Hello again!

Whew, I did not intend to leave that last post up there for so long without making a new one, especially since it was kind of negative-sounding. I’d started writing a post weeks ago but then school got in the way and I never ended up finishing it! Anyway, here’s a post! Sorry about the absence!

Some updates on the last post: the ice cream was even weirder after it’d been in the freezer for a while – it became kind of dry and crumbly. I need to make a new, different kind of chocolate ice cream! The brownies were thrown away (actually they were stored in a cupboard by someone – not me-, forgotten, left there to be discovered after a week and then thrown away). It’s sad, but they just weren’t good. The muffins on the other hand were still good and satisfying and I ate almost all of them by myself as snacks during the next week.

My parents left to go on holiday a few days after my birthday, so I was home alone for a week. This meant I had to cook for myself every day, too. Normally this isn’t the case; I cook dinner only sometimes and have meals prepared by my Mom on most days (she’s vegetarian herself but cooks pretty much only vegan dishes these days!). Not that I minded, though, I obviously enjoy cooking. I did forget to make sure I had all the ingredients I wanted before the stores closed a few times, but luckily the fridge and basement were still full of enough food to make many, many decent meals.

As I had to spend most of my time studying for exams, I chose to make simple and quick meals. Here are some pictures I took:

A simple lunch: wholewheat pita bread with a salad and olive tapenade.

Pasta! I love pasta. Especially pasta with pesto, because it’s so easy to make and so full of flavour. One of these dishes has a regular basil pesto, but I made pesto with arugula when I ran out of basil and that was delicious as well. The upper picture has pasta with pesto, eggplant and sundried tomatoes, the other has sautéed mushrooms and kalamata olives. yum!

This pizza has all kind of yummy things combined. It’s a simple wholewheat storebought crust with some tomato sauce, eggplant slices, olive tapenade and basil leaves. I think I also incorporated some leftover pesto into the tomato sauce for extra deliciousness.

These are one of the few baked goods that I made during the past weeks (I also made cookies today, to celebrate the beginning of the summer holidays!): Black Bean Brownies! This is the recipe I used. I’d been planning on making it for a long time, but I had to get myself some black beans first. I thought they would be hard to find (and I still think they are), but then I discovered a can of them in the basement! It had probably been there for a long while, but I never noticed it before. Weird! Anyway, I felt I had to make them right away, and I did. And they were good. You can really taste the bananas, coconut and cocoa in there, but you can’t taste the beans! Next time I come accross a store that sells black beans, I’ll be sure to buy a couple of cans.

Super-simple but so good: a fruit salad of melon, grapes and (frozen) raspberries. Perfect summer food.

Now, I spent the last few weeks focusing on exams, but as I had the last two today, I’ll have some more free time again! I have been peeking at pictures on blogs I’m subscribed to in Google Reader, and they looked so delicious and really made me want to be in the kitchen cooking (or eating) instead of buried under a pile of books studying, so I’m going to take the time to take a closer look at all of them now! Either that or I’m just going to fall asleep on top of my keyboard and will continue reading the posts tomorrow.

I’m going on holiday in a few days, though, so I won’t be home next week. In any case, I’m so relieved to have finished all these exams! and I’m hoping, hoping, hoping that I passed them.