Mamarati

I made an eggless banana bread today and it turned out not half bad. (Does that also mean not half good?)

I was a little afraid of a couple of the bananas, though. They seemed just a bit off. I mean, when you’re cooking with overripe (rotten) things, how do you know when you’ve gone too far?

It’s a very dense loaf. I’d take a picture but my boyfriend went on a trip to the Faroe Islands and took my camera, leaving behind his janky piece of shit that I don’t even know how to run.

In other news, I gotta go get the kiddo. Don’t let me forget to talk about the nervous breakdown I had last night over Day 4 foods. And about his suspension from school.

Well, I start to feel a little better during the day, but then I do a bunch of stuff and feel like crap again, or I lay down and all the sinus stuff just pools up in one place making my head feel like it’s going to explode.

I spent all morning cooking. Chicken soup. Had to cut up potatoes, carrot and celery for that and get those veggies tender so that I just plop some cooked chicken in it tonight. Luckily I’d made the broth last week. Washing, cutting, bagging. Strawberries, blueberries, cantaloupe. Making hashbrowns, which I’ve never done without using an egg and an onion. That was weird. I used some psyllium seed husk and a little bit of buckwheat flour and water. They look kind of odd, but taste fine.

And baking a cake. An eggless chocolate cake. And I just looked in the oven and it might just work out. It’s actually rising and looking normal. Go figure. I hope so. It would be nice to make Jacob a birthday cake. I could top it with whipped cream and strawberries.

Who needs all that shortening frosting anyway?

Or I could pulverize some sugar and sift some on top in the style of powdered sugar, which he can’t have any more.

My head is killing me and I feel so loopy. I’m not even on any cold medicine and I feel like I’m out of my mind. I really dislike being sick. Much much much. More than just about anything I can think of, I hate this feeling.

I hope this cake is moist. How great would that be?

—

Update… cake. Pretty delicious. Quite moist. Could have cooked it about 5 minutes less… but turned out great. At least by my standards. We shall see when the “real” tester gets home today how he likes it.

10/19

Dinner:
Turkey burgers
Spinach

Breakfast:
Cashews, mango juice, coconut, apple

Lunch:
Tuna pack
Jicama chips
Apple
Black olives

Snacks:
Jicama chips, pistachios

Shopping:
Tuna packs
Black olives

10/18

Dinner:
Spring rolls (shrimp, rice paper, rice vermicelli, avocado, snow peas)

Breakfast:
Almond milk
Rice
Honey

Lunch:
Rice crackers
Peanut butter
honey
Pineapple

Snacks:
Peaches, oranges, grapefruit, peanuts

Shopping:
Rice vermicelli
Shrimp (small, about 18)
Snow peas
Almonds (1/2 cup to 2 cups water)
Rice crackers

10/17

Dinner:
Fried chicken
Mashed potatoes
Salad

Breakfast:
Hashed Browns
Cantaloupe

Lunch:
Chicken soup
Red grapes

Snacks:
Walnuts, raisins, celery, sunflower butter

Shopping:
Chicken pieces
Red grapes

10/16

Dinner:
Pork Roast
Collard Greens
Wheat Rolls

Breakfast:
Strawberries and blueberries with sugar

Lunch:
Ham sandwich
Cheese sticks
Milk (J buy milk at school)

Snacks:
Bread, cheese, banana, brazil nuts

Shopping:
Pork roast
collards

Dinner:
Turkey thighs with gravy
Jimaca fries
Spinach

Breakfast:
Pears
Quinoa flakes
Date syrup

Lunch:
Leftover from dinner

Snacks:
Apples, coconut, cashews, pistachios, hazlenuts

Shopping:
Cashews (CM?)
Pears (w*m)
Spinach
Jimaca
Turkey thighs (Target)

Dinner:
Salmon sushi w/ tamari, avocado
Edamame

Breakfast:
Rice and honey

Lunch:
Rice crackers with peanut butter and honey
oranges

Snacks:
Peaches, oranges, grapefruit, pineapple

Shopping:
Edamame
Avocado

Dinner:
Baked chicken with tarragon, mashed potatoes, carrots, celery

Breakfast:
Grapes
Cantaloupe
Toasted Walnuts
Cream of Buckwheat with maple syrup

Lunch:
Chicken and salad
(use balsalmic vinegar and safflower oil for dressing, sprinkle with sunflowers)

Snacks:
Grapes, cantaloupe, cucumbers, salad

Shopping:
Potatoes
Carrots
Celery
Whole cut up chicken
Salad greens (lettuces)
Tomatoes
Cucumber X 2
Cantaloupe

Dinner:
Beef Stroganoff (use leftover flank steak)
Broccoli and cheese

Breakfast:
Bacon
Toast on homemade bread
Butter
Strawberries and cream

Lunch:
Leftover stroganoff
Or Grilled cheese sandwiches

Snacks:
Chocolate cake (rz#52396 -vanilla)
Kiwi, banana, strawberries cheese, blueberries. milk, oatmeal cookies, oatmeal, cheese toast, bacon

Shopping:
Sour cream (daisy full fat has no additives)
Fettucine noodles
Broccoli
Cheese without cellulose
Cane syrup
Strawberries
Cream
1/2 gallon of milk
Buttermilk (1 cup)
Try to find “vanilla essence” w/o corn or alcohol

Hmm. It’s probably edible. I mean, it actually tastes fine. The consistency is a bit hard, however. Probably needed more oil and less cooking time.

At any rate, I’ve figured out how to make crackers if I just omit the pie filling. Ha.

Crap.

So, my first time baking with amaranth flour. (I’ve mentioned that I can’t use eggs, no?)

Wow. I was so impressed. The batter actually looked like a real muffin batter, unlike the buckwheat snot that I was faced with earlier in the week. I fill the muffin cups and put them in the oven and wait.

Never before has waiting for baked goods been filled with such confusion and mystery. What will they taste like? What will they look like? How much will they weigh? Will they turn into rocks? Sludge?

So I open the oven when the timer goes off and there they are — a beautiful sight to behold. I wish I’d taken a picture. Fluffy, risen, gorgeous muffins.

And so I set them aside to cool… and I come back a few minutes later to find that they have completely imploded and all that is left are these flat little disks of sludge.

What a disappointment.

Again, I’m about to give up on baked goods. Why am I bothering?

At any rate, I found a pie crust recipe in the book that is close to the pie crust I started making when I jacked up my arm… an oil crust that you press into the pan. So far, so good, it appears to be behaving like a crust. But as I just learned from the muffins looks can be deceiving, no?

So, the buckwheat waffles were completely and totally stuck to my waffle iron like nothing I’ve ever seen. The batter was like snot. It was so odd. I’ve never seen quite this consistency before. I had to scrape the bits out with a bamboo skewer. And this is a nonstick waffle iron that was lubed up.

I thought I’d try pancakes instead. The book suggested using a well-seasoned cast iron skillet. I own several of these. The small one is my favorite (I think it’s 6 inches, which is perfectly average. Ha.) I’ve had this thing forever. It couldn’t be more seasoned unless I spent a week deep frying butter in lard.

And still, the pancakes stuck to the skillet so much that I couldn’t even get a spatula underneath them to even get them out of the pan. So I let the pan cool and filled it with water. Half an hour later, I go to wash the pan and I turn it to dump the water out. The pancakes are still stuck to the pan, wholly intact and hardly even phased by the water.

So I still have some of the pancake batter left and I decide to try it in a teflon pan and they don’t stick this time. But they weighed about 80 pounds a piece. And these were tiny little silver dollar pancakes. I haven’t gotten the verdict from Jacob yet on how they ended up tasting.

So far, Jacob has been great at giving me feedback on foods. Cooking is kind of one of those things for me… I really like to do it, but food is expensive so I don’t like to screw it up. I have some guilt in that area. And then I hate serving things to my family that don’t taste good. And I never get a “this tastes like crap” response on any of my cooking, so I wonder if everyone is just being nice or if I’m really an OK cook or what.

Anyway, I told Jacob that I need to make sure that I get absolutely honest feedback with suggestions for improvement… examples of why something didn’t taste good or whatever. It helps that he spent a lot of the summer in the kitchen with me cooking like crazy. He learned a lot of things about food and how it all works together, consistency and texture, color, flavors that go and those that don’t go so much… So hopefully that will make these dishes work at some point.

I’m about to say screw buckwheat, though. That stuff is weird.

I’m also having a hard time finding buckwheat noodles that are all buckwheat and no standard wheat. It seems that Korean noodles don’t have any wheat, so I’m going to have to ask David where to find some of those since he’s my go-to guy on all things in that sphere. (Hint, Hint)

I have figured out that all this cooking is going to be a lot of experimentation.

I mean, I know how to cook, right? I know what an egg does. I know why you have to have sugar and salt in a yeast bread recipe. I know some of the science of cooking, people.

And yet, the first recipe I cook using these new, unconventional ways of cooking for a diversified rotary diet yielded hard little rocks instead of oatmeal cookies.

To be fair, I probably should have used a more conventional flour since this was actually a day where I could… and I used butter instead of oil because I could and I probably shouldn’t have done that. But the egg. Man… duplicating an egg is not as easy as it sounds.

Still, even though they looked like rocks and were crumbly outside, they were surprisingly soft inside and Jacob said they were good and that he’d eat them. I have to say that the consistency was more like a cereal bar, but not one of the nasty corn syrupy concoctions… more like odwalla bar meets kashi bar.

At any rate, even today after just the first few meals I realize that my entire repertoire of cooking skills will not be available to me each day. Ditto my entire pantry. It’s going to take some creativity and serious note taking. I may be throwing some things out after they fail miserably, but I guess that just means I will be taking away an entirely different set of skills with each recipe I try.

More later. I’m off to make some eggless buckwheat waffles. Wish me luck.

Starting with dinner on 10/11 (J will be at Dad’s this whole time)

Dinner:
Turkey and Sweet potato casserole, spinach (p245)

Breakfast (send to Dad’s):
Pear Amaranth Muffins (freeze for future, p127)

Lunch:
Apples, pistachios, coconut, turkey chunks, sweet potato casserole

Snacks:
Apple pie (p281), coconut, cashews

Shopping:
Turkey meat
Apples x 1
Pears x 2 or enough pureed pears to make 1 cup (baby food)
Coconut
Date or Beet sugar
Sweet potatoes x 4
Cashews (3/4 cup)
Dried Dates (1/4 cup)
Loose spinach
More amaranth flour (about 1 cup or so more)