Red, Brown and Blue! How... American...?

Ever since I was young, my dad would go on the ocassional trip into the Canada. Each time he would bring home Canadian candy. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was chocolate covered Smarties. (YUCK!) My favorites are these malted candy bars I can never remember the name of. But they're in French and they're in a big pale yellow package! This time he brought me some Canadian Raisinettes! YUM! =)

On a semi-unrelated topic, I just recently started following Peas and Thank You, a really awesome vegan blog! Now, I'm not a vegan but somehow stumbled across her blog while perusing one day and couldn't stop laughing at her stories about her adorable girls. She had hooked me! I signed up to recieve updates.

Yesterday morning at 4:30, nature woke me up in that unpleasant way it has gotten into the habit of doing. As I stumbled back to my room and flopped back onto my bed, I checked my email. Hooray, an update from P&TY! It was for vegan brownies. "Mmm... brownies..." I muttered into the pillow. Crap, I don't have applesauce. It's ok, I'll use tomato sauce I thought as I drifted back to sleep.

Fast forward 3 hours. Now fully awake, I still want to make these brownies with tomato sauce. So I did! And with honey instead of sugar, cornmeal for some of the flour, I was a substituting maniac!! And you know what?



They were pretty delicious in my opinion. Addictive even. I ate a whole row out of the pan before lunch. An acquired taste, definitely, but so am I.

Tomato Laden Brownies
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup blue cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup canned tomato puree (for more concentrated flavor you could use tomato paste)
1/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 cup raisinettes (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8x8 pan and set aside. In a large bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, baking powder, baking soda and salt. In a separate bowl, mix together tomato, honey and extract. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, stirring until just combined, then fold in raisinettes. Pour batter into prepared pan, then bake for 20 minutes or until the sides start the pull away from the pan. Cool and enjoy! Or.. eat hot and enjoy!