One of Those Days

Have you ever had one of those super-foodie days where everything you make turns out just spot on?

Today was NOT one of those days.

No, sadly, the Gillianasana kitchen produced multiple failures this morning. I documented the more epic one because, as with most things, I had high hopes for the outcome. Oops.

It all started with this new cereal I found, Newman's Own organic Cinnamon Flakes. This is unlike any cinnamon cereal out there - it's super flavorful and has strong notes of cloves with the cinnamon. It literally jumps out of the box asking to be eaten in some kind of apple cinnamon dish. So, I made one up.

Ok, it does have a basis in reality: the hotel my family usually stays in when they visit me at school serves this french toast that is encrusted with crushed corn flakes before cooking. So I thought, hey, I'll do that with this cereal! Only instead of bread, I wanted to use tofu. It worked in my head, I swear.

I laid out my ingredients...

...crushed the flakes...

...cut up the tofu to be dredged in egg white and then the cereal crumbs...

And threw it on the skillet. And that's about where my big idea, um, shrank. The flakes didn't stick at all, some of the egg white slipped off and cooked separately, and then my brother poked me and I burned my finger on the skillet. All resulting in this:

Yup. Just dumped some applesauce and extra cinnamon on top and attempted to eat it. It actually didn't taste bad or anything, it was just...er, nothing like the picture in my head. On the bright side, it did give me another idea for playing with an already-existing recipe - and that one has considerably less chance of failing.

I went on to make a truly revolting smoothie, and eventually gave up and let mom take over. She made a kickass salad featuring some spicy salad greens fresh from the Farmer's Market!

I used these to create a very tasty little salad myself yesterday:

With fennel and some tempeh sauteed in golden balsamic vinegar. YUM!

Mom's luck continued into dessert (although in her case, luck hasn't much to do with it, she just knows what she's doing):

A strawberry-blueberry-rhubarb crumble. Totally has that sour-sweet thing going on, and then with a little vanilla ice cream, wowza! Seriously good stuff.

I'm excited - I've finally nailed down a new "plan" for the blog and it shall start tomorrow! 

Happy July 1st! [Anyone know how that happened??]

~Namaste~