Pumpkin & Pomegranate

Yesterday I decided to make my own sunflower seed butter. I love Sunbutter, but find it to be prohibitively expensive. If you can afford it, great! if you are like me and trying to save your pennies, then you might try to make your own. Especially since sunflower seeds are fairly inexpensive compared to nuts usually used to make “butters”. For this batch I used some roasted sunflower seeds I bought at Trader Joe’s for $1.62. Next time I will get organic if I can find them. I poured the bag into Dolce (My Vita-Mix) and revved her up. Stirred once, and out came this:

Perfect.

And It tastes better than Sunbutter too because it is fresh. Fairly sure you could do this in a food processor too, it just will take a little longer. I also made more coconut butter in Dolce the other night and it took about 2 minutes. LOVE THAT THING.

So, last night I also celebrated the moving out of the roommate by dancing around in the living room in my jammies without a bra on. Definitely fun, but a little painful too. I had to close the blinds to do this, and was a tad embarrassed that my cats had to witness the shenanigans. I missed dancing around like that! I am not much of a public free-form dancer as I don’t exactly have “moves”.

I also celebrated my geekdom by finishing up the first episode in the Battlestar Galactica miniseries.

So far I am liking it, but am not completely loving it. I imagine I will get there though. I just need to have more emotional investment in the characters.

I then watched an episode of Star trek the Next generation, or TNG with my mother. She never watched it before, and I was a HUGE TNG Trekkie in my youth (i.e. Middle School-until it was over). So we are now watching the entire series from start to finish. Yay!

Now these characters are like family to me. I even went all the way to NYC to go to a convention to meet the gorgeous Jonathan Frakes

I actually had that poster on my bedroom wall as a teenager. I kid you not. I had Jonathan Frakes, Brad Pitt (from legends of the fall), Christian Slater ( a la Pump Up the Volume), and many a Jonathan Brandis from random Teeny Bopper magazines.

But my FAVORITE character has always been Counselor Troi (played by the fabulous Marina Sirtis). Oh how I wanted to be her!

By the way, the geekdom continues…I also read novels based on TNG. My favorite of course being Imzadi.

Good times.

For dessert last night I took a cue from Averie. She has been making me crave mint chocolate chip ice cream ever since she posted about making mint chocolate chip “soft serve. So last night I decicde make chocolate, chocolate chip soft serve (as I don’t have any mint extract at home). I popped a frozen banana into Dolce along with about 1.5 T cocoa powder, a little coconut milk and also a few chunks of a 70% chocolate bar, and let ‘er whirl. AMAZING. It was SOOOO good. Really hit the spot. Thank you for the inspiration Averie!I need to buy more bananas and make big batches to keep in my freezer :-)

I am going to start making my own “milk” soon. I read yesterday that carrageenan has been linked to both cancer in animals, and inflammatory bowel disease. Lovely. My precious So Delicious coconut milk sadly has carrageenan in it. Serious sadness. I was depressed all day because of this revelation. Now, apparently there might not be as much of a concern with cancer as it would take MUCH more than what is in foods to do anything (I think i read that correctly), but I already have IBS and I don’t need any more inflammation in my intestines if I can help it. So, I am going to limit my carrageenan as much as possible. It just doesn’t seem like something we want to be eating if we can help it…so…I will be making my own milk. probably from hemp seeds, and maybe nuts on occasion. Plus I can also get some coconuts and go that route. Young coconut meat blended with coconut water is WONDERFUL. I also will pick up some ready make “milk that doesn’t have carrageenan in it, just to keep around for when I don’t have time to make my own, but the ready made hemp milk that I found that is safe is super expensive. Making my own is just more economical. So Delicious…I love you! I wish you would keep allergens out of your milk! The coconut is all we need!

There are still a few hours to enter my knife giveaway! And I am so sorry,the way to follow my blog on facebook is by clicking on the “Networked Blogs” link in the box on the right hand side of this blog. That will take you to the facebook application. Or click here.

Hope you all have a wonderful Cinco de Mayo!