black bean brownies....yeah, you heard me right

So yes, the Healthy Girls at work might have corrupted me a little as now I am making the delicious black bean brownies that have been made twice in the office. You gotta trust me on this one, guys, these are GOOD. And what a way to get your dose of fiber in for the day. Just make sure it's not too much fiber, aka don't eat the whole tray, or else the people you live with might not like you so much for a while. Get my drift?

The actual intention of this recipe, however, is to make a brownie that is gluten-free. All people, though, can enjoy this dessert no matter their gluten-status. The key? Black beans, of course. These provide the starch and such to give these puppies substance. All you do is mash 'em up in your friendly food processor.

Ewwwwww. Looks like.....yeah, just use your imagination.

Hmmmm, looks like normal brownie batter. Not a shabby start. And in the end, these guys came out as good as the Healthy Girls' version. I'll chalk that up as a win in my book. :) These are also great with frosting on top, too.

Black Bean Brownies
Taken from Allrecipes.com

1 (15.5 oz.) can black beans, rinsed and drained
3 eggs
3 tbsp. vegetable oil
1/4 cup cocoa powder
Pinch salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray an 8x8-inch baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.

Put the black beans in food processor and puree until smooth. Place in bowl with eggs, oil, cocoa powder, salt, vanilla, and sugar. Mix until well blended. Pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish. Sprinkle chocolate chips over the top.

Bake in preheated oven for about 30 minutes, or until the top is dry, and the edges start to pull away from the sides of the pan.

NOTE: The above recipe is for a completely gluten-free version. For those who are NOT gluten-free and want a brownie with a little more height, add 1 tbsp. all-purpose flour + 1 tsp. baking soda to your mixture before combining. This is what I did to make this batch.

ANOTHER NOTE: If you're feeling lazy....box brownie mix + can of pureed black beans yields delicious, non-gluten-free brownies that don't require water, oil, and eggs.

extraordinary ordinary brownies

So I'm lazy and didn't take a very decent pictures of this creation...but just wanted to make a note of a really easy way to fancy-up an ordinary brownie mix.


Step 1: Make brownies as usual.
Step 2: Chop up a lot a lot of Oreos. Feel free to use the vanilla flavored ones, mint-y ones, peanut butter-y ones, whatev. Let the creative juices flow, people.
Step 3: Mix all these Oreos into the batter.
Step 4: Put the deliciousness in an 8x8-inch pan. The back of the box says a 13x9-inch pan is dandy, too, but the 8x8 really makes 'em high and impressive looking.
Step 5: Bake the brownies for 40-50 minutes, depending on how fudgy or cake-y you want them. 40 for fudge-like brownies (you will have to keep leftovers refrigerated it you want them like this) or 50 for cake-like. Personally, I prefer fudgy, almost batter-like brownies, but then again, I am a batter fiend. Bake these puppies as you desire.

chocolate peanut butter pretzel mish-mash

So I had a vision. Sometimes I get these when I have a bunch of random foods in the cupboards.

Today's random ingredients? Pretzel sticks, chocolate chips, peanut butter, and red, white, and blue sprinkles.

So what do you do with such yumminess? Place the pretzels on a waxed paper-lined cookie sheet. Heat up the peanut butter in the microwave. Pour over the pretzels. Melt the chocolate chips with a tablespoon of shortening. Pour over the pretzels. Then sprinkle with sprinkles. And, voila! You've got a delicious 4th of July treat that's sweet, salty, and addicting. Uh oh.

The only problem with these is that I should've added a tablespoon of corn syrup (or shortening? not really sure about this one without experimentation) to the peanut butter after it was melted. Even though the peanut butter hardens a bit after you place the whole cookie sheet in the fridge, it still gets a little gooey after it's been sitting out after awhile. Note: Refrigerate these puppies when you're not devouring them!

However, apparently these treats passed the Nonni-test, as she really couldn't stop eating them. And hopefully Guinea Pig Michael will like them, too....I'm bringing some of these over to his house tomorrow when I go visit. Really, though, they're chocolate and peanut butter, so I really don't know how anyone couldn't like them. :)

organic cake....?

So now that calclueless is over (passed with a C! WAHOO!), I am now working (kinda) full-time at work. Hey, 32 hours a week feels like full-time to me. I sit in front of a computer 8 hours a day, 4 times a week.

Yay. I love my life.

Anyway, the girls I work with are in the dietetics program I will be in this upcoming fall. And, man, are they healthy. I always thought I ate healthier than the Average Joe. How wrong I was. These girls bash preservatives, lunch meat, and even Ranch dressing, which is not vegan since it is made with milk.

WHO KNEW Ranch dressing even HAD milk in it?!

So here I am, little Miss Hypocrite Dietitian over here at work. Sitting on her exercise ball "chair", eating a processed lunch meat sandwich on store-bought bread while drinking a can of Cherry Coke Zero. I am sure they all shun me inside.

However, I really couldn't care. While eating organic and choosing foods that are prepared without preservatives is the ideal way to go...really, those preservatives can't be doin' our bodies much good...but really, people. If you're not makin' decent money, all those organic foods are gonna run your bank account dry. I don't know, this is just my view. And I have a sneaking feeling that healthy eating can be done by eating non-organic foods.

However, this is where our story begins. These girls at work have slightly begun to warp my mind (just a tad) and at least have given me the curiousity of the Organic World. So it was when I saw that this organic cake mix was on sale at Meijer, I knew I wanted to give it a whirl. Yeah, yeah, I know, two bucks for a cake mix....still expensive. But I was curious, okay??

Oh. Hello, adorable bottle of Hennessy.

Yeah, who wouldn't be side-tracked by miniture bottles of liquor? But anyways, the first thing I noticed about this cake mix recipe is that there were no eggs involved, just water and melted butter. Hmmm, this is new. I thought to myself, questioningly. However, I continued to bake...took a [minor] detour when Cameron the Canon Camera fell into the bowl of batter, where his life flashed before my eyes, though I pressed on.

And there it is! ORGANIC CAKE, TA DA! It definately has a different texture than "normal" yellow cake from the mix. A bit denser, but I kinda thought that made it delicious. It's great served with a schprinkle of powdered sugar. NOTE, however, one mix only made one layer. Strange, as you usually get two layers out of a single mix. I was quite perplexed, but whatever. Nothing to lose sleep over. :)

sweet n' salty pb fudge

I discovered this recipe for fudge off of foodgawker.com. The picture literally called to me, "Pattttttti, bake meeeee." And so I did. It just looked so SO good with the chocolate, pretzels, and Oreos layered oh-so-deliciously. The recipe did have a layer of white chocolate on top on the chocolate-pretzel layer, but I decided to replace that with a peanut butter layer. Peanut butter trumps white chocolate any day.

Also, this picture looks sooo OCD to me because the pretzels are lined up so straight. Well, kinda straight. Which reminds me of Mike and his slight OCDness...the guy really likes everything to be in its place, haha. We fondly call it "CDO", though. The letters are all in the right order that way. :)

Mmmm, chopped Oreos go into the peanut butter layer. SUCH DELICIOUS NOM-AGE.

Oreos and peanut butter. Together at last. Up close and personal.

And then smushed all together and placed into the fridge. I'm gonna give some of these to my guinea pig tomorrow....aka Mike. I'm sure he'll like these since he's a big fan of chocolate and peanut butter. No wonder we get along so well. :)


Sweet N' Salty PB Fudge
Altered from Dynamite Cookes and Pretzel Fudge

6 oz. dark chocolate
8 oz. peanut butter chips + 2 generous spoonfuls of peanut butter
1 (14 oz.) can sweetened condensed milk
Oreos, quartered (about 20)
Skinny pretzels

Microwave th dark chocolate with 1/2 the can of condensed milk for 2-3 minutes, or until chocolate is nearly all melted, stirring thoroughly after each minute.

Line an 8x8-inch pan with waxed paper. Spray waxed paper with nonstick cooking spray. Spread the chocolate mixture into pan. Top with pretzels sticks, pressing them slightly into the fudge.

Repeat melting the peanut butter chips + peanut butter with the remaining condensed milk.

Stir chopped Oreos into peanut butter mixture. Spread that on top of the dark chocolate and pretzels.

Refrigerate until firm, about 2 hours.

Devour. WARNING: These are not for the faint of heart! Super chocolatey and sweet!

cinnamon ice cream sundaes

So I guess I've been in a sundae kind of mood lately. First the Overload Cookie Sundaes and now these monstrosities. There's just something amazing about buying a boring ice cream flavor and then layering it with delicious random things.

This time the layering deliciousness including a homemade cinnamon sauce and chopped walnuts. OH SO GOOD. The original plan was to mix in the cinnamon sauce with melted peanut butter, but the sauce ended up tasting lemon-y, and that wouldn't have tasted too well with PB.

So I decided to nix the peanut butter and just did some layering with cinnamon and walnuts. And WHOA, did it come out good or what. After scooping all of that out, it got mounded atop an oatmeal cookie in muffin-form. Yeah, I'm a lazy baker. Like a really lazy baker. I dumped the batter into mini-muffin tins. My guinea pigs affectionately called them "mookies". You know, muffin + cookie. :)

Anyway, the mookies with cinnamon ice cream was delish. Many more ice cream layering creations are to come.

well, hello, my little fattoush

So I heart fattoush. And there was this place, LaShish, that made the MOST AMAZING FATTOUSH EVER. But then the restaurant got closed down for.....um....shady reasons.

Anyway, though, one of the best parts of fattoush is the ah-mazing pita chips that are sprinkled throughout the salad. They are oh-so-good. And that's what those pita breads are doin' up there...about to be baked up into delicious chips.

Ahhh, there was an olive oil EXPLOSION during fattoush-concoction. Shhh, don't tell the madre. She gets annoyed when I mess up the kitchen. ;)

Ohhh, olive oil-drenched pita bread sprinkled with salt. Doesn't get much better than that, huh?

And they came out B-E-A-YOUTIFUL. And crunchy. And delicious. And....addicting.

So this fattoush came from the cookbook How To Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman, God of Cooking. My housemate, Leah, swears by him, and for the entire year, I've seen her bright yellow cookbook of his lying around. Finally, I have realized the amazingness that is this yellow cookbook. Seriously, people, nearly everything you need to cook is in here. There's even alterations you can make for each recipe, too, which makes life exciting.

Oh, and this cookbook has a mean brownie recipe. And when I say mean, I mean furious.

But anyways, the fattoush came out reallllly good! Not quite like LaShish's, but pretty darn close.

So I am lazy. Here is the recipe I found on a website somewhere. This recipe is great to alter as you please. I went ahead and went parsley-crazy and used alllll parsley for the herb-goodness (no basil or mint). Also, I didn't use the "basic vinaigrette" Mr. Mark suggested to use but my own concoction of olive oil + juice of one lemon + a little salt + a little pepper. Go ahead! Be creative, people! :)