Day 3: Garden Salad and Pumpkin Bread

   Today I went to the grocery store to load up on veggies for the epic salad I was planning to make for dinner. I filled my salad with cucumbers, artichoke hearts, avocado, and red bell peppers with a little balsamic dressing on top. I must say it was one of the best salads I have made for myself. I then washed it all down with green tea and a side of rosemary bread.

    One thing that I keep reading is to eat colorful food, for numerous reasons. For starters when you go to the grocery store the fruit and vegetables that have the richest colors contain the most nutrients. It is always a good idea to have a variety of colors in our meals for that means we are getting all different types of nutrients, not to mention psychologically it is more appealing. Different companies have realized this and corporations use it all the time to make us buy there products. Take M&M's for example. The manufacturer of M&M's decided to make the M&M's many different colors to give the illusion that they taste different or that we have more options to choose from when in reality they all are the same milk chocolate.

   After my colorful salad I went on to dessert and decided to try a recipe from the cookbook “The Kind Diet” by Alicia Silverstone which I mentioned more in depth in an earlier post. The recipe that I chose was pumpkin bread. All the vegan recipes I have been looking at seem really good, but the thing that always gets me is there are way too many obscure ingredients. So after picking the pumpkin bread recipe I decided to tweak it a bit in order to avoid buying things like safflower oil or almond milk. Here is what I came up with.

Pumpkin Bread

2 ½ cups of pumpkin

1 cup of brown sugar

1 “egg”: 1 table spoon of flaxseed pureed with 6 table spoon of water

½ cup of soy milk

1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract

2 cups of flour

2 teaspoons of baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon of ground nutmeg

A handful of nondairy chocolate chips

    Preheat the oven to 350*F. Combine the pumpkin puree, “egg”, milk, and vanilla extract in a large mixing bowl. Then add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and chocolate chips. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

The pumpkin bread turned out delicious, and I even had enough left over to make mini muffins that I could take on the go. This is definitely going to be added to my list of go to recipes.