Mini MoFo November 2017: LAZY AF!

Ok, I added the "AF" to the "lazy" part. I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder these most recent post Irma days. Roller coaster baby, it's a roller coaster down here and we're all on it together as a community. Hence the AF part, since I have said chip.

I'm dragging myself out from under my safe space of the desk to be here and write this post. I've retreated. Away. From everyone. Everything. Except for the animals. I am with them. All. The. Time.

I went up to pick Angel's ashes up today. I ended up stopping somewhere else first, and then I forgot why I went up to Marathon. Yes, I forgot to pick up Angel's ashes. I suck beyond words. This is what it is like for me now, this is my newest stage. I forget everything. What I do seem to remember, I want to forget. Someone linked a hurricane video to me a few days ago, I felt physically sick. It ruined me and I think I made it through 6 seconds. This is what life is ... I'm a bit of a mess.

But.... we always have MoFo! Praise MoFo! I saw the prompt of "lazy" and promised myself I would do a post. I have done so. Sort of what I planned on, but not quite. We're tasked with showing you essentially just how lazy we can be with our vegan food.... that doesn't mean BAD vegan food, it just means, um simplify?

In my post Irma world, I now wear my "lazy" badge with honor. I admit the wind is knocked out of my sails with Angel dying and Lemon getting diagnosed. That kinda pushed me over the edge a bit. I'm still not cooking, although I did muster enough kitchen cleaning and ingredients to pull a few things together for Tina & Phil's vegan ThanksLiving potluck in Key West on Thanksgiving Day. Beyond that, basically I'm still going into the food donations daily, rummaging around, seeing what I might be able to eat enough of to consider a meal (still on the Irma diet, and so many of us still are) Yeah, still not hungry a lot, but I eat because I'm reminded when headache comes along.

When I got the Vegan Black Metal Chef's Seitanic Spellbook, my perspective on cooking changed a lot. I've talked about this before, in my better days. I became far more experimental on my own with cooking. And I learned to really simplify things. One of the best "hacks" in the book is carmelizing onions in a crock pot. Absolutely epic. The first "lazy" thing I did for this post was do the onion thing. I pulled out the tiny crock pot that Adam & Timberly sent in a relief delivery (thank you Robin!!!), sliced up an onion, put some olive oil over it, set to low and left it overnight. Viola, beautiful carmelized onions! I mean, I was so lazy I never even stirred them. That is REALLY lazy.

Lazy Crock pot Onions Before Crockpotting

Lazy Crock pot Onions After Crockpotting

But, then I got to thinking.... what else can I do with this crock pot besides make lazy soups, lazy onions, and lazy stews. Bread?

Don't mind if I do.

Lazy bread..... in the tiny crock pot. Ok, honestly the crock pot was too small, I needed a bigger one, or I should've cut the quantity in half. But overall, the method itself was enough to prove this IS doable. I found a recipe on line, but .... LAZY...... I decided to do my own based on the first recipe that popped up. All I remembered was 2.5 cups of flour, after that, it's all me:

LAZY FREAKING CROCK POT BREAD "RECIPE!"

2.5 cups flour

2 1/4 tsp yeast (1 envelope if you do the envelope thing)

wad of diced lazy carmelized onions

oregano, basil, crushed red pepper flakes, cracked black pepper

about 2T vegan sweetener (I just jammed a spoon 2x into my sugar bin)

a little oil (ok, here, check this.... the height of laziness.... I didn't even measure this, I simply used whatever liquid was floating in the bottom of the tiny crock pot from the onions and dumped it into the dough, for reals)

some sea salt

some wheat gluten (no measure, I just added it to the dough til it wasn't overly shaggy anymore)

3/4-1 cup filtered water (1 cup was too much with the onions cuz they are wet, so if you don't use onions use 1 cup, if you do use onions reduce the amount OR add the wheat gluten like I did)

Put the warm water, yeast & sugar in a cup and let it fizz about 10 minutes.

Mix the rest of the ingredients, add the fizzy yeasty water, and knead til smooth, and not overly shaggy (I love using the word shaggy when I describe dough, cracks me up... it's the little things, what can I say?) Use a mixer if you have one. Use your hands if you don't.

What next?

I lined the tiny crock pot with parchment. Why? Cuz the thing I saw online said to do that. So, I did. I mean, I didn't even wash the pot from the onions... LAZY. I unrolled some parchment, cut it then just stuck it into the crock pot. I then dumped the dough into the tiny crock pot, sprinkled some fleur de sel over it, and flicked it on high for an hour. Came back in an hour... oopsie the crock pot it a wee bit small... the dough is hitting the lid but... I'm LAZY... not gonna swap the pot out. I removed the lid, scraped the wet dough off, and plopped a sauce pan on top of the crock pot like a hat. Yes, I really did this. LAZY! Then what? Well, then I went to Hell Depot for 3 hours and subjected myself to the lights, sounds, smells and FREAKING CHRISTMAS MUSIC up there. Why? Because I had to. I have to pick flooring, tile and whatever else I'm forced to do in my post Irma days instead of flipping pancakes and playing with cupcakes. Dammit. Oopsie, I'm raging again.... back to LAZY.

Come back after my Hell Depot experience and look at the bread, holy bananas, basically it worked! The top was a teeny bit doughy, the bottom a teeny bit dark, but it actually was bread!

Lazy Freaking Crock pot Bread Before Crockpotting

Ok. There it is. Lazy me doing 2 things with no quantities (basically), no measurements, and just fly by the seat of your pants. You know what else? I'll bet I could do lazy mushrooms in the crock pot.... am I the only one that could sit down and eat an entire super large bowl of cooked mushrooms? But it takes a long time to sweat them out if you do it right...... maybe the lazy in me will crawl back out of my safe space at some point again to go to the store and get some mushrooms. Then again, maybe not. The social in me, which barely existed before, is gone now. You don't mind, I mean do you? Nah, I didn't think so.

Lazy Vegan Crock pot Bread After Crockpotting

Lemon is still with us, if you are wondering. Ellin at Food for Thought gifted us a bottle of True CBD brand 325 mg CBD oil for him. And you know, it is helping. I have been giving him relatively large doses. No, it's not going to cure him. But it is absolutely giving him a better quality of restorative rest. And, he is eating. He is walking. He is on my lap some days for hours and hours and HOURS at a time. I love it. He is my main purpose right now. I know we don't have much time together left. He and I have been through a lot, and I mean A LOT in our years together. He's my last connection to my pre-Deer Run life. I cannot imagine being without him, so most times I just pretend he is not sick, he's just sleeping and purring in my lap.... I rotate the chair to face sun and let him bask and purr while in my lap. Lazy? No... this is SMART. It's a big difference.

My boy Lemon

Ok, oh, yeah... I forgot. When I said this was mostly what I meant to post about as far as lazy food, this is true. What I did intend to do was make something more out of these ingredients though. I pulled a polenta out of the donations.... some roasted red pepper hummus..... a couple bags of fancy crackers. All from the epic, magic "ingredient" trailer.... I considered making a small plate of appetizers with the onions and the bread. But... I got LAZY. Oopsie daisy. Here's what happened instead:

Ok, Ok, I opened a pack of red pepper hummus
Spread it on the lazy bread
covered it with the lazy onions
Crawled back into my cave and ate this
Lazy, but REALLY delicious

Maybe next month for the mini MoFo I'll remove the AF from any post, and not be as lazy. Then again, if I were a betting gal, I would NOT take that bet. After all, somehow it finally dawned on me (at Hell Depot I guess) that next up is December, and for the love of dog, people actually cook, and bake, and socialize, and have parties, and wear sparkly things. No, no, no.... just no. Not me. Not this year. No.

Lazy? Yes..... I got that... no prob.

Thanks for checking in.

xo