Chai is the spice of life, and cobbler!

Straight up, I jacked this recipe from Linny. Well, the base of it anyway. One time she chopped up apples and threw them in a pot with some instant chai mix we had lying around and cooked them down until they were soft and brilliant and obviously delicious. Fancy apple pie without having to make a crust? Yes, please!

Whoda thunk there was any way to make it taste better?

CHAI CHAMP!!!!

4-5 peeled, tart apples

One pint blueberries

Juice from one orange

1/2 cup sugar

2 TB instant chai mix

1-2 cups old fashioned oats

So you're about to experience a little bit of a "do as I say, not as I do" recipe in that the pictures to follow will definitely LOOK like they have unpeeled apples featured in them but... You're hallucinating. You should really get that checked out. 

STEP ONE!!!

Chop up your tooooootally peeled apples and put them on the stove over medium heat with the orange juice, blueberries, and sugar. Once the blueberries start to pop and there's a little more room in the pot, add your chai mix!

Here's the kind I used! I have no idea where it came from! Probably fairies!!!

Cook the whole thing down until the apples are soft and just barely holding their shit together. And definitely not at all covered in peels. 

Add some oats to the pot to soak up some of the juice! Only like a tablespoon or so. Then put all them tasty fruits into a baking dish and top 'em with some more oats and a sprinkling of sugar. If you're feeling fancy, you can even toast the oats beforehand so they'll be extra delicious and...oaty. 

Slam that thang into the oven at 340°F for about 45 minutes or until nice and bubbly. 

Scoop it into bowls, top it with ice cream and whipped cream and shovel it down your gullet before it cools. Or heats up? Melts? Look guys, the technicalities aren't important as long as the end result is the same. 

Tummy full of yummy all the way. 

<3 Kat. 

Picnic perfect

You ever feel like sometimes you may be spending a little too much time inside hissing at the sun and hiding in the sweet sweet luxury of air conditioning? Aside from the excellent driver's tan I seem to have acquired this year, my complexion indicates I may need to get the hell out of the house soon. 

Eff it, y'all, let's have a picnic. 

I don't care how hot and sweaty and humid and full-of-children it is, picnics are the shit. Almost every Sunday during the summer my family and I would go to a local park and enjoy a free concert while dining on either subs, sanwiches, or things shoved between two slices of bread. With all that fabulous variety, it's no wonder that I've taken picnicking to a whole different level in my adult life. I mean...drink flavored desserts?!?! What is this madness?!?! That kind of stuff would have been completely unheard of to my ten year-old self. 

Here's what you're gonna need to blow your pb&j picnic out of the water. 

2 c. Cookie of your choice, crushed.  (I recommend shortbread, nilla wafers, or graham crackers)

1TBsp gelatin (I'm using "natural desserts" brand vegan gelatin. It was like $2.50 on amazon.com.)

1 lb. strawberries

3 lemons, juiced and zested

2 packages very soft cream cheese (16 oz.) (or tofutti better than cream cheese for vegan-style)

1 pint Heavy cream (or use cool whip or whipped coconut cream to go vegan.)

1 1/2 c. Sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

Couple pinches of salt

10 8oz. Jars/individual portion things (or you can just slap it into one big pan. I won't mind.)

Step one!

Roughly chop up some strawberries and throw them into a pot with a cup of sugar and the lemon juice. Stir it and cook on medium low just long enough to dissolve the sugar. If you're using normal gelatin then you don't have to worry about the heat, but if you're using vegan gelatin you're supposed to put it in cold stuff and also non-acidic stuff. I figure might as well go for one out of two. 

Once the sugar is dissolved, blend it into a fine purée. You can strain it if you'd like to make it super smooth, but I didn't because that seemed entirely too much like more dishes to clean. 

Take your heavy cream and put it in the blender with your 2tsp of vanilla. Gradually raise the speed to whip on high until they make those infamous stiff peaks. 

Put the now-whipped cream into a separate bowl if you're using a stand mixer. Hand mixers, just use a second bowl for this part. 

Put your softened cream cheese (mine was left on the counter for most of the day.), lemon zest, remaining 1/2 cup of sugar, and gentle pinches of salt into the bowl. Mix 'em up good and nice until it also looks nice and fluffy like the cream. 

At this point, I put the vegan gelatin into the strawberry puree since the instructions said to use it as quickly as possible. The whole package was about 1TBsp and did the trick just fine, should you be in the market for some. 

I suspect that this would have been even easier if, at this point, I had taken the strawberry stuff and mixed it into the cream cheese while it was still in the kitchen aid. I recommend doing it that way rather than what I did, which was fold together the two fluffed creamy whatsits and THEN gently stir in the strawberry. 

Then it really just came down to assembly, honestly. Throw some crushed cookies into your jars, and follow it up with some strawberry lemonade fluff. Repeat until out of fluff. 

I let mine set in the fridge overnight and they got a slightly less airy texture (which I was hoping would happen), although it still very much feels like you're eating a strawberry lemonade fluff puff magruff the crime dog. Or something like that. 

If you want it to really FEEL like you're eating something truly sinful, only make half the whipped cream. Otherwise you're going to trick yourself into thinking that this sweet and tart delicacy has no calories at all because it doesn't nearly have the kind of weight to it that a baked cheesecake does. 

Gosh if it ain't good, though. 

Oh but those summer nights. 

<3 Kat. 

BANANANANANANANANANANA....bread.

It's kind of perfect that today, the day on which I'd intended to actually publish our first blog post, I was recruited by my lovely friend Marta to make a bazillionty banana bread muffins. She's running a charity 5k to help with an orphanage very close to her heart and was hoping we could bribe people to donate via the power of food.

In my experience, food is the best bribe in the world.

So rather than start you off on the badass journey of making fried pickles entirely from scratch (get pumped for next week!), I'll start this blog off with a journey based on love. Because while Linny and I are sure to rock your faces off on the regular with our culinary genius and complete and total shamelessness, we are both people who live to help those we love. I think it's important for us to start off making a good impression before we throw around enough curse words to make you doubt our sincerity.

Please, consider donating any amount to help my friends Brett and Marta Weber in their fight against world suck.
Donate to Marta
Donate to Brett



Banana Bread

3 c. flour
a couple dashes of salt
1.5 tsp baking powder
1.5 tsp baking soda
2 c. dark brown sugar
1/2 c. coconut oil
2 eggs
1 c. buttermilk (or 1 cup any milk mixed with juice from one lemon for that slight tang.)
6 or so ripe-to-very-ripe bananas

Optional-two dashes of cinnamon and a sparing dash of nutmeg. (I added them to the muffin version I made today and it was pretty freakin' awesome.)

Grab yourself a bigass bowl and two greased loaf pans while you preheat the oven to 300˚F.

Throw your bananas in the bowl and mash them with whatever you happen to have handy (I traditionally use my giraffe whisk because the whisk portion is great for both mashing and mixing, and the giraffe part IS A FREAKIN' GIRAFFE.)

Throw in the rest of the ingredients in whatever order you like. I've literally done it in every single order possible and even though you're supposed to mix the dry goods separate and slowly add them to the wet goods.... I don't bother. My method of cooking is pretty well described as PUT SOME STUFF IN A THING. COOK UNTIL IT'S FOOD. And as you can tell from all those capital letters, it does not involve much delicacy or give a damn at all.

Once the batter is all mixed up, separate it into the two loaf pans. If you're feeling crazy, mix in some chocolate chips and/or walnuts at some point before putting them in the oven. (I usually do it right in the loaf pan, but smart people will do it in the pre-panned batter.)

Cook for about 45 minutes to an hour at 300˚F for two loaves, or about 25-30 minutes at the same temp if you're using muffin pans instead.

Pro tip! If you tap the top of your bananananananess and it springs back up, it's done. If it indents, sticks to your finger, or feels all woobly inside... it's not done. It's also best to cool these on a drying rack, but since I don't own any I sometimes grab the grates from inside my toaster oven and use them.... Or just cool them in the pan. You should NOT cool things in the pan because they'll get soggy on the bottom, but to be fair... Banana bread is a sticky, semi-soggy treat anyway so most people won't notice for the couple of seconds it takes to shove these babies right on in their face.

See you, space cowboy!
<3 Kat.