Kitties + garden + arm therapy progress

This has nothing to do with cooking.  Lol.  I'm okay with that.  I think you'll live, too.  Hehe.

First, CAT IN A BAG!

And My garden is sweetness!  I provide you here with a short, unorganized, rambling tour.  Hope you enjoy!  Lol.

And did I tell you I broke my arm in February?  Well that explains my disappearance a bit, doesn't it?  Couldn't really type!    Lol.  I'm doing great, building muscle and getting strong again.  Been having my chiropractor coordinate my therapy, he is really helping, it's going great.  I'm enjoying playing around with 3 and 5 pound weights and hope to be able to lift my kayak to the car roof soon!

Things I put together (1)

Apparently I've been making this too much work for myself.  Since I dip out the planted blogosphere for spans of a month just to pop up and say "nope, not dead" and recede again into places unknown.

NEW SERIES??  Maybe?
Things I put together.  Because I'm eating soup.  And who the heck would think to put this stuff together is what I always hear.

Warning - this stuff is largely from my garden.  I need to be more proud of that!  Yet I look at the ingredient list and I think "nobody else in the world is gonna have this stuff!  Ever!"  So, yeah, farmer's market?  In-season yummies?  Farm-shares?  I seriously don't know.  What I do is walk paths in the garden and pick stuff.

What did I put together today?

Last night I soaked a combo of black beans and black eyed peas.  Drained and rinsed them.

In a stock pot.
One large soup bone chunk.
(I love the meats department at Khun's - an odd little grocery chain here in PA)
I browned the meat on the meaty half of the bone.
Added the beans that were all soaked and rinsed and ready.
And a bunch of water.

Then out to the garden!
Radishes
Bulb tops from my 'walking onions'
Let me see if I have a pictures of this species...

I do!  It's the little reddish bulb looking tops that I snapped off and threw in.  :)

Then to the freezer!
Sunchoke slices (I really don't recommend freezing these, grow them in pots or raised beds and they harvest from under the snow just fine!  And taste way better.  But this was a couple years past failure.  Needed used up.)

Cooking cook cookness.

Soup!  Yum.

What will I do next?
Strain some of this out, wrap it up in some of the red cabbage leaves I have frozen, and wrap the soup mix into the leaves for stuffed cabbage yummies and bake it at something like 300 for an hour or something.

Hey!  That was fun!  And easy!

Primary Ingredients!

The primary ingredients to my gluten free life, this is basically my GF life in a bullet pointed nut shell!

instinct
Shit, did I burn that?
My garden
Taste contrast... some of the craziest things work!
Freaking busy schedule
zero disposable income cuz I'm poor
Aw, man, I didn't turn the stove off!
Slow cooker, slow cooker, slow cooker!
Eating the same thing several days in a row.  Often.
Forgetting to eat on weekends
Living off of hot cocoa, basically.
Realizing I'm hungry at midnight
forgetting I have so much amazing stuff in the chest freezer
investigating the chest freezer... again.
Shortcuts.  LOTS of shortcuts.  As many shortcuts as possible.
Eating what I burned.
Seeing the adventure in the act of of feeding myself
Listening to lengthy involved recipes that people want to share with me.
Remembering two key ingredients of that recipe, forgetting the rest, and succeeding!
Failing.
Eating my failures.  Often.
Thinking "I have this, and that... hmmmm?" and ending up with good food.
Microwaving water.  Milk.  Radishes.  Stuff.  It's a shortcut.
Never ever ever doing dishes before the crisis stage.
Vinegar.  Mmmm Hmmmm.  Oh, and olive oil.
Skillets!  Yes!  Skillets!
Oversized bowls in the microwave so things don't bubble over.
Soaking beans.
Going to the little grocer to see their cool meat cuts!
Freezing things that shouldn't be frozen, and skipping blanching entirely.
If I can't put a shortcut on the time invested, then I better shortcut the price.
Being cheap.  Yeah.  Can't afford to be any other way.
Spending a lot of time not-in-my-house.
Asking the cats to help me catch up with my chores.  Yeah, it's that bad.
Going and checking the chest freezer again.
Digging through the mass of stuff in the regular freezer.
Washing the dish I need.  The pan I need.  The crockpot I need.
Putting things out to get rained on.  On purpose.  And forgetting them.
Herbs!  Fresh from the garden!  Or fresh from the kitchen pot!  All year, yay.
I dunno.  Other stuff too.

Well, that was fun, wasn't it?

I have pictures to show you how to make your own super laundry soap for pennies a bottle!  Woah.  Need to post those for you guys.  :)  And the garden is awesome.  Um.... strawberries!  The cats are great, too!

Yogurt with Almond

I started getting Dominoes dark brown sugar because of something I learned that I found very interesting.

A good while back I had started using brown sugar hoping to avoid refined white sugar.  I was buying the cheapest stuff off the shelf, but then heard something very interesting.  A lot of brown sugar is really refined white sugar that's been re-molassesed.  So I took a closer look at the ingredients.  My cheap brown sugar said "Sugar, Molasses" and the next time I was at the store I looked at a few labels, and found that the better quality brown sugar only had one ingredient "brown sugar".

So if you're for any reason interested in avoiding refined sugar in your diet, you'll want to go for the one-ingredient "brown sugar" instead of the two ingredient "sugar, molasses" to accomplish that.

I use brown sugar in everything as my substitute for refined.  It has a rich complex taste.  Wonderful.  So since I use it rather often, I've stored it specially.  The molasses can create hard lumps if it does not have some moisture control.  So I keep it in a sealed glass canister, and the oldest moisture adsorbing solution for brown sugar is terracotta - so I've washed and used one of those tiny terracotta pots as my scoop in the canister, and it turns out to be almost exactly 1/4 cup, so that's perfect.  Here's a picture:

And so yes, I made almond extract sweetened yogurt.  It's easy!

To a bowl of plain yogurt, add -
2Tbs dark brown sugar
A tiny bit of almond extract (a little less than 1/4tsp will do it)

And stir and eat!

And of course we have to say hi to the kitties!
Randal had a great time helping me sew pockets onto my jeans...

Lytkin's MUCH harder to capture a good photo of!  He's so black, I always have to use the flash, and the flash always makes him look really angry.  Here's a good one of the little fur man being all happy about cuddling!

Desert Apples - cinnamon cream cheese

This one is way too delicious to wait.  I am currently eating this!

And it's so easy!

Slice one apple.
Spread cream cheese on each slice.
Sprinkle cinnamon on each slice.
Eat!

Can it get any easier than that?  I hope your day is also going deliciously!  I'm going to get back to my world and perhaps there will be some garden to see very soon?!