2 Year Anniversay and Peanut Butter Cookies

Hello everyone! Yesterday was mine and Tony's 2 year anniversary...woohoo. It doesn't seem like we have been married that long....time sure does fly! Anyway, since it was our anniversary, we went to Memphis (about an hour away) and went to Whole Foods. Don't laugh...that's where I wanted to go, because I don't get there very often. :o) As you can see from the picture below, I bought quite a bit of stuff. Those are purple sweet potatoes. Has anyone ever had them? We had never seen them before, so needless to say, we had to get a couple. Now we just need to figure out the best way to cook them. Any suggestions?

As we were in whole foods I came across some Kombucha. Okay, so that stuff is a little on the expensive side, but I had to try it. I've seen several bloggers drinking it, so I wanted to try it. The funny part about this is that I didn't read everything on the bottle before opening it.

See where it says "Do NOT Shake"? Well apparently it says that for a reason. It had stuff sitting in the bottom of the bottle, so my inner self told me to shake it up, so that's what I did. Big mistake! As we were leaving Whole Foods, I shook it up (pretty hard) and decided to open it....in the car. Oh my, talk about an eruption. Thank goodness I was fast to twist the top back on tight, or I would have been in serious trouble for making a mess in Tony's car. It took like 15 minutes of slowly trying to open it back up to be able to drink it without it wanting to spew everywhere. The lesson learned here is to read about new products before trying to consume them. On the very positive side of this.... the Kombucha tasted awesome....I want more! Tony even drank half of it. :o)

We had planned on staying in Memphis to eat, but when we left Whole Foods neither one of us was hungry, so we decided to just head back to Jackson. When we got back to Jackson, we decided to go eat at the Old Town Spaghetti Store. I don't think I have been there in almost a year. I know I hadn't been since I became a vegan. I had a "make your own" pasta dinner. I ordered some whole wheat angel hair pasta with a mushroom sauce and added some spinach. It was fantastic! I didn't have my camera, so I took a picture of it with Tony's phone. What you see in this picture is about how much I brought home. I ate and ate, but didn't seem to get anywhere. I had enough leftovers to make two more meals. :o)

I'm going to rewind a bit more to the weekend. Friday night I had leftover veggie pot pie, sweet potatoes and some roasted corn that Tony made. I'm going to hold off on giving you that recipe because it needs a little tweaking. It was still good though. Those are two sweet pickles(gherkins) on my plate also. I do NOT like sweet pickles and my lovely husband put them on my plate and told me to eat them with my other food. He did this because that's what I do to him....lol

Saturday night we had Mexican. I sauteed an onion, red and green bell pepper, and a couple of cloves of garlic (minced) in some olive oil to go on top of my bean tostada. Tony cooked some Mexican rice, while I tried to salvage as much of an over ripe avocado as I could, so I could make some guacamole. The guacamole that you see on my plate is all that I was able to make, because most of my avocado had ruined. Have you ever gotten a tree to grow from the avocado pit? We keep trying, but we haven't had any luck yet. We stuck 3 toothpicks into the fattest part of the pit and filled a glass with water. We then let the tooth picks rest on the rim of the glass with the bottom of the pit sitting in water...about an inch deep. I'm wondering if maybe it's not getting enough sunshine.

Saturday afternoon I made some peanut butter cookies, which turned out very good. I liked the ones with chocolate chips in them the best. :o) Tony requested that I put a pecan on top of a few for him.

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup peanut butter

3/4 cup brown rice syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 cup safflower oil

1/4 cup almond milk

turbinado sugar, for sprinkling before baking

Preheat over to 350. In a medium bowl combine the flour, baking soda, and salt. In a larger bowl combine the peanut butter, syrup, oil, and vanilla. Stir until combined and pour the four mixture over the peanut butter mixture and mix well. Shape cookie dough into balls and then place on a nonstick cookie sheet. Press down on the dough balls with a fork making a criss cross design. Sprinkle with turbinado sugar and bake for 10-12 minutes at 350. Let cool for 5 minutes on the cookie sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack to finish cooling.

~Peace~Love~Happiness~