I never believed bloggers who claimed to bake with vegan ingredients just because they ran out of butter and eggs. Pshhh. You just know people want to see vegan recipes!
But, ahem, now I believe it, because I fully intended for these pancakes to have eggs. Then I got home from the grocery store and realized I had no eggs. Welp. Vegan pancake time.
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You know what’s really good together? Quinoa and chocolate.
Quinoa haters, you’re like “aw heyyy-all no!” Quinoa lovers, you know better.
I recently decided I wanted to try to make a quinoa chocolate bar. And right after that, I saw just such a thing at the grocery store! Talk about serendipity; of course I had to buy it… you know, to see if my efforts would be worth it and everything.
Well, as you can probably tell from the fact that I made three different variations, stuffed my face with them all of last weekend, and am now posting about them… the quinoa chocolate bar was good. VERY good.
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I’m going to do that thing again where I talk about the weekend on a Wednesday! Partially because I’m in denial that we’re in the middle of the workweek. And partially because my weekend just ended – we were in Sacramento until Monday night so Nate could run the California International Marathon.
We left for the airport on Saturday morning, but before that, I had aggressive plans to cook and photograph several dishes. Hmm… can you guess how that turned out?
Luckily, we made it to the airport on time. Not so luckily, I completely forgot the garnishes for these photos. Boo.
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It’s been a while since we talked about granola… so let’s make today about my favorite crunchy snack.
Granola is one of my biggest food weaknesses. If it’s visible in my apartment, I want to be eating it. That is great when it comes to things like dreaming up new granola flavors to make for you! Not so great when I have several test batches of said granola sitting around the kitchen all weekend. They may as well be tapping me on the shoulder, begging to be eaten.
These are the kinds of problems I have in my life. Remember Friday’s post about feeling lucky? Mmm hmm.
This is not your bland garden-variety granola. Two types of ginger (ground and crystallized!) pack some serious zing. I would go so far as to say that you must love ginger to enjoy this granola. If you don’t? More for the rest of us, as my mom would say. (And Mom loves ginger.)
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Can you handle some mushy talk today before we get to the food? I hope so… and if not, just skip down to the recipe!
Today I am feeling unbelievably lucky. Lucky to somehow have such an amazing man in my life, to have such wonderful, caring and generous parents, and just generally to have the deck stacked in my favor. I’m not sure how I ended up with so much, but I am so very thankful. It’s easy to take all the wonderful people and things in my life for granted, and I do that too often, but today I am just feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I am not sure how I’ll ever live up to it all!
I guess in the meantime I will just make everyone lots of food. Sometimes even reeeally good food.
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