Recipe Files: Sweet Potato Souffle

Oh, right. Thanksgiving is over. We've all moved on to busily talking and thinking and gushing about all things Christmas. Forgive me, for half a second, if I indulge in posting a very Thanksgiving-y recipe. If I were any sort of considerate food blogger I would've posted this recipe on November 1st so you all could've had access to it as you meal planned the biggest feast of the year. But I'm not a food blogger, and I didn't have a picture of this dish to post until I actually made it on Thanksgiving day. Besides, the point of me posting recipes here is entirely selfish and for my own electronic files anyway.

That being said, I highly recommend you pin this recipe and remember it next year when planning your Thanksgiving dishes. Or better yet, make it for your Christmas dinner this year, even if you've never done sweet potatoes for Christmas dinner before. Believe me, no one at your table will be complaining. Because honestly, this is the BEST sweet potato dish I've ever had. This stuff is practically a dessert, it is so, so good.

Recipe Files: The Best Cole Slaw Ever

Growing up, I hated cole slaw. Actually, it was just the mayonnaise dressing on most cole slaws (or maybe Miracle Whip? I still can't stand Miracle Whip). It was too... too something. I don't even know. Slimey? Sweet? Just plain disgusting? I like cabbage, I like carrots, I just couldn't stand cole slaw.

Until I tried this recipe.

I found this recipe in a Rachel Ray magazine a few years ago (June 2012, just so I credit my sources as correctly as possible), and was intrigued to try it because it called for caraway seeds. I had a jar of caraway seeds sitting in my spice rack (a wedding present) that I had never once used, because honestly, how many recipes call for caraway seeds? So despite my reservations about cole slaw, I decided my caraway seeds deserved a chance to be used, and I tried this recipe out.

It. Was. AMAZING.

Recipe Files: Broccoli Quinoa Salad

Oh, look, another recipe. I'm not sure how many more of these I'm going to post, but the more I go through my files, the more recipes I realize are missing from my Pinterest archive (including some of my paper recipes that I would really like to transfer online). So there may be more, but I'll try to spread them out.

Okay, I know that picture doesn't look super appetizing, but you're just going to have to trust me when I say that this is one of my favorite salads of all time. While it's technically not 100% vegetarian (I suppose you could omit the bacon bits, but then, you'd be omitting the bacon bits), it's still packed with other super healthy high nutrient foods (and a little sugar in the dressing, but you know, whatever).

Recipe Files: Cilantro Lime Sweet Potato and Black Beans

As promised at the end of my last post, here is the first of my vegetarian recipes that I need to update my Pinterest recipe archive (since I'm weaning myself off paper recipes). Also as promised, the amateur food photography (but Pinterest does require a photo for pinning).

I don't really expect anyone else to care, but a note about this recipe just in case. I love this dish so much. It combines my two favorite foods (sweet potato and black beans) with the stellar flavors of lime and cilantro. It's beyond delicious. It's also super easy to pull together. The original recipe source I got this from (no longer available to link to, unfortunately) called this a side, but I treat it like a main dish. My favorite is to serve it with a tomato/avocado salad-- a perfect meal in every way, except there are never enough leftovers.

More Thoughts on Food: On Being Mostly Vegetarian

A little over a year ago I wrote a post all about my complex feelings around food, plus a reading list. Well, recently I've been diving a (very little) bit into my next book club book: How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease by Dr. Michael Gregor. Perhaps I should wait until I actually finish the book before writing on the topic, but even the little bit I've read has dragged up so many of my foodie issues. That, and the fact that I'm finally (finally!) able to eat a little bit more normally, means that food is on the brain, and so here I am, writing about it all over again.

In that post last year, I mentioned my anxiety over choosing a healthy, daily diet for my family. I'm a fairly avid blog reader, I follow all sorts of cooking blogs as well as "lifestyle" blogs, and I tend to get super anxious when I read about other people's super committed diets to Paleo, or Whole30, or Extreme Raw Veganism, or whatever. But I'm becoming more and more confident in the pattern our daily family diet is developing. Using extremely unscientific methods such as experimentation, trial and error, gut instinct, and a smattering of what is probably biased research, I've decided that the best overall diet for our family (re: my shopping and cooking style), is to be about 90% vegetarians. We will never, ever be 100% vegetarians because: bacon. Also, barbecue. (And we will never, ever be vegan because: cheese).

Deep Musings on the Fragility of the Internet, and Also a Recipe for Bran Muffins

One of the more terrifying parts of David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks (which I just finished last month) is his predictions of how civilization will collapse in a few decades.

For some background, the book has an interesting narrative structure with time. It begins in 1984 and each section jumps a decade or so into the future. There are tons of cultural references, which are all completely accurate until the book veers ahead into the year 2017 and then beyond. Mitchell still uses cultural references, but at that point they become pure speculation (my favorite was the reference to Justin Bieber's fifth divorce). While it was extremely fun to read this book now, less than a year after it was released, I'm afraid it will become dated quickly as anyone who reads this book decades from now will not understand how Mitchell was playing with time.

Sorry, that was a tangent. Back to the point. In the book, Mitchell outlines an apocalyptic-type collapse of civilization (at least, Western civilization) that includes the complete annihilation of the internet. Just poof. The internet disappears. No servers, no infrastructure, no internet.

Um, I cannot express how deeply this scenario terrifies me.

Yes, I was born before the internet existed. We didn't have the internet in our home until I was in middle school (which I'd like to point out, was less than half my life ago), and at first I hated it and never wanted to use it (dial up, *shudder*).

But now? Now my entire life is on the internet. I don't even know how to function without the internet. If the threat ever becomes real, I will support all the tax dollars and military force necessary to protect Google servers and whatever infrastructure is necessary to keep me online. That might be a slight exaggeration (you know, people's lives first, of course), but really. This should be a matter of national security. I hope somebody in power is thinking about this now.

I realized how fragile my online reality was a few months ago when I went to check the recipe for my favorite bran muffins, only to find that the website I'd pinned that recipe from was now defunct. No longer on the web. Not accessible to me.

This unsettled me a little, because over the past few years I've been transitioning from using real cookbooks to just pinning all my recipes online. I even threw most of my cookbooks out in my latest book purge. I never once thought that these websites might not last forever and some day my recipes might disappear into a void.

How will I make dinner?

Okay, so maybe this issue isn't quite life-or-death, but it certainly got me rethinking all my recent attempts to go paperless and move our lives online (including all our bank statements, family videos and pictures). What will I do if these websites disappear? Gah!

Luckily for me, I happen to have the bran muffin recipe memorized. However, my memory is as fragile as the internet from whence it came, so I want it written down somewhere. But have I learned my lesson? Am I going to write it on paper and stick it in a file folder to have and hold as long as the paper shall last?

Of course not. I'm enjoying a life without paper clutter too much.

Also, I love having all my recipes on Pinterest. It totally makes my meal planning/grocery-list-making system work. So, I want this recipe back online, pinned to my Pinterest Breakfast Board. Which means I'm posting it here, solely so I can re-pin it there.

Here you go, dear readers. My favorite bran muffins (sorry I can't link to the original source, as it no longer exists).

I don't consider myself a food stylist or photographer whatsoever, but you've got to have a picture if you want to pin something.

Bran Muffins

4 Cups Bran Flakes (slightly crushed)
2 Cups Flour
1/2 Cup Sugar
2 T. Baking Powder
1 t. Salt
2 Eggs (slightly beaten)
1/2 Cup Oil
1 Cup Milk

-Combine dry ingredients (bran flakes, flour, sugar, baking powder, salt) in a bowl.
-Combine wet ingredients (eggs, oil, milk) in a bowl.
-Combine wet and dry ingredients.
-Grease a 12 well muffin pan.
-Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
-Divide batter evenly among the 12 cups.
-Bake for 13-15 minutes, until golden brown.

Notes:

*Obviously, these are best fresh out of the oven, but I think they last very well for a day or two in the fridge. I will also eat them a week old, but they are pretty dry by that point.
*I do not claim this is the best bran muffin recipe out there, but it is easy, and I could eat these muffins every day for breakfast. In fact, I do eat these muffins every day for breakfast. Two of them, usually.
*My 3 year-old loves these muffins as well, so I would claim they are child-friendly, but I tried serving them as a snack at our preschool coop and none of the other kids would eat them. In fact, one kid even told me it was nasty. So they may not be everyone's thing.
*These muffins are not gluten free, and despite being bran muffins, are full of carbs and sugars and oils and dairy and all that good stuff people seem to be down on these days. So, not a health food. Whatever.
*I promise this will not become a food blog.