Strange Blogging Locations 1, Recipe Revisits and No-Sugar Mesquite-Flax Cookies

We have a gorgeous blue-sky day here! In fact, after pouring rain all day yesterday, it brightened up in the evening too. Blue sky usually means lots of wind here too, so no boating today! I'm hoping to get a little hike in this afternoon. Our friend John is such a trooper - he's not letting three broken ribs keep him back at all (doctors make their own worst patients!) so we are all keeping an eye out. He's still hoping to go on the short plane ride over the glacier, and maybe dayhiking out there.

Now that I can write my blog at home, it's time to start a little catalogue of the weird and wonderful places I've blogged when that wasn't an option. Stop 1: the laundromat!

I went there yesterday and did five loads of laundry, which was an ordeal - was glad not to be trying to fit my whole day's internet in at the same time! They have laundry, public showers (that cost an arm and a leg but we sometimes indulge in), wi-fi, and a little coffee shop - they must make a killing. We dry our clothes back at home and there is simply not room in our cabin for five loads-worth of laundry! Note to self - do it sooner next time! Everyone and their uncle was in the laundromat yesterday! It was sheeting down rain and I guess all the RV-visitors were there, as well as several of the many Homer-ites like us who have no running water. To add to the chaos, there were about 7 machines out of order, so we were like a pack of vultures in there!

I wanted to revisit a couple recipes I've blogged about here. First up, the No-Sugar Superfood Cookies. The dehydration worked just fine, but I badly need to revise this recipe! I'm eating them, because I hate throwing stuff out, but may not be able to eat them all - there is something very strange about the taste, soapy, almost. My first thought is that I put in way too much orange zest and overpowered it. I'm also thinking that I might have thrown some almond extract into the chia-sweet before having all that orange zest and deciding to make it orange-flavored. Orange and almond flavor are not the best combination! But I'm going to go back and taste those superfood powders too, and see if any one of them has the kind of flavor that would react intensely like that with orange zest. One other thought is that it wasn't an organic orange - not sure what I was thinking, I never usually use the zest off of those… 

Here's a rough-and-ready recipe for the previous batch of no-sugar cookies I made, to make up for it.  I 'winged' it, so quantities are approximate. I mixed together:

1/3 cup coconut oil melted, with 1 teaspoon white stevia

~2 cups shredded coconut

~2 cups flaxseed meal

1/4 cup mesquite meal

cinnamon, ginger, cardamom galore

And then added as much more flaxseed meal as necessary to get them cookie-dough texture. 

These are a little more crumbly than the others, but they are so good - no weird tastes here!

The other 'revisit' is 'bark' (or whatever I should call it). I did a post a little while back with a lot of variations on the theme. Lately, I've been leaving the cacao nibs out always, regretfully (a post on that coming up very soon), but have been tending to add more reishi powder, and will be adding fo-ti and rhodiola now also. And now that I'm chelating, I've also added zeolites (just about a tablespoon per batch) to my latest two batches - mint/algae flavored (pictured left) and almond-sesame-maca (pictured right). 

This is my absolute favorite food that I eat every day - so much so that I'm afraid of them, afraid I'll eat too much! When I was in Fairbanks and ran out, I was so much hungrier, so I must get a fair proportion of my calories from them. Well, they contain little-to-no sugar (depending on whether I've used carob/mesquite/maca at all) and are packed with protein powder, algae, superfoods, coconut oil, so it can't be too bad, right? 

Oh, and another thing I've been adding to some of my 'bark' recipes lately is 'nooch,' aka Nutritional Yeast - it's not 'natural,' it's not raw, but it's really high in protein, fiber, B-vitamins and I happen to love the taste. I'd been avoiding it for months because of the 'yeast' issue - it didn't really make sense to me why inactive nutritional yeast would feed candida, but my philosophy was 'when in doubt, leave it out.' But I spoke with my ND about it and he encouraged me to eat it again, and said that in his opinion, the folks who assert that eating that kind of yeast is detrimental when you have a yeast problem don't have their facts straight.

Speaking of which - yet another revisit! My dressing for marinaded broccoli and cauliflower - I made another last night - about three tablespoons each of tahini and nooch, a shake of smoked paprika, a tablespoon of flax seeds, 1/2c water, a shake of oregano, and a bunch of parsley, cilantro and chives from the garden. This dressing was so delicious to me, it helped me to think of food as something to enjoy and savor, as opposed to a torturous obligation that gives me body-image anxiety!

The final revisit is not a recipe, but a vegetable. 

I've always thought I wasn't much of a fan of peas - we grew a lot of them the last two summers but I really thought they were for Phil and some of our friends. Well, this year I seem to have changed! I've been loving picking a couple peas off as I go past and munching on them! Here's one of our pea tangles - so beautiful…

This photo was taken around 9.30 last night from outside the cabin. Do you see the half moon in the clear sky? It shows you how low the celestial bodies are in our skies.

Much Love.