Sniffles and Spaghetti

It's that time of year again... the time when every single person on my college campus collectively gets sick. We call it the plague. I thought I had successfully avoided it, but the endless amounts of Vitamin C and tea can only fight it off for so long.

Instead of wallowing in sniffles and coughs, I'm trying to look on the bright side of being sick, for once. Now, I can catch up on some much-needed sleep, watch movies that I've had saved up in my Netflix forever, and finally finish that great book I started reading! Yay!

...But let's be real. Being sick actually mostly sucks.

I was going to make myself a big pot of soup today, but I realized I'm all out of vegetable broth. Instead, I might make another batch of this cajun white bean spaghetti that I had about a week ago for dinner. 
I got the delicious recipe here, from Noelle at the Peaceful Plate, except I made some minor changes. I used spinach instead of kale and had to mix up my own cajun seasoning using equal parts oregano, paprika, cayenne pepper, black pepper and salt. 

All in all, it tasted super yummy and made great leftovers for a couple days! This will definitely be a weeknight staple around here. Maybe the spice will help to clear up the stuffiness in my head a little bit, too.

More yummy dessert recipes to come when I'm better! For now, time to doze off watching reruns of Mad Men.

Taste & Create

Eat well, travel often.

This is my new life motto. I'll be completely honest... I found it on stumble upon. Doesn't make it any less important. 

Recently, I think I have been doing an excellent job following this saying. I have been taking walks to new places every day here in California and trying delicious food at farmers markets, mexican restaurants and in our own kitchen! 

Can I just live here now, please?

Both of these I took on a morning walk along the Monterey coast with my 1970s pentax

Now, onto the food. Funny story about making these cookies. This was my first time doing Taste & Create (a fun monthly blogger recipe exchange) and I was really excited to swap recipes with Kat from Study Food! I decided to try veganizing her chocolate oat spice cookies. Making it vegan wasn't a problem- I just swapped earth balance with butter and a flax egg with a real egg- the issue was accidentally reading the amount of flour as 1 tbsp instead of 1 1/4 cup minus 1 tbsp. I'm not sure why I thought that could be right... but I put the little oatmeal-y blobs in the oven anyway. When I saw that they were not doing anything except bubble and melt, I double-checked the recipe, saw my big mistake and quickly pulled them out of the oven. I ended up scraping all of the oatmeal mush back into the bowl and then adding in the flour, but since the chocolate chips had all melted they ended up as solid chocolate cookies instead of chocolate chip. Despite that whole ordeal, they turned out pretty well!

Oatmeal Chocolate Spice Cookies

makes about 2 dozen

1/2 cup earth balance

1/2 tbsp vanilla extract

1/2 tbsp water

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 flax egg (1 tbsp flax meal mixed with 3 tbsp water)

1 1/4 cup whole wheat flour

1 tbsp cocoa

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1 1/2 cups rolled oats

1 cup chocolate chips

1. Preheat the oven to 350º and grease or place parchment paper onto two large cookie sheets. 
2. Whip up the earth balance with a fork until it is creamy, then stir in the vanilla and water. Add the sugars and cream until nice and fluffy.

3. Stir in the flax egg, then slowly add the flour, cocoa, baking soda and nutmeg. Mix well, then fold in the oats and chocolate chips (or stir in melted chocolate chips if you want just chocolate cookies!).
4. Roll about tablespoon-sized pieces of dough into balls and flatten them onto your prepared cookie sheets. Bake for about 8 minutes. Take the cookies out while they're still very soft- they will harden as they cool and you don't want them too crumbly! Let cool and enjoy with some milk, coffee or tea.

These are very unusual cookies. The chewy texture is great, but it took a few bites to get used to the strong nutmeg flavor. They definitely grew on me. The friend I'm staying with didn't like them at first, but had another the next day and said they were in fact oddly addicting and actually pretty tasty. They taste like fairly "healthy" cookies because of the whole wheat flour, so keep that in mind. However, it was a fun experiment! If you decide to make them, just make sure you do the smart thing and read all the directions and ingredient amounts before putting anything in the oven. Whoops. 

See what Kat from Study Food tried out from my recipes here!