Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Tasty cornbread



Today I decided to make some cornbread for breakfast. It is a quickly prepared, very satisfying, and actually quite versatile meal. Eat it on its own or maybe with a bit of sour cream on the side. It is also great as a side dish to beef or  vegetable stews (in this case,  I like to reduce the sugar a little bit but, hey, that's just me).

Cornbread
Preheat oven to 375F / 175C

1/4 cup coconut oil
3/4 cup Splenda
1/4 cup raw sugar
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk OR 1/2 cup sour cream + 1/2 cup whole milk
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt

Mix together all the dry ingredients.
In a separate bowl, mix together all the remaining ingredients.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet mix and stir it all together for a creamy dough.

Pour the dough into a greased baking dish.
It does not really matter what kind of baking dish one uses, if it's round or rectangular, but I would recommend to use a smaller dish to keep the dough thicker. In my case I used a 5 x 8 in glass baking dish. 


Bake for 30-40 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Growing Zucchini

Another first for me this year was growing a zucchini plant. 

It sprouted really quick and the young plant developed nicely. Flowers keep coming but until now there is no female flower. Well, at least the color is pretty. I do not harvest the flowers for frying at this point since there is only one at a time blooming and I don't think that warrants to heat up the oil. 





Thursday, July 19, 2012

Growing Asian long beans

This was my first attempt to grow those pretty long beans. On the package it said that they would grow from seed to crop within 50 days. Well, it took double than that in my case until I harvested my first bean. I did not mind the delay and enjoyed the simple fact that the plant produced something that I love eating.