I don’t really drink caffeine much at all. I used to drink coffee when I was young, but then I switched to tea when the caffeine was getting to me. When that was a lot I stopped that too, and now I like a hot beverage in the morning, but not the caffeine. I drink cocoa instead, and yes it has a smidge of caffeine, but not enough to trip me up.
I also don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so most commercial mixes are way too sweet for me. I do it when I eat out for breakfast, but on the day to day breakfast? I prefer less sugar. I feel like everyone is competing for the sweetest hot cocoa mix.
I also like a bit of heat in my cocoa, so I make mine with cayenne pepper. Just a tiny smidge.
This started as an Alton Brown recipe, but it’s since been tinkered with to fit my needs.
I like to lay out all the ingredients out before I start in case I miss one. Ignore the batch of tomatoes. They just keep growing, so I need to make more tomato sauce. Also ignore I have four tins of cocoa powder. We kept buying it and opening it, and now I have like three half tins and a full one.
Ingredients:
5 Cups whole Dry ilk. (No Nonfat! It won’t work right!)
4 Cups Powdered Sugar
1 Cup White Sugar
2 Cups Cocoa Powder
4 Tsp Cornstarch
2 Tsp Salt
1 Tsp Cayenne Pepper
Directions:
Toss it all in a bowl, and mix with a whisk.
To use, put 1.5 TBSP, or one heaping spoon full in your mug, and fill with hot water.
Adjust everything to taste.
Whisk a lot to make sure it’s incorporated, but carefully so you don’t toss powder all over the kitchen.
I was worried about calories because that is a lot of whole milk, but I put it in MyFitnessPal.com, which isn’t 110%, but it turns out it comes to approximately 46 calories for 1.5 TBSP of the stuff, so go wild. The lowest calorie packet I could find was a generic Winco packet for 110 calories so this beats the pants off of that.
I converted everything into tablespoons for the recipe and at 1.5 TBSP for each serving it comes to about 130 servings, in case you were wondering. I make this up every few months.
This is a screen shot from MyFitnessPal’s recipe calories screen.
Lastly, be prepared for storage. It makes a lot.
Finished mix in containers and one cup of cocoa, and a thumb in the lower right corner because I have fat fumbling fingers. I keep the ball canning jar on the counter, and the rest in the cupboard out of sight.
I’ve been doing this for years now, and honestly I even take it with me when I travel. Trying to get a non caffeinated option at a hotel is stupid hard for some reason. I just pack it up in little bags and add water.
I wasn’t sure what to do for lunch today, but I had some garden grown red cabbage and some leftover feta cheese.
I decided to make air fryer grilled cheese sandwiches. I like doing them this way because I can toss two of them in the air fryer at a time, and they have a very crunchy exterior and soft interior that just is melty perfect. Then my wife and I get them both at the same time.
All the fixings for grilled cheese. Tally is the background judging me.
I assemble the grilled cheese right in the fryer basket. For these I did a layer of cheddar on my buttered bread than sliced up little diced cubes of feta to lay on top, before topping it with another layer of bread. This is some sort of sourdough sandwich bread.
Two assembled grilled cheese in an air fryer just waiting to be grilled.
I toss it in for 350F for 5 minutes, flip them over, and 380F for 6 minutes. Then I pull them, slice them and they are done.
The Cole slaw was super easy, too. I just made the slaw dressing as follows:
3/4 Cup mayo – we use low fat.
3 TBSP Apple cider vinegar – I prefer Braggs
2 TBSP sugar
Salt and pepper to taste.
I mix that up and keep it in the fridge and just toss it in a bowl with some diced red cabbage from the garden. It’s a favorite in our house. I usually keep a container of this slaw sauce in the fridge at all times. It’s also tasty on carrot sticks.
Two plates with the grilled cheese, slaw, and sugar wafer cookies.
This literally takes me about 15 minutes to make. I keep diced cabbage in the fridge with premade slaw sauce, and that way I can toss it together on a work day, and then go back to tying out financials to source documents with a nice hot meal in front of me.
You can’t have this in an office environment! Well, I mean, you are not supposed to. We do have a forbidden panini press hidden in the closet that my coworkers and I use in the office, but this is much less likely to get me in trouble.
My wife had surgery on the 9th. It wasn’t a huge surgery. She’s had, I think 9 of them in the last 4 years for her transition from female to male. She’s one of the craziest strongest recoveries I have ever seen for surgery. When I was a nurse, in my first career, I did medicare units with post surgical recovery on and off, and so seeing my wife recover this strong is impressive to me.
For instance, she didn’t take anything much for pain the last couple days. She never does. She hates narcotic pain medication, so she switches over to Tylenol or something over the counter really quickly.
I think part of the issue is my wife has ADHD, and I am not sure if it’s related, but meds just hit her different. Stimulants put her to sleep. Every time she has general anesthesia she is incredibly busy until it wears off in a day or two. The night I brought her home, she was so chatty I had to tell her to be quiet at midnight so I could sleep. She was happy and up, but I was exhausted from getting her to Seattle and back and getting all the details taken care of.
For the bigger surgeries, she is more out of is and sleeps, but every little one like this? She practically doesn’t notice.
Wife in her housecoat I made for her out of my grandmothers quilt, being stalked by Tally the cat. This is a general picture of them, as I didn’t think to snap pics of my wife yesterday. Plus she’s so busy, it’s hard to chase her around.
Anyways, on to food. My wife always wants Dick’s Cheeseburgers and jelly beans after surgery. I don’t know what the anesthetic does to her, but it’s pretty reliable. Once, years ago before her transition, she had a vasectomy in a town an hour away, and on the ride home, she was so insistent I get her jelly beans I had to pull off and go into a Fred Meyer to buy her a pound of bulk candy.
When we got to the house, 20 minutes later, she once again got insanely insistent, so I asked where her jelly beans went. Turns out, little miss post-anesthesia ate the entire pound of jelly beans without remembering. It made her a bit queasy too, so after that I was much more careful with her demands, and I only got her a small bag of jelly beans, and vetoed Dick’s Cheeseburgers on the way back until I could be sure she wasn’t going to be nauseated from eating.
Sweet and Sour vegetables and rice.
For the first night I wanted to go easy on her stomach, so I made the above, sweet and sour rice and vegetables. I made the sweet and sour sauce from scratch and the green onions are from my garden.
I wanted her to have a good protein-rich set of meals for recovery. We don’t normally eat steak and red meat that much. The costs are prohibitive and we just don’t miss it, but I splurged to make sure she had good recovery food. I should note, I was so tired from the night before, that I got the groceries delivered, and the steaks I wanted were replaced with flank steak. Which is fine, but they looked like they’d been through it. I am a little pickier on my meat selection, so I just cooked them up in the pan with butter, salt and peppers and sliced them across the grain.
Steak, country mashers, candied carrots and Hawaiian rolls. This is my plate so it has all the fat and gristle bits, because I like that.
She woke up well, and I made her a late lunch, early supper with flank steak, country mashers with some leftover potatoes in the fridge, and carrots glazed in honey. She loves rolls, so I bought Hawaiian rolls. Normally they are a bit sweet for our tastes, but it was what was available for delivery.
Later that evening we were both hungry, so I used leftover steak to make burritos with steak, rice (leftover), cabbage, green onion, and cheese. I used some light sour cream for sauce in them. I forgot to get pictures of that one.
Steak, mushroom, green onion, and cheese frittattas with Trader Joes polenta broiled with parmesan cheese.
I made a nice frittata and used it to use up leftovers in the fridge. I used up the leftover polenta as well, broiled with parmesan.
The cheese in the polenta is pepper jack, and cheddar. The only place I buy cheese these days is Costco, in large blocks, and grate myself using a KitchenAid grater attachment. I swear the pepper jack tastes like pepper jack. Some grocery store versions are very bland and not remotely spicy.
I might do more sweet and sour vegetables for dinner. I need to get more veggies into her.
However, she’s been doing super well, and maybe now that she’s good, I can finally relax.
Garden Rat 