It ended up perfect - how pancakes turned into crackers, and home made applesauce

I thought I was onto something good.  You see, yesterday I made another creamy batch of almond milk.  Again, I was left with the anticipation of something great happening with the left over almond meal.  The macaroons that I had made with my last almond meal reserves were bursts of the most minute and pleasurable crunchiness from the almonds.  The whole lot of them was devoured within 18 hours.

I thought I could do better.  Something more inventive.  Playful.  Creative.
My supposed stoke of genius came when I was putting away some quinoa I had just purchased in our pantry.  Quinoa has that minutely gentle nuttiness going on.  Wouldn't that compliment the almond meal?  At once, the crazy gears in my mind started turning as I started to piece different ingredients together in my head:  almond meal, almond butter, quinoa, and applesauce...pancakes!

I started off making my own applesauce while simotaneously cooking the quinoa.  Making your own applesauce is a sinfully easy thing to do, and the sweet aroma of the freshly blended apples is like smelling the essence of autumn.  To start off, take 3-4 apples, of any variety, and chop them into bite-size pieces.  Put them in a saucepan with about 2 inches of water, add some cinnamon, and turn the heat onto medium.  Place a lid on it, and hang out in another room for 15 minutes.  You don't want your nose to adapt to the perfume of apples and cinnamon.  When you come back, take off the lid, and inhale.  Ah.  That's bliss.  Carefully pour everything into a blender, and blend away.  Now you've got some steaming applesauce, ready for sweetening up anything.

By that time, the quinoa was ready. My supposedly fail-proof pancake making could commence.

Or so I thought.

Instead of being fail proof, things were a big, runny train wreck.  The combination of almond meal, quinoa, applesauce, almond milk, and cinnamon just weren't cooperating.  Things were falling apart.  My mixture appeared to have the consistency of pancakes as a batter.  On the skillet, things were another story.

I started to get cranky.  I had set myself up for something perfect, and now was stuck with this useless batter. I'm too stubborn to let things go to waste.  What to do?  Muffins? Well, you may how the last muffin mistake turned out.  Not quite wrong, but without a muffin pan, the idea of muffins was questionable.

I decided to try a different approach.  I set the oven to 350.  I added some buckwheat flour to the mix, letting things come to an almost-dough consistency.  I added more cinnamon and a few drops of liquid vanilla stevia.  With two greased pie plates, I tried something different in each.  The first bit of batter would attempt to form crackers, while the second would attempt to form some sort of flat bread.

Things didn't come out looking so pretty.

Check it out.  Experiment #1: The Cracker, was unevenly cooked, partialy burnt, and didn't look like any crackers I have ever seen.

Experiment #2:  The Bread, didn't want to come off the pan, and split half.  I scraped out the bottom half and shoved it in the fridge, hoping I'd feel better about things tomorrow.  The top half didn't look so bad...

Just showing you the top would  be like sweeping a room and hiding the dirt underneath a carpet.  The truth underneath this "bread" was...

an uneven softness in place of a crust.

I decided to sit down, read for a while, and not be disappointed.  I had experimented, I had played, I had been creative.  As an artist, I should know that all endeavors to be creative don't always turn out as I would like.

I forfeited the cooking over to Andrew so that I didn't have to worry about dinner.  He made me this earthy mushroom soup, filled with crimini, oyster, and shitake mushrooms.

 

When the soup was just about done, I started to play with the "experiments."  I got out my aggression on experiment #1 by chopping it into little pieces. This produced some crunchy and downright tasty crackers.

I cut experiment #2 into triangles, and brought the bowl over to the dinner table as Andrew was blending the soup.  Once we sat down at the table and had taken the time to inhale the steam from the soup, we sprinkled bits of the crackers on top, letting the crunch accent the creaminess of the soup.  We dipped the triangles of bread into the soup, took a bite, and discovered that the previously scorned uneven softeness was in fact exactly what was needed to soak up the puree.  We simultaneously sighed with the joy of it all. 

It was perfect.