Recipes 'n' stuff

A month ago, I promised to post my tortilla soup recipe. I'm going to make it again this week with a few final tweaks, then post it. I think I've finally gotten it where I want it.

I also made a delicious low-fat pumpkin bread, and that recipe is here now.


Low-Fat Pumpkin Bread

Ingredients:
15 oz canned pumpkin puree (not pie filling)
4 large eggs
1 cup unsweetened applesauce
2/3 cup water
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
3 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp table salt
1 Tbsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Instructions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease three 7x3 inch loaf pans.

2. In a large bowl, mix together pumpkin puree, eggs, applesauce, water, vanilla and sugar until well blended. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger and allspice. Stir the dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture until just blended. Pour into the prepared loaf pans.

3. Bake for 60-75 minutes in the preheated oven. Loaves are done when toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Notes:

You may prefer to reduce the amount of spices. I like mine with lots of flavor!

Also, you could try replacing two of the eggs with non-fat Egg Beaters to reduce the fat content even further. I haven't tried that so I'm not sure how it ill affect the texture of the bread. As written, it is already moist and dense, more like a cake.

I decorated the top of the loaves by sprinkling sliced almonds on them before baking. As soon as I removed the bread from the oven, I sifted a very fine dusting of powdered sugar over the top of each loaf. Pretty and tasty!

Smallville Shower Count!

Ok, we've seen three episodes so far in the new season of Smallville. It's a good season so far, even if last night's episode was sort of lame, but there is a strange new trend on the show to depict characters in the shower as often as possible.

Episode 4.1: Lana showers in Paris. We get a full minute or two of watching her somehow much curvier silhouette behind the shower curtain. Gratuitous, but not unpleasant.

Episode 4.2: Lois busts in on Clark while he's in the shower, hijinks ensue. Also, Lionel Luthor takes a shower in prison. There are only two possible outcomes to scenes involving prison showers, and this scene follows that rule.

Episode 4.3: Radical Plastic Surgery Girl and Dumb Jock Boy make out in the boys' locker room shower, ensuring a lifetime of toenail fungus for both of them. No, wait, they're in the shower still wearing pants and shoes. I wouldn't shower in there without being mostly dressed, either. I'm not even going to count the scene with Clark in the dunking booth because it's not technically a shower, but it is sort of an overdressed bath.

So that's four shower scenes in three episodes. I wonder if they'll work one into every episode this season. I also wonder why. Did the WB tell them specifically to amp up the near-nudity content this year? Will it eventually turn into Buffy Season 6, from the glory days before UPN had a Standards & Practices department? If so, I want to see a lot more hot middle-aged action between Jonathan and Martha. They're the best TV parents ever, and quite attractive. I think part of being a good role model is letting those punk kids know that old married folks can still get it on, only it's way better because they have more experience and fewer neuroses.

Which Historical Lunatic Are YOU?

Which Historical Lunatic AreYou?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.


My results:

You are Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved!

A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other's language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry's underskirts.

This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.

In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout "boo!", upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.

A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges.

Why do people live in Florida?

Is it the chance to be wiped off the planet several times a year by hurricanes? House-smashing, car-crushing, person-drowning hurricanes? Or is it the thrill of possible having a snake of record-breaking size take residence underneath your house? Or maybe the chance of being chomped by an alligator? Or maybe some people just don't like their votes counted. I think the government should permanently close Florida, or at least the peninsula part, and turn it into a great big wildlife preserve. We waste enough money in this country without haing to replace every house and car in Florida every year, sometimes more than once. Arguments might be made for keeping California, but Florida is nothing but a liability.

Mmm, tortilla soup

I've been away from blogging again. I'm the worst blogger ever. I'm keeping busy though. Work's still really frantic all the time and when I get home I sually don't feel like plunking down in front of the computer. Instead I hang out with my hubby and read comics, watch movies, or cook. This whole diet thing has been interesting (down 34 pounds now: 242/208/137) because it's made me search out recipes that are healthy but still yummy. I've learned how to alter them a little to make them healthier than they started out, and it's always fun to experiment.

I'm tweaking a chicken tortilla soup recipe right now. The original one was tasty, but it made more of a stew than a soup. Not enough broth to soak into your tortilla chips. I'm going to double the amount of broth and spices, then fiddle with the spices some more. I'm also cooking the chicken by baking it slowly in the oven in a casserole dish, covered with habanero salsa. The salsa is too hot to eat by itself (yummy when diluted with mild salsa though), but if you cook the chicken in it then throw out the actual salsa you get chicken with a nice heat to it without overpowering yourself. I use fat-free chicken broth and pour the soup over Baked Tostitos so I can eat 'til I'm full without cheating on Weight Watchers. Once I perfect the recipe, I'll try to remember to post it here.

I made some Weight Watchers eclairs awhile back that were surprisingly good. They were tough to make the first time, but I bet it would be easier the second time around.

Great, now I'm hungry.