breadcrumbs

last week, if you'd opened up our freezer you would have found the following: flax meal, orange juice concentrate, a few frozen bananas, ice cream, normal things like that. and two+ loaves'-worth of ezekiel bread heels. we really like ezekiel bread- it's hearty, fiber-y, filling- all that good stuff. but it is one of the densest, most bran-ful kinds of bread i've ever had, and neither of us bother to even attempt to eat the heels. but, being cheapskates and hating the idea of wasting anything, we've been saving up the heels in the freezer. in the past, i've tried making bread pudding with them, but i don't enjoy the texture, and b (though he's an awfully good sport) was never able to keep up with the 9x13 pans i'd make of it. so what else do you do with unwanted bread? i don't like stuffing, meatloaf, meatballs, casseroles or any of those kinds of things, so the normal bread crumb recipes are out. and then last week i found this. you can count on the good ol' tightwad gazette for excellent ideas such as this- bread crumb cookies! of course! what genius!

making breadcrumbs is fun. i put ten heels on a pizza pan and baked them for about 15 minutes at 275. then i turned off the oven and let them stay in there while the oven cooled. then i ripped them up and dropped them, five slices at a time, into our beloved vita mix, and flipped the variable speed dial to "low". the sound is like that of grinding rocks, which is essentially what baked/dried ezekiel bread is, but it worked beautifully. in no time, i had several cups of breadcrumbs. the recipe was easy, though i substituted peanut butter for the butter and added chocolate chips (of course). the resulting cookie was just sweet enough and dense. they look a bit less like this and more like this, but they taste good, i promise! and personally, i like a cookie with character. we took about half of the batch to small group on friday, and then b and i ate the other half over the weekend. :) i have a new batch in the oven at this moment. i wanted to try them with some of the butter this time, adding cashews to (hopefully) make them somewhat reminiscent of trader joe's caramel cashew cookies, which are delicious. i think i added about 2/3 cup of  cashews, but it's hard to tell because i kept eating them out of the bowl. YUM.

in other news, b and i have been reading the harry potter series aloud to each other. we got the idea from some friends of ours, and it's so much fun! tea, ice cream, and harry potter- that pretty much sums up many of our evenings. but we aren't total couch potatoes- we've also been running together about two or hree times a week, and walking several other evenings as well. i've said before that i think running alone is pretty boring; running with b is awesome. :) 

also, here are some pictures of the harriet tubman poem. i actually missed all of the dedication and performances of the event itself (i was busy teaching art history in pasadena and then had to drive east to claremont in rush hour traffic), but got there in time to meet the poet, lynne thompson, and the artist, alison saar (both scripps alums). the maquette of the actual statue, which is in NYC, was installed outside one of the art galleries at scripps. both women seemed very cool; it would be neat to cross paths again.

by the way- the cookies turned out gooooood. real gooood. yay, it worked! :)