As I was making my latest creations today, it occurred to me that one side effect from this diet may be that I turn orange! I’m kidding of course, but it does seem like I’ve been eating lots of orange veggies: carrots, pumpkin (as always!), sweet potatoes, and butternut squash. At least they are all super tasty!!
Instead of making my usual breakfast smoothies for the week, I decided to try a baked oatmeal that I could eat on all week. Since I had 5 lbs (yes FIVE) of carrots, I thought I would use some of those to make Baked Carrot Cake Oatmeal. It sure looks amazing! I used the chia seed alternative to eggs (which BTW I just found these milled chia seeds, awesome!) and I used pecans and pumpkin seeds for the topping.
5 lbs of carrots peeled!
shout out to amazon prime- got these in two days!
carrot cake oatmeal
So you remember my not so successful adventure with goats milk yogurt? Yeah, well I hunted around for something to make with it so I could use it up, and I found this Yogurt Carrot Cake recipe. I decided to make this and if my husband enjoyed it, then keep some of it for him, otherwise I’m planning on bringing the rest to work. He tried a sample bite and thought it was tasty, though I’m a little concerned it was overcooked, but I followed the directions, well except I just used regular flour instead of whole wheat.. maybe that was the difference? He thought it would be even better with frosting, so I’m currently straining the remaining goats milk yogurt to attempt to use as a frosting. And then goodbye goats milk yogurt, my excitement over you was overrated!
carrot cake
Since I was doing so much baking, I figured what was one more thing? I wanted to make up another healthy dessert for myself so that I wouldn’t be tempted to reach for something off limits. I settled on Healthy Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Oat Bars, which I’ve made before and LOVED. SO I guess I’m adding chocolate back to my diet this week..? 🙂 There really isn’t that much chocolate in this, just enough to make them nice and gooey, and they are vegan chips, so no lactose to worry about. I wanted to try out my newly purchased dextrose, but was afraid to use it as a 100% substitution for the brown sugar, so I tried a 1/4 cup brown sugar and a heaping 1/4 cup dextrose. Dextrose is supposed to be not as sweet as regular sugar, so that’s why I added a little extra, but after tasting one, I could probably get away with less. I also substituted an extra 1/2 cup of pumpkin mixed with some maple syrup in place of the applesauce. Hey, bring on the pumpkin I say! Dextrose is supposed to be better for people with fructose-absorption issues because it is just straight glucose whereas regular sugar is one molecule glucose with one molecule fructose and therefore can cause issues.
pumpkin choc chip oat bars
The other night I had a hankering for some hot chocolate, I love the stuff! I think what I really like is just to have a warm, creamy drink to finish the evening. So I thought about just heating up coconut milk and adding some cinnamon and maple syrup, then I realized I had an open can of pumpkin in the fridge, so I added two scoops of that with the cinnamon and maple syrup and warmed it up. YUM and almost as satisfying as hot chocolate!!
hot pumpkin coconut milk
Can you tell that I’m in love with pumpkin? I just did a “find” in my massive (as in 1043 pins…) recipe board on Pinterest and found 163 pins with the world “pumpkin” in the title!! Yeah I’m in love, what can I say?
My other recent purchase, thanks to my Amazon Prime signup, was some GF flour. I didn’t actually use it today since the two recipes for me both just used oats, but I’m glad to have it on hand! It seemed the most reasonably priced that I could find as well as not containing any issue ingredients.
GF flour blend
Adventures in Picky Stomachs 