I’m winding down for the night, sitting in the burnt orange armchair in the corner of my bedroom with a halo of lantern lights. Thankfully I’m on the downward slope of a sugar rush caused by a recent baking bug that produced pumpkin pecan tea cookies yesterday and salted caramel pretzel blondies this evening.
The blondies were inspired by Damn Delicious’s recipe, but I attempted a vegan version, replacing butter with coconut cream and egg with a flax “egg.” I also made a vegan caramel, based off Fork & Beans’ recipe. The result was more like a soft caramel soaked cake than a blondie, which really is not at all bad. It was a sweet and salty combo made for this season. I’ll have to give it another shot someday to make it more like blondies.
I’ve been quite the hermit this week–working from home, staying up late. I’ve binged through three seasons of Breaking Bad on Netflix so I suppose you could say I’ve been productive. Working from home with random foods in my fridge and pantry also forces me to get a little creative in the kitchen. My lunch this week has been a kale, lentil, and wild rice stew with pan-fried falafel patties.
Once again, I had bought kale over the weekend for the sole reason of having some healthy greens in my fridge and once again I was not really psyched about eating it. I also had some dried lentils that had been sitting on my pantry shelf for too long and some wild rice. Fighting the temptation to walk down the street for some tamales, I decided to whip together a stew. One pot dishes really are a wonderful thing. The lentils, the rice, water, some vegan bullion cubes, spices and herbs, and kale thrown in towards the end–and bam, a vegan protein-packed stew. I also had some Bob’s Red Mill garbanzo bean flour that happened to have an insanely easy falafel recipe on the package so I thought, why not have a side?
Then later on in the day, I thought, why not have a dessert.? I happened to have all the stuff for Cookie + Kate’s pumpkin pecan polvorones and they were heavenly little bites of soft pumpkin spicy goodness.
They were just the thing to nurse a sweet tooth for a fall afternoon at home.
Culinary Grammar 