Last Friday I took the day off work and made blackberries and biscuits for breakfast. I whipped up the biscuits using this lovely recipe from Holy Cow Vegan, then topped them with a warm blackberry sauce containing no added sugar. The sauce got me feeling …
Last weekend I helped my yard wake up from its long winter’s nap. I swept thick layers of leaves off the paths, did hours of pruning, pulled up loads of winter weeds, and planted pink and white dianthus around my three stone birdbaths near the …
On Saturday morning, I baked some sugar-free vegan banana bread. It was so good—mildly, pleasantly sweet due solely to the bananas, and nice and hearty and filling because it was made with whole-wheat flour.
“It’s really good with butter on it,” Rob said.
“Yeah,” I said, “a little butter puts it over the top.” (I was talking about vegan butter, of course, ha ha.)
We ate like kings on Saturday. We had banana bread for breakfast, and then for lunch (an hour later) we had vegan quesadillas with black beans, guacamole, and sweet potato fries.
It was quite a delicious day!
1/4 cup unsweetened almond milk
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
2 cups mashed overripe bananas
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts
Mix the almond milk and apple cider vinegar together in a small bowl and set aside.
Mash the bananas well. In a large bowl, blend the mashed bananas, coconut oil, vanilla, and milk/vinegar mixture.
In another bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and gently combine. Be careful not to overmix. Fold in the chopped walnuts. If the batter seems too dry, add two teaspoons of unsweetened apple sauce.
Line a 9×5 loaf pan with parchment paper and pour in the batter. Bake at 350 degrees F for an hour or until you can test the bread with a knife and the knife comes out clean.
Let the banana bread cool for 10 minutes and then remove it from the pan and allow it to cool further on a wire rack.
On Sunday, Rob and I put up our Christmas tree! As we worked, we listened to Christmas music (and the thunder and rain) and chatted about our childhood Christmas memories. “We’d always put up our tree on a Friday night,” I said. “Back then, a …
Today I took the day off work and, to celebrate, I made some healthy sugar-free muffins using a recipe I found on The Conscious Plant Kitchen and modified just slightly. I also picked some of our homegrown Meiwa kumquats and enjoyed breakfast out on the …
Last Sunday, I had the best day ever, not because anything exciting happened but because of how peaceful I felt in my heart. I played with the cats, polished the furniture, carefully cleaned and rearranged my collection of Fiestaware, and hung a little garland of pine cones on the mantelpiece in the dining room. It was a delightful day of puttering.
In the late morning, a great sunbeam spread itself across the dining-room floor, so all the cats gathered to bask in the warm, golden light. They dozed and stretched and got into lazy wrestling matches. Meanwhile, I took pictures of them and complimented them on their cuteness.
I was calling them dumb nicknames. I was calling Buntin “Miss Beauty Lady,” for example, and Carl “My Little Cutie Boy.” At about eleven, Rob joined us in the dining room, and his nicknames for the cats were even dumber than mine were. He was calling June “Jan,” for some reason.
We groomed the cats with an array of different combs and brushes. Then we gave them some Cat Sushi (bonito flakes). As we watched them eat, Rob was jabbering on about FSU football. During college football season, it is all he talks about. (He’s a Booster and has season tickets.)
“The cats are big FSU fans,” he said.
“No, they’re not,” I said.
“June is,” he said. “I mean, Jan is.”
We like to pretend that smart, busy June is a local Quincy business tycoon with questionable ethics, and that Elroy and Leroy, our chubbiest, shyest, most babyish cats, are her two hapless employees; she’s always taking advantage of them.
“Ticket scalping is where June’s interest in FSU football begins and ends,” I said. “I guess you saw Elroy and Leroy at the Duke game, standing on the corner by the stadium.”
Rob nodded, playing along. “June wanted them to wear FSU jerseys while they were working, but she wasn’t about to pay good money for them. So Elroy and Leroy had to make their own shirts.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They wrote ‘FSU’ on some old undershirts in Magic Marker. Some of the letters were backwards.”
Rob spent the rest of the day watching pro football while I continued to play with the cats and make tiny home improvements. After I hung the pine-cone garland on the dining-room mantelpiece, I repositioned the painting on the wall above it. The painting used to hang too low, so it was touching the clock beneath it. I moved the painting up just a couple of inches, and the result was “amazing” (as I bragged to Rob). I was pretty proud. I took more pictures and savored my small but sweet success.
October is a magical month here in North Florida. The temperatures are pleasant, the leaves and grass are still green, and the meadows, vacant lots, and roadsides are abloom with yellow and purple wildflowers. After the long, hot, hard summer, the world seems fresh and …
A couple months ago, back in June, Rob and I noticed an Eastern box turtle floating in our little homemade backyard pond. Rob became concerned because box turtles are land turtles and, he’d read, are not strong swimmers.
“Maybe she fell in and she can’t get out,” he worried.
“Well, she could get out if she went over to the shallow end,” I suggested. (She was currently floating in the pond’s deep end.) “After all, the water’s only a couple inches high over there.”
“Hmm,” Rob said, “but maybe she doesn’t know there’s a shallow end. Maybe she’s been over here in the deep end for a long time now, trying to get out, and she’s getting tired. Maybe I should help her get out just to be safe.”
“Yeah, I see what you’re saying,” I said. “That’s probably a good idea.”
So he fished the little turtle out of the water and set her in the ferns at the pond’s edge.
Then we went in the house to have lunch, and when we returned, the turtle was back in the pond, floating contentedly in the deep end again.
“I’ll build her some steps over here at the shallow end,” Rob said, and he set to work building three stone steps that led out of the water. “I just want to make sure she can get out okay.”
After the steps were built, the turtle continued floating, and we sat there among the ferns, watching her, as the bullfrogs croaked and the goldfish darted about in the sunlit water. She seemed quite at her ease.
“I’m still worried that she might not know there’s a shallow end,” Rob said after a while. “Maybe I could entice her over to this side with a little watermelon snack. That way, we could test the steps and see if she can really use them.”
“Good plan,” I said.
So Rob went in the house and rustled up some nice ripe, sweet, fragrant watermelon chunks and arranged them at the top of the new steps he’d built. The turtle smelled the watermelon right away and swam (surprisingly quickly) to the shallow end. She clambered to the top of Rob’s steps, a bit of hornwort draped about her neck like a boa, and began to feast.
“Well,” Rob said, “she’s definitely proven that she can negotiate the steps. The steps are no problem for her.”
But still he worried. The next day he found her in the deep end again.
“What if she forgot about the steps and the shallow end?” he said. “What if she’s not all that smart?”
“Well,” I said, “I guess we could remind her about the steps. We could remind her with some more watermelon.”
So, once again, Rob enticed the turtle to the little stone steps with watermelon chunks, and, once again, she demonstrated her ability to easily climb out of the pond on her own.
But Rob continued to fret. He kept reading about box turtles on the internet, and every article seemed to confirm that box turtles are clumsy swimmers (they don’t have webbed feet) and won’t hang out in anything but the shallowest water for any length of time. Yet our turtle wasn’t conforming. She was floating in three to four feet of water for long spells, for hours at a stretch.
“I hope she’s okay,” Rob would say.
“Well, she looks happy,” I’d say.
Finally, after we’d observed her floating in the pond every day for a week and had forced her to demonstrate her water-exiting skills countless times by luring her to shore with fresh melon treats, Rob let himself relax a little.
As she floated among the hornwort on a warm June day, he announced, “Well, I know what her name is now. It’s Ariel. She’s the Little Mermaid, and she’s doing just fine in the pond. She’s here because she wants to be, and I think she’s going to be all right.”
Rob’s prediction proved correct. Now, almost three months later, we still see Ariel every day. She’s been enjoying the pond all the hot summer long, and she seems to be thriving.
