In My Kitchen ~ January

I jumped on the In My Kitchen wagon in November and I think I may have skipped December!  Oops!  But I'm not going to let that stop me for January!  I have a lot to share with you about my Kitchen Adventures!  Looking back to that first post many things have changed!  I mentioned in that first post about wanting to upgrade my dehydrator and I did that last month!  I even gave it a name!  Another update since that last post has to do with Maca.  I mentioned I wanted to do more with my Maca stash and I have...a few desserts and smoothies.  And finally...my Garden of Life Products I have been having fun with - almost on a daily basis!  So much so that I hope to have some REALLY exciting news to report in the near future! 

Moving ahead to a new month and a New Year...what are some of the utensils that I cannot live without?  Well, it may be simple, but, my all-time favorite is wooden spoons.  Any kind, really, but today I would like to narrow that down to these smaller scoops that I like to use for loose leaf tea, matcha, and other things!  I really love them!  I also obtained some plastic funnels over the last month or two.  Can you believe that up until recently I had never had funnels for pouring food related items into other containers?  Now that I have been reusing a lot of my glass jars I have been using these almost every day!

Speaking of Tea...Tea is a staple in my kitchen and my life everyday.  You can read a lot about that over at the Sororitea Sisters site that my friend Anne and I co-founded.  But I not only drink tea...I use it for crafts and more recently revisited a childhood use of washing my hair with it.  More on that down the road.

A few new products to my kitchen include...The Spaddy and the Spaddy Daddy...as seen on Shark Tank.  I will be doing several posts about these products in the future!  It's a neat little tool that helps reach the bottoms of bottles - such as condiments - and make-up containers - like foundation, for example.  But one thing I will be playing around and posting about is my attempts to use this product with small compartments of my Bento Boxes.  Which brings me to my next item In My Kitchen for January...Bento Boxes!

And let's not forget about my NEW obsession with EcoJarz and many of their products!  I started blogging about them last month and continue to LOVE them.

The last In My Kitchen I posted a few of the healthy snacks I had be into at that time.  This time around I've decided to include - various home made Kale Chips that I have made in my new dehydrator, some of my new favorites including Coconut Chips from Trader Joe's, and some seasoned Cashews that I have been making at home, too! 

(And it just occurred to me that I think I forgot to post about these so I will try and do that in the near future, too, they are a very tasty and healthy snack with very little time and effort involved).

In my freezer this month I've been pretty hot on frozen fruit - mixed berries and Mangoes - but also I challenged myself to get into frozen bananas more and have been able to handle about a half of one in a smoothie.  I'm pretty proud of that - for some one who has always HATED bananas! 

This past weekend I was able to SCORE some FRESH Blackberries and Blueberries as well!  They aren't local this time of year - of course - but I bought them anyways and they were tasty.  If you scroll down to the previous blog entry before this one you will see a vegan smoothie recipe I made with the Blackberries!

I have been getting back into various grains, again, including Farro - which I posted about in the previous blog post as well!  YUM!  And have also been tinkering with my NuNaturals Products again - thanks to Christine for the encouragement there, too!

And here's a REAL Shocker...I attempted to BAKE...read more about this HERE.

I could go on and on with things happening in my kitchen as of late but I think I will end it with this next item...that I have YET to try...but am super excited about...Chocholistic.  Raw Vegan Chocolate...among other things...but a full review on that, soon!