Technical Difficulties

I'm not doing too well keeping up with posting.  I've actually got a few posts ready waiting to be finished up and posted.  Since I lost my hard drive and everything on it, I've been kind of in limbo.  So I will get back to this very soon (I hope!)

Vegetarian Black Bean Chili

Chili is the new soup.

I made (and ate) chili for the first time just a few weeks ago - the Confetti Chili, if you recall.  It was delicious, but I wanted to try a vegetarian version as well.  During Meatless Mondays in December, Georgie posted a Vegetarian Black Bean Chili.  She made it using dried beans, but wanted to hear back from someone trying it out with canned beans instead.  You can see her recipe here. 
I made the following adjustments:
- 3 cups of water instead of 4
- 2 cans of black beans instead of the dried
- 1 tsp salt (because of the canned beans, though I did rinse them)
- 4 tsp regular chili powder instead of 2 Tbsp, which I thought was hot enough but Ken disagreed
- added 1 cup of frozen corn, because it's one of my freezer items needing to be used up.

It came out tasty.  Texturally, I think I prefer a mix of meat and beans, but it was good, so I have a bit in the freezer to eat when I don't have quite enough time to make anything.  I wish I had made cornbread to go with it, but I just didn't think of it, I guess.  I might make this again, but more likely I will make a variation of it to make a chili using up some of what I have to use up from the freezer.  If I do make it again, I want to try it with dried beans in the pressure cooker.  I've only used my pressure cooker a few times and I want to get more comfortable with using it since it's such a useful tool!

Peanut Butter Cookies

I haven't been cooking much lately.  Since school started right after we got back from vacation, I've been pretty busy reading, reading, sitting in class, and reading.  As I mentioned, though, not eating well makes me feel like crap, so I did my best to carve out some time to cook this week.  Last week, we cut up onions, red peppers, and broccoli on the weekend and used them in omelets and pita pizzas.  Not too bad for lazy cooking, but I want to do better!  Fortunately, I have a new fun cookbook to help me - Georgie's new book Fuel Up.  It's full of nutrition advice, even photos of how to stock your refrigerator!  And of course there are tons of recipes.  I wanted to make something from the book, but didn't feel like doing a lot of prep work or going to the store.  After flipping through for a while, near the very end, I found a recipe for Peanut Butter Cookies.  The recipe has 4 ingredients and you bake the SIX cookies in the toaster oven.  Perfect!  It was exactly what I was looking for.

I had peanut butter, but I have an almost-done container of almond butter that needs to get used up pronto, so I decided to try out some Almond Butter Cookies first.  They were so easy to make.  The flavor was pretty good, but the cookies flattened out - nothing like the picture!  (And no, I did not forget the baking powder!)  They were more on the crisp side, like sugar cookies.  Ken asked me to make them again, and I decided to try it with peanut butter this time - I was determined to make them look like the picture!  I guess peanut butter is texturally fluffier or something, because they did puff up and look pretty like the picture in the book.  They were a little gooey in the middle, but tasty.  One of my favorite qualities of this cookie was that I didn't want to eat a lot of them - they were so rich!  What a great little snack to make when you're craving baked goods but don't want to end up eating a lot of junk.