Because of our quarterly sales conference, I was home today by 4PM (Amazing. This day has felt 37 hours long). After an exhausting 36 hours at the conference, it would have been tempting to collapse onto the couch and clean out the DVR all afternoon, but instead, I decided to put the day to good use. After a little bit of work and a 4-miler in the park (I couldn’t resist taking advantage of being able to run in the daytime/non-creepy-SVU-episode hours), I came home to cook up a giant domestic storm.
As cheesy as it sounds, two friends are coming over tomorrow night in honor of Valentine’s Day, so I thought it was my duty as hostess to (a) vacuum and (b) bake something delicious, fudgy, and chocolatey. After accomplishing Duty A, I turned to the Wannabe Chef and his recipe for Almond Flour Brownies.
In case you accidentally ended up here looking for a food blog, let me show you how wrong you are. His brownies look like this:
(source)
Mine look like this:
They aren’t pretty and they’re sort of falling apart (and the Valentine’s Day m&m’s I tried to sprinkle on top sunk to the bottom of the pan so the bottoms are weird and pink/white/moldy-looking), but they are delicious and fudgy, and you would never know they’re gluten-free (I didn’t choose this recipe for that reason, but I was definitely curious to try it). So, F in the aesthetics department, but an A for taste. Which I can vouch for, because I ate a brownie that fell apart, the brownie pieces that stuck to the pan, and a fair amount of batter. Oops.
In addition to brownies, I wanted to make a high-protein, nutritious dinner after a day and a half of catered meals at our conference (that would also yield leftovers for lunch tomorrow, because I am lazy and also really cheap), so I used a recipe for turkey sloppy joes from The Athlete’s Plate. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, but mostly used it for inspiration to throw tomato paste, onions, tomatoes, and turkey into a pan to make dinner. I skipped the bun, the agave nectar, and the vinegar and subbed in fire-roasted tomatoes, and it was delicious. I kept sticking my fork back into the pan for extra bites… while simultaneously cutting brownies and eating pieces of the ones that fell apart. And did I mention I did all of this in sweaty running clothes + a sweatshirt splattered with brownie batter (a casualty of the aforementioned batter-eating) while dancing around my kitchen to Robyn and Ellie Goulding? Living alone is 150% the best, ever.
I baked brownies today, too! And also ate like 50% of it before it went into the oven. Then had a terrible chocolate OD stomach ache. BUT IT WAS WORTH IT.