January 21: Granola Bar Day & New England Clam Chowder Day

Granola Bar Day

Granola bars are awesome when you're hiking or camping.  Or when you find yourself stuck in a class or meeting and you start getting distracted by a growing hunger.  Whether you like crunchy granola bars or chewy granola, granola bars are handy little snacks.

Store-bought granola bars can sometimes have ingredients you weren't expecting, so always check the ingredient list.  You can always make your own granola bars, too.  In honor of Granola Bar Day, CDKitchen has a round up of granola bar recipes.  If you like a certain brand of granola bars, make sure to check the brand's website for coupons.

As for me, I do keep at least one box of granola bars handy and usually have one in my bag. 


New England Clam Chowder Day

I'm not a huge fan of heavy, creamy soups.  I prefer my soups to be light and broth-based, so I don't eat New England Clam Chowder very often.  Clam chowder can be hit or miss- some people make it too salty.  New England Clam Chowder is good when paired with crackers.  Food Network has a highly rated recipe of New England Clam Chowder.  Epicurious has a New England Clam Chowder recipe that uses bacon.  AllRecipes also has a recipe that uses bacon. I guess bacon makes it really taste good - just look at the number of reviews and the average rating!

Well, if you have a bowl of New England Clam Chowder today, not only are you celebrating the day, you're also celebrating National Soup Month!

National Wheat Bread Month, National Soup Month, National Bread Machine Baking Month

I've been keeping up with the daily food celebrations, but I can't help but feel I'm lacking on the month and week food celebrations.  I just don't blog as much as I anticipated.  I did manage to make a dinner this week that touched on multiple food month celebrations.  Let's take a look at the dinner.

First, bread made in the bread machine!  There!  That knocks out National Bread Machine Baking Month.  Wait!  It was a 50-50 wheat bread... there's National Wheat Bread Month!  Sweet! And since it's been cold and rainy, soup is the perfect thing to warm me up.  (National Soup Month!)

The bread was made following the "Fifty-Fifty Whole Wheat Bread" recipe from More Bread Machine Magic by Linda Rehberg and Lois Conway.  Not only was it a hit with wheat-bread-loving me, the roomie liked it, too, and the recipe was officially labeled a "Yay!" recipe.  (We tend to sort new recipes as "yay," "needs a little tweaking," "meh," and "ew, never again.")  The bread was so tasty, it only lasted a few days, so I didn't get as many pictures of it as I had hoped.  In fact, that's the last piece there with dinner.  It was had as toast with jam, butter, or honey, used to make cheese toast, and used in a sandwich.  I did add a little more water than the recipe called for, as the bread machine seemed like it was struggling.  Pictures of the bread at the start of the cycle and at the end:

The majority of my soups these days are made from scratch.  Soup's just so easy to make.  In fact, Grist called soup a "packaged food you never need to buy again."  If you're scared to jump right in and start making soups completely from scratch, you can always buy a soup mix and toss it in the crock pot.  Crock pots make soup making easy - just toss in some veggies, some liquid (broth, water, milk) and just let the crock pot cook away.  Looking for a recipe?  Whole Foods recently tweeted a link to Heart Greens Soup.

Truthfully, there's always a day or two when I didn't start up the crockpot, I have no leftover soup in the freezer, I'm lazy, or I'm hungry and I want to eat IMMEDIATELY.  For those days, I do turn to packaged soup.  For some people, sodium is a concern but some packaged soups are low in sodium - you just have to hunt through all the labels.  If you're worried that soup in cans can expose you to BPAs, there's always soup in boxes or paper containers from soup counters.  The soup pictured here became mine because my roomie didn't like it.  She felt the onion flavor was too strong (she doesn't like onions) but I thought it was just fine.  If my basil plants hadn't succumbed to the cold, I would've added a little basil to the bowl, if only for color.

Then, because I felt the dinner needed more vegetables and something green, I added some leftover broccoli raab.  (Remember, make half your plate fruits and vegetables!) This broccoli raab was cooked in a saute pan with some garlic and almond slivers.  If you like broccoli, you'd probably like broccoli raab.  If you can't find it in the grocery store, it may be hiding under a different name, but it basically looks like broccoli if it was stretched and had smaller florets.

National Soup Month, courtesy of Whole Foods

I haven't really been doing as much as I thought I would be for the "month" foods.  I'll get some up soon, but in the meantime, Whole Foods has a blog entry in honor of National Soup Month.  It's going to be cold enough this weekend that all I'll probably want will be soup, so I'll probably really truly celebrate it this weekend.  Actually, it'll be cold enough to celebrate both National Soup Month and National Hot Tea Month!