Domestic Dharma: cool new jars

I bought a cookbook, I'd been doing so well (this was a budget buster for me) I ordered it after looking at the menu of Angelica Kitchen. I read about this restaurant on Choosing Raw. I was wanting to eat many of the menu items, especially the dragon bowls, kraut, pickled veggies, fresh slaws and salads. Flipping through I see many recipes I'm excited to try.

Dinner Friday night was Creamy Mushroom Soba from the July/August 05 issue of Natural Health. The combination of dark miso (we used the 3 year barley from South River Miso) and coconut milk with scallions and mushrooms was awesome! I've eaten it cold leftover since. Next time I'd like to use different veggies for the top like snap peas, peppers, and leeks maybe.

I tried a soba made with wild yam and buckwheat. After taking this photo I realized why I had always passed it up before, it's not organic, woops.

We had coconut milk leftover from this recipe.

so the next morning we created some strawberry banana smoothie pancakes. I used the Banana Pancakes recipe from GIR, however we had maybe 1/8 c of wheat flour in the house. I combined it with brown rice and coconut flour, added an extra banana and some ground flax seeds since brown rice doesn't have the gluten that wheat does to hold together. They ended up being a test of patience to flip...so Dave took over the cooking of them and we enjoyed these beauties drizzled with coconut milk, fresh strawberries, and maple syrup, yum!

more coconut milk is this smoothie was delicious. Banana, strawberries, coco milk, almond butter, almond milk, and dates. Decadent and creamy=) I made this for bfast before heading to VegFest yesterday.

Over the weekend we stopped into the co-op for soup to share for lunch while we were out enjoying our Saturday together. We shared a bowl of vegan millet chili, got samples of Coconut Bliss ice cream (&coupons=) They have so many flavors I didn't know about! It was our co-op's 35 birthday. When we got home we added our spoons that are biocompostable to our compost bowl, pretty cool.

For some reason lately I've been wanting coffee. I kicked the caffiene habit almost 3 years ago. Occassionally I will get decaf soy lattes, but this week I decided on something from home, teeccino. It's a yummy herbal coffee that is alkalizing to the body. Teeccino is made from carob, barley, dates, chicory almonds, and figs. It is a warm coffee like beverage, but it does not taste like it to me and I cannot try as I may drink it black, where I can savor a cup of black coffee. I use a decent amount of almond milk (still not making it homemade here...Mom and Dad checked on nut milk bags for me when they were AZ this past week, but they were out, guess I'll just have to online order them) and agave. I think our next agave will be this, there is some info on agave useage here on their site. We do use it in moderation in some recipes here, I'm a little unclear of the health benefits/unbenefits, but it's a sweetener like any other not a food staple. A Bitt of Raw has a great post on raw sweeteners here. So anyway, here's teeccino.

the grounds are pretty coffee like

this is how we make coffee, in a chemex

Mom and I were shopping in an antique store in Dixboro and I found these glorious jars (I have a little bit of an infatuation with glass;) They're going to be cute food storers for us.