Cooking Day

Today was a day of reflection and cooking.

I made hard-boiled eggs for snacks for the week. I made this raspberry chia jam, which is a little tart and amazing. I mixed up this bread dough and baked a loaf of it (you can keep the dough in the fridge for two weeks and bake a single loaf at a time). This is my first foray into bread making (without a bread machine) and I'd like to make whole wheat loaves for sandwiches eventually, but this recipe seemed so simple I thought it was the best way to get some experience. UPDATE: It tasted amazing! Especially given how simple it is to make!

My first loaf!

I also cooked quinoa and baked sweet potatoes as prep for these sweet potato quinoa patties. I also assembled a lasagna for tonight's dinner that is waiting in the fridge to be baked. I didn't use a recipe, though I loosely followed the one in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook and the lasagna came out huge. I hope it will flatten a bit when it cooks, because it has close to a pound of raw spinach in it right now (which is sure to flatten out). And I baked Brad an "apple pie" though its not much like a pie because it has an oatmeal crumble crust thing...worried it wont be that good.

I haven't listed my meal plan for a few weeks, so here it is for this upcoming week:

Monday: "Influenced Vegetable Stew" from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook with homemade bread
Tuesday: The sweet potato quinoa patty recipe listed above, with kale and bread
Wednesday: Peanut sauce on soba noodles with kale (vegan and gluten free!), also from EBF cookbook
Thursday: Spaghetti...

I finished reading my fifth book this year. It was Wuthering Heights. I never wanted to read this book because my sister read it in high school and she hated it. But then I watched the BBC version on Netflix. I loved the story that they presented in that version and decided I just had to read the book...the book is nothing like the BBC version though. It was still worth reading once but I probably wouldn't read it again.

And of course, happy birthday Bradley (yesterday), who has cared for and accepted me these past 3.75 years, in spite of everything good and bad that we've been through together!

From the aquarium last weekend, the river otters were sleeping...