Lunch Love

-Boiled egg half
-Cherry tomato heart
-Sunbutter and jelly on Rudi's gf bread with hearts cut from a blueberry fruit strip
-Chocolate hearts
-Smoothie with coconut milk, banana, strawberry, almonds.
-Giant heart stickers that I've been saving for so long

I wish I'd been able to arrange to come to school for lunch tomorrow so that I could be there when they open these. Even though neither one is eating tomatoes right now, and the girl is on an egg strike, I think this will be a fun lunch for them. The fruit strip hearts are glued to the bread with little dots of sunbutter so they won't fly around the container, and they each have a tiny marshmallow hidden inside one of their chocolate hearts.
The eggs didn't turn out very well, I think they were a little too fresh and a little too small to fill out the mold all the way. There is such a fine line with those. Store-bought eggs tend to be too big, but our eggs generally fit them pretty well. But, with the recent cold weather, the chickens aren't wanting to go out to play quite as much and their eggs are smaller. The smoothies are also different since we ran out of cashews. I'm planning a bulk order though, and should be getting enough to last through the end of school. I can't wait to make cashew butter with the kids!
The girl has been asking me to make chocolate hearts for weeks, so she'll especially appreciate those. They are so simple to make. I melted about 1/4 cup of Enjoy Life vegan chocolate chips with about 1/4 teaspoon of coconut oil, and poured into a silicone mold. If I'd had more time I would have filled them with peanut butter, yum!

Chocolate covered Christmas bean balls

The kids wanted to make Christmas cookies. I've made gluten and dairy free sugar cookies that looked good, but am not thrilled with the way they taste. I decided to do some poking around on the internets and see if I could find another treat that we had ingredients for. A large pot of garbanzo beans had just finished cooking when I came across this recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookie dough truffles. They are grain-free, full of protein, and covered in chocolate. Three things that make them worth a try in my opinion. They were really quick to make in the food processor, and not a lot of mess. After scooping the dough onto a cookie sheet, they did need to firm up in the fridge for about 15 minutes to be able to handle them enough for dipping into the melted chocolate. If we make them again, I'll definitely make them smaller so the dough-to-chocolate ratio is better, and they are more bite sized. The taste is pretty good, possibly a bit "healthy" tasting, but if you didn't know there were beans in there, you'd never know there were beans in there. The girl gave a big thumbs up, but the boy is on the fence (however, he's not feeling well enough to want to eat chocolate, so his vote won't count here.)

Chocolate disappointment

I just made myself a cup of hot chocolate (with a tiny bit of mint) to help get into a festive holiday mood. I have so much sewing left to do for the holiday sale, and need to build up momentum. Chocolate usually does the trick. Anyway, as I was mixing my organic free trade cocoa, cane sugar and unsweetened soy milk, I remembered the very first time that chocloate made me sad.

I was about 7 and needed some chocolate milk. I had made myself nestle Quick plenty of times, and loved the little sweet floaters of chocolate dust that would collect on the surface. Well, we were out of Quick, so I got the Hershey's powder out of the cabinet instead. (I'm sure that it's obvious where this is going). I did know that it wasn't presweetened, so I added some sugar and stired it up. There were more floaters than with the Quick, and I was thrilled. Until I tasted it. I felt so betrayed. I did everything I could think of to save it. I heated it, I stirred with a wisk, I may have even put it into a tupperware and shaken it. Nothing worked to make it drinkable. 

Now I know how to make a proper cup of chocolate milk (or soy, or whatever). But, almost every time I do, I'm brought back to that sad day in the kitchen trying to wash the horrible bitterness of unsweetened cocoa out of my mouth. I wonder if this is one of those universal experiences that many children have, or if I was just a strange one.