Granola can be expensive to buy. It’s often stale, or contains cement-hard dried fruit. At very least… the wrong combinations of nuts and dried fruit. When you make your own you can experiment by adding candied ginger, pumpkin seeds, anything you love! I grew up eating granola warm from the oven and sometimes still pour cold milk over it, just to hear it sizzle. Here is my mom’s recipe: 6 cups oats 1/2 cup brown sugar 1 cup of finely chopped nuts 1/2 cup dried milk 2/3 cup honey 2/3 cup of oil 2 Tbl water 2 tsp vanilla My adaption: I like to also add 1 tsp of cinnamon, 2 Tbl flax seeds and 2 Tbl sesame seeds First click to continue reading…
Category: From Frugal to Exotic
Recipes and adventurous food, living frugally
Sereno-Cilantro Miso Soup
Miso is not something that should feel intimidating to make. Miso is a fermented soybean paste (occasionally rice or barley) used to season everything from broth, marinades and salad dressings. You can find miso paste in the refrigerated section of Asian markets or usually in the health food sections. I once got hold of a book which attributed the lack of fall out poisoning in Hiroshima to their diet of miso. You’ve probably already heard of the benefits of live culture in yogurt, basically it is the same in miso. Miso is a living bacteria and should not be boiled hard or long. It is added toward the end of cooking and just dissolved or heated through. Most people would click to continue reading…
Egg Foo Young
Egg Foo Young is a quick and easy vegetarian/pescetarian dinner. We sprout our own mung beans and that takes several days, but otherwise, this doesn’t take much planning. I whisk two eggs per person, and add vegetables until it looks like there is the same mount of veggies as eggs. You want one half of the veggies to be mung bean sprouts. Season with Thai fish sauce*, about 1 tsp per four eggs, and finely minced ginger and garlic to taste. Scoop mixture by a half-cup measuring cup into a hot pan coated with oil. I prefer a combination of olive oil and sesame oil. Sometimes a little egg will run, it is OK, just pull it back to the click to continue reading…
Hippie Craft
My son needed to make and decorate a pinata for his Spanish class in homeschool co op. He had a handful of waded up tissue paper that he brought home, but I wanted to find the tissue squares we used to decorate pinatas when I was little. I don’t know if my mom was particularly inventive/crafty, or if it was just a part of being a kid in the 70s that meant making things like pinatas. I assumed people still did it all the time. We went to four different craft stores looking for tissue paper squares–which you can buy online–but no one had even heard of them. The lady at one craft store laughed when I told her what click to continue reading…
Jalapenos? Kitten food…
My husband has developed a taste for spice that few peppers can temper. We had a whole garden bed devoted to the fiery little bits. This is a small portion of our harvest, in the back you can see the bell peppers…second class citizens. We’ve dried and pickled serenos, jalapenos, Thai chilies, Tabasco “super chilies” and habeneros . And made dozens of jars of something we’ve named “Hab-Sauce.” I also tried a batch of Habenero Gold this year–it was a new project from my favorite canning book. Habenero Gold is a glorified adaption of jalapeno jelly, which you can eat with tortilla strips and cream cheese or brie. Last year I just substituted jalapenos with habeneros and it was such click to continue reading…