Blackberry Pie (and Blackberry Mini Pies)

I have two confessions:

1. We ate the pie without taking pictures because,

2. The pie was ugly. I had never attempted a lattice-top crust before, and it was not a pretty sight. I felt badly about that, of course, the pie being for my roommate's birthday, and all. In spite of its unattractiveness, though, the pie didn't fail to taste wonderful.

After making (and eating) the pie, I had a little bit of crust dough left and a lot of filling. (I blame that on my small, Marie-Calendar-sized pie pans.) I probably could have sat there and eaten both (to my detriment), but I had a better idea: mini pies!


Please forgive the out-of-focus picture!

A Whole (Vegetarian) Meal

What was on the menu a few weeks ago? Crockpot Chickpea Stew with Balsamic Caramelized Onions, Rosemary Sea Salt Focaccia Bread, and a salad.

It was a little cooler out then – granted, we've had some cold spells recently (plus hail, apparently!), so it may not be totally inappropriate to this post now. I would make the stew no matter the temperature, though, if I'm being completely honest. It is just delicious. The focaccia bread is a different recipe than I usually use, but very flaky and good.

The salad was a bit fun, because I set it up as a salad bar on the kitchen counter, and everyone could build their own masterpiece.

And can I just say that I absolutely love balsamic vinegar? We practically guzzle it down at my apartment. (Although, thinking about actually guzzling any kind of vinegar is making me a little queasy. Duly noted.)

Oh, and everything except for the bread is gluten-free, as far as I know.

Low Fat Banana Bread

Have you ever experienced something that you could only define as a moment? Something that seems to exist out of time itself, a separate, stolen entity just for you? In the movies, these moments are generally in slow motion with a soundtrack of soft soprano vocals or silence. You can see the exact second when everything begins to still, yet come alive. Perhaps scenes like those seems dumb, and highly unrealistic. It's all well and good to be artistic with your editing program, but moments like that don't seem to exist in real life.

Maybe you'll believe me when I tell you that I had a moment earlier this week, or maybe you won't. And maybe you'll think I'm silly when I tell you that that moment involved banana bread. Maybe it's a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. I don't know. All I know is that for me, it was magical. Simple, fleeting, but magical.

I had the banana bread in the oven. It had been baking for at least twenty minutes, and so the smell of it had begun to leak from the oven and spread into the kitchen, and from the kitchen, to the living room. There were only traces of it, though, as if you could only sense it there if you knew to search for it.

I was patient but restless. Still apron-clad, I paced about the living room, waiting, searching for small tasks I could do to pass the time. Then all of a sudden, I came to walk beneath the whirling ceiling fan, and I stopped. First, the cool air gently met me; next, I inhaled. The scent of the banana bread was somehow stronger here, as though it were spiraling down toward me from the fan blades themselves. I just stood there for my moment, looking up, breathing in. It was quiet. Everything seemed to slow. I felt that, if I spread out my arms, I could somehow gather the scent, the air itself, to me, and we would simply exist forever in this column of time. And then I smiled.

Baked Spice Doughnuts

I've been having an off week. Not consistently bad, just... off. So on the days where I've come home feeling rather sour, I've hung up my keys, flung my backpack to the floor, whipped out my laptop, and done the best thing I know to make me feel a little bit sweeter: I've baked. I may have stormed into the kitchen on one occasion, glowering at anything that moved, but what really matters is that I emerged sometime later feeling happy and relaxed.

Sometimes I just know when I need to bake. Sometimes without even thinking, I will gravitate toward the kitchen and automatically begin gathering ingredients from my cupboards like wildflowers. Times like these, I bake not for sustenance, but for peace of mind. I bake because there is nothing better at cheering you up than doing something you love.

But it does help that I love both the baking and the eating, especially when it comes to these doughnuts. They're a lot healthier than normal doughnuts because they're not deep-fried, and have the potential to use some low fat ingredients without compromising taste. Plus, they're light on the butter! Whoo hoo!

They also couldn't be easier to make, which is a good thing, since you may find yourself wanting to make another batch immediately after.

Lemon Frozen Yogurt

Remember when I mentioned yesterday that we'd eaten frozen yogurt with our carrot cake? Well, surprise! (Or not-so-surprise, for the foreshadowing-detecting-savvy.) I figured that birthday cake without something vaguely ice cream-like is just shy of a travesty, especially when you've had an ice cream maker staring at you morosely from your cupboards all winter. As an added bonus, the lemony flavor matched the lemon zest in the cake's frosting.

Now, our ice cream maker is a little unusual – it's one of those Donvier ones (look at the picture of the blue one, that's it), where you don't use ice and salt and don't have to crank it like a maniac. Instead, you chill the magic, cylindrical metal container overnight; the next day, you pour in your would-be ice cream, and turn the funny handle on top once or twice every three minutes. (They say you're supposed to do it for twenty minutes, but it usually takes an hour.) I've got it on a long-term loan from my mother, because I'm the only one who's used it in the last six months (read: years).

Personally, I am fond of the ice cream makers you have to crank like a maniac. They bring back memories of Girl Scout Camp and slightly runny vanilla ice cream. (We had to crank in shifts.) But I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth – especially one that makes ice cream. And I can say that I have successfully made three or four batches of ice cream in it.

I'd never made frozen yogurt before, though, so I was a little skeptical about it working. The instruction booklet said you could do it, but since when do instruction booklets know anything?

You may laugh, but it turns out I was a little bit right in my skepticism, just for a different reason. You see, the ice cream maker worked too well. Upon contacting the bottom of the chilled cylinder, the yogurt mixture instantly froze, so that there was a solid block of frozen yogurt about two-inches deep on the bottom, and just enough climbing up the sides to make it impossible to turn the handle. This meant that for the next half-hour or so, I would get to systematically poke at the remainder of the frozen yogurt mixture, which was behaving as it was supposed to.

I don't know if our freezer is just possessed, and went above and beyond the call of duty when freezing the cylinder; or if maybe nonfat Greek yogurt has mystical freezing properties heretofore undiscovered. Whatever the case, we ended up with a thick, gorgeous layer of perfect frozen yogurt, and a bottom layer of ice-like crumbles that one could happily eat with an ice pick. It did taste good, though I was a little dissatisfied with the aftertaste, or afterfeeling, I suppose: the same one you get after drinking lemonade (and which is why I don't drink lemonade). Personally, I think it tasted better as unfrozen yogurt. I'm sure you could fix that by omitting the lemon juice, though, and increasing the amount of lemon zest.

(Somewhat) Low Fat Carrot Cake

I love waking up early on Saturday mornings to bake. Or I suppose any morning, really, but Saturday is best; I can work as slowly as I like, taking my time because I know I have no other plans but to relax and recover from the week.

There's something to mornings, too. Being that we're in college, my roommates (and I) often don't wake up until around noon (give or take an hour). This means that, if I happen to wake up at nine, as I did yesterday, and venture downstairs at ten, I will be the only one about. So I can assemble my ingredients, set the oven to preheating, turn on the 2008 Mamma Mia! soundtrack, and fall into peace. And maybe one of my roommates will appear an hour or so later, but I've still been able to enjoy that secret time, that secret delight of knowing I'm the only one awake while everyone is sleeping – that I've been able to greet the world that day before anybody else.

Yesterday, as you have probably inferred, was one of those mornings. I started baking/preparing at ten, and continued at various points throughout the day. The reason was that we were all going to celebrate our roommate Louisa's birthday, which was during spring break – thus the reason we were only just now getting to it. She wanted carrot cake as her special birthday treat, and I was determined to make it a bit healthier, thereby somewhat guilt-free, as she is on a diet.

I don't know how healthy it turned out (that frosting was determined to ruin my good intentions), but it did taste good with frozen yogurt after we spent a while playing games and eating pizza. I can also tell you that it continued to be good as we snuck seconds while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Just in case you were wondering.





Recipe and more pictures if you read more...

Healthier Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Well, well, well. It's already April – April Fool's Day, to be exact. If I were perhaps a bit more mischievous, I'd have thought up some clever prank to post here today. (Yes, food pranks do exist!) But as I am not, my small readership shall be spared. Instead, I've got a batch of oatmeal cookies to share – ones which I made roughly two weeks ago and, you guessed it, forgot to tell you about. (Luckily for my roommates, they got the memo anyway.)

Keeping with my butter-vendetta, these cookies use yogurt instead of butter, and in the general "health" trend, contain other lovely things like skim milk and egg whites. The original recipe technically didn't call for chocolate chips, but there are limits to my health-consciousness when it comes to cookies.

I know I've been absent most of March, but I promise there are more things to come this month! The weather lately went from an utterly frigid – by California standards – winter to a rather humid summer with little transition and regard for Spring's feelings, so I've been craving more seasonally-appropriate treats. Plus, we are celebrating two of my roommates' birthdays within the next week, and I've a few tricks up my sleeve not quite of the sort that an April Fool might have in mind.



Recipe and more photos if you read more...