ups and downs

Apart from sewing, there's other kinds of work going on here. I'm trying to stick to a work-schedule because I have a deadline to meet, and I've been working on some other personal projects. There are good days and there are days where I feel like on a rollercoaster, and then there are the days when I wish I woul have stayed in bed in the morning.
Changing my eating habits is going well. It hasn't been hard at all so far.
This morning I had muesli with selfmade almond milk instead of normal milk, which is great. I'm used to having muesli with fruitjuice or smoothie instead of milk from the vegan experiment, but the almond milk is really a great milk subsitute and adds a bit of body to it. (Just mix some almonds with water in a blender and sieve the bits off. (Keep them for baking!)

The season's also working for me because there's lots of wonderfully sweet fruits to sate my needs for dessert or snacks. And today Trev cooked such a nice lunch with sauce from the first Swiss tomatoes. Things taste so different when they're really ripe.

Green pepper, potatoes and squid with tomatoe sauce

I also tried my hands at some baking recipes that work with fruit and stevia to make things sweet. It has been... interesting. ;o)

 

 

I tried three different recipes. But if there's fancy things on the ingredient list, I normally can't be bothered to run around and look for them. I want to use what's there and I'm also not a fan of very careful measuring. So the recipes were only used as an reference and general idea.

I made these peanut butter cookies a few days ago, but didn't have enough peanut butter, so i topped up with flour and bits of date. The dates are great, but I don't know if they're not 'peanutty' enough or if I'm just not a fan of the taste, they're not so much my cup of tea. They're nice as a not-so sweet snack, though.

 

Recipe: Sugarfree peanut butter bites.

The first batch of todays cookies were inspired by this recipe for Grain- and Sugar free Scookies from heatereatsalmondbutter.com - a blog worth reading! :o)
I couldn't find unsweetened choccolate though (Trev says choccolate needs to have sugar in 'cause that's what holds it together, so I assume unsweetened would mean cocoa powder? But that's certainly not what she wants), so I helped myself out with dates again. Instead of the complicated mix of flours I used this morning's leftover grinded almonds as a base. I added some plain whole grain flower, the eggwhite, some stevia and vanilla flavour. The result are nice nutty cookies with some juicy bits to make them more interesting. Next time I would reduce the egg content though, because they have a curious aftertaste that reminds me of breakfast. ;o)

date and almond scookies

The second thing I tried were coconut maccaroons. They seemed like my thing because they use only four ingredients. I think they are nice if a bit dry and very much on the coconut side. It's my fault that I dropped in too much vanilla flavour and now they have a really strong and quite horrible overtaste of vanilla which makes them practically inedible. *Blegh* We tried dipping them in Grand Marnier, but the aftertaste just sticks with them.

coconut macaroons

The final recipe worked really well though. They are a little variety of the coconut maccaroons and have apple added to them. I think that makes them really perfect because it adds some freshness and juice to the coconut. This time I also got the sweetness, vanilla and egg content about right (I added four eggyolks for glue and color). Defnitely my favourite of today.

apple maccaroons

Now they are sitting here and I just can't stand any sweet stuff anymore, after all the smell of vanilla in the kitchen and all the tasting I had to do.

Good thing I have some bread dough rising. :o)
And look what I found in the kitchen after cleaning away the dishes:

flour heart