Coming to the Table: Prime Time for an update

So, I've gotten some queries about my lack of blogging as of late. Some difficult personal stuff followed by a 6 day long silent migrainey dizziness will do that to a girl. Then, when I finally sit down to it, I can't decide which thing I want to blog about. So, as a result, I will try and make this a culmination of all the things that I've been meaning to write down and haven't quite gotten to yet...

In the last 11 days I have:

1. Gone snowshoeing for the first time! ( I wish I had brought my camera as my Mom and I trudged through the snow to the crystal clear beautiful Swift River at Quabbin last Saturday) Snowshoeing is hard! But SO much fun. I hope to go again very soon.

Imagine a 2 and 3 candles right at the end of the red dots

2. Made a cake for my friend Sarah's 23rd birthday. She is a bit of a math geek (math teacher!) and loves her some prime numbers. This birthday was her golden birthday 1/23/2011 all of which happen to be prime...as a result, she wanted a prime number cake-- what you won't see int he picture is the 23 made with number candles at the end of the red dots. I forgot to take a picture with the numbers on :)

3. Hosted a dinner for some oldie but goodie friends. I've missed them a lot and it was nice to catch up. We tried taking a nice picture of our time together and Steve didn't want to have his eyes closed...so as a result, you have this:

For dinner, I made some chili in the good old crock pot, and while I've made chili before, I need to confess that I really don't like chili all that much. However, I do like this chili! It's really easy: one can of black beans, and one kidney bean can, a diced up sweet potato, onion, garlic, and chicken spinach sausage cooked up with casings removed. The spices were cinnamon, cocoa powder, cumin and chili powder. I pretty much followed this recipe, with a few changes: http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/browse-all-recipes/slow-cooker-vegetarian-chili-with-sweet-potatoes-00000000049528/index.html. I also made it earlier this week except that I didn't have a can on tomatoes on hand, so instead I used a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, a tad bit of red sauce, and water and decided that measuring out ingredients was over-rated :).

With it, I made some cornbread. This Gluten-Free Cornbread is super easy (even if it did have a bit of sugar): 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup brown rice flour, 1/3 cup sugar, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1/8 tsp. xanthum gum, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1 beaten egg, 1/4 cup canola oil, and 1 cup almond milk. Spray the muffin tins with oil and bake at 400 degrees for 17 minutes. Delicious! Crispy on the edges and soft in the middle.

For dessert, I was still rocking the avocado black bean brownies, this time with some FrozenTangy vanilla frozen yogurt, and Stonewall Kitchen's Raspberry Balsamic jam drizzled on top.