Homemade Cinnamon Nut Butter

I'm not quite sure where to start this post... I could start by telling you about the inordinate quantities of nuts that I have been consuming over the last month. Or I could start with telling you about the little jar of gourmet Saigon Vietnamese Cinnamon that is lurking in my cupboard and which I occasionally take out, sniff and then loose myself in a cinnamon roll daydream. Or I could just dive right in and tell you that tonight my recent snack and sanity saver called "nuts" met up with a few teaspoons of my fancy cinnamon in the food processor and something beautiful was born!

As a part of my treatment for the yucky intestinal infection I am dealing with right now, I have to avoid all forms of sugar including fruit and most carbs along with the usual gluten and dairy. Just this week, eggs got temporarily cut as well. What does that leave me to eat, you ask? Meat, most veggies, beans, brown rice or quinoa and NUTS! I am probably eating more nuts than is nutritionally recommended for most people. But they are my only quick option when I need a snack or something fast. I have also discovered that I get somewhat passionate about the Mauna Loa Dry-Roasted Macadamia nuts and in this season where treats are so scarce, I am more than happy to pay $13.99 for a jar of them at Costco.

As a concession, to try and make these few months more doable, my doctor agreed to let me have one apple or one pear per day. Tonight I decided to try and make some homemade nut butter to go with my daily apple. Peanuts and my tummy are not on speaking terms at the moment, but I had a bag of Tamari-roasted almonds, raw macadamia nuts and dry-roasted cashews. I have never heard of a nut butter using multiple kinds of nuts, but I thought I'd give it a try and put them all in my food processor for a few minutes until a paste formed. I also decided to try adding in some cinnamon to the final product and it is DELICIOUS! The awesome thing is that we usually associate cinnamon with sweet things (at least in American cooking) and so adding the cinnamon makes my nut butter feel a little like dessert. And feeling like I can eat a little dessert right now makes me very happy!

So if you have some nuts in your cupboard and a food processor, try dumping them in with a little cinnamon or even a savory flavor like cumin or chipotle powder and enjoy!

Cocoa Brownies w/ Browned Butter and Walnuts

Need I say more? I was hooked the moment I saw "browned butter" in the title! Despite the fact that I can't eat these right now, I've been aching to try them out for a couple weeks just to see if they could live up to such a decadent name. (I will confess that I actually think grocery store box brownies are pretty good and haven't made homemade ones in a long time!) I finally made a batch yesterday, of which my sweet, chocolate-loving boyfriend ate about 1/3 last night. He very nicely requested that the remainder of the batch be sent home with him and when I said "no", he resorted to guilt trips and pleading looks. I was a rock (mostly...) He is gearing up for his next marathon and doesn't need to eat a whole batch of brownies. The funny thing is, I took the rest of them to work today where he just happened to be spending the day working on our computers and he snuck in 3 more when I wasn't watching. I guess that means they turned out pretty good!

The recipe came from my February edition of Bon Appetit. I am new to this magazine, which was a Christmas gift. If this recipe is any indication, I look forward to trying out more of their stuff.

Here you go!

Cocoa Brownies with Browned Butter and Walnuts

10 T unsalted butter, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 1/4 cups sugar
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I used the Hershey's Special Dark cocoa)
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp water
1/4 tsp salt
2 large eggs, chilled
1/3 cup plus 1 T flour
1 cup walnuts (I used pecans because it is what I had on hand)

- Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
- Line a 8"x8" inch square baking pan or a 9" cake tin with foil and spray with non-stick cooking spray.
- Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat and continue cooking until butter stops foaming and starts to turn brown (about 5 minutes).
- Remove from heat and immediately add to sugar, cocoa, water, vanilla and salt in a bowl. Stir to blend. (I will warn you... The lovely, rich chocolatey buttery aroma here will be slightly intoxicating!)
- Let cool 5 minutes.
- Add eggs one at a time, stirring well after each one.
- Add flour and stir vigorously for 60 strokes.
- Stir in nuts and transfer to prepared baking pan.
- Bake until a toothpick inserted comes out mostly clean with a few moist crumbs attached. The recipe said this should take about 25 minutes. It took my oven closer to 35 minutes. Just keep an eye on it.
- Cool in pan on a rack. Lift foil from pan and cut into slices.

Because of the relatively small amount of flour in these, I am looking forward to attempting a gluten free version in a few months when I can eat sugar again. If they turn out good, I'll post an update.

Enjoy!

Quinoa Salad w/ Black Beans, Avocado, Goat Cheese & Hummus

I have recently come up with a new meal creation that I thought I'd share here real quick tonight. The new doctor I am seeing took me off of all forms of sugar for about 6 weeks as a part of a treatment program for an intestinal parasite and a bacterial overgrowth called Candida. This new restriction includes fruit, all refined carbohydrates and a couple of starchy vegetables like potatoes, corn and carrots.

Now that I've been at it for a few weeks, this change doesn't actually seem that dramatic. Initially though, dietary changes are always hard. This dish below was my first attempt to come up with something new and tasty, staying within the confines of veggies, beans, eggs, meat and whole grains (like brown rice or quinoa). To my surprise, I loved it! I made an extra portion today for the sweet lady who does my taxes and she loved it. So I figured I would put it here on my blog. Here you go:

Quinoa Salad w/ Black Beans, Avocado, Goat Cheese and Hummus
(The title is pretty self explanatory...)

For one lunch portion:
1/2 cup cooked Quinoa, warmed (I am into the "red" variety at the moment, but regular brown would be fine too)
1/4 cup black beans (approximately)
1/2 diced avocado
1/2 diced tomato
5-6 diced Kalamata olives
Lemon juice
Olive oil
Sprinkling of goat cheese (or any other cheese you like - Feta would be pretty tasty too)
Dollop of Hummus

-Mix all ingredients through olives.
- Squeeze about a 1/4 of lemon's worth of fresh juice over the top and drizzle with a little olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste and then toss together.
- Sprinkle cheese over the top.
- Finish with a dollop (I LOVE that word!) of hummus.

I like mixing again at the end so that the hummus becomes a sort of sauce. I have varied this a tiny bit and added raw, shredded spinach and also a diced hard boiled egg. Feel free to omit ingredients you don't like or add others. The lady I fed this too today thought it would be yummy with some Salmon and capers (in place of the olives).

I resolved to do my utmost to eat well and not complain while on this journey with my unruly digestive tract and I feel like the Lord is giving me grace to that end! A lot of that "grace" has come in the form of encouragement and love from many of you. Thank you! I hope you enjoy the new recipe :)

A Tip for Making Roast Chicken

Hey! I tried out a tip I heard about once last night on my roasted chicken and thought I'd share with you all. I read somewhere that cutting up a celery stalk and stuffing the inside of the chicken cavity with these 2-inch or so pieces will make your chicken really moist. Typically when I roast a chicken, I put liquid in the bottom of the roasting pan (usually some chicken broth and white wine) so that I can baste my little bird with it while cooking. Last night I skipped all basting and just put celery in the cavity and it turned out just as moist! I was pretty impressed! I am guessing all the moisture in the celery sort of steams the bird from the inside.

Roasted chickens are not all that hard, but in case you've never made one, here is what I do:

Rinse the bird and pat dry.

Remove any gizzards from the cavity. (Isn't "gizzard" an amazing word?!)

Drizzle with a little olive oil.

Sprinkle with your favorite seasonings.

Cut 1-2 stalks of celery into approximately 2-inch pieces and put these inside the body cavity.

Roast at 350 degrees until a meat thermometer reads 180 degrees.

Let rest for 10 minutes or so and carve.

If you don't have a meat thermometer, go buy one! They take all the guess work out of cooking meat. I don't know how I ever got by without one. (Thanks Larae and Jonathan!!)

Hunger Pains and Frozen Nose Hairs

I have no recipes to share tonight, just a few thoughts on the topic of hunger. One of my coworkers and I got into a conversation last week about food and hunger and how hard it is to actually pay attention to hunger signals, like an empty stomach or the sensation of fullness. If I'm honest, I don't think I pay too much attention to either of these in my eating habits.

So... My coworker and I decided to try a little experiment this week for three days. We decided that we would only eat when we felt a literal hunger pain and we would go carefully and stop as soon as the hunger pains went away. We were curious how much more often we would have to eat and if, at the end of the day, we would wind up eating less.

To my surprise, this has been EXTREMELY difficult for me. Also to my surprise, it hasn't been the waiting for hunger pains that has been hard, it has been stopping when they go away! I'm not sure why this surprises me, but it does. I find that I have a super strong desire to continue eating even after I feel satisfied. Perhaps I am used to feeling overly full? Perhaps it is just fun and enjoying the way things taste is a form of entertainment? Perhaps it just bugs me terribly to leave a 1/3 of my meal on my plate and feel that I have wasted food? I have no idea. But this has been an interesting revelation.

I've also found that my psychological desire for food sometimes outweighs my physical hunger. Today I was having hunger pains around 3pm, enough to be uncomfortable. But I did NOT want the carrots and hummus that I had brought as a snack. So I just didn't eat anything until I could get home and devour a handful of dry roasted macadamia nuts. Interesting... I'm hoping I'll be a little more aware after this of what is going on inside of me when I reach for a snack or plow through my lunch.

And lastly, I just needed to post out there into the great, wide world that it is RIDICULOUSLY cold here!! Maybe the coldest it has ever been since I moved to Colorado. Cold enough, yes, to freeze your nose hairs when you go outside, which results in a funny tickling prickling sensation that makes me wrinkle my nose like a rabbit while I am trying to get to my car. Yesterday we had a "High" of -7 degrees with a wind chill factor of somewhere around -30 degrees! This morning, for fun, my coworkers and I tossed cups of hot water up into the air just to watch it turn instantly to powdery snow. (SUPER fun!) Below is a picture of some girlfriends and I who braved the cold last night to get together and watch a movie. We watched it under blankets with hoods on and hot tea just because it took me 45 minutes to get warm after being outside for 5 minutes!



That's all. Those are my deep thoughts for the day. Hope you have a lovely evening!