St Patricks day 2011... Edmonton edition

Hello Everyone,

Today is one of the greatest days of the year St Patricks day. Now here in Alberta it is way less cool than the good old days at Western so I decided to compensate with some breakfast treats.

First up is the mint chocolate smoothie

Mint Chocolate Smoothie

Ingredients:

- 1 cup of spinach

- 1 banana

- water (or milk)

- mint extract

- Chocolate chips

- ice cubes

Directions:

- add, spinach, and banana and liquid until about half of the high of the contents into blender... blend until smooth

- add a few drops of mint extract and fill up with ice... blend until smooth

- add chocolate chips and enjoy.

Yes, one of the main ingredients is spinach... it is wonderful.. trust me.

Also there were no fresh banana's so I used one from the freezer. I "defrosted" it in the microwave and ended up squeezing it out of the peel much like Andre does in his method two of how to eat a banana.

I think peppermint extract is my new fave. Do not fret, if you don't have any the spinach banana combo is delicious on its own... sounds a bit crazy... but it is good. Sometimes I add chia or flax for a bit more of a nutritional kick.

Beer? Spinach? Why not both?

(On a side note this awesome shirt was gifted to me by Sara. It is epic!)

Next up, green pancakes, and you may or may not have guessed that there is no food colouring involved. I used Bisquick mix and (extremely) loosely followed the pancake directions... replacing the water it called for with 1 cup of pureed spinach and 1 cup of Guinness.

Who doesn't like beer in their pancakes?

A work in progress.. for some reason I like small pancakes better than big ones... maybe its because I can eat more of them that way.

Devin showing off his master flipping skills.

A modification on Irish Car Bombs...we didn't have any whiskey so we used Irish cream. I dub it the Irish Pipe Bomb!

Happy St Patricks Day Everyone!

Cheers,

-Kirsten

Carefree Conundrum

Hello,

Once again I woke up with a sore throat. Un like last week is just sore all over but no stabbing, oh and I sound like an idiot. In honour of said sore throat I consumed a cold liquid breakfast this morning.

Sorbet or smoothie, that is the question.

I couldn't decide between the two so why not have the best of both worlds?

In the mix:

-Banana

-Frozen strawberries

-Frozen blue berries

-1/8th of a frozen avocado

For the sorbet the above mixens were pulverized in the blender to make a sweet, no sugar added treat.

Half of the sorbet was left in the blender and orange juice was added and blended to form the smoothie. The avocado makes it super smooth and wonderful, you can't even taste it.

I am not a huge avocado fan, which also means I am not a really big guacamole person. I would really like to try to like guacamole though so if anyone has any awesome recipe recommendations I would love to hear them.

I want to start putting beans into my smoothies, sometimes... is that going too far?

What would you pick given the choice, smoothie or sorbet?

-Kirsten

New Toy!

For Christmas I asked for a crazy blender. My dad had no idea what I was talking about so he threw some money at me. What I would normally do in such a situation it to put all of the cash into the "Die student loan die!" fund and watch it make a negligible dent. The other option here would be to buy a normal not 500$ blender, but thats no fun.

First up the Apple smoothie:

In the mix:

-1 frozen banana

-1 cup of spinach

-1/2 lime

-2 apples (with the core!)

-1 cup of ice cubes

-1/2 cup of water

Before After

I was pleased this was after a few seconds and it was so smooth. I like the texture the apple provided and I also really like the colour the spinach brings (you cannot taste it at all).

Next experiment: Larabar mimics

These bars have a really short ingredient list consisting of dates, some sort of nut and some flavour. Devin requested something fruity so I made a lime one for him and chocolate mint for me!

Ingredients:

-1/2 cup cashews

-1/2 cup almonds

-7 dates

-for the lime flavour I added the zest of 1 lime

-for the chocolate mint I added 1 Tbs of cocoa and 1/2 tsp mint extract

process the nuts until powdery, stop before it becomes nut butter.

Pit and add the dates, these remind me of The Dancing California Raisins I just want to dress them up like Mr. Potato Head and have them dance around the kitchen.

And add in your flavour!

On the left is the dough when it is done, on the right is the dough rolled into snack size balls for easy snacks on the go.

The are so tasty!

What is your favourite on the go snack?

-Kirsten

Not for the faint of heart

Hello!

Yesterday I had a pot luck to go to for the Chemistry Graduate Students Society executives. While running around stocking up on baking goods we stopped at a spice shop and I found some sweet loot.

Ginger Beer and pineapple pop. The pineapple pop kind of tastes like those rocket candy's you get on halloween, it was really sweet but oh so tasty. There were two brands of Ginger Beer, the one we picked had a bit of spice and was pretty good. We are trying to find a good source of ginger beer for a drink called Dark and Stormy, which is spiced rum mixed with ginger beer, quite tasty. Brent; I think you have had the Grace brand (the same as my pineapple pop) of ginger beer, what are your thoughts about it?

I also found jilebi, which is some sort of desert I had at New Asian Village a while ago and it is sugary and deep-fried so I decided to pick up a pack. The panner looked pretty interesting too, it is an indian cheese and when I've had it before it was so good. We will see how the pre-packaged kit turns out. These kits were 1.50 each so I don't think you could go wrong.

For the pot luck I made WHOOPEE PIES!!!! These are by no means healthy. These cookies are a cake like consistency with icing sandwiched between two of them.

I got the recipe here and modified it slightly. Instead of all white flour I used half white and half whole wheat. We made chocolate with mint icing and banana with cinnamon spice icing. I also found the batter very thick so I added a bit of water to make it manageable.

I have never had luck with egg based icings so I didn't use that recipe either.

Icing recipe:

-1 cup of lard

-4 cups of icing sugar

-cinnamon or mint

-vanilla extract

Blend lard with dough hook attachment for hand mixer until light and fluffy. Add icing sugar one cup at a time until mixed. Add water until desired consistency (for these you want it to be pretty thick). Add 1.5 tsp of mint extract or 1.5 tbsp of cinnamon depending on desired flavour.

Mix-y the dry ingredients.

Devin helping with the wet ingredients and me pouting about the mess the sticky batter made.

Put cookies on sheet, I also put some in to muffin tins because there was SO MUCH batter, I recommend halving the recipe depending how many you want. We ended up cutting the muffin ones in half a and putting the icing in-between. Bake for 10 minutes on 350 et voila.

For traveling convenience I put the icing into ziplocks and when I arrived at the party I just cut off the corner of the bag and it worked as an icing bag.

The finished product (the next day, my camera died when I got to the party).

Devin enjoying a hangover Whoopee Pie.

I also made a smoothie this morning. It consisted of 1 banana, 1/2 cup frozen pineapple, a splash of juice, and ice until full. Nice and refreshing morning snack.

Tonight is wing night!!! (Finally) My wing topping of choice is going to be sweet chili. What is your favourite wing flavour? What is the craziest/most unique wing flavour you have heard of?