, to do...

The tomatoes are done! But what happened to the 5th can? I swear we put 5 cans into the steam bath...

How sad! The bottom blew off the jar, so we lost 1/5 of our tomatoes.

But it turns out we had way more peaches than we anticipated.

All in all, we ended up with 4 jars of tomatoes and 13 jars of peaches, and it only took 3.5 hours from start to all cleaned up and blogged about. It should be a peachy winter!

Adventures in Home Canning, Part II

When you can pickles, you can't taste them right away. (It turns out that pickles are really just cucumbers.) You have to wait a couple of months so that the vinegar has time to work its magic. Justin and I decided that the time had finally come for us to try our home canning experiments. We started with the spaghetti sauce.

I was making stuffed pasta shells for dinner one night, and the recipe called for spaghetti sauce, so I decided to use one of our homemade cans. We had used the recipe from Barbara Kingsolver's book, the one that inspired all the domesticity in the first place. It turns out that while Kingsolver has written several good books, she doesn't really have a flare for writing recipes. The spaghetti sauce was nasty, and we dumped it all out.

Next we tried the pickles, with much the same result: it turned out they were nasty, and we dumped them all out.

After two disappointments already, we turned to the salsa without much hope. Even as we were canning it, we thought that there was a good chance we had chosen a terrible salsa recipe. The thing that clued us in to this was the apple cidar vinegar combined with 7 cloves of garlic. We were right. The salsa was terrible, and we dumped it out.

So what did we get out of more than 50 pounds of tomatoes and cucumbers? A mere 6 jars of tomatoes. Lessons learned: 1. Find a good recipe before you start canning. 2. Instead of canning, just go to the store and buy what you need.

Adventures in Home Canning

The other day Justin asked me, "Bethany, if we get married, can we have turkeys?" and I asked myself, "Who am I dating?" Actually, I didn't really ask that, but I responded with a firm no. He then asked if we could just have a chicken coop instead. Again I had to make sure that we were very clear from the outset that I am not okay with livestock in my backyard.

Justin has been reading a book called Animal, Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver which is about her family's experiment with only eating locally grown food. Since he started reading the book, he's started buying all his produce from the farmer's market--a good choice, but that's just where it started. Now he's decided to learn how to make cheese, he's considering buying a bread machine and wants to slaughter his own meat. (Man, I hope Justin is cool with me sharing his bazaar new passions in such an open forum...oh well, it's adorable, so how could he possibly object?) On top of that, he decided that he needs to learn how to can his locally grown produce himself, so we spent last Saturday in a grand canning adventure.

It started with Justin happily canning some pickles, and me excitedly peeling tomatoes.

It turns out, however, that you can only peel so many tomatoes before the joy of it wears off. We peeled a little more than 50 pounds. It also turns out that canning is kind of a messy process.




I also think that we had been a little over-zealous in the scope of our canning adventure. We decided to can pickles (6 quarts), tomatoes (7 quarts), salsa (3 quarts) and spaghetti sauce (3 quarts) and we were going to do peaches at well, but apparently peach season ended the week before and the farmer's market was fresh out of peaches. (By the way, we were very disappointed to discover that a box and a half of tomatoes only produced 3 quarts of spaghetti sauce...and this was supposed to be cost-effective?) But after 7 hours, we were pretty proud of our accomplishment. We were also very sweaty. Imagine a poorly air conditioned room on the 3rd floor with five large pots of water boiling constantly for 7 hours, and you will understand why we were sweating.



So after we finished, we started cleaning up, and for the first time in an apparently really long time, looked down at the floor. It was really dirty, so I decided to mop. The look I was going for with this picture was "Wow, that's a digustingly dirty floor. " I think the look that I actually got was "Watch me squint my eyes and show you my teeth." I guess my dreams of becoming America's next top model may not ever come to fruition.


And here's a look at how dirty the floor really was...

In the end, I think we decided that unless you grow the food yourself, it's really more cost-effective (and time-effective) to buy canned vegetables in the store. An important lesson for anyone to learn.

What random adventures have you had recently? Please share!