The garden miracle...

Look at all the amazing produce that my garden presented me! Yet not. As my students say,"Oh Mrs. Longoria, quit clowning me."

I have to admit that only about 1/3 of the tomatoes are mine and pretty much nothing else came from my garden. The rest is from the lovely little German grandmother who lives next door to us. What did I do wrong? Which gardening god did I tick off? What can I do to appease the universe's karma?

It is finally hot enough for tomatoes to start taking off, but wait, it is Sept. which means in 2 weeks the frost date will arrive andgrowing season will be over.

I digress...

In good news, my back to school whoopie pies are delicious. I made a bunch, wrapped them individually and keep them in my freezer to put in my lunch each day (and, of course, I shared with other fellow teachers). I used an official whoopie pie pan, which looks sort of like a shallow muffin pan. However, I have been told by many people that you can scoop out the batter like cookie dough and drop it on a sheet pan for a more free-form pie. The middle (or the whoop of the pie as Daniel likes to call it) is good 'ole fashion marshmallow fluff straight from Beantown.

Here is what I used for my "back to school red velvet whoopie pies":

3 c. flour

1/3 c. cocoa powder

1 t. baking powder

1/2 t. baking soda

1/2 t. salt

1/2 c. unsalted butter

1/2 c. crisco

1/2 c. brown sugar

1 c. regular sugar

3 t. vanilla extract

10 drops red food coloring (more or less if you prefer)

1 c. buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease whatever sort of cookie sheet or pan you are using.

Mix together: flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a bowl and set aside. Beat together in a separate bowl: butter, crisco and both types of sugar. Mix on low until just combined then increase the speed to medium and beat until fluffy (4-5 minutes). Next, add one egg at a time while beating the batter. Add food coloring and vanilla. Next, add half of the flour mix and 1/2 c. buttermilk to the batter, after it has incorporated into the batter, and the rest of the flour mix and buttermilk.

Use a cookie scoop and put about 2 tablespoons of batter into each cup of the whoopie pie pan (or see above if you do not have this pan). Bake for 10 minutes. Here is my warning as I over baked about 1/4 of my pies :( Check at 8 minutes and do a toothpick test. As oven is on longer, the latter batches will cook faster. Burnt whoopies=a sad baker.

Fill with marshmallow fluff, jam, or cream cheese.

Enjoy!

(un)Natural Selection

The first week of decreased sugar (I'm going cold-turkey for the next three weeks) went satisfactory, though it will be a long road ahead.

This is a conversation that happened the first day:

Daniel: "You are grumpy!"

Laura: "I am not grumpy, I am suffering from sugar withdrawal."

Daniel: "Eat some ice cream, I do not want to deal with your grumpiness for the next month."

That pretty much sums it up.

This weekend was a mix of sunshine and rain, but I was determined to get some serious gardening done. First job on the docket: transplanting my tomato starts. I used my trusty power drill to make holes in the bottom of used yogurt containers which are unrecycable in our city (I am such a handy woman) .

When I was my seeds I put a few in each starter section, thinking that not all the seeds would germinate. However, in a weeks all the sprouts were at least two inches tall. I realized that tough decisions needed to be made. Having 20+ tomato plants did not seem like a good idea, unless I wanted to set up a farmer's market stand (wait a minute...that doesn't sound too bad...). So I had to sacrifice baby tomatoes for the good of the garden. I felt very bad condemning them to death (Note: Atticus sniffing the fallen soldiers).

The good news was that I have 14 healthy tomato, 3 cantaloup, and 6 pepper plants left, that now have to room to develop healthy root systems. To celebrate making it through the selection process, I took my seedlings on a field trip to the sunshine in the side yard.

In other news, as reported before, the RWAs (robins with attitudes) ate half of my pea plants. The picture below demonstrates the devestation that occured. I am planning on planting additional rows next weekend. Anyone have any suggestions what I can do to scare away the birds? Moses is a useless guard cat!

The rest of the gardening chores accomplished were: aerating and thatching the front yard (if you don't know what this is, be thankful), Daniel "moding" his sprinklers (he likes to take parts off the new sprinklers and modify them into Frankenstein sprinklers), and cutting back the rose bushes further than the WA state legislature can cut back teacher's LID days (just kidding, they already cut back all of our LID days. I just thought of that joke when I was pruning and chuckled to myself). All in all, I felt like I had accomplished a good deal this weekend.

Cheers to week one of no/less sugar and sunny spring weather!

My Sugar-Free Week In Review

As of last night I made it one week sans sugar. And it was... not too bad? Not as bad as I thought it was going to be at least. Here are some notes I made during the week.

Sunday: Not too bad. Was almost thrown off course at the start of the morning when I went to add honey to my tea as if on autopilot. The second waver came when Erik waved strawberry cheesecake jelly beans under my nose. I stayed strong. Also if I am going to eat leftover easter candy it is obviously going to be Reese's peanut butter cup eggs. Duh.

Monday: Yawn, yawn, yawn - all day long. Had a very filling, healthy dinner. I am hungry less than an hour later and want a piece of cake! Or a sliver of pie. Or even just a crumble of cookie.

I always believed that hummus was one of those things you just had to buy - but no more. It is hard to get hummus smooth and creamy when you are using beans from a can. I find the secret is to cook dry beans and then puree that.
My "recipe"
Combine cooked beans/lentils/split peas, a squeeze of lemon juice, spices (pepper, penzeys seasoning, hot sauce, whatever.), saltiness (e.g. sea salt, miso, bouillon, soy sauce). Blend it up until very smooth. Add a small amount of liquid if too thick.

The majestic peaks of Mt. Hummus

Tuesday: Had peanut butter for breakfast that after observing the label has a ton of sugar in it. Also you can't trust ketchup!

Spring is finally defying the winter overlords.

Wednesday/Thursday: Didn't note any specific troubles. Perhaps I am past the worst? My study group passed around starburst and I didn't even consider them!

In the blender: Frozen cherries, beets, strawberries, spinach, frozen banana

Friday: Brushed my teeth after dinner and didn't even think about having a sweet snack!

I have never liked cottage cheese that much (except when my mom made pear bunnies with cottage cheese tails!) but I bought some this week to try as an alternative to greek yogurt. I made a "dip" with it that was actually pretty good with tortilla chips. I just mixed plain, non fat cottage cheese with Penzeys Chip and Dip Seasoning.

Yummy but still can't completely get over the texture.

Saturday: Almost broke this morning. We went for a long walk since it was nice out, and stopped by our neighborhood diner for frozen lemonades. I knew this would be breaking my rules, but I wanted one because they are AMAZING, not because I was craving sugar. But alas, I was protected from myself. The diner's frozen lemonade machine was broken, and thus I was kept from slushy lemonadey goodness. The walk was still nice however, we did about five miles and walked by the ocean.

First toes in the sand of the year.

Erik even busted out his boat shoes.

With iced coffee and not frozen lemonade :(

I ran around in a field of dandelions doing impressive leaps and cartwheels, but the photographer was unable to capture the magic. Ahem.

Not a good action shot.

Since Laura tells me it can take three weeks for sugar to leave your system and this week didn't kill me I am going to try to keep it up. I have finals this week so I'm not making any guarantees. You have to confront the EVIL tricks the finals monkey throws at you with whatever defenses you have - sometime that means ice cream sandwiches.

I hope everyone had just the best week. And happy mother's day to my awesome mom who made pear bunnies with cottage cheese tails for me when I was a kid :)

Hello. My name is Ellen, and I am a sugar addict.

This is somewhat embarrassing to admit. I consider myself a pretty healthy person. I bake with whole wheat flour. My top ten favorite food list includes brussels sprouts. I have a t-shirt that says "Eat More Kale" for crap's sake. But over the years, slowly but surely I have come to see cookies as an always food. It is the unfortunate combination of having only a modicum of self control and surrounding myself with tasty confections. My mom was a baker extraordinaire when I was a kid. There was always a homemade tasty cookie, cake, pie, or bread around the house. Which rules when you are a kid and have someone there to tell you not to have pie for breakfast, lunch, AND dinner.  

As an "adult" I have failed at policing myself. Somewhere I went from enjoying a treat for dessert to eating cupcakes for breakfast and calling them muffins because I didn't frost them.

Laura and I have discussed our mutual love for our cristalline friend and we are ready to break the cycle. Care to join us Chardracers? For the next week we are committing to eliminating/decreasing our sugar intake. Let's really stick it to that snotty sugar.

Ugh, look how haughty sucrose looks.

Hopefully putting this in writing will help me hold myself accountable. So I say here, on Lord of the Chard, the most sacred of all blogs, that I will abstain from superfluous sugar from May 1st though May 7th. May the world have mercy on me. And you if you choose to join me.

It is 11:28 pm on April 30th as I write this, so I better go get one last squeeze of the chompo bar in. Please leave any messages of support, sugar avoidance tips, or smack talk about how stupid sucrose looks in the comment.