Quinoa Flakes with Stewed Rhubarb

 

You can buy quinoa flakes at most higher end grocery stores.  They are a great, higher-protein substitute for breakfast cereals such as Cream of Wheat or oatmeal.  It is tasty with additions such as cinnamon, something sweet, milk, and nuts.  To really dress it up, try making rabarbaragrautur (an Icelandic word), or as we say in English - stewed rhubarb.  

Rhubarb is not something I grew up eating, but truly love it.  It came as early as usual in the south this year, but since everything else started so late, I never got anything with a strawberry-rhubarb combination.  I thought some of the rest of you in more temperate states might just be seeing rhubarb in the markets.

I don't really have a recipe for you as much as an idea.  Cook the quinoa as directed on the package.  Slice the rhubarb after cleaning, and cook with sugar or sweetener and some water until soft and slightly syrupy, like above.  Top the quinoa with the rhubarb and milk.  I could eat this every day and never get tired of it.

Low Sugar Chocolate Macaroons

I know it is slightly past macaroon season, but chewy sweet coconut cookies are tasty.  Every season should be macaroon season!

Most macaroons are made with sweet condensed milk, sugar, and sweetened coconut flakes.  Those things are a no-go for this lower sugar household!  I had found a few recipes that didn't use condensed milk, so even though I found a sugar-free condensed milk recipe, I didn't end up needing it for this recipe.  I will probably still make it for coffee, but that will be a different post.

Nathaniel kept seeing chocolate macaroons at the store, and they were taunting him, so he challenged me to try to make a lower version of them.  Most of the recipes I found used a combination of melted chocolate and cocoa powder.  One of them used only cocoa powder, but looking closer, the recipe wasn't as traditionally macaroon, so I decided to go ahead and use a bit of sugar in the bittersweet chocolate I melted down.  That's why I call them low sugar and not sugar-free, just to clarify.  Your mileage may vary.

This recipe is based on a Martha Stewart recipe, but I tweaked it enough to call it mine.  Thanks for giving me a good place to start, Martha. 

Lower Sugar Chocolate Macaroons

• 4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup brown sugar Splenda (you might want to use 1/3 cup for a bit more sweetness)
• 2 1/2 cups unsweetened coconut flakes (the kind I find was almost ground but not quite)
• 3-4 large egg whites
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• Pinch of salt
• Handful of chocolate chips, optional

Directions

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
   
2. Melt chocolate and cool.
   
3. Combine cooled chocolate, cocoa, sugar, coconut, egg whites, vanilla, and salt. Use your hands to mix well, completely combining ingredients.  Mix in chocolate chips if desired.
   
4. Dampen hands with cold water. Form 1 1/2 tablespoons of mixture into a loose ball, and place on prepared baking sheet. Repeat with remaining mixture, placing macaroons 1 inch apart.
   
5. Bake until just firm to the touch but still soft in the middle, 15 to 20 minutes.
   
   

Coloring Eggs with Natural Ingredients

I've been pinning interesting egg ideas to my holiday Pinterest board for months, and many of the Easter pins have to do with using natural dyes for eggs.  I was planning to do blue-gray and blue, but forgot I used the rest of the frozen blueberries in smoothies (new blender, it's a compulsion).  In the end, I only made one color, but was very happy with the results and will be doing more of this next year!

Step 1: Boil eggs.  Martha Stewart says you can actually boil the eggs in the strained natural dyes, so you can take that into consideration.  That isn't how I did it.

Step 2: Prepare natural ingredients.  I roughly chopped half a red cabbage and simmered it in water for 15 minutes.  I let it cool then added 1 tbsp vinegar.

Step 3: Soak cooled eggs in cooled natural dye overnight in fridge. I stirred my container a few times because I noticed white spots where they were touching.  My container may not have been ideal.

 

Step 4: Gently wipe eggs and let dye dry.  This could be a fine place to start, as the colors are vibrant.  But I had some other ideas.

 

Step 5: Draw on eggs with food-safe markers.  I used the foodoodler markers I had previously purchased from King Arthur Flour. The moisture on the eggs was a problem, and many of the designs were smudged.  But those that dried looked pretty amazing.  The white one with words has the beginning of the poem "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand.  Tomorrow is the start of National Poetry Month, so I've had it on my mind. 

Recommended Replacements for Google Reader

(xposted to Reading Envy)

Hey you, blog reader.  Do you access this blog through Google Reader?  If so, you should know that it will be shut down on July 1, 2013.  Happy birthday to me!  I use Google Reader as my blog and tumblr manager, and follow hundreds, maybe thousands of baking, reading, library, art, and music blogs.  At first I was grumpy, but I got some great ideas from friends and colleagues about what to do.  I have culled the suggestions into three solid replacement ideas for the RSS reader's functionality, and pass them along to you now.  Feel free to share the love.

NewsBlur
Free but not free, but my friend Jeff who has been using it thinks paying is worth it. 
He also says: "You can export your subscriptions into an opml file (from Reader) and then import them into Newsblur. It's not free for a premium account, but I don't mind paying for software when I think it's useful and will stick around."

NetVibes
A "social dashboard."
From the person who replaced me at DePauw: "I've been using Netvibes for years to aggregate RSS feeds into useful tabbed pages. It's easy to follow and keep up with. You can also create public pages of your own design. If you use that to subscribe to your own social media, you can create a centralized portal for others to see what you're sharing, everywhere. Also has a built-in play for podcast audio."

The Old Reader
It looks just like Google Reader before the last update or two.  Currently in beta, but vetted by my friend Jon in Virginia and a LifeHacker post (thanks Robyn!). 

There are several graphic-heavy apps or platform-specific apps, but I want something I can get to from everywhere, so I haven't bothered.

I hope this list is useful!  You have until July 1 to find a solution. 

Lower Carb Chocolate Blintzes

Although the Food Network and I aren't really friends anymore, since they seem only want to teach me how to use processed food or to host reality television, I have found a new friend in the Cooking Channel.  Actual chefs, making things from scratch, and I've been learning things.

One show I adore, even if I only watch the beginning to get the general idea most of the time, is Brunch at Bobby's.  Bobby Flay is the real deal.  Even when he made strawberry shortcake milkshakes, he startsby making shortcakes from scratch.  No excuse about not being a baker, no time-saving tricks like buying pre-made shortcakes with a kitchen-sponge texture, just a quick demonstration of how easy biscuit making can be.

Anyway, one day he made what looked amazing - Chocolate Blintzes with Chocolate-Whipped Ricotta Almond Filling and Warm Cherry Sauce.  The entire episode was about a chocolate lovers brunch, and I started thinking how I could adapt this recipe to a lower-sugar version.  And I did.  And it was good.  So now I share it with you.  The only regret I have is that had I had frozen unsweetened cherries on hand, it would have been easy to make a lower-sugar sauce version, but since I didn't, I used thinly spread jam inside the crepes.   And honestly, this was one of the rare moments in our lower-sugar eating that didn't feel like a big sacrifice.  If you start with a good flavor profile with a lot of layers of texture and flavor, the way Bobby Flay always cooks, then it is easier to bridge the gap even when you are having to pull back on a few ingredients.

I started with the lower carb crepes recipe that often finds its way onto our weekend menu, and made a few tweaks.  I added 1/3 cup cocoa powder and 3/4 cup-1 cup of unsweetened almond milk (to partner the almonds in the filling), and gave it a go.  The crepes were a little thicker than normal, but tasted chocolatey and were still rollable.

I used Bobby's ricotta filling recipe, but added a few tablespoons of almond flour, 1 tbsp of chocolate chips, and used splenda instead of powdered sugar.

I already said I used a thin layer of jam inside, whipped cream on top, and these were great.  Next time I'll make a fruit sauce or add fresh fruit. 

Belated Pi(e) Day

One of my goals for the year was to not forget Pi Day.  What kind of baker forgets Pi Day?  Well, I forgot Pi Day.  Almost.  At 8 pm, I decided I couldn't just let it go by, and that I should make pie based on what I had no hand.  That included rhubarb, only one stick of butter, no eggs, and little patience.

I stumbled across a recipe for Foolish Rhubarb Pie on ScienceBlogs.com.  Well, if it is science, I might as well trust it!  I adapted it to make it slightly lower sugar, by using brown sugar Splenda blend instead of brown sugar, using half hazelnut flour for the graham crackers, and cutting back on the rhubarb a bit (only because I only had 3/4 lb.).

Fool is tasty.  In my opinion, it doesn't need crust.  But without crust, would it be a pi(e)? Well, for this one day a year, we'd better not chance it.  The Pi(e) Day of all Pi Days will of course be 3/14/15, so we'd better start planning for two years from now!

Hazelnut Low-Sugar Muffins

 
In The Joy of Gluten-Free, Sugar-Free Baking by Peter Reinhart and Denene Wallace, I have found many recipes to try that fit the way we eat now.  First I had to track down new kinds of flour. After snagging hazelnut flour, I used almost the entire bag to make these muffins.  The original recipe is for a hazelnut-coconut coffee cake.  I couldn't decide between adding blueberries or chocolate chips, so I decided to just make muffins instead.  Half of the dough got chocolate chips stirred in, and the other half got blueberries.  The blueberries added a wee bit too much moisture, I neglected to realize that without traditional flour to soak up the moisture, the blueberry muffins were a bit wet.


I made a few other changes to the recipe - I used almond-coconut milk instead of straight coconut milk, and left out the toasted coconut.  I can see how those flavors would have been really nice, I just didn't have any on hand.  Instead I added vanilla extract. I also didn't use as much Splenda as was called for; I always intentionally cut back on it to limit the chemical taste overpowering the recipe.  From what I've read of others' opinions, I get the impression that taste doesn't bother everyone the way it bothers me.  So I just minimize.

These were lighter than the flaxseed muffin disaster I had last year, although you can still tell they are not traditional flour.  The flavor of hazelnut flour is nice and not overpowering.  I also had to buy xantham gum again, but I couldn't tell you how much it did to the texture.

Low-carb, low-sugar people: buy this book.  I haven't found any cookbook with recipes that are more palatable.  The next recipe I want to try is one of the sandwich bread recipes.  We need bread that fits in with the way we eat!! I may have enough hazelnut flour left to do one of the flaxseed-heavy recipes, so I may do that this afternoon.

Also, the carrot cake on the cover certainly looks tasty!

Low-Sugar Peanut Butter Cookies

This is an adaptation of a recipe found on Pinterest; not too sweet because I find that pulling back on sweetness by using less Splenda is preferable to metallic Splenda flavor! These are a bit crumbly but if you can't eat regular peanut butter cookies, I think you'll still enjoy them.

Low-Sugar Peanut Butter Cookies

1 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup Splenda for baking
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional)

Mix first four ingredients until paste-like and uniform. Stir in chocolate chips. Scoop onto baking sheet (makes 12). Press down with fork to make the peanut butter cookie marks. Bake in preheated 350 oven for 8-10 minutes.