Tom Cruisian

A bumpy night with waking babies and a cranky momma, but hey, it's Monday. Time to stick to my Tom Cruisian ideals of refocusing on healthy eating during the week, and eating whatever within reason on the weekends!

Granola bars are fab, though I forgot to add spirulina and flax to this batch. Cook's Illustrated has an article breaking down granola, which may make me reformulate the recipe I've been using for quite a while now. 

Lifted weights this morning, funny how a baby crying can motivate you to move harder/faster so you can go and stop them from crying!

TODAY'S COOKING
Brownies: Not for consumption, but for recruiting students tomorrow.  The standard recipe, replacing extract with bean scraping and doubling the salt.

Caramelized Onions: Baking a series of knishes on Wednesday, already have 4 cups worth of cooked onions from a month back (stored in the back of the fridge, still smell great), but don't want to be short handed. While Mil slept, chopped 6 lbs, salted and two big glops of shortening, 200 degree oven for about 6 hours, stirring every once in a while. If I'm caught short handed, it'll defintely effect the thing I like most about knishes -- a proper level of yummy cooked onion flavor.

Vanilla Extract: As I make this kitchen staple myself, I don't know if I've ever gone on at length about it. As I split and scrape beans, I put the used husks in a dark glass jar that's full of 180 proof vodka (that's 90% alcohol). When a good number of beans fill the jar, by that time about half the vodka has evaporated from opening and closing the wide-mouth jar. I place the contents in the blender and make a slurry. I strain the slurry through a cheese clothe covered chinois back into the jar. I fill it up with water, as the strength of the extract uncut is crazy-strong. It's still much, much stronger than any commercially available extract, so watering makes it go a lot farther with not really blunting it's pure vanilla punch. Even if this was standard strength stuff, a pint of it would cost 40 to 50 bucks -- my half pound of beans only cost $30, and after using the scrapings in all sorts of things, I end up making 3 or 4 pints of extract from it. Just about all my pastry, all my ice cream, all my smoothies and various other things get hit by vanilla in my kitchen, and buy buying in bulk and making extract, it's probably not only something that elevates my cooking over the scrum, it also is one of the biggest bangs for the buck. I should get some nice little jars and give it way as presents to my cooking-friendly friends...

AM SNACK: 7:30am, iced green tea


BREAKFAST: 9:30am, smoothie, 1 bowl, hunger 4/5
I don't mind that the spirulina makes the smoothie a really ugly shade of mud-blue, but the fruit mix with the nitty raspberries are a drag. A smoothie is suppose to be smooth, not slightly gritty! But down it went. I imagine if I tried to push the smoothie through a sieve, I might loose more than the nits, but it might be a worthy experiment regardless...

LUNCH: 12:30pm, sardine & avocado on whole grain sprouted toast, health salad, pickle, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5


PM SNACK: 5:45pm, granola bar, water, .5 bowl, hunger 4/5


DINNER: 7:45pm, hotdog with onions, mashed potato, baby spinach with bean dip, 1.25 bowl, hunger 4/5

EVENING SNACK: 8pm, grenadine soda, .25 bowl, hunger 4/5
I made myself a whole pint, but half of it was enough.