Yamiam

Team Fresh n’ Fibrous did relay for life this weekend, and it was a fresh and fibrous time. We made healthy muffins of all kind to sell in support of colon cancer. Because a fibrous muffin a day keeps the colon cancer away.

The event started on Saturday morning and the night before I had a sudden urge to make clafoutis. So I got up at 7, which is not really very early for me, to make it. I really like recipes like clafoutis, because its simple- you just mix a bunch of things together with a whisk, pour it over another thing in a pan, and you can make a billion variations on that theme. The hardest part was waiting for it to bake! I took some pictures, which were again subpar, since point and shoot seems to be a complicated direction for me. But here it is - thanks to Ellyse who at least attempted to present the blob of clafoutis well!
This one, I took when it came out of the oven. I had to bake it in a square pan since we didn’t have a tart pan. Next time I will borrow Iris’s and make it pretty.
It came out kind of a blob because I used frozen rasberries which made the clafoutis more soggy.

Here’s a close up of the BLOB. It’s coming.

The Clafoutis was really good, light and eggy and not too sweet. The perfect breakfast.
And then we headed to the track for some hardcore walking in circles.
The muffins that we made were tasty, and fibrous, and.. fresh.


I made the “Bran Experience”. It was. It’s the trip of the lifetime- to the bathroom. Hee hee.

This is a post that is long due. I made these cute mini bagels probably two weeks ago, on a whim. You see, I’m not really a bagel fan- most of the time they are hard and stale and just too much bread. But I saw this mini bagel recipe on Delicious:Days, a newly discovered foodblog that everyone should visit! The recipe is taken from there.

I like these bagels because they are so small and cute, and to shape them all you have to do is poke a hole through with your finger or the end of a wooden spoon.

These bagels are jaundiced because my camera skills are still very poor. One of the parents must have been Type - O (how appropriate! Haha, I slay me.)
But yes, ignore my picture and instead mosey on over to Delicious:Days where you can find the recipe and a much better picture here.

On another note, the other day I finally went to the Top Dog, the mecca of College Studentiness. We played taboo the night before and one of the words I had was sausage, and then someone talked about links and sausage.  After that, I just couldn’t stop thinking about, well… sausages (the kind off the grill, thank you very much).  So, off to top dog I went. I got the bird dog and it was delicious! I usually hate hotdogs, but this was a different species, literally.

So my goal now is to become a better college student eater. That means trying Cheese n Stuff, Bongo Burger, La Cascada, and Pie in the Sky. Those are the first on the list, but I’m sure there are others that I’m missing.

So, two nights ago EM decided to make some uber delicious chocolate banana bread. We had some discount, overripe bananas from Berkeley Bowl, so it was the perfect opportunity. It was also the perfect opportunity to use a teeny weeny sample of bourbon that we received in the mail (courtesy of whoever lived here before us). Anyway, the ingredients were readied..

and the next step was to open our small drop of bourbon to soak the cranberries in. We all tried really hard (even me with my large muscles )

But we just couldn’t get it open! We even took it up to our wonderful neighbor AB’s place. He couldn’t open it either. We brought it back to the apartment and then, upon some reflection, noticed that the name was inscribed backwards on the “lid”.

Hahha. It was a seal!! No wonder we couldn’t open it! Silly us. Needless to say the bread was made without the bourbon. But it was just as delicious! Unfortunately, in the excitement I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. HA! HA!

It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because spring break started and I’ve been hanging out with my mom, and also because my spring break technically began a bit earlier than most, as my brain stopped working last Wednesday. The good thing about that is that it gives me time to watch TV, and catch up on Top Chef. I think it’s really cool that there are two chefs from San Francisco on the show this season, and it’s doubly awesome that they are lesbians. This could get complicated…

But before the neurons shut down, I did manage to make some pretty delicious muffins for St. Patrick’s day. Now, I’m not normally a big fan of Irish Soda bread, because the traditional version, containing just baking soda, salt, and flour, is dense and not very flavorful. But on Tastespotting (of course), the weekend before St. Patty’s Day, I found a recipe for beautiful Irish Soda muffins that had currants, caraway, buttermilk, and a bit of butter.

It was so fluffy and light, like a biscuit. I added only a little bit of caraway and some bites had more than others, but when you got a caraway bite, it was a surprise!

Here’s the link to the recipe:  http://therecipegirl.blogspot.com/2008/03/irish-soda-bread-muffins.html

Gaahh.. Why are there no planners for sale in the student store? How can they run out of planners? Are they really that popular? I mean honestly, do people really keep track of their lives so closely? Okay, yes they do. I know that now, because after I lost my planner, my life has been in disarray. Assignments have been forgotten, passwords have been forgotten, I even feel like I am losing track of peoples’ names. I miss my cute little planner which I got from Ranch 99. I miss you planner, come back to me. None other can compare with your shiny red cover and weird drawings of big headed Asian cartoons. I searched for another to take your place. But I found none at Urban Outfitters, none at Ned’s, or Moe’s, or Pegasus, or at the student store. I must undertake another pilgrimage to your birthplace and go back to Ranch 99. Alas, I fear that day will come too late.

Anyway, back to the real topic of this post. Which is… PIZZA! Last Friday Ellyse made pizza, off of a recipe from the Cheeseboard Collective Cookbook. Iris tried to teach me how to take better pictures, and I think they turned out quite well. It is definitely still a work in progress though.

Mushroom pizza in the making

Tomato and Feta

The finished pie!
Oh it was so delicious. I think it was better than Cheeseboard. Blasphemous? Possibly, but it’s true.

Man, the food at our apartment is good.

I think that I should chronicle the day to day meals that we have here because I’m really proud that we eat like this, even though we are only students.

Here is the vegetarian chili that Ellyse made.

It is so flavorful, it makes no difference that it’s vegetarian. I have to remind myself not to eat too much though, because we all know the consequences that would entail.

Three Bean Chili ( adapted from Nicolette Hahn Niman’s recipe featured in the SF chronicle)

1 cup pinto beans

1 cup black beans

1 cup kidney beans

2 tsp ground cumin

4 tsp oregano

1 tbsp canola oil

2 tbsp olive oil

2 large onions, diced

salt and pepper

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

4 tsp sweet paprika

3 tbsp ground red chile

1 28oz can whole stewed tomatoes, chopped, with their juices

1 15oz can of tomato sauce

1/4 cilantro (plus more to taste, in our case, lots more)

dash of red wine vinegar

soak beans overnight, and then boil for 40 minutes.

Crush cumin and oregano with a mortar and pestle and set aside.

In a large, heavy bottomed pot, heat the canola and olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions and saute until the onions are translucent and the edges are brown, stirring frequently. Add salt and pepper to taste, then the cumin and oregano, the garlic, the paprika, and the chile. Turn heat to low, stir to combine and allow to cook for a couple of minutes. Then add the chopped tomatoes and their juices, the tomato sauce and cilantro to the pot and stir. Raise the heat to medium and wait until the mixture bubbles. Add the beans and stir gently. Turn heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 1 hour. Add water to thin the mixture from time to time, while also checking the soup for needed additions of salt, pepper, or chile powder. Just before serving, add a dash of red wine vinegar. Serve with sour cream and shredded cheese as well!

Last week I made two recipes from the blog 101 cookbooks. If you haven’t read this blog, it’s definitely worth checking out, as Heidi Swanson makes some of the best recipes from whole and natural foods. I made two recipes from her blog last week- yeasted cornbread and rustic cabbage soup. They both turned out great, as expected of course. But the cornbread, especially, was one of a kind. It had real chunks of corn and chives in it, and it was more like a bread than your regular cornbread. It was so good, with hints of honey and a great, light texture. I ate it for dinner, then lunch, then breakfast consecutively.

So what do both of these things have to do with food?

Last night I went to the Vagina Monologues with my roomie Mellyse and our friend Batasha ( to protect their real identities after all). All of the monologues were excellent and they did an amazing job given that the open rehearsal venue was changed from Dwinelle to the SLC, a much smaller space, at the last minute.

As we were about to leave, I spotted a familiar face. It was a face I recognized from television- from the Bravo show Top Chef! I don’t know how many of you watch Top Chef, but I watched season 1 religiously. And there, in the SLC, was Tiffani Faison, who was runner up to winner Harold Dieterle! I wasn’t sure if it was really her, so the first thing I said was , “excuse me, but were you on TV…” haha. And she nodded like she got that all the time. I didn’t want to bother her too much, but I kept smiling and bobbing my head excitedly while asking her why she was there. It turns out that she went to Berkeley! Now, upon googling this information I didn’t get any confirmations, but I suspect she wouldn’t want people to be able to just find out that kind of personal stuff online? Who knows. She also said that she had a restaurant in San Francisco, but I looked that up and couldn’t find anything out either.

As Top Chef viewers know, Tiffani Faison was a contestant on Top Chef season 1 , competing with some really good chefs. She made it to the top two while earning herself the reputation of being quite intense- to the point of bitchiness some may say. Her signature phrase was uttered during one episode when she told fellow contestant Dave Martin that she was “not your bitch, bitch.”

All in all… quite an exciting night.

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

- e.e. cummings

I love bran muffins. I mean really really love bran muffins. I guess my favorite store bought ones are the ones from the Zen Bakery that are sold at Trader Joe’s. But they are expensive there, I think almost four dollars! Gasp- talk about a dent on my college-sized wallet. So a while back I turned to making my own. I found a great recipe on Allrecipes.com that can be tweaked a lot of ways and still turn out well. Now I make them at least once a month, and when I am really in a branny mood- once a week. I have to put in a caveat, however, and that is that once I entered these muffins into a contest I had with my friend Kelly. And unfortunately, they did not stand up to her equally healthy, and DAIRY FREE muffins! But I still liked mine better.

Recipe adapted from Allrecipes

Banana Bran Muffins

• 1 1/2 cups wheat bran
• 1 cup buttermilk ( I used vanilla soymilk with 1 tbsp lemon juice)
• 1/3 cup applesauce
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 banana,mashed
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat over to 375 degree F and grease a muffin pan
pour the buttermilk into the wheat bran and let it stand for 10 minutes, while you mix the wet ingredients

Mix the applesauce, egg, brown sugar, mashed banana, and vanilla together in a bowl

add the wet ingredients into the bran and mix

sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon

add the flour to the wet ingredients and mix until just combined

fill muffin pan ( I like big ones so these only made10 for me)

BAKE AND ENJOY!

This recipe is great, you can add oil instead of applesauce if you don’t like the texture, and any types of fruit and be added as well. I’ve added chopped apple, carrot, nuts, blueberries, pumpkin, anything is possible!