Extra Vitamin A Every Day

Again, this isn't my picture. I swear...if I don't find my camera's battery soon, I will go crazy. I've missed out on SO many photo opportunities this semester at school (at home I used my mom's camera).

Anyways, I've been trying to eat up all of the heavy foods in my room to prepare for move-out day (less to carry! It WILL make a difference!), and one of those heavy things was my huge can of pumpkin. I really want to make pumpkin muffins or pastries, but I also want to stay healthy, so I've decided to come up with healthy/semi-healthy ways of eating all of that orange stuff. I haven't come up with much, but here's what I've tried so far:

1. Canned pumpkin + soymilk
2. Canned pumpkin + cereal + milk (I've been adding a little glob to my cereal bowl every morning)
3. Canned pumpkin + waffle + cinnamon + butter
4. Canned pumpkin + whole wheat bread + butter + brown sugar
5. Canned pumpkin + oatmeal + brown sugar
6. Canned pumpkin + non-fat milk + brown sugar
7. Canned pumpkin + melted chocolate chips
8. Canned pumpkin + maple syrup (fake or real)

If you don't like the texture of baby food, you probably won't like most of these ideas.

* Note: I only use SMALL servings of butter and sugar (using a lot would defeat the whole purpose of trying to avoid making unhealthy things like a pie)

I think the pumpkin oatmeal is my favorite. Try it!

So far I haven't eaten much of that huge tupperware of pumpkin I now have in my fridge. Maybe I will have to freeze it after all. :o(

Bread & Chocolate 3400 Phinney Bar

Note: This the second one is not my picture.

Chunks of bread in a chocolate bar? That's unique. It ended up being pretty good. It was on the bitter side because it was a dark chocolate bar, but I liked it. The bread pieces were tiny, and they were crunchy (sorry I don't have a picture of the chocolate up close!!). It was expensive ($2 something for that small thing), but I was feeling impulsive, and I wanted my mom to try it cuz I was on the phone with her when I saw it at Berkeley Bowl. If you like weird things, you're willing to splurge, and you're not picky about chocolate, go buy it. Berkeley Bowl has a bunch of weird chocolate bars, actually. Got Kurtis a latte bar a few weeks ago (which is when I bought this bar too).

Homemade Chocolate Ice Cream

Mom and I also made chocolate ice cream over spring break. I made vanilla last year, and it was awful (too sweet and I added the eggs incorrectly). This time, my mom wanted chocolate so we made chocolate.

Before freezing, it just looked and tasted like chocolate pudding:



I wasn't so great at pouring it cleanly into the machine...


Ta-DAA! It would have frozen better if we had chilled the pudding-like stuff before putting it into the machine, but we were impatient.


So we tried it while it was goopy and then froze it.



Looks like actual chocolate ice cream!

Moist Oatmeal Pumpkin Muffins

I found a new favorite pumpkin muffin recipe!! I made these during spring break (last week) for my mom because she wanted some kind of pumpkin and oatmeal muffin.

You can see the recipe here at Recipezaar.com. As usual, I cut down on the sugar.


They really were moist like the Recipezaar person said! The ONLY problem was that I made half of a batch (i.e., 12 muffins), but I ended up with 10. The flavor was perfect (not too spicy, the perfect amount of pumpkin, etc.), and I really liked the texture because the bits of oatmeal stayed intact (I used old-fashioned oats). They were really easy to make too! You just dump and mix all of the ingredients in one big bowl pretty much (no worrying about mixing the dry and wet ingredients separately or beating anything). I would DEFINITELY make these again.