Two dollars!

I made some things

I made these muffins. Or energy bars. Or something. They're really good, whatever they are. And they were easy. Someone gave me a huge bag of rolled oats and a huge bag of dried cherries. I took this as a challenge.

First, I made oat flour. Sort of. Making oat flour is normally really easy. You put rolled oats into a blender, then turn it on until you have oat flour. In my case though, the only blender I have is a stick blender. For a decade, it's worked as well or better for all of my blendering needs. Making oat flour though wasn't one of those. I stuck the blender in a bowl with a small amount of oats. Turned it on. Oats flew all over the kitchen. I chose a mixing bowl I have that's more than a foot deep and taller than it is wide. Nope. Same thing. I ended up putting two towels over the bowl with the stick in between. This prevented huge clouds of oats from flying all over the kitchen, but some still sprayed out of the spaces. I ended up only blending it about halfway, so that it was basically half oat flour and half rolled oats. That's about what I was going for though, so it was all good.

I didn't actually measure any of the ingredients, because this was totally just improvising, but the recipe ended up being roughly:

• 2 cups crappy oat flour (so, like one cup oat flour and one cup rolled oats)
• 2 tablespoons oil
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup almond milk
• dried cherries added so that they made up about half of the volume of the batter/dough

I then spooned it into a muffin pan. I had these muffin papers that I got at IKEA for 99 cents or something, and I used them because I had no idea what consistency I would end up with, and I wanted them to come out of the pan easily. They ended up being something in between a chewy muffin and a soft energy bar. I still have a crapload of oats and cherries, so I likely will make them again. Um, I might see if one of my neighbors will loan me a jar blender though.

Oh, WIC now allows oatmeal, and they give you milk and soymilk, so this could be a great WIC recipe too. They don't allow dried fruit, but you could make it with fresh blueberries or bananas I'm sure.

WTHDIDWTV: Still moar cucumbers

I did another google search for cucumber recipes, because they're continuing to take over. We keep giving them to people and eating them ourselves, and there keep being cucumbers. This was a quick and easy lunch; cucumbers, dill, and cottage cheese, served on toasted pumpernickel from Fair Foods. It's a little hard to eat, because the cucumbers slip off, but it was really good. Except notice how a whole lunch only uses six cucumber slices. There just is no way to get rid of these things! Argh!

I seem to have a shitload of cucumbers

Cucumbers neatly lined up (bottle of free wine for scale)

So, I don't really know how growing stuff works, other than that you put seeds in dirt, water it, and it works maybe 50% of the time.

Apparently my cucumbers decided to do really well this year. We've been getting a harvest like this every couple of days. If you live on my street and wonder why there were cucumbers in your mailbox, you're welcome. Of course they had to go and do a lot better than the more versatile things we planted (squashes, tomatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, okra, collards...). Not that I'm complaining, but I have a feeling I'm going to end up spending more to buy things to use up the cucumbers than I saved by growing food myself.

All of us in Chez Scraper really like cucumbers, but the one downside is that is that most everything you can make with them is pretty much completely devoid of calories, which doesn't really work as an entire meal for kids. Cucumbers are not like most vegetables where you can make stir fries, pasta, burritos, etc. with them. A few weeks ago I made cucumber maki rolls, which was enough for a standalone meal. It still only used up one cucumber for the entire family though; they're mostly rice. We made cucumber/watermelon/basil/mint salad all from our garden, which was delicious but not an entire meal for growing kids, so we served it with some hummus, bread, and grilled veggies. We've done some salads with more substance to them too -- green salads with salad dressing and canned beans, and a salad of cucumbers/peppers/chickpeas/olives. This weekend I'll probably buy some grains that work with cold salads and do some of that. Or maybe I'll ask the internet how to make pickles? Hm, I wonder if you can make cucumber kimchi...