Awesome Sesame Kale Chips

I never thought of kale chips as being difficult, but when I brought a bowl to a party everyone ooohed- and aaaahhed and said they had trouble making good ones. I must have lucked into a great recipe from the beginning. The chips are crispy, melt-in-your-mouth perfection (and this is coming from a certified kale hater). By the way, even if you are a kale hater, you should go ahead and try growing it anyway. It's easy and you can hide kale in a lot of things to take advantage of the health benefits without having to taste it straight-up. But these chips make kale the star, and they are awesome and addictive.

Perfect Vegan Cupcake (high altitude)

I've adapted sea-level recipes for dairy-free, egg-free cupcakes before, but they usually end up sunken and stuck to the muffin tin (or stuck to the paper liners, even worse). So, I went on a hunt for a really good cupcake/muffin that would work at high altitude. (I'm not sure what separates a cupcake from a muffin. I've reduced the sugar from the original cupcake recipe, bringing these dangerously close to muffin territory.) These can be frosted for dessert, or filled with power ingredients like nuts and raisins to make a breakfast or snack. Most recently, with autumn on its way and apples falling from the trees, I made these with apple chunks and walnuts, cinnamon and allspice, and brown sugar instead of white. It tasted like fall and it was delicious.

Colorful Upcycled Table

I mean, really. This is almost too easy to count as a legitimate DIY.

Whole Wheat Crepes

With the chickens popping out 4-6 eggs every day, we look for ways to use them up. I'm not the biggest fan of straight-up cooked eggs, but I love to make crepes, high-altitude popovers, and German pancakes, all of which use a lot of eggs with a little flour. This crepe recipe uses 4 eggs, fills the whole blender, and makes delicious crepes to last a week. Cook them all up at once and store in a baggie in the fridge.

Soft Maple Applesauce Cookies

When 30 lbs of apples show up on your doorstep (a surprise "leave the produce and run" drop-off from a friend), what do you do? We're dehydrating them, making apple jelly and apple butter, and applesauce cookies. This recipe assumes you have already made the applesauce, or you can use store-bought. The cookies are scrumptious and customizable. I made them with a boozy cream cheese/maple glaze, but without the glaze, sub chocolate chips, would be awesome, too. These cookies are wonderfully soft, but the flip side is that they're not too sturdy. Don't toss them into a backpack without any protection, or they'll be crumbs.