Coconut mini muffins, an adventure with too much coconut flour.

I read a recipe for a cross between donuts and bagels that intrigued me. They were made with coconut flour and sweetened with raisins. The most interesting thing about this recipe is that they were cooked in a mini-donut machine.

I have, so far, avoided buying one of the little donut/cupcake/mini-pie bakers, because honestly my garage is FULL of seldom used, single purpose small kitchen appliances. Enough is enough, right?

But, I was intrigued  by the the "Donagles" on this page. This is Jennifer Priest's website and this is a page on Paleo diet friendly snacks for kids.

Disclaimer: I am not following a Paleo diet, or any other kind of diet, for that matter.

So, off to Amazon I went to get some coconut flour. If I had been paying attention I would have seen that the recipe called for 1/3 of a cup of coconut flour and I was ordering a 3 pound bag. So this big bag of coconut flour comes in and darned if it doesn't say on the bag that it should be kept in the freezer, or at the very least in the refrigerator. Of course the bag it came in was not resealable.

The artwork on this bag suggests that the company is related to "Nuts About Florida". Or at the very least they use the same graphic artist.  So, into mason jars went the flour, until I ran out of mason jars, that is. The rest went into another zip top bag and into the freezer. Did I mention that this is best used in a few short months? Yikes!

I made some changes to the printed recipe, of course. I used dairy milk (I don't have issues with dairy, thank you very much). I also had a mason jar full of flax seeds and no flax flour (flax meal?) so I just put the flax seeds in the Vitamix with the other liquid ingredients and let 'er rip.  When I got to the part about sifting the coconut flour I said "Oh hell no" and just put it in the Vitamix, too. As a matter of fact, the only thing that didn't get the blender treatment was the raisins and the walnuts.

This recipe is the perfect size for a mini-muffin pan. I baked them at exactly twice the time recommended for the mini-donut cooker and they came out great!

The only thing is, they taste exactly like bran muffins to me. They do not have a bagel texture at all. If you are avoiding grains, this is a great recipe. For me, it was just a delicious experiment.

Now I have to cook other stuff with coconut flour and see if I can pass this off to my coworkers. They might suspect something is a little off about these, due to the "rough" texture. If cooking these for others, I will top them off with some cinnamon sugar to give that first sweet bite.

Any suggestions for my next coconut flour experiment?

Going old school with iced tea

It's time for iced tea again, and I have, for once, gone backwards technology-wise.

I put the old electric iced tea maker in the garage and pulled out my old teakettle. The reason I did is that I am officially in love with my new tangerine colored Fiesta pitcher. She's a beauty! And a classic, too.

How many of us remember a pitcher like this in our Mom's or Grandmother's house, all loaded up with either lemonade or reconstituted frozen orange juice? My grandmother's pitcher was a light turquoise, and not as big as mine. It was almost always used for OJ.

Yes, I'm tripping down memory lane again, but I'm not ready to give up my Keurig in favor of a Drip-O-Lator just yet.

My formula for tea is 4 family sized bags of decaffeinated tea, 2 teabags of Lemon Zinger, and 64 oz of boiling water. After adding the boiling water to the pitcher, I wait until the pitcher is cool enough to handle. Then I transfer the tea to a plastic pitcher and add 4 Truvia packets. I refrigerate this pitcher, and when I want a glass of tea I put ice in the glass and water up to, or just past, the halfway mark, then add the tea.  Yes, this is very lightly sweetened, and I like it like that!

The best part is the cleanup. It is much easier than with the old Mrs. Tea. Yay, old school!

Angel or devil?

My new Keurig brewer is amazing. Every cup of coffee is delicious all day and all evening. I never drank coffee in the evening before because it was kind of a hassle and by the time I got to the 2nd cup it wasn't so yummy any more.

But I have a devil on one shoulder whispering "Do it. Use the K-Cup. You know you like it!" And I have an angel on the other shoulder who says "If you use the reusable cup there will be less plastic to throw out and choke up landfills."

My reusable cup is the EZ-Cup with paper filters. I tried the MyKCup and one other with the wash-out filters but I didn't like them for 2 reasons. One, I'm spoiled and like my coffee clear filtered through paper, and two those reusable cups are darn hard to clean. I ended up leaving a skewer out on the counter top to loosen up and dig out the tight grounds. With the EZ-Cup, the little filter lifts right out and you are good to load up another one, lickitey split.

Now I am trying to find the perfect decaffeinated coffee. I have some organic decaf from Walmart, but it is too dark a roast for me. Now I'm going to be buying cans of decaf until I can get the perfect medium roast that I like to drink and drink and drink...

Kalalu in my cart. or don't ask a whimpy blender to do the job.

I got the idea into my head to start doing green smoothies. Green smoothies, for the uninitiated, are blender drinks with greens disguised by fruits, blended in (usually) a really strong blender.

I have an Oster blender that is good for the spinach/banana/melon variety of green smoothie, but once I tried to get out of my comfort zone I had some problems. At the vegetable stand, the greens looked tired and hot, except for these pretty greens marked kalalu. No, I'd never heard of them either, but I did need to do something besides spinach everyday. I knew I wasn't ready for kale or collards. The Romaine lettuce produced 3/4 of the container of fiberous foam. Yeah, like that was pleasant to drink. Thank you Osterizer.

But I found out that kalalu, or callaloo, or calalu; is the Jamaican equivalent of spinach. Maybe, but it was so darn tough that I had flecks of the stuff settling to the bottom of my glass almost immediately. And it tasted like St. Augustine grass smells when mowed.

So I ordered the Vitamix. That was a week ago and I haven't even been notified that it's shipped.

I had a lot of  kalalu, so I cooked the rest like spinach: put wet greens on top of sauted onions and garlic and steam until soft. They were still tough. Like collards.

Me and spinach, we are still real good buddies. He's a softie, what can I say?