Listery and collations!

That sounds like a really weird old sort of cursing, doesn't it?

Well, anyway, here's the semi-weekly list of all the articles and posts and stuff I've been hoarding up in my inbox to share with you!

• Nine Morning Habits to Start the Day Right from Daring to Live Fully - Drink Water With Lemon is now something I do most mornings, and when I don't have lemons, I use ACV. It's helped me get my tea habit down to a reasonable amount, which has helped make my caffeine intake reasonable, too! And I love the idea of Creating Something before you consume anything; I'm so on that.
• Is "Multipotentialite" a real thing? - I certainly believe it is, since I identify as one. Go see what others think!
• Food Is Free Project - something I heard about on IG, and absolutely love. I can't build a raised bed since I live in an apartment, but I fully plan on growing more food than I need this summer and sharing the overflow!
• A DIY Furniture Polish from PopSugar that looks cool.
• Some Unexpected Ways to Find Hormonal Balance from Elevate Vitality - This is something I've been wrestling with for a year or so now, and sometimes I still find useful posts about.
• Shutterbean and some notes on Meal Prepping that makes me want to chop all my veg on one day to make the rest of the week easier. And there's piles of her go-to recipes!
•  I first saw these pics of a super-clear frozen lake on Tumblr, but these are better resolution.
•  I want to make a million of these Origami Market Bags. I wonder if I could figure out a no-sew method for the same shape...
• 36 Genius Ways to Hide the Eyesores In Your Home
• A nice simple infographic / list for How To Keep A Clean Home.
• Have you seen NatGeo's Photo of the Day posts? Always amazing, and they can keep you occupied with eyecandy between the magazines (which I feel like I'm ALWAYS waiting on)!
• What Will Google Glass 2.0 Need to Succeed? I'd say some option for those of us who already wear glasses, but maybe I'm being too narrow-minded...
• The Top Five Videos of Elon Musk's Quest For Reusable Rockets, despite the setbacks, makes me super-hopeful about space-travel for the rest of us.*
• Over on Kickstarter, this guy is making a documentary about gluten and Alzheimer's and cutting-edge cognitive science, and needs some funding.
• The Right Brain Planner is now on IG! Go say hi!
• A TED Talks playlist featuring seven videos about Growing Your Own Stuff, and all of them, as usual, are super-interesting.
• 16 Objects You Might Find In A Pawn Shop In 2050 -- actual things you can actually buy, and the proceeds support research! How flipping cool is that??
• Slight Intoxication Facilitates Creative Problem Solving! But only slight--like, one drink. Which you barely feel if you have any tolerance at all, but is enough to loosen you up to solve things in new ways.
• How To Control Your Dreams Whole You're Sleeping, according to the people who write as Oprah.
• Remember stuff better with this rundown of how Cornell Notetaking works! I like writing raw drafts on Cornell-lined paper so I have space to comment and edit around the sides, too!
• According to this post, Addiction is caused by isolation and not by chemicals--or not only by chemicals--which is why hospital patients so rarely wind up addicted to morphine, but heroin addicts, who are doing basically the same drug, keep going back. It's powerful and super-interesting, and confirms my feeling that we, as a culture, have been Doing Things Wrong.
• On getting Stuck as a place to start, rather than a place to stay.
• MessyCanvas talking about when to ditch the ToDo and get out and discover instead.
• Playing with color in SketchNotes.
• Wondermark is suggesting we check out A Case For Boredom.
• YumUniverse is looking for doctors that use holistic approaches, especially food-and-lifestyle-before-drugs, to make a list of resources. It's set up as a survey here.

And these are the recipes I wanna live off but haven't made yet:

• Joy the Baker, you are killing me with this Burnt Orange Salty Caramel Sauce. (Also, since you're in NoLa now, go find a guy named Dereck who works at a shoe store. He'll be wearing a handlebar mustache and sometimes my nail polish, and he's cool. Say hi from me.)
• The White On Rice Couple have these Meyer Lemon Cream Puffs that I am willing to grow a whole Meyer lemon tree just to always have.
• Shutterbean again with the Reset Button Salad that sounds great!
• Baby Bloomin' Onions! I can't eat the sauce at the restaurant (I'm allergic to horseradish), and a whole onion is too much fried stuff, but these are so cute and look like the answer to my woes. Plus! Making them at home, I can make them GF!
• Gnocchi Verde from Food 52 really makes me want to get back to figuring out GF gnocchi, because it's my fav pasta and I miss it!
• Make-Ahead Detox Lunches sound pretty great.

NOTES:

* It's a whole other post, but I really, really believe space colonization will save us, and I'm so glad that someone is Getting On That who has the resources to actually do something about it. Also, I think Elon Musk is neat as a person.

Holy crap three ingredient peanut butter cookies, guys!

Dudes. How did I not know I could do this sooner?

It's so simple:

1 c peanut butter

1 c sugar

1 egg

Mix it up, scoop it onto a baking sheet with parchment or greased foil, bake at 350 for 5-8 minutes. Let them cool to bare-hand touching temp before you take them off, and EAT THEM ALL.

No flour at all, and so no gluten! Not even a little!

I ate them as a side for dinner that night...

*

I feel like this is a super-versatile recipe. I'm going to try it:

- with one of the chocolate-based nut spreads--if Nutella is too squishy, it should work perfectly with the Hershey's ones, which are thicker

- with chunky peanut butter and / or brown sugar

- with sunbutter, pepitabutter, cashew butter, pecan butter, walnut butter, pistachio butter, sesame paste, coconut butter, almond butter--basically any butter I can get or make

- as little tarts with a nice sharp jam in the middle

- with chocolate--chips in them, or dipped

- with brûlée tops!

NOTES:

They are fantastic warm, but they're almost squishy. When they're cool, they're firmer, but tend toward crumbly.

They don't brown like normal cookies; cook them until they're mostly dry-looking on top. If your oven runs hot like mine, that's maybe six minutes; if it runs cold, and therefore cooks slower, you might be able to get some nice caramelization on them.

You do feel the texture of the sugar. I love that; if you don't, maybe it'd work with powdered sugar, but it'd taste different and I'm not sure how much of the texture is actually structure. Liquid sweeteners would almost definitely not work.

Makes about 24 cookies if they're not too big, and each has just a titch over 98 calories each, with lots of protein but also lots of carbs.

I can tell you from experience that one or two plus a cup of tea makes a very satisfying breakfast!

How would you make these babies?

*Im totally a ketchup-on-eggs heathen

GF Experiments - All-corn cornbread!

Hey, look how these are not TOTALLY horrible pictures! I'm learning, little by little, to make them better.

Anyway, this is all-corn cornbread! Naturally gluten free and super-simple to make, and totes tasty. I found the recipe here at Plan To Eat, and I made it to a tee--no changes, so I'll not repeat it here in case that's stealing or something. But I AM going to give lots of notes.

The first time I made the CB, I made it in an 8x8 glass baking dish (the same one I used for the Crispies, actually), and I used yellow corn meal because that's what's usually used for cornbread, and it was tasty--but the grind was coarser than something I would strictly call 'flour'. It was much finer than grits, but not so powdery as flour usually is, and the heavier bits of corn sank down to the bottom so that the bottom was denser than the top, a little polenta-y, and the eggs sort of floated to the top and formed, like, a custard skin. It was tasty as all get-out, but it's so not what I intended and it's not at all what the recipe said.

I ate that one with butter and syrup instead of having a waffle when we had Breakfast For Dinner. I think it would be amazing with, like, green chilis and cheese mixed in, and maybe roasted red peppers; they'd sort of float with the eggs and milk and make it like a quiche-cornbread.

This time, I made it with the white corn, because it was a finer mill, and cooked it in a muffin tin. They came out of the oven puffy, but by the time they were cooled enough to come out, they had all sunken down in the middle--and you know what, that's fine. Because now they're like little yum-shells. The same dense, corn flavor, though a little milder with the white corn, and none of the separation that happened with the yellow. These are good with sweet and savory fillings--I did blackberry jam, nutella and cream cheese--are chewy without being weird, warm up beautifully, are dense but not hard or hard to eat, and two or three make a perfect mid-morning mini-meal.

Because they're made of mostly eggs and milk (the recipe is two cups of milk and two eggs), they're loaded with protein and really satisfying.

I used honey the first time, like the recipe says, and brown sugar the second, and didn't detect any difference in sweetness; they're barely sweet at all, really.

There's leavener in here, but no gluten to hold the fluffiness in; I'm thinking of subbing some of the corn flour for, like, brown and sweet rice, maybe, and see if that lightens it up more. Although, being this dense makes it a perfect base for heavier things like chili or stew or ratatouille or something--I think I'll make a batch in the jellyroll pan and see how it comes out baked in a thin slab for putting dinners on. Or I'll bake it in a bread pan and then pan-fry the slices and top THEM.

mmm, saucy things on top of starches...

The recipe says you can make it with water instead of milk to make it vegan, and that has my wondering if I could sub in other liquids. Like, can I make it with juice? I think orange juice with orange zest would be good. Apple juice would probably be good, too, and I could add cinnamon and some chopped nuts. Could I make it with two cups of strong tea and more sugar, and call it a literal tea-cake? I bet lemon and milk would make a sort of lemony buttermilk thing that I could add zest and poppyseeds to, also...

One of my favorite things ever is a simple recipe because of questions like these, questions that boil down to "how versatile can I make this stuff, and in how many different flavors?"

Do you have a favorite cornbread recipe? Share it in the comments! What would you do with this one?

GF Experiments - Peanutbutter Crispix Bars

Look! It's one that worked! And like all my hand-made recipes it's vague! And that's why I'm unlikely to write a cookbook!

Okay, so I needed a dessert one night because dinner was light and I was hungry, and what we had were Crispix, giant marshmallows, margarine, Peanutbutter, and an 8x8 pan.

I've made rice crispy treats a million times and so I sort of knew how to do it. I only had a little pan to melt it all together and I knew I didn't want a six-cups-of-cereal start, so I did this:

Buttered the pan within an inch of whatever life a Pyrex baking dish has.

Put somewhere around a half cup of peanutbutter (we had honey-roasted) in the saucepan with a few tablespoons margarine, and melted it down.

Measured four cups of the cereal into the baking dish while stuff was melting.

Plunked in four of those enormous campfire toasting marshmallows (which would maybe be ten regular sized ones?), and melted those down, too, and the second it was a smooth sauce of deliciousness, drizzled it over the cereal. Mixing was easy, but the flattening wasn't, because I forgot to keep the napkin I used to butter the dish with around and the spoon was sticky. But it went fine.

I let it six for an hour or two, and then cut it into sixteen pieces and proceeded to eat two at a time.

It's sweet, sticky but not overly so once it set, not hard to cut or to get out of the dish, and had just a little sweet peanuttyness that I love.

Notes for next time:

- I think I'll add just a pinch of salt next time, just to balance the flavors a little--or will use salted butter instead of margarine

- I'd like to try to make it with natural peanutbutter, which should make it more nutty, and maybe with any of the slew of chocolate-and-nut butters that are on the shelves now.

- I'd maybe like to add a layer of chocolate ganache to the top like the way my elementary school did with the rice crispies they had.

And that's about it! They were delicious and I don't want to change all that much!

How would you make em? Share in the comments!