Happy recipe time!
LJ users,
So this week I've gone themed with my happy note! Food theme yay! For my little bit of economic advice:
-Trying buying your groceries from the dollar store or some other small store. The prices are usually lower, and if you're willing to look and ask for help, you can usually find everything that the higher end grocery stores have except for produce. Seriously, my friend and I have a weekly cooking night and we can always find everything we need to cook a meal from scratch at the dollar store. I made cinnamon bread this week that was super good, if I do say so myself, and we found all the fixings for it including the bread pans for around $15 at the dollar store.
-Cook your food from scratch (or as close as you can get to that) rather than going straight for the prepared foods section. A lot of times it's cheaper to cook it yourself and it's a lot healthier. That way you also have leftover ingredients that you can stretch to make other stuff, like soup! Over the summer we'd buy enough food to make a couple simple meals and then we'd just make soup on the in between days with the excess. You get a lot of really good an interesting soups this way, too. Also, cooking can be a natural de-stresser. There's nothing like coming home from a stressful day of working and destroying a head of garlic. You feel so much better when you're done, and then you get to add it to something yummy and enjoy the fruits of your destruction!
-Don't buy the name brand products, they're really freaking expensive. I know Tazo tea is awesome, but trust me, the generic brand of herbal tea is just as good. The same is true for other products as well. I bought off brand dried fruit this week and it was better than the stuff I usually get from the Ocean Spray brand.
So, for my non-economic related happiness booster, this week I made yummy cinnamon bread. It was like apple pie in bread form. I tried making it twice before out of random leftover ingredients at home, and once with rice flour which failed, and it usually blew up. Seriously, I looked in the oven and was like: uh... where's the whole middle of my confection? oh, there it is... on the floor of the oven... that's weird.
Yeah, I put chocolate chips in it and that made it not only turn into this weird brownie fudge mixture, but mushroom cloud inside my oven. lol.
It didn't explode this time! I nommed so much of it last night; had to make up for the horrible cafeteria food that i didn't eat somehow! Anyhoo, I this is how I wrote out the recipe for when I had to go to the store and get ingredients:
(everything crossed out I just didn't add cuz I didn't feel like buying it)
-shit ton of applesauce
-bunch o' flour
-nom nom sugar
-but load dried or fresh chopped apples
-some vegetable oil
-bit o' salt
-dash of baking powder
-toss in some baking soda
-add the not so important nasty 'nilla extract
-sprinkle in some ground 'nana chips and/or hazlenuts
-some eggs w/o shells <--the first time my aunt baked she got this wrong. apparently her brownies had some extra crunch xD
Bake at 350ªF for 60 minutes and then eat it out of the pan-- trust me, it's better this way.
It was so yummy. I need to buy some more apple sauce so I can make some more. I couldn't find hazlenuts this time, but imma see if I can find them tomorrow at the store when Chelsea and I go shopping.
So, for those of you who are confectionally challenged, LET'S PLAY WITH PLAYDOUGH!! I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I made this gnome out of playdough a little while ago. His name is gnorton the gnome. He makes me smile every time I walk into my room b/c he looks slightly ridiculous. So, playdough, like cooking, can be a natural stress reliever. Why you ask? Well, you can beat the crap out of playdough and then put it back together and do it again! You can do it over and over again until you are satisfied! You can also make really amusing things while you unwind from your day. All you need for it is some flour, some salt and water. Mix in a bunch of flour with some salt and some water until it's at the consistency you want, then play with it! Once you've made something you like you can bake it and then paint it with acrylic paints and enjoy, or you can bag it up and play with it another day! And who doesn't love playdough? It's so fun to just chill on the floor and play with mushy dough goodness. For those of you who either don't have an oven or are like me and just really lazy, you can also microwave the playdough, just watch it since it can catch on fire. Unless you want to burn it, in which case that's you choice. I made the mistake of making a. aluminum foil for my playdough creation once, and then whe I got to impatient for the oven I didn't get all of the mold off and it caught on fire. My sister and I spent a good chunk of time fanning the smoke smell out of the house so wouldn't have to explain to out parents what we were doing making playdough at 3am. Good times.
Well, I hope you are all having good weeks, and if you want the actually ingredient amounts for the bread, just message me!
Cari
So this week I've gone themed with my happy note! Food theme yay! For my little bit of economic advice:
-Trying buying your groceries from the dollar store or some other small store. The prices are usually lower, and if you're willing to look and ask for help, you can usually find everything that the higher end grocery stores have except for produce. Seriously, my friend and I have a weekly cooking night and we can always find everything we need to cook a meal from scratch at the dollar store. I made cinnamon bread this week that was super good, if I do say so myself, and we found all the fixings for it including the bread pans for around $15 at the dollar store.
-Cook your food from scratch (or as close as you can get to that) rather than going straight for the prepared foods section. A lot of times it's cheaper to cook it yourself and it's a lot healthier. That way you also have leftover ingredients that you can stretch to make other stuff, like soup! Over the summer we'd buy enough food to make a couple simple meals and then we'd just make soup on the in between days with the excess. You get a lot of really good an interesting soups this way, too. Also, cooking can be a natural de-stresser. There's nothing like coming home from a stressful day of working and destroying a head of garlic. You feel so much better when you're done, and then you get to add it to something yummy and enjoy the fruits of your destruction!
-Don't buy the name brand products, they're really freaking expensive. I know Tazo tea is awesome, but trust me, the generic brand of herbal tea is just as good. The same is true for other products as well. I bought off brand dried fruit this week and it was better than the stuff I usually get from the Ocean Spray brand.
So, for my non-economic related happiness booster, this week I made yummy cinnamon bread. It was like apple pie in bread form. I tried making it twice before out of random leftover ingredients at home, and once with rice flour which failed, and it usually blew up. Seriously, I looked in the oven and was like: uh... where's the whole middle of my confection? oh, there it is... on the floor of the oven... that's weird.
Yeah, I put chocolate chips in it and that made it not only turn into this weird brownie fudge mixture, but mushroom cloud inside my oven. lol.
It didn't explode this time! I nommed so much of it last night; had to make up for the horrible cafeteria food that i didn't eat somehow! Anyhoo, I this is how I wrote out the recipe for when I had to go to the store and get ingredients:
(everything crossed out I just didn't add cuz I didn't feel like buying it)
-shit ton of applesauce
-bunch o' flour
-nom nom sugar
-but load dried or fresh chopped apples
-some vegetable oil
-bit o' salt
-dash of baking powder
-toss in some baking soda
-add the not so important nasty 'nilla extract
-sprinkle in some ground 'nana chips and/or hazlenuts
-some eggs w/o shells <--the first time my aunt baked she got this wrong. apparently her brownies had some extra crunch xD
Bake at 350ªF for 60 minutes and then eat it out of the pan-- trust me, it's better this way.
It was so yummy. I need to buy some more apple sauce so I can make some more. I couldn't find hazlenuts this time, but imma see if I can find them tomorrow at the store when Chelsea and I go shopping.
So, for those of you who are confectionally challenged, LET'S PLAY WITH PLAYDOUGH!! I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I made this gnome out of playdough a little while ago. His name is gnorton the gnome. He makes me smile every time I walk into my room b/c he looks slightly ridiculous. So, playdough, like cooking, can be a natural stress reliever. Why you ask? Well, you can beat the crap out of playdough and then put it back together and do it again! You can do it over and over again until you are satisfied! You can also make really amusing things while you unwind from your day. All you need for it is some flour, some salt and water. Mix in a bunch of flour with some salt and some water until it's at the consistency you want, then play with it! Once you've made something you like you can bake it and then paint it with acrylic paints and enjoy, or you can bag it up and play with it another day! And who doesn't love playdough? It's so fun to just chill on the floor and play with mushy dough goodness. For those of you who either don't have an oven or are like me and just really lazy, you can also microwave the playdough, just watch it since it can catch on fire. Unless you want to burn it, in which case that's you choice. I made the mistake of making a. aluminum foil for my playdough creation once, and then whe I got to impatient for the oven I didn't get all of the mold off and it caught on fire. My sister and I spent a good chunk of time fanning the smoke smell out of the house so wouldn't have to explain to out parents what we were doing making playdough at 3am. Good times.
Well, I hope you are all having good weeks, and if you want the actually ingredient amounts for the bread, just message me!
Cari