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About

We are a family of two people, two cats, and three chinchillas, living in a metro area in Pennsylvania.

Kara is an academic teaching at a small college.  Karen is a high school English teacher.  We met in college and have been in each other's lives ever since, getting married nearly 8 years ago.



We try to cook with a weekly plan, prepping meals with snacks and lunch for the week made in advance.  Because we're committed to ethical meat (and moving toward ethical dairy as much as possible), we tend to be "semi-vegetarian."  We are low-to-no soy household due to allergies. 

While we strive for healthy foods, especially heart-healthy choices, we adore all that bad-for-you stuff that one should avoid, including a deep and abiding addiction to chocolate chip cookies.

We love to cook for friends and think dietary restrictions are a fun chance to try new recipes. 

Our kitchen is fairly small - the homestead is a townhome - but well-supplied.  You should expect stuff made with the slow cooker, the pressure cooker, the standing mixer, and more.  

Freddie (aka Queen Freddie Purrcury) is by far the most popular member of the house.  (Follow her on Instagram at feministfreddie.)  Her brother Alexander, usually just called Xander, completes the free-range part of the family.
a black and white kitten sitting in a chair, her face visible over the edge of the dining room table
Freddie waits at the table.
an all-gray cat sitting in a white laundry basket
Xander thinks he's helpful around the house.

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Chickpea Tofu

This one is sort of like a polenta, but seems to be firmer - and, of course, it uses chickpeas.  We've modified our version from Jennifer Schmidt's . The Ingredients: 1 cup chickpea flour 1 tsp salt at least 1/4 spice (we used ground ginger) 3 cups water (divided) Cooking spray or a neutral oil. The Process: Grease a pan or baking dish with the neutral oil.  An 8x8 is about right, but you can go smaller for thicker pieces or larger for thinner ones. Put 1 1/2 cups water in a saucepan and bring to a boil. While your water is getting to its boil, combine chickpea flour, salt, and spice in a bowl.  Mix in 1 1/2 cups water and whisk until smooth. Reduce heat on the saucepan to medium-high.  Add in the chickpea and water mixture, stirring constantly.  Continue stirring until the mixture thickens.  (Schmidt claims this will take 8 minutes.  It took more like 15.  Also, if you stop stirring, your tofu mix will bubble and spit at you....

It's not that I always want to cook...

Confession: I love cooking, but I don't always want to cook when I get home at the end of the day.  I don't get people who claim they do.  Believe me when I say that I too come home tired, annoyed, and/or aggravated, and I am as tempted as the next person (if not more) to cry "screw it!" and hop on GrubHub. I was having just such a day today - not that anything bad or annoying occurred, but it was hot, and it's summer, and I just wasn't feeling it.  Karen and I had gone out to do a few errands, and as we drove home, it seemed like every restaurant was taunting us. I could smell Mexican food, and something else delicious, as we made our way homeward through increasingly annoying traffic.  But I knew that there was a fridge of CSA vegetables awaiting us, and something had to be done with them before the next batch arrives on Saturday. So, grumbling, I made my way to said fridge, staring for a bit.  We've started to have lots of "scraps" of ve...

Treats for the whole family

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