Call It An Indefinite Hiatus

To anyone who reads this blog with any regularity, I apologize for not publishing with any regularity at all. In my defense, I just recently obtained my bachelor's degree in a fit of productivity and then proceeded to sit on my bum at my parents' house and not cook anything exciting. Then, I moved to Montana in order to do grad school and now live with three people I found on Craigslist who have a tiny kitchen. I'm not quite comfortable in the house yet, even after a month, so I think that hogging the kitchen and taking pictures of food in various stages of completion could generate unneeded tensions. 

In addition to this, I am at the moment a baker out of flour and sugar, not eggs and butter. 

Still, even when I get flour and sugar, the sixty gen-chem lab reports I'll have to grade each week, the gen-chem lab prep I have to do each week, the lab group rotations (and then the research), and the grad-level chemistry classes I'm taking should keep me way too busy to get elaborate in the kitchen. 

Just so you don't get jealous of me and start demanding that I disclose what I'm really doing, I make a lot of pasta with sauce from a jar, falafel from the dehydrated mix, and far too many peanut butter and jam sandwiches. I make a big (for one person) batch of rice, open a can of beans, and eat rice and beans for a week here and there. I also found highly discounted vegetable flavored vegetarian cup-of-noodles style soup in the damage and final clearance section of a local grocery store, and I'm embarrassingly excited about eating a cup of noodles again. It even has the dehydrated vegetables! And the tendency to collect flavor sediments and carrots at the bottom! And the peas are as bad as I remember! And the broth tastes like yummy salt! Just like in elementary school! Wow! 

These habits will probably continue for a while, since I'm sleeping on an air mattress and my furniture is either boxes or cost less than $10 at Target (a plastic drawer unit for a dresser and a TV tray for my fish). I'd also like a car and to pay it off before I get my PhD. 

So, if I end up living alone or having lots of free time, I might make a post here and there, but the rent is too cheap here and the "free time" thing you speak of? Yeah, I doubt it. 

In the meantime, I refer you to Trina of the Beans, who isn't me but is still witty, vegetarian, and broke/cheap. You can read through her archives and pray that she posts again someday.  

In the meantime, thanks for playing along.

Baking is hard when you're broke.

Fact of the day: life is expensive. If you haven't figured this out by now, you're either a very lucky person who gets all the jobs they can handle or you have rich parents. I have moderately well-off parents, but I'm kind of over asking for money, especially after I drained their funds when I went to England.
So, my grocery budget is shot for a while because I'm trying to pay rent and bills, and I owe my parents about that same amount for my computer. Bundled in with this is me not wanting to turn up the heat in the house because I am paying for 1/6 of it.
I'm baking more than usual because I can't really afford to buy new food. Unfortunately, the heat being on low means that yeast dough isn't really down with rising as fast as one might like.
My pita bread was supposed to double in about an hour, but an hour and a half later, it's still just a mostly cold lump of dough instead of a big puff of warm dough. It's even sitting on the stove.
However, I figured out the problem. I'd wrapped the bowl in a damp towel (instead of my usual dry towel plus plastic wrap because the instructions called for it; that's the last time I try to follow instructions like that) and tucked the ends under to keep in the moisture, then set it on the stove (warm because the oven is on with my housemate's strange experiment). The warm damp towel in the cold room had cooled almost instantly, and the ends of the towel under the bowl had insulated the dough from the warmth of the oven with incredible efficiency.
Next time I try to follow weird instructions about how to rise dough, remind me that saran wrap plus a dry towel works wonders and that other methods are probably less useful, especially given my propensity for screwing things up in little ways.
Update on the dough: it's doing great now that the damp towel is firmly pressed around the bottom of the bowl and keeping the oven heat focused into the bowl. My dough is all big and puffy.
You may be asking yourself, why is she making pita bread if she seems to think that she can't afford heat? That seems kind of fancy for someone who, by her own account, is about to become a vagrant who doesn't even own her computer.
Well, I don't quite have enough flour for regular bread for longer than one week and I'm unwilling to pull too much money from my savings account (really sick of debt), and I do have falafel mix and beans and all manner of pasta and plenty of sauce and some peanut butter and potatoes, so a small, easy-to-store bread as a vehicle for falafel and possibly bean soups is just what I want.
And I've been kind of taken with the idea of pita bread for a long time (it was the first thing I pinned on pintrest when I set up my account this summer) and happen to have all the ingredients AND something to put in it.
I used a recipe from a cookbook, but this is the one that I pinned: DIY pita bread. My recipe required more rising steps (the whole blob of dough rises until doubled, then you split it up, then you let the balls rest, then you roll them out, then you let them rise for 30-40 min), but I feel like this is an equally valid recipe. My recipe also doesn't call for a stand mixer, which I don't have anyway. It works okay, although they're a bit crunchy. Still delicious, though.

Eggless Chocolate Chip Cookies

I was craving chocolate chip cookies lately, and I happened to have a recipe that billed itself as "better than sex". I forget where the original came from, but I have it written down as coming from Yeah, That "Vegan" Shit, which does not in fact have a recipe for chocolate chip cookies called "Better Than Sex Chocolate Chip Cookies". 

The ingredients and instructions are pretty much the same, though, so whatever.

VwaV Chocolate Chip Cookies (No, I'm not sure what VwaV stands for. Go google it yourself.)

I halved the recipe, which yielded several cookies. My cookies are not vegan, since my margarine is just whatever was cheapest at winco. 

Ingredients

• 1/2 c butter
• 2/3 c sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp molasses (1/2 tbsp)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 1/4 c whole wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• as many damn chocolate chips as you want

 Instructions

• Set the butter out in the sun in the bowl you want to use (don't unwrap it, there are bugs and dust out there) to warm it up to a reasonable temperature.
• Preheat the oven to 350 F.
• Cream together with white sugar until it's nice and fluffy.

Trusty spatulas work for this.

• Mix in molasses and vanilla

I had my doubts about the molasses. It has such a strong smell.

After mixing in molasses and vanilla, the butter mixture should be light brown, about the color of normal cookie dough.

•  Mix in the dry ingredients. I mix them together first, but you don't have to.

This food blogging thing isn't so hard...

Bam! Dough! It will be softer than normal cookie dough. This will result in thin, chewy cookies. If you're a cakey cookie person, add some flour.

 Let the dough sit while you find your chocolate chips. My pantry shelf is a swamp of winco bulk bags, and I bought these before I bought some other stuff. I don't know if the sitting is necessary, but it might give the whole wheat flour time to absorb some moisture.

Chocolate chips. The Hershey's "special dark" ones are actually the cheapest at walmart, beating out Nestle and Tollhouse, not to mention Ghiradelli.

•  Add as many damn chocolate chips as you want. I follow the school of thought that teaches that there cannot be too many chocolate chips in a cookie, but that chocolate chips should be hoarded as much as possible without sacrificing the goodness of the cookie. I used half a bag for this half a recipe. It was about perfect.

That right there... beautiful.

•  Put on a lightly greased baking sheet and bake for 8 minutes.

When making a new recipe, I make a small first batch to see how long to cook them, how they spread, if they'll stick, that sort of thing.

 While you're waiting, eat some cookie dough. You know you want to. And besides, this won't make you sick, at least until you eat too much sugar and get diabetes.

No fear of salmonella.

 See, could have packed a lot more on there. I left the first batch in a bit too long, so they're kind of stiff now. 8 minutes is about perfect.

Nicely browned. This batch stuck to the pan a little more than I would have liked, so I greased it for the next batch, which used up all my dough.

This is how they should look when you pull them out for minimum stiffness. Make sure they're a little puffy and not too browned.

Blurry cookies!

I hope you enjoy your chocolate chip cookies that could be vegan if you had fancy vegan margarine. I've made a valiant effort to eat too many of them.
Because they are delicious.

We're Making Sourdough! (Day 2, part 2)

Day 2, evening (22:00): I may have killed the sourdough, actually. I know I said it was all nice-smelling and a little bit bubbly this morning/afternoon/it's the same thing when you're out of school and jobless, but I think I killed it. Instead of smelling nice and yeasty like it did this morning, it smells all sweet with a faint hint of flour. There were no bubbles, and it was covered by a thick layer of clear, brownish liquid that may be a baby version of the hooch that Mike says can develop on improperly fed refrigerated starters. Since the house has been cold today (I refuse to close my window all the way, since the house gets claustrophobic, especially when I've got cabin fever), I stirred the starter vigorously (with the trusty red spatula, of course), as per Mike's instruction, and put it in the oven with the light on (and the oven off. My housemates, I hope, won't try to use it in the morning, or we'll have a noisy mess of dead, burnt starter and glass shards and maybe some melted plastic all over the inside of our oven.) so it will be warmed overnight. I did not feed it. It recovered its gloopy texture upon the reincorporation of the hoochy liquid. I also decided to put the lid on loosely, even if it looses some moisture, because I don't want it to pressurize and explode. Metal screwcaps are less forgiving than plastic wrap.
An hour and a half later, the starter is warm from the oven light and smells encouragingly, if not entirely, yeasty. The sickly sweet smell of the baby hooch is still the main smell, but it hasn't reformed the hooch yet, there's some itty bitty bubbles, and the mass of starter goop looks light instead of like a dense paste under the hoochy stuff.
I promise, I'll get batteries tomorrow even if I have to go to the gas station down the street. I object to this because they're way cheaper at Winco and I need stuff from there anyway, not on principle or anything.
And by "need" I mean crave avocados and squash and pizza and chocolate chip cookies and applesauce and really really necessary things like that.
I'm also thinking of naming the starter. Thoughts?
And also, probably no more twice-a-day posts unless something really crazy happens that necessitates a super long post dedicated to it.

An Introduction

This is going to be different from at least two of the blogging adventures I've had and/or am having. There will be no dates in the titles, no numbers. This isn't about making a statement or letting people know what I'm up to, it's about food.
Specifically, it's about being a broke-ass vegetarian student in the dry part of the pacific northwest. Living on-campus, it was easy, if unhealthy. Just get the cheese-smothered food from the vegetarian window in the cafeteria. Just ask for the mashed potatoes without the gravy. Get a grilled cheese, or maybe a bean burger if you feel like waiting ten minutes at the grill. Eat an unappetizing salad, possibly with rubbery, cold tofu chunks and never any garbanzo beans. Eat tomato and cheese subs. Have a scone and a mocha for breakfast every day or so.
Living off-campus without an exorbitant meal plan is freeing, although somewhat paralyzing at the same time. Lunch breaks are harder to plan, since you can't just pop over to the cafeteria or back to your room for a snack, since your hour-long break is so close to being done by the time you factor in your half-hour round trip. It's hard to cook for yourself when you're so used to having everything prepared.
Fortunately, I love cooking. I love knowing what I'm eating without going "Um, what's in this?" and seeing the terrified look of the student worker behind the counter who has no idea.
Of course, I fall into ruts. There has been a lot of tofu and couscous consumed. I'm not necessarily healthier than my more omnivorous counterparts, since my vegetable servings are lame to nonexistent.
I have high hopes that this blog might spur me to greater vegetable consumption. If nothing else, it's somewhere for me to write down what I eat.
A bit about me: I live with two friends right now, S and A; this number will expand to 5 when school starts up and will include L, K, and C. I'm about to be a senior in college; I plan on going straight back to school as soon as I graduate. My passion right now lies in disease research, but I haven't actually done any, so I guess we'll see. 
Regarding the title, I did say baker?
Yes. It's how I procrastinate. I also mentioned how I'm generally broke. While eggs and butter are not expensive, they run out fast when you bake a lot. I don't have a car, and the cheapest grocery is a very long walk. I hate shopping with a group, so I tend to only shop when I have to walk to the store, even if I end up calling someone to get me home because I accidentally packed something horribly wrong. I am rarely in possession of eggs and butter, which renders me practically vegan. I'm not, although I respect them a lot more and am intrigued by the health benefits, as someone who discovered she had a shitty cholesterol problem at the ripe old age of 18.
So, without further ado, I give you this food blog.