Using What I Have Journal Entry #7

 It's been a while since I checked in with you in more depth about this using-what-I-have quest. I observed that when we returned to air conditioning weather, I was more or less over it. I can't really think about cooking when the heat domes come, and I recently had a really discouraging one.

Even so, I fortunately have been keeping a list of recipes that will use things earmarked for using before I get adventurous with ingredients again (or at least before I get anything that wouldn't get used up all at once). One of those recipes was for millet flour pancakes, a gluten free recipe I found at Power Hungry.

It was a challenging recipe, to say the least! I used soy milk instead of water, as the recipe suggested you could, and this might have been where I went wrong. I don't know. I should have let the flax-and-millet mixture sit for more than "a minute," though I followed the recipe on that; it was far too runny with clumps of flax when I started.

This was also a horrendously sticky mixture, even on a nonstick skillet. I don't think it damaged my skillet, though I won't know until after I try making something else in it, but it was a surprisingly finicky recipe--and not at all "fluffy" as promised. Most of my pancakes turned out to be shredded up lumps of dough when I tried to flip them.

Even so, I managed to get a few decent-looking pancakes out of the batch.

I put them in a bowl with berries, non-dairy yogurt, and banana. I found this to be pretty good; I did like the flavor of the pancakes, just not the whole process of making them. But it's hard to enjoy a meal after that much frustration making them.

But I plunged ahead with this, and I'm glad I did. And the principles underlying it--using what I have but supplementing with some fresh produce to make life more interesting, and having the good berries because that's what makes it bearable to live through the heat of this season--still held up.

It's a lot easier for me to think about cooking in the fall and winter, so I imagine my quest will ramp up again then. In the meantime, I'm learning that keeping things in a kind of stasis until I get my cooking mojo back is just fine. You may see meals geared more toward summer survival in some of the coming weeks than specifically geared toward using things up, but I am still committed to this year's goals.

My freezer is still serving me well, too, though. I ran out of frozen fruit so I restocked there (smoothies are a necessity, and I know I'll use it up anyway), and I still have the habit of putting odds and ends in there, so when I do cook, future me can benefit, too.

Stay cool, everyone.