On a Roll.....

Don't you just love toilet paper that makes you feel good using it? Get your filthy minds out of the gutter now I'm talking about using IT versus some other brand. The kind of toilet paper that fills one with pride when they open their bathroom cabinet and see all the pretty rolls piled up.
Wait....what? Are you serious? You don't have any pride in your t.p.? Wow, I'm sorry, seriously now, I had no idea. I thought every one was as thrilled over their t.p. choice as we are...huh...well sucks for you then.
I'm sorry that your t.p. doesn't fill you with a deep sense of satisfaction over a choice that is not only good for you but better for the environment as well.
Come again? You just buy what ever is on sale? ohhhhh.....That's o.k., I used to be like that too. Our quest for the perfect t.p. didn't start solely for environmental super hero ego stroking reasons. We wanted t.p. that when you blow your nose with it, a small dust storm of t.p. particles wouldn't fill the air and cause you to actually sneeze MORE defeating the whole point of the t.p.
Oh, you're shocked cause we don't buy tissues specifically made for nose blowing? Tissue smissue, what's t.p. but a bunch of tissues on a roll. Well anyways we picked up the 7th generation t.p. and we were very impressed. I mean....as impressed as a person can get with a new brand of t.p.
I'm gonna try and make like we didn't party like it was 1999 when we stumbled across this wonderful product so y'all think I have some small iota of coolness....Oh...that ship has sailed, well frig it, who cares. WE were very happy with our new t.p.choice. At first you might think it seems rougher in comparison to the other super soft, quilted, hand stitched by mountain monks rolls of t.p. But it's only that people have come to expect billowy piles of t.p. dust with their loo paper....this doesn't have to happen though. 7th Generation is a nice t.p. that doesn't pretend to be anything other then what it is. I don't need t.p. so thick I'd lay it over my bed in loo of a quilt...get it? lieu, loo? hahaha I crack myself up sometimes, filthy minds, gutter, I warned you! Ignore all words like crack in a blog about t.p.

(Something else awesomely cool you can do with a huge amount of rolls of t.p., throw em in the air just to see them fly.)

Anyways it turned out this t.p. is made of 100% recycled paper, 80% of it is post consumer materials (what ever that means but I'm sold, sounds good) and also NOT bleached with nasty ol creepy stuff. Instead it's whitened with an environmentally safe process. SWEET! How do I know all this, it says so on the packaging, I love loo paper that is also good bathroom reading material as well.
We were buying the rolls in the standard 12 pack at the supermarket but for some strange reason they stopped selling them so we started buying the rolls separately at a different store for....don't faint...1.69 a roll. I know, it sounds like a lot BUT it's a better choice for the body as well as the environment and at 1.69 a roll you sure as hell won't be wasting it for no reason. However, have no fear as I was struck by genius the other day (feels a bit like getting smashed in the head with a butterfly, in case you're curious what true genius feels like) I wondered if I could order t.p. online and guess what? Oh........you actually guessed, and you already knew you could get t.p. on the internet, well bully for you (I swear I dunno where the inner British is coming from, if I'd drank tea today I could understand)
But who wants to get 12 rolls of t.p. when you can get, drum roll please, 48! WooooooHooooo for the Loooo Paper people! I saved over 30 dollars as compared to buying it at the store, I got to make a super awesome t.p. tree in the living room AND have a frigging awesome cardboard box that they came in to play in. How cool is that? VERY COOL!
Of course some day in the future we won't even need t.p. but until that beautiful day comes we'll stick with 7th Generation. I did a quick look on Amazon and turns out buying the 7th Generation there in bulk makes it competitively priced with other leading brands, in a few cases even CHEAPER! yeaaaah! So I'm not wasting money, I'm doing a small part to not contribute as much to nasty environmental issues AND I can play fortress with the rolls in the mean time. Life is cool.

(Me in my happy place, a beautiful new loo paper box)

Round We Go...

Ohhh OHHHHh OHHHhhhh this was fun! Stumbled across a new site, well new to me,
Photojojo
They had a super cool tutorial for making your own planet like spheres from panorama photos. After I cleared all the drool out of my keyboard and let it dry for half an hour I whipped up my own *planet*. This was a photo I had taken in San Diego.
I warn you though, just a few clicks in Photoshop and you'll be creating planets like mad...it's addicting!

Rotten Cabbage????

(innocent organic cabbages awaiting their transformation into sauerkraut!)

If you used to think sauerkraut was just a fancy way of saying rotten cabbage and that it was better off polluting some other poor sap's meal than your own but now you're a sauerkraut fiend then...wow.....cause seriously that's almost exactly what happened to me!(hacking up the cabbage into food processor sized bits)

Sauerkraut used to be a lot like New Zealand for me. I knew it was out there but knew next to zip about it and wasn't too concerned about my lack of knowledge. I still know zip about New Zealand BUT sauerkraut....oh mama......who knew that it was a gastronomical delight?

(shredding organic cabbage in my big fancy food processor)

Seriously now, who can I blame for my lack of sauerkraut knowledge? There has to be somebody! I've been missing out on one of the most fabulously tasty not to mention HEALTHY things that humans have discovered, and this went on for yeeeeeeeaaaaaaars.

(loose, shredded cabbage with sea salt in glass container)

Other people were out there gobbling up great vats of sauerkraut while I was suffering, unbeknownst to me. Oh sure I didn't know about how yummy it was so I can't miss what I don't know of right? WRONG! I ache for every year, every minute every tick tocking second of my past sauerkraut stupidity. That's 852037002 seconds of life I was deprived of sauerkraut. Of course I'm calculating based on discovering sauerkraut as a yummalicious food and not a weapon of mass destruction a couple of years ago. How long I've know about HOMEMADE sauerkraut as the fricking easiest, cheapest of all mega fabulistic foods is more like 15778463 seconds. Which is not long enough if you ask me.
Well lets just let bygones be bygones and not place the blame of my lack of culinary education squarely on the shoulders of all the adults in the life of me as a youngin, lets move past the horrible betrayal of said adults keeping yummy sauerkraut a secret for their own nefarious needs and not cling to silly past wrongs of those again, previously mentioned adults, severely depriving me of tasty sauerkraut. I'm past that..........I think........

(adding sea salt to shredded cabbage, it will bring the juices out of the cabbage and make its own brine)

Alan and I discovered we could make sauerkraut in our very own home after reading about it in a super fabulous book called wild fermentation. Ooodles of interesting recipes and things in there.

(packed down cabbage)

All we needed was salt, cabbage (organic of course) and a big old thingy-ma-jig to store it in, plus some super heavy stuff to weight it down with. They'll sell you sauerkraut making crocks online for a hundred bucks, We bought a gigantic glass cookie jar type container for 15 bucks at the local department store.
Can I get an "oh yeah" for the thrifty people in the house?

So here's how ridiculously simple sauerkraut is....are you ready? Shred a fricking boatload of cabbage, add about 3 tablespoons of sea salt for every 5 pounds of cabbage, weight the whole mess down in an appropriate container....and......you wait....THAT'S IT????? Hell yeah that's it.(bottled sauerkraut, to be kept in the fridge as it's preservative free)

I know, I know I'm as shocked as you but that's seriously it. There's no cooking no sauteing no fancy herbs or oils, vinegars, HA no way and spices don't need em. REAL sauerkraut is just salt and cabbage and time. Ingenious really.
It does take a wee bit more time then the average home maker is perhaps used to...like 3 to 4 weeks BUT if you think about it that's a lot less time then it would take to seriously lay a whoop ass down on the people responsible for your lack of homemade sauerkraut knowledge.

(our homemade sauerkraut is featured here in a feast of homemade Russian black bread, German potato salad, galric-y rapini greens, a pasilla and onion pepper medley and homemade pork sausage patties.....ohGodhelpmeIwantitnow...)

Homemade sauerkraut is zesty, delicious, crunchy, cool and full of all kinds of microscopic probiotic doolies that are good for your insides. Considering that in a way it's alive, it's sort of like a really boring pet you can eat....eww, strike that comparison from your brains please.

Drunken Cookies Update!

Wow, those cookies were so damn good they've been coming to life, getting snookered and going on youtube. I don't know how people manage kids I can't even keep my dang cookies in order.
You can see what I mean at:
http://www.youtube.com/iteacoffee

(Is there a 12 step program for cookies? Perhaps Alan and I need to stage a little intervention, the first step is for those sweet little morsels to admit they're nuts, full of nuts, what ever....)

A little Cheesey...

I used to think cheesecake was some bastardized version of wonderful regular cake with something as odiously disturbing as cheddar cheese added to it. Don't get me wrong , cheddar cheese is a beautiful thing, just not in dessert. I mean come on, CHEESE cake, what was I supposed to think? Plus I was like 6 so give me a break.
Of course when I dared utter these complaints in my childish ignorance I was bitch slapped, metaphorically speaking, in to shape by nobody.
I recall two life altering cheesecake moments from when I was a little girl. Strangely enough each was with a Grandmother. I remember visiting my Grandma Shirley and we'd some times go for jaunts in to town. All I can recall of this one particular jaunt was harsh fluorescent lighting, cafeteria style tables, a lunch counter with glass fronted area, you slid your tray along the counter and pointed at what you wanted.
Grandma got cheesecake, it looked rather ordinary. brown bottom with white stuff on top and brown crumbles to top it off. It wasn't neon red or ice cream so I'm sure I wasn't too impressed. It was a dessert though so I was more then willing to give it a try. My love affair with all things sweets started waaaay back.
Can you see it? A little frizzy red headed girl at a cafeteria table with her Grandma, sliding a fork through a dense, moist layer of cheese cake, scooping up the dark buttery graham crust and having an epiphany. Right there, right there in the middle of the cafeteria at Wool-Co!
It wasn't just good, it was LIFE CHANGING! When you're a little kid cookies are the height of culinary genius for your wee under-developed taste buds. Sometimes pie if you were feeling crazy, always ice cream and anything you could get in a brightly colored packages at the check out counter and had words like Gummi, Fizzy, Gooey or Sour in the title.
If I'd been given my choice of dessert that day, oh how my heart falters at the thought, if I'd been given my choice I might have picked a sundae, an ordinary, uninspiring sundae from a cafeteria. But my Grandma Shirley she picked cheesecake! Oh it was AMAZING! I can't remember much else but the feeling of glorious silky, thick creamy, slightly tangy wonderfulness. Nothing fancy, no fruit or chocolate or anything to muck up the purity of it. JUST cheesecake. I was a changed girl leaving that cafeteria.
Cheesecake wasn't something we had often when I was a kid, actually more like never. For all I know that might have been my first and last bit of cheesecake for a long time to come. But I never forgot it.
The next memory of cheesecake is a little sharper, a little brighter. I suspect it was my second experience with cheesecake, so I was older and ever so slightly more prepared. Of course how prepared can one be when it comes to cheesecake, it's like holding a bright shining star in your mouth and feeling the glory of the universe for an instant. Even if you did that a thousand times could it ever be dimmed, could you ever be truly prepared?
This time I was with my other Grandma, Grandma Prest. Perhaps it was even during the visit when my family were luxuriating in homemade root-beer at home while I was away for a week or two for a summer holiday with Grandma.
I remember it was her birthday and the sun was super bright. I remember that people were coming over, I haven't a clue if it was 2 or 200 but I remember the busy feeling of *company's coming*. Grandma was making dessert in the kitchen. I can see her at the counter putting ruby red slices of fresh strawberries all over a...... glossy white cheesecake. I don't remember the agonies of waiting for a piece, thank goodness things like that do fade in time. I don't remember who the company turned out to be, I don't remember finally getting a piece of the cheesecake. I just remember the tart sweet strawberries and vanilla creamy cheese cake and rich crumbly graham crumbs combination that was even MORE heavenly then the cheesecake from Wool-Co.
I don't think I asked for the recipe. I wish I'd been sophisticated enough to realize I could maybe MAKE this glorious dessert for myself and got the recipe out of my Grandma. I remember going on and on and on and ON to my Mother about this amazing strawberry cheesecake that I got to have at Grandma's. Since our family budget didn't run to cheesecake when ever we wanted I was probably torturing her with descriptions on the cheesecake I got to have and she didn't. Of course...if this WAS during the fateful summer of the best root beer I never got to have then perhaps she got her JUST DESSERTS, so to speak. hahahaha
At some point during my teenage years my Mom got a cookbook from my Grandma Prest. I was well in to my infatuation with desserts then. Some girls save up and buy makeup I bought chocolate chips. Well this one time I was flipping through the cookbook and found a recipe for cheesecake that seemed familiar. The thing that both of these mind blowing childhood cheesecake experiences had in common was the TYPE of cheesecake they were. Unbaked. No eggs, just cream cheese, whip cream and sugar. Oh Mama.
I saved my pennies, and I worked damn hard for them pennies too! House cleaning at a Lady's house every Saturday and I bought myself the ingredients for the cheesecake with some of my earnings. Look I wasn't a total bi-otch about it, I shared, for the most part, with my family.
The first cheese cake I made I topped with slices of bananas. The bananas were pretty good.....but the cheese cake....
HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH!
There were angels singing and the skies opened up bathing in me in golden light when I tried my first bite of that cheesecake. Well, maybe not exactly but I'm pretty sure there was a lot of "MMmmmmmm MMMMMMMmmmmmmmmm MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM"
IT WAS PERFECT! The cheesecake part I mean, you can top it with anything you want but the cheesecake is the essential part. And this recipe was EXACTLY what I was looking for. It was easier to make then I could ever imagine and it started a whole new world of flavors for my family. It was easy to get them addicted to things like that. Sure I spent my hard earned dollars buying cheesecake supplies....ONCE...muahh ahhh ahhh, but after that they WERE addicted, not so subtly hinting "make that cheesecake, what do you need for it?"
A funny thing, this is the only cheesecake recipe I've ever made. It's that good. It's like my husband, why would I stray to another? I hit on the perfect thing first time up to bat so why would I mess with perfection?
Oh, I'm sorry. Were you wanting the recipe? Hmm, all that lead up and nada, zilch, nothing. Just the cold empty cruelty of me denying you your own cheesecake perfection? Don't freak out, I'm not one of those *family secret* kind of gals. Here's the recipe and enjoy. I don't have the name of who originally made this cheesecake but if I ever find it I'll include it here too. I have changed it a wee bit from the original anyways. You can too, sometimes lime pie filling on top, some times lemon, sometimes fresh fruit. Yummers. Customize to your wee precious heart's delight!

Lemon Cheesecake
INGREDIENTS:
For Crust:
1 cup of graham cracker crumbs
2 tbs white sugar
1/4 cup of melted butter
For cheesecake:
1 package of cream cheese (8 oz.)
1/2 cup of white sugar
1/8 tsp of salt
1 tsp of vanilla
1 tsp of lemon juice
1 small container of cool whip
Lemon Topping: 1 package of Jello lemon pie filling, just follow directions on the box.

DIRECTIONS:
Mix graham crumbs, butter and sugar and press in to 9” square pan, bake in pre-heated oven at 350 degrees for 10 minutes. Remove and cool.
Soften cream cheese to room temperature, resisting the urge to just eat it on crackers and skip the whole cheese cake thing...Stir the softened cream cheese with sugar, vanilla, lemon juice and salt in a bowl till well combined. Fold in the whip cream, dont forget to take it out of freezer before hand so it will be soft enough to fold in. Spoon cheesecake mix on to cool crust. Keep in refrigerator while you prepare the lemon pie filling. When the pie filling is ready, pour hot over the cheesecake and let cool. It’s yummiest if you have the will power to leave the whole thing in the fridge a few hours till it’s good and chilled and set up!

This recipe is one I've played a lot with, you can use lower calorie ingredients, you can make homemade lemon or lime pie filling, home made whip cream etc. Replace regular ingredients with organic. You get the drift, it's super simple and super delicious EVERY time I've made it!

Drunken Cookies

Please note that tis not me or my sweetie inebriated in this video but the cookie who came to life. How bizarre. I think it's all fine and well for cookies to talk but I really don't think they ought to be running around getting drunk, it's not seemly you know.

A classic style peanut butter cookie got totally *pimped out* and the results are my uber peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. So good they talk back!

Uber Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
(makes 12 cookies, or 2 really decent cookies)

1/2 cup of salted, smooth, organic peanut butter
1/2 cup of organic coconut oil
2/3 cup of brown sugar
1 organic egg
1/4 tsp of sea salt
1/2 cup of stone ground whole wheat
1/2 cup of spelt flour
1/4 cup of ground flaxseed meal
1/2 tsp of aluminum free baking powder
3/4 tsp of baking soda
a handful of salted roasted pecans
a BIG handful of chocolate chunks from a block of chocolate
We prefer the Scharffen Berger Bittersweet 70% Cacao

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F, Mix the ingredients together adding as much chocolate and nuts as you prefer. This makes a stiff cookie dough that needs to be man handled in to cookie shapes. Bake in the oven for about 11 minutes, don't overbake and ENJOY! Particularily mind blowing when frozen and nibbled on cold with a glass of French Roast iced coffee....

These cookies are not only brain alteringly delicious BUT...take a breath....they're healthy, satisfying and did I mention freaking taste-tastic?
(please note these cookies are so miraculous they can be known to come to life and talk. Just saying, fair warning is fair warning!)