Kyle and Kristen: Lots o cooking

I've been aiming for doing one new recipe and one new Texas thing per week, and along the way hopefully seeing our friends and spending some good time together. It has been fun to cook again, and especially fun since we are using all of our neat and very nice new kitchen things! Some are very simply but still super nice additions (like new kitchen towels) and some are complicated but useful (like the food processor!).

This weekend, we cooked several things: chickpea cakes with cucumber-yogurt sauce (new), chia pudding with mango (new and doesn't actually require cooking), black bean burgers (not new but we used the food processor), and chocolate chip banana muffins (not new but are delicious and healthy and we had bananas in the freezer). Everything is quite tasty. The chickpea cakes were great tasting, but difficult to cook. I convinced Kyle to do the actual stovetop cooking and it was difficult to get the cakes to stick together, plus Kyle kept getting spattered with hot oil. I am curious if baking them would be a reasonable way to approach them.

The chia pudding essentially just required mixing stuff together and then letting it set. It has the consistency of tapioca pudding. It certainly isn't as sweet as that, but it has a nice light sweetness to it. I also made some with raspberries and I plan to freeze that for popsicles.

I got to use our new baking scale to make the muffins, and it was very easy to use. A double batch of black bean burgers fit into the food processor, which is awesome! We had a two cup one before that was pretty annoying to use, plus it smelled like burning rubber whenever it was on. The bean burgers look gross but taste quite good, especially with some hummus.

In terms of a new Texas thing for the weekend, I went for a run in the POURING Texas rain, so I experienced some warm rain and then we watched the Shoal Creek overflowing over the pathways, which was neat to see as well.