Sriracha Kale Chips

After I popped a batch of these into the dehydrator, I climbed onto the roof to watch the meteor shower. I came down about two hours later to find they had been scavenged from the racks.

Sriracha is magic.

Ok, we generously received the bounty of a neighbor's kale harvest. And nature is beautiful and photosynthesis is great and yadada, I smothered the leaves in sriracha and dehydrated it. Yeah, that's it. Rip the stems off, smother in sriracha, and place on the racks.

Desiccate for two hours. Done.

Watermelon Chips

For this recipe, you need a food dehydrator and possibly some silpats. You can dry fruit in the oven (your lowest setting, so usually 180 to 200 degrees) but it's less energy efficient.

Basically, all you do is slice the watermelon into slices only a hair thicker than 1/4". Any thicker and you'll get chewy watermelon taffy that looks like this:

 Not a bad thing, just different.

These need to dehydrate for about 8 to 10 hours.

They are delicious. 

Lemon-Infused Honey

Honey comes in all varieties with a whole slew of adjectives--raw, local, unfiltered. It also changes flavor based on what plants the bees are collecting nectar from. The honey we ended up getting is pretty bitter, so I'm going to fix it.

My house mother has had a sore throat for some time now so today I am making lemon-infused honey. Lemon-infused honey is pretty simple for a big pay-off: the perfect stir-in for hot tea.

Lemon-infused Honey

• 1 lemon
• 1 cup of honey (any variety)

Grate the lemon peel into a sauce pan. Slice the remaining lemon and toss those in, too. Cover with 1 cup of honey. Stir constantly over low heat for about 5 minutes.

Place in a jar and allow to sit for at least a few hours. The flavor with intensify with time.

Add to beverages at your leisure.

No-Bake Almond Oat Coconut Date Bars

Long hiatus. Moved to California. Now have access to a bigger and grander kitchen that came already stocked with all kinds of exotic flours and dried beans and nuts and shrugs as to what to do with them. Yay for me! Yay for you. Yay for us.

Anyway, so today I found a bag of dates in the pantry. Dates are basically ugly balls of natural sugar with pesky little seeds that you have to take care to remove. To be frank, I've never actually used dates before. These are not in my usual repertoire of food objects, so today is an experiment.

To make these bars, you'll need a food processor. I used my brand new Nutribullet which I love because when it's not being used to create edible things, it's being used to facilitate my consumption of absurd amounts of greens that I would otherwise never put into my system. I'd dedicate a blog entry to it, but honestly,  "handful of spinach and a banana..." not very interesting. 

So, right, food processor. 

No-Bake Almond Oat Coconut Date Bars 

(adapted recipe from Oh She Glows)

• 1.5 cups of almond meal (ground almonds)
• 1.5 cups of oats
• 1/2 tsp. sea salt (or kosher salt or any salt, whatever, who cares)
• 10 pitted dates
• 1/4 cup coconut oil

Filling (make separately)

• 30 pitted dates
• 1/2 cup water

1. Process the almonds, oats, 10 pitted dates and salt until you get a crumbly meal. Then add the coconut oil (melt first if solidified). 

2. Press about 1/4 of the mixture into the bottom of a glass-bottomed 8x8" pan. 

3. Process the remaining 30 pitted dates with 1/2 cup of water until you get a sticky date goo. (Mmmm, goo.)

4. Press the goo into the pan, over your pressed meal layer. 

5. Press the remaining meal over the goo layer.

6. Refridgerate at least 1 hour, preferably 8-10 hours.

7. Don't do what I did which was to wait 45 minutes and be super impatient about it because you're wicked impatient because you'll get something crumbly and messy like what you see below and not the professional-looking bars that other bloggers seem to achieve. But it tastes good.

(mmm. goo.)

Fridge Tea

No posts from me lately mostly because I've just not been eating much this past week or so. Hard to blog about eating when you're dumb and don't eat. Don't do that. Don't be like me. Do as I say, not as I do.

And given my emotional and practical stupidity, here's a non-food post about fridge-brewed tea. I have a system for this that involves old peanut butter and applesauce jars. I recycle a lot of jars. 

Fridge Tea

- Cold water

- Teabags

- Clean Jars

Basically the rule of thumb is 1:1, one teabag to one cup of water. A pint jar is obviously two cups and a quart jar is four cups. I usually make stronger tea, so 3 teabags in a pint jar, 6 in a quart jar. Your preference.

Fill the jars up, throw the tea in and leave in your fridge over night. Tea does go bad, so don't leave it in there more than a few days. That's why I like to make small jars like this because I don't have to worry about an entire pitcher going rancid. Also, I'm so obviously hipster it fucking hurts.

You can sweeten it with whatever, but obviously, if you're going to be authentic about this, you're going to have to suck it up and make simple syrup. Simple syrup is a sugar-to-water ratio of 2:1; heat the sugar with the water over high heat until you make syrup. You can store it separately to use in your tea.

Sriracha-Lime Salad Dressing

I know. Stop it. Don't you eat anything that isn't coated in three inches of Sriracha, Holly?

The thing is when I'm stuck on a flavor combination, I try to figure it out. There's a combo here of Sriracha, lime and sugar that you've noticed has been the theme for the last three entries. I'll probably move on to something else eventually, but I'm trying to knock this out. It's how I work. I get obsessed with something until I feel like I've adequately worked it out and then I move on to a new problem. 

Ok, so salad. Eat to Live Joel Fuhrman says you should eat salad every day. Per ounce, nothing is really more nutritious for you than greens. I buy that. But salad dressing is kinda gross. There are only a few kinds I actually enjoy, most of them made by Paul Newman. And there are no Sriracha salad dressings, so I mean, really, what's the point. So I invented one!

Sriracha-Lime Dressing

- 2 tbs. Sriracha

- 2 tbs. lime juice

- 2 tbs. white sugar

- 1 tbs. minced garlic

- 1 tsp-1tbs. olive oil (I don't really even know if this is necessary. Err on your fat preferences.)

- 2 pinches black pepper

- 1 pinch of salt

Shake it up in a jar.

Stupid-fast Sriracha Peanut Noodles

I received two special requests in the last two weeks. The first asked for something that could be packed in a lunch box. The second asked for something that could incorporate leftovers. Well today's you're lucky efficient (vegan-friendly) day.

This recipe will use leftover pasta. I don't care what pasta. Obviously, I recommend whole wheat pasta over white. But do you care what pasta? No. Probably not. You just have that leftover tupperware of pasta and you're like fuck what do I do with this?

Ok, so this is basically a variation of the peanut sauce recipe I use on everything. Except it's different. It's more Sriracha-y and it requires no immersion blender. You can make this sauce in literally two minutes with a fork. It'll yield a much smaller amount (enough for a small jar) that you can stash in at work to eat over leftover pasta.

Sriracha Peanut Noodle Sauce

(Adapted from here)

- 1/2 cup of peanut butter 

- 3 tbs. of Sriracha

- 1 tsp. minced garlic (or powdered)

- 1 tsp. powdered ginger

- 1 tsp. black pepper

- 1 tbs. sesame oil

- 2 tbs. lime juice 

- 1 tbs. sugar

- 3 tbs. hot water

This is some rich, thick sauce.  It's slightly tangier (because of the lime) than my crack sauce recipe. If you like cold sesame noodles and sriracha, you will like this. If you don't, well, you're shit out of luck, pal.