I don’t eat a lot of sweets much, but if I want something sweet, I like to eat it in the morning.
These banana pancakes with chocolate chunks were great!
Definitely satisfied my craving for sweets.
The melting chocolate, butter, and maple syrup together…
So good!
I haven’t bought bagels for a long time because I usually make bagels myself.
This was recommended by an SNS friend.
And since everyone is enjoying pumpkin-something now, I thought it would be fun to try it.
But the first thing’s first.
Cream cheese.
These are the ingredients I use.
I like the texture and the taste made of the mixture of tofu and cashew nuts.
It’s super creamy.
It’s soft when just made but it hardens when refrigerated.
The bagels have some nice pumpkin color.
They were a bit flat, though (maybe because they were tightly packed in the bag).
I like a thick layer of cream cheese on my bagel.
I don’t know about you, but I just had to keep going…
I just couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning, so I decided to do breakfast for lunch.
It’s hard to see, but there were pumpkin pie spice bits inside.
I flavored my favorite super simple banana pancakes (bananas, rice flour, baking powder, salt) with cocoa and cardamom.
They turned out perfect!
(By the way, this pancake tower fell right after this shot.)
The pancakes were served with banana slices, cacao nibs, vegan butter, and maple syrup.
Lately we like to eat a salad for at least breakfast and dinner every day.
We usually start with mix leaves and then add whatever vegetables we have that week and sprinkle roasted sunflower seeds.
Today I added cucumber and fresh white mushrooms.
I love raw white mushrooms in my salad, but not my husband, who does like them cooked.
Are we doing this wrong?
Or is it simply a bad design?
I made the jam a while ago and froze them.
I was glad that I remembered them!
I enjoyed the jam with my freshly baked bagels.
This is my husband’s new toy.
I wasn’t sure if that was a good purchase, but I quickly realized how cool this little gadget was.
You can design and print from your iPhone.
There are many fun pictures to choose from too.
He made these pretty labels for me.
These were both so good.
Since we enjoyed our last picnic so much that we decided to do it again.
I was initially thinking of making rice balls, but I didn’t prepare enough for that, so instead I went with pizza.
I still needed to make crust, but it takes much less time than cooking rice.
I usually make my egg with tofu or a mixture of tofu and chickpea flour, but today I just used chickpea flour (because the cheese I was going to use is made of tofu), and I really liked it.
Hash browns.
I found these on sale ($2.99 instead of $6.99).
Of course, I grabbed some.
I cooked the sausage as another topping.
I used my favorite tofu crust and make the sheetpan pizza.
This turned out great!
I packed up a few more things.
I also got my hot green tea packed just like the last time.
We decided to go to the same spot as the last time.
It was another cloudy day.
Today I didn’t even bother to bring a hat or sunglasses.
The pizza was so good!
We got some veggies and dip.
Green tea for me.
My husband brought coffee.
Unsweetened vegan yogurt with blueberries and currants.
It was another successful picnic breakfast.
But toward the end it started sprinkling, so we packed everything up quick once we finished eating.
Since I bought a picnic basket, I wanted to have a pinic.
We’ve been busy, but a few weeks later finally this morning we decided to do that.
Since it was brunch, I didn’t want to spend too much time in the kitchen.
I slept in, put together this breakfast sandwich quick.
The only thing I made was the tofu-chickpea omelet.
Our favorite everything sourdough bread, dijon mustard, vegan cheddar cheese, vegan deli meat, homemade vegan omelet, arugula, and vegan mayo (I used store-bought mayo for this, but I doctored it up a little; it’s convenient, but I haven’t found any vegan mayo that tastes right as is.).
Some veggies and grapes.
Homemade vegan cheese dip.
This basket is smaller, but really perfect for the two of us.
I got hot green tea in a thermal tumbler.
Now ready to go.
Unfortunately, right before we left, we saw the weather forecast predicting rain.
Initially we were planning to walk to the picnic spot, but we decided to drive.
It actually turned out to be a perfect weather.
75 degrees.
No strong sun.
Very comfortable.
Luckily, the rain that was supposed to come disappeared before getting to our area.
Simple but satisfying!
But first.
Pictures.
This is me arranging things so that they look good in pictures.
My husband is so patient.
Love him :).
Now we get to eat!
These are the savory muffins I made a while ago (I kept some in the freezer).
Everything tastes extra good when you eat outside.
The hot green tea tastes great too.
This was our picnic view.
The Mississippi river.
Not bad, right?
We were only a few blocks from our place.
This is the city view behind.
It’s fun to go for a drive to a countryside and have a picture in the nature, but I also enjoy a city picnic like this very much too.
I took a few more pictures before we left.
This was such a great idea.
We enjoyed it so much.
I can’t wait to do it again!
The funny thing about checking ingredients…
For certain recipes, I’m attracted to a small list.
The fewer, the better.
This pancake is made of two main ingredients plus two extra ingredients.
The main ingredients are bananas and rice flour.
I use two ripe bananas to make four small-medium sized pancakes.
That’s perfect for the two of us to eat for breakfast, two pancakes each.
I mash the bananas first (I usually use my hand blender) and then add rice flour until the texture achieves your preferred texture.
Don’t put too much rice flour.
I’ve done that before, and it makes the pancakes tough and not good.
Oh, the other two extra ingredients are salt and baking powder.
I never skip them, but I have a feeling that the pancakes still probably turn out okay without them, just not as fluffy, I assume.
The pancakes turned out great!
I made this pancake so many times while we were in a vacation home in Hawaii last winter.
Anything you can make with a few ingredients is great when you are in a temporary residence.
These pancakes are delicious with butter and maple syrup.
But this time I was in a mood to keep them light.
So I ate them with vegan yogurt and fig butter, both from Trader Joe’s.
The sourness of the yogurt goes so well with the sweet and rich fig butter.
And they were lovely eten with the banana pancakes together.
I’ve been trying not to eat sweets.
The toughest part is not that I cannot eat sweets, but rather that I cannot “make” sweets (lol).
So this was kind of a compromise.
These are… okay, slightly sweet, but definitely savory.
When I don’t for a while, I definitely miss baking.
I can’t wait to get my corn from a farmers’ market yet, so this is from a grocery store.
But this was super sweet!
Corn.
Wild Rice.
Scallion.
Our old pepper mill broke, and it took us a long time to get a new one.
I looked everywhere online and stores, and I had a very hard time finding something that looked good, unique, functional, and not too pricy.
I finally gave up and asked my husband to pick one.
This is what he found, and I’m happy with it.
It’s reasonable, certainly functional, and it looks fine.
Not unique, but that’s okay.
A lot of freshly ground black pepper.
I also added some dry cranberries.
These papercups are from Ikea.
I bought them a long time ago, and I never had a chance to use them.
They are tall and skinny, so I used the canelé pan instead of the regular muffin pan.
They fit very well.
These turned out so cute!
I liked the cup designs and the shape both.
I liked that they created the cute top, but next time I may put more batter to make the top even bigger.
This makes a great breakfast!
You never know where fun food ideas come from.
We have been a regular customer of Adagio Teass
It’s been years we have been purchasing green tea (and some other teas) regularly.
They usually put a sample tea with our order, but this time we received something different.
Apparently, they partnered with this company and sent some samples of cocoa powder, cardamom pods, and rose petals to make their suggested drink.
I’m not a big hot chocolate drinker, but I did like the flavor combination idea.
So with the idea I made pancakes.
Loved the cocoa and cardamom together.
We always make our pancakes smaller and eat two or three.
Do you make your pancakes small or make them big.
Since I got the beautiful currants from my mother-in-law’s backyard yesterday afternoon, all I could think of was how to use them.
I get so obsessed when it comes to food!
My mother-in-law’s sister was there yesterday (she helped me pick these), and she gave me a lot of good ideas, including making scones.
I decided to add bergamot black tea (I ground it fine) along with the currants.
The scones turned out amazing!
Super flavorful.
You can eat it with butter, but I didn’t need it.
Doesn’t it look like a wonderful Sunday breakfast?
(I eat vegetables every morning now.)
