Pumpkin rice pudding.

My friend shared this recipe with me the other day, and it looked so good, I decided to try it out today. It's a really simple recipe, and you don't need a lot of crazy ingredients in order to make it.

Pumpkin Rice Pudding
Adapted from notwithoutsalt.com

1 cup brown rice
2 1/4 c water
3 cups milk (I used 1 cup of rice milk and 2 cups of almond milk)
1/2 teaspoon salt – vanilla salt is wonderful here
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 cup pumpkin
1 teaspoon vanilla

Combine the rice and water. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat and simmer covered for 20 minutes.
Add the milk, brown sugar, salt and spices to the rice. Bring back to a boil then turn the heat to low and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes. Add pumpkin and vanilla. Cook on low for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and let sit 15 for minutes. Serve warm with lightly whipped cream.
Can also be served cold for breakfast.

I felt like it needed more spices, but it tasted lovely anyway :) I can't wait to try it after it's been in the refrigerator for a few hours.


Xoxo,
         <3 ichelle

Cookies and Cream Cake

I have been wanting to make this cake ever since I got my cookbook (Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World). In the book, the cupcakes are made with the chocolate cupcake recipe, not the vanilla one. I didn't have cocoa powder, but I did have some Newman's O's....

Coconut Lime Cupcakes

Here I am again! I don't really have anything to say, but I thought I would post some pictures of these Coconut Lime Cupcakes that I made sometime in September. The recipe is from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. For the frosting, again I used regular butter since I did not have Earth Balance. They were SO good, not to mention just plain cute!

Summer's slipping away...

You might be wondering by now if I have fallen off the face of the earth. Well, rest assured, I have not. My mom's computer has been broken for who knows how long, so I have had to be content with the not-so-regular library trips to use the internet. It is on one of the aforesaid trips that I now write this post.
   Here are some baking and cooking that I have been up to since I last wrote...

Last week

My SD card with the pictures from my graduation party are is still not working... Let me rephrase that. I haven't done anything about my SD card not working yet... It's a long story, but I'll probably end up formatting the card and then using a recovery program. I'm just scared to format the card... But, I'm going to talk to someone I know and ask if he thinks that's a good idea, or if he has any other ideas.

In the mean time, I have been looking for any opportunity for things to take pictures of, so I can blog about something.  I've gotten quite a conglomeration of pictures, but our computer is broken due to a virus, so I had to wait to use my brother-in-law and sister's computer.

I also just like taking pictures :)

 Lemon Lavender Cookies
 

1 ¼ cups whole wheat pastry flour
¼ teaspoon celtic sea salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons dried lavender, finely minced
¼ cup safflower oil
¼ cup sugar (I think that's how much I used. I can't remember exactly)
1 tablespoon lemon zest 

2-4 tablespoons of water (to make the dough more moist)

1. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl
2. Stir together wet ingredients in a smaller bowl
3. Mix wet ingredients into dry
4. Form ½ inch balls and press onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet
5. Bake at 350° for 7-10 minutes
6. Cool and serve

Makes about a dozen cookies

 

Adapted from Elana's Pantry.

                                       ~ <3 ichelle ~

I don't like goodbyes....

  "I'm laying in bed at 6:45 in the morning, trying to get a little bit of sleep before waking up again, but I find myself thinking about my sister, L----. She was here, getting ready with me almost three hours ago, and now she is either sitting in the waiting area of the airport, or, more likely, already boarded and sitting in the airplane.

   These past nine days and a morning are gone too soon. The last few days didn't go by as quickly as the rest of the days, but they are gone, none-the-less. Time goes by especially fast when it is 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. Sometimes I wish the person visiting wouldn't come at all if they're just going to leave again. But  in the end, in spite of all the sadness, it's most definitely worth it..."

                                                                                                                                  ~Written on March 28, 2011, 6:45 a.m.~




The day my sister got here, she had a craving for something chocolate-y...something like brownies. Luckily for her, she has a sister who loves to bake anything ;) So, I looked through my cookbooks and found a recipe in my Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar cookbook! (I was very excited to find a vegan recipe :) )  I made them, and they turned out really good! I didn't sift the ingredients, so I was kind of worried about that, but they ended up being fine.

The next morning, I made omelettes. I haven't had much experience making omelettes, so I wasn't sure how they were going to turn out. They might not have looked like perfect omelettes, but they were really good. I used parmesan cheese, mushrooms, and red bell peppers.

 

         One evening, the sky looked like a painting. It was so amazingly beautiful...

 It snowed on one of the first few days my sister was here. My sister was pretty excited :)

The beautiful tart that my sister's mother-in-law and my sister made for my brother-in-law's birthday...Does that make sense ;)

" 'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, From In Memoriam

The End

Cookie, anyone?

These are some of --possibly the best--cookies ever...
  Here are some pictures of the Chocolate-Bottom Macaroon Cookies my sister and I made for our third Cookie Day:

 

 

  These were easy to make, and absolutely amazing!

You put the sugar in, right?

For the second Cookie Day, my sister and I decided to make Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies.  They were really good!  Most of the pictures didn't really turn out, but here's a decent one :)

They're great by themselves, or with a glass of milk (or in our case, rice milk, hehe).  Definitely a keeper!
                                                                                                                        <3    Michelle

Cookie Day Adventures

This Christmas I received the cookbook Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.  Ever since I first heard about this book I have been wanting to get it, and so I asked for it for Christmas, and I got it!  Sometime after, I was showing the book to my sister, and we both thought about how fun it would be to go through the book and make each of the recipes.  Then we thought...Why not now?  And so it was decided that, starting in two weeks, every Thursday would be "Cookie Day".
  So, come two weeks later, my sister came over to my house at about 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon.  Plenty of time to make some cookies, right?...We had decided to make "Ooh La Las" (Oreos), and it started out easy enough; measuring and mixing everything up.  I even got to use my new Kitchen Aid hand mixer (which I also got for Christmas)!  We didn't have shortening, so we used Earth Balance; or black cocoa powder--where do you find this stuff anyway?--so we used dark cocoa powder. We also didn't have parchment paper (which we have since bought because, when a recipe calls for it, you can do without it, but it makes life so much easier to have it).  So, we refrigerated the dough, and set to work rolling it out...on wax paper(since we didn't have the parchment paper).  After cutting out little Oreo-size circles, we then tried to take those circles off the wax paper and place them neatly on the cookie sheet...and then found out why parchment paper is so amazing.  After maybe an hour we got all the cookies onto the cookie sheets, and baked (we also had to do them in batches because they didn't all fit on two cookie sheets). While they were cooling, I made the filling--after finding out we didn't have enough powdered sugar, and then making some powdered (more like super-fine) sugar--and then we filled the cookies.  And then...we finally got to try them, and...they were really good!  They were a little bit on the sugary side, in our opinion, so I will probably cut down on the sugar next time.  They did taste like Oreos, so I would say they were a success!
  So thus ends our first "Cookie Day Adventures".      Bye bye for now!                 
                                                                                                                             Michelle