Guys, it’s a Wednesday afternoon, and I’m exhausted.  I don’t know why, but today felt extra long and tiring.  Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve finally been exercising again now that we own a new-to-us treadmill.

Maybe it’s the fact that we have 1 week and 1 day of school left with the students (and then a couple weeks of clean up, prep for next year, etc.).

Maybe it’s the fact that it’s nearing the end of the regular work week, and I’m just tired.

Maybe it’s the fact that it’s extremely hot outside and it’s wearing me down.

Maybe it’s the fact that our alarm clock didn’t go off this morning and it threw us into a rushed frenzy on our way out the door…

Regardless of the reason for my tiredness, I had the best of intentions to type up this amazing shrimp risotto recipe I’ve got, but I just can’t muster up the energy today.  So instead, I’m doing a bit of a recipe throwback, and reminding you of 4 great recipes that you can start using now that it’s presumably feeling like Spring where you are (…although for me, it’s now feeling hotter than a comfortable temperature, being that it’s 40+C these days).

Curried Deviled Eggs

Greek Bean Salad

Monster Mushroom Burger

Strawberry “Daiquiri” Smoothie

Happy Spring!  Here’s to lots more days of glorious sunshine.

March and April just kind of slipped by, and I forgot to tell you which recipes I had published in the Faith & Friends magazine!  Oops!

Palak Paneer & Indian Style Chutney

French Toast & Grilled Nut Butter ‘n’ Banana Sandwich

How do you feel about Bounty bars?  You know, the coconut-filled ones covered in delicious chocolate?  I’d never really gotten into them until this past year.  For some reason they’re super popular over here, and so when I can’t find the perfect dark chocolate bar, I tend to opt for a Bounty bar.  I think it’s really the coconut that attracts me.  Okay, and the combo with the chocolate, but still, I’m not usually a coconut-in-my-chocolate-bar kind of girl.  But I think I’ve changed my tune on that now.

In any case, when I decided to break in my new food processor this past week, I decided I wanted to make some sort of power bite/dough ball idea that would combine two delightful ingredients: chocolate and coconut.

So I just started dropping in ingredients, mixing and matching, processing, and seeing if I could find a good consistency and combination in flavours.  And that I did, friends.

Although, I’ll be the first to admit that they kind of look like miniature cow patties… but that’s something we can get past, I’m sure of it.

These are like a healthier version of a Bounty bar.  They’re sweet, but waaaaaay less so than a Bounty bar.  They’re packed full of protein, but not in a I-can-taste-the-chickpeas kind of way.  Give ‘em a try.

Chocolate ‘n’ Coconut Power Bites:

• 2 cups of cooked chickpeas
• 1 tbsp. shredded coconut
• 1 banana
• 1/2 cup of oats
• 2 tbsp. honey
• 2 tbsp. peanut butter (or any other nut butter)
• 1 heaping tbsp. cocoa powder
• Pinch of salt

Combine all of the ingredients into your food processor and pulse for approximately 30 seconds, or until the mixture is well combined.  Refrigerate the mix as-is for at least 30 minutes.  Remove from the fridge, form into small balls and place on a baking sheet.  Bake at 350F for 10 minutes, just until the bites firm.  Transfer to a cooling rack and once they are cool, keep refrigerated.  Makes 12.  They will last for about 5-7 days in the fridge.

Like the sound of these?  Try my Peanut Butter Pomegranate Power Bites too!

One of the quick and easy snack foods around here is called Fatiyer.  I like to joke that if you eat too much of it, you’ll have a “fat tire” around your waist… it might not be too much of a joke!  But in any case, it’s super delicious.  It’s kind of like an Arab twist on pizza meets calzone.

You can get it filled with a variety of things, but my favourite is cheese, tomatoes, olives and zaatar.  They fold it over and bake it fresh right there in their ginormous clay oven.  I love it!  It also helps that it’s approximately a 3 minute walk from our school…

I’ll miss grabbing a quick fatiyer here and there when we’re back in Canada for the summer.  It’s so much tastier than regular fast food.  Probably just as unhealthy with the grease factor, but at least the ingredients aren’t sketchy.

What’s your favourite fast food?

Once again I got caught up in the marinated/pickled/deli/nut/seed food aisle of our local grocery store.  It’s magnetic to me… I have to go and scan the glass windows to see what’s new and if anything should come home with me in my grocery cart!

I noted that a few of the nut mixes had been replaced with different kinds (I’m not sure how I feel about this yet), and that they’d moved around some of the olives, which has thrown me for a bit of a loop since I’d memorized the spot where my favourite one usually goes.  I guess I’ll just have to try them all again…

But I definitely noticed an item that hadn’t caught my eye before: the cheese-stuffed hot peppers.  I love hot peppers.  I love cheese.  I pretty much wanted to take home the entire vat of them…but I resisted and bought just a couple to test out.

Well, here we are a couple of weeks later and I have a much more full tub of cheese-stuffed hot peppers in my fridge.  And I find myself saying things to friends like, “Hey, you like spicy food.  Have you seen the cheese-stuffed hot peppers at the co-op?  I think you’d like them.”

That’s what I’m here for friends: to make your grocery shopping experience more enjoyable.

These are now an official staple in our house.

**This is a post written by my husband, Peter to give you a glimpse of life behind the blog from his perspective!  Enjoy!**

My wife Alison has been blogging for some time now.  It’s had different looks (some of which I have helped design or create); it’s gone through different phases and focused on different subjects over the years; but in one way or another she has been blogging since 2006.  In fact she has had a blog longer than we have been married – anyone remember the first few years of Blogspot? I remember the summer before we got married we were both tweaking our blogs over our lunch breaks from the Cable Company in Ontario where we both worked.

Over time she has shared about how she has grown and developed as a person, and occasionally how the process of blogging has been a part of that change.  With that in mind we thought it might be interesting to have me say a few words on how I have been changed or effected by the blogging process.  A peak at what its like being married to a blogger, if you will.  So this is the exclusive, once in a life-time, not-to-be-missed report from behind the scenes.  This is “The Husband Edition” of Alison’s blog.

Food:
I guess right off the bat I should say the biggest change for me has been meal times.  You see I grew up with, let’s say, a more “traditionally North American” menu.  Most meals consisted of the classic trio: meat, potatoes and veggies, with the occasional break where we ate pasta or a stir-fry.  That’s sort of how I imagined life as a married person going as well.  And truthfully, in our first year of marriage that was probably pretty close to how we ate (we even had a solid supply of Hamburger Helper on hand in the cupboard during the first year or so of marriage!).

But change was in the air.  

Over the past 6 years meal times have become even more a time of experimentation and creativity.  For the most part these creations have been amazing and left me thinking, why did it take me so long to taste this!  I have eaten things I never thought I’d ever eat, and occasionally eaten things that I had frankly never even heard of before.  Truthfully this has been a real treat.  Meals that I now see as normal go-to meals, are vastly different than what I would have considered a go-to meal years ago.

I now see eating a primarily vegetarian diet as being pretty normal and find myself being far more aware of what’s going on in the organic section of the grocery store than I ever had been in the past.  But as tasty and as wonderful as my role as primary taste tester has been, there are a few side-effects that we have experienced over the years that I think are worth sharing.

First, would be that in experimenting with food as often as we do, occasionally things… well… let’s just say they don’t turn out as planned.  There is also the amount of dishes that get left after a fancy or creative meal.  The tastier the meal, sometimes the larger the pile of dishes produced (and as the chief dish washer, that’s not always great).  And finally, for a time, there was a long pause between dinner being hot and us being able to eat it.  That was of course in order to get that perfect photograph to use for the blog or some other publication (this one seems to have worked itself out over time.).

But truthfully it’s been worth it.  The food experience and journey has been fantastic (including the occasional flop or cold meal).  And in part I have to see Alison’s blog as contributing to that in some way.  Both because it has connected to her to a community of food bloggers for inspiration and because the need to write that ‘next post’ or get that recipe in for a deadline has often motivated her to push to the next level of creative cuisine.  Alison, my stomach thanks you!

Experiments around the house:
Beyond the amazing food experiments it seems there is always a new idea or experiment for around the house as well.  From homemade cleaning supplies to homemade toiletry items and the occasional homeopathic remedy for sickness.  A couple of week ago, for example, when I was sick, I found myself being treated by Dr. Alison with all sorts of special homemade detox drinks and even found myself with my feet soaking in Apple Cider Vinegar while sitting in the shower… I blame the blog ;)

Although at times these experiments have been odd or peculiar, we have as a result had an increasingly healthy and affordable home.  Like the food experiments, any downsides (like awkwardly sitting my with feet in Vinegar having just chewed raw garlic) have been small in comparison to the relative benefits.  Needless to say, like the food experiments this is not exactly how I envisioned things turning out – but boy am I glad it did!

Life is well documented:
Far more than in years past I find a camera or camera phone accompanying us on outings so that we can get a nice shot for the blog.  I even find myself saying things like, “Oh you should totally blog about this…!”  The net result has been that we have an amazing amount of pictures and written stories about our life thus far.  While you might not access the archives around here all that often, doing so for us can be an amazing reminder of the things we have done over the years.  In the moment you might think, “Really, do we need to take a picture now, this is just everyday-life stuff?”  In the long run, looking back, it’s so worth it.  Thanks to the blog for keeping track of our life thus far for us!

The Experiment of Life:
In writing this short little post I noticed how often the word ‘experiment’ came up.  And I think that’s probably a great word to describe my experience as a blogger spouse.  By being connected to such a broad and diverse group of people through the blogosphere I find the limits on what we saw as possible when we got married continue to be shifted.  

Far from planning on settling down and paying a mortgage, I now find myself thinking, “Moving to Thailand and working on an online business might be nice for a year!” “Wouldn’t it be nice to open up a nice artsy music cafe some place?” “What if we quit working and backpacked for a year instead, we could blog about it as we go?” “I’d love to move to Europe and do my Phd.”…

True. Much of this is not directly related to being a blogger spouse, but the consistent reminder from blogging to record and remember the past, to experiment with the present and dream of the future has played an important role.

Thanks Alison for putting so much into your blog, as much as it has surely cost you time and energy and certainly at times feels taxing, the benefit to us as a couple in our adventures with life has been worth it!  I am thrilled to be on this adventure with you, and equally thrilled that you have been so willing to record it as we go.  

Our work day begins at 7:00 a.m., which means I eat breakfast around 6:30 a.m. (I’m up at 6:00, but we live a 5 minute walk from school), and so by 9:00 a.m. my oatmeal is starting wear off and I feel those familiar grumbles of hunger…

I typically pack some quinoa salad with roasted veggies (I make a giant batch on Saturdays to last the entire week), a cucumber (they grow them in a perfect “personal” size over here!), a piece of fruit and a hardboiled egg.  But I needed something else.  So I started playing around with various “granola bar” options to fill in that morning “tea time” that I like to have.  So far I’ve tried, and LOVED the following recipes, which I think you should definitely check out:

• Chickpea Cookie Dough Balls (there are also a ton of other options for dough balls here as well!)
• Oatmeal-on-the-go Bars

I’ve also played around with another version of granola bars that I made up (not quite ready for the blog yet!).  Plus these black bean brownies and granola bars are also in our repertoire of snacks for work.  I think I’ll be including some banana muffins as well at some point.  It’s nice to have variety!  I don’t want the same type of snack every week, so doing it on a weekly rotation works well for me.  Try a few recipes out, and then go back to them in a month or so!

One of the recipes I created and absolutely loved was this recipe for these Peanut Butter Pomegranate Power Bites.  I am a huge fan of peanut butter, but it can be subbed for any nut butter.  And we have dried pomegranate arils in abundance over here, but of course you could use any dried fruit cut into tiny pieces.  In any case these are soft but hold together well and they’re fantastic for taking on the go.  They look like cookies, but I make them a bitter smaller to fill the “bite” roll a bit more.  Two + a cup of tea is how I like to eat them.

Peanut Butter Pomegranate Power Bites:

• 1/4 cup oatmeal (not quick-cooking)
• 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
• 2 tbsp. baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 tbsp. peanut butter
• 1 cup dried pomegranates

Pre-heat your oven to 350F.  Mix the dry ingredients together, and then add in the honey and peanut butter.  Mix well.  Stir in the pomegranates.  Your dough will be sticky and soft, but if you feel that it is too soft to transfer to the baking sheet, then add in a bit more oats, about 1 tbsp. at a time.  Scoop the dough onto a greased baking sheet in 2 tbsp. mounds.  Bake for 15 minutes.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely before transferring to the fridge.  They will last for approximately 1 week in your fridge.  Makes 24.