Socca - A French Flatbread

Socca is a completely grain free flatbread that comes from France. It's even a traditional grain-free flatbread, so no weird substitutions to alter the taste, woo hoo!

This stuff is SO easy to make, it's awesome. And it tastes good, too. My kids tell me it reminds them of the batter around a corn dog; I assume that's a positive review, heh.

Stevia Syrup

I can have stevia as long as I grow it myself, so imagine how excited I was to learn that you can make stevia syrup from the leaves!

This site shows how: http://lifehacker.com/5951453/diy-stevia-syrup

Stevia Syrup:

How to make your own chickpea flour

This is really easy. It takes a bit, but it's really easy. I don't have a grain grinder or nut grinder, so I have to use my blender. I'm sure it's even easier with a grinder!

Making Chickpea (garbanzo bean) flour:

Wild Flowers in my yard

The first thing you should know is that I live in a desert. So a lot of the typical flowers don't grow here naturally. Which means that the flowers that do grow here give me a kind of thrill, usually. They're just so lovely, and fleeting even more than flowers often are. So, here's some of the flowers that grow in my yard with no effort from me.

Optimism

I'm a fan of optimism, although I often think it's not a trait I possess in abundance. I'm more of a natural pessimist. Or maybe it's simply that I have a different flavor of optimism. I'm only optimistic if it can kick me in the pants. So, I'm pessimistic about my optimism.

Case in point: eating soup today.

Green Chile Sweet Potatoes

There are some new sweet potatoes at the Whole Foods this last week. I'm really not sure what they are, as the store just called them 'japanese sweet potato.' However, they have dark pink skins and white insides, which is unlike any japanese sweet potato I've seen - I usually see ones listed that way with red insides. I did a bit of digging (okay, I went to this one site) and it turns out these were Murasaki sweet potatoes.

These are awesome. Mild sweetness, lacks some of that dark, earthy kind of sweet flavor that you find in redder sweet potatoes, and which I rather dislike. So these were good.

But the kids hate 'em. So I started looking around my fridge and thought: I've got green chile and sweet potato - would that go together, maybe?

Stuffed Bell Pepper

This comes from yet another failed recipe, LOL.

So far, soaked, raw beans that I freeze and thaw later do not do well in my falafel recipes. I wasn't certain this was the case, but the last disaster has left little doubt in my mind. But unfortunately, that left me with nothing to do with my just-now-made bean and cucumber falafel dough (Don't judge. I was out of veggies to use!).

I baked it in a loaf pan, instead but it was...not good. Tasted like dry crumbs, although the fact that it did taste like crumbs has given me possibilities for its use in other things.

So today, I'm using my crumbs.