A Dip, and a Scam....

Sunday was a cooking, cleaning, and brewing kombucha kind of day. (My favorite) I wanted to tackle Veganomicon some more, so I decided to make the creamy kalamata spread on page 63. It was so easy, and is so delicious I had to stop myself from eating it all with a spoon! I subbed the juice of half of a large lemon for the white whine, but other than that I followed the recipe exactly. I spread some on a piece of crusty bread, and loaded it up with romaine, shredded carrots, cucumber, avocado, and banana peppers. BEST SANDWICH EVER! And it gets better after sitting for awhile, so if you ever try this, make it a little bit before you want to serve it. I'm going to try kalamata hummus next. Afew months ago my local Co-op had kalamata hummus and it was hands down the best hummus, possibly best food ever. Kalamata olives are definitely on the pricier ends of olives, but if you have a grocery store that has an olive bar, you can save money, because, bulk. I paid two dollars for the amount of olives needed for this recipe, versus the five or six dollars for a whole jar, and the olives in the olive bar looked much more appetizing than the olives in jars.
On the topic of saving money, I also wanted to warn anyone who is interested in using coconut oil for skincare, or vinegar for cleaning. I recently was horrified to see in the skincare section of  some grocery store, a tub of coconut oil for skincare. I noticed that it was in a plastic tub as opposed to glass, and it was two dollars more than coconut oil found in the oil section. And guess what? It is just unrefined coconut oil! Nothing more, nothing less, and it was the same amount of ounces, it was just packaged to look more like skincare I guess. What a freaking scam! So if you ever want to try the single best moisturizer I have ever used, just make sure you go to the cooking oil section, or sometimes it's also in the organic/natural section and just grab the unrefined coconut oil. The other disturbing scam I saw was Heinz having bottles of "cleaning vinegar" next to regular white vinegar, the "cleaning vinegar" being of course the pricier of the two, and they are both vinegar!!! You could use the "cleaning" vinegar to make a salad dressing!!! Just be careful to not pay more than you should for something, and I think doing this is unethical to say the least. They are preying on people being just too busy to even notice these differences.