While it was never fun getting sick as a kid, I still remember how great it felt to be able to get into my parents bed and stay there all day, warm and cuddly, watching tv and eating toast. With two 4 year olds running in circles around me, it's usually not quite as relaxing now as it used to be. How sweet it is, that the mister stayed home yesterday, and I got to stay in bed. I've set up camp in the room that passes as our guest room, since it's the only room in our house with both a bed and a door. I've got a down comforter, a few books, and the laptop. Every once in a while, a little loud visitor comes up to see how I'm doing. It's like a little vacation, and I think I love it. Well, except for the searing pain in my throat, ringing in my ear, and the coughing that wakes me up every hour or so.
With this sudden free time, I've been clicking around on Pinterest, and found a few recipes that sounded like they'd go well with my current state. Thursday night, I made this carrot ginger soup. The only changes I made to the recipe was to add a couple of cloves of fresh garlic and a whole chopped pasilla pepper. I figured the spicyness would help blast some of the germs out of me, and the pasillas have a ton of vitamin C. It was quick to make, and was super tasty.
Then, last night, I needed something cold to help put out the fire in my throat. We'd baked a giant squash earlier in the week, so I thought I'd use it in place of the pumpkin in the pumpkin pie milkshakes.
I had to do some fiddling with the ingredients since we are dairy and gluten free, but it turned out pretty well. I used coconut milk and soy ice cream, and replaced the graham crackers with Envirokids animal cookies. I would have preferred to use the gluten-free craham cracker crumbs that I used to make the s'mores, but didn't have any. It tasted exactly like pumpkin pie, but colder and much more soothing.
An optional part of the pumpkin pie milkshake recipe is a caramel drizzle made by melting caramel candy. To keep ours dairy free, I called on another Pinterest recipe that I recently found.
I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make this one dairy-free, but I did! In place of the heavy cream I used Mimicreme, and it worked perfectly! I also used raw sugar in place of refined sugar, and cut the whole recipe in half in case it turned out badly. It didn't turn out saucy, I think because I cooked it too long. Since the raw sugar is already darker in color, it was difficult to know when it was finished cooking. So, the finished result was definately not able to be drizzled, but was so unbelievably yummy crumbled up and sprinkled on top of our milkshakes. I guess I'll just have to try making this one again to see if I can get it to come out the way it's supposed to. Darn.
