Whole Wheat Sugar Cookies with Naturally Dyed Icing

  
      I'm happy to report that our cookies turned out even better than I expected. Take a look!

We did have some issues making icing, but the colors were bright and beautiful. I was trying to follow our traditional icing recipe, which calls for powdered sugar. We didn't have any organic powdered sugar so we tried to powder regular organic sugar in the Vitamix and something went horribly wrong. Both times the icing came out brown and tasted nasty. The only explanation I can come up with is that the Vitamix got so hot it burned the sugar. So we had to whip up some cream cheese frosting instead, which ended up being quite runny. Next time we will find powdered sugar first!

Anyway, for the red we used beets. Just chopped them up and blended them and then strained the liquid out. It was so bright that when some splattered on the floor, of course, Evie stepped in it and her toes were stained red for a week!

For the yellow I tried to cook down some pineapple but it never really got concentrated so I ended up just using turmeric powder. It gave the icing a little spicy kick which I didn't mind, but next time I will use mango like I did for the icing on Evie's birthday cake. (See previous post for details)

Green was made from a handful of raw spinach thrown in the blender with the icing. You couldn't taste it at all! My mind was blown.

 Purple was boiled red cabbage put in the blender. Blue was that same cabbage with a bit of baking soda mixed in, which cause some kind of amazing chemical reaction and turns the purple to blue. I put too much in the first batch and it was really salty, so I suggest just adding a tiny bit at a time until you get the right shade. The blue was the least successful of all the colors so next time I might try a different approach.

This is what it looked like when I sprinkled baking soda on top of a spoon of the purple dye. Crazy!

Please note that our cookies always look like they were iced by a bunch of drunken preschoolers. So the fact that this year's cookies don't look like Martha Stewart's is a result of serious lack in cookie decorating skills, not quality of icing colors!

Overall I would call this adventure a huge success. Yes, it was more work. Yes, it was more expensive. Yes, it was more mess. But who cares, really? We ended up with beautiful, delicious, and most importantly not poisonous cookies that I feel comfortable giving to children. Now I know it can be done every Christmas from now on! What a weight off my shoulders.

The whole wheat sugar cookies were so delicious that we ate the first batch before we even iced them! 

Here is a link to the original recipe which I tweaked a bit.

Ingredients
1 1/4 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 teaspoons baking powder*
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
6 tbsp butter, softened
1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract 


* Make sure your baking powder is aluminum free and the corn starch in it is non-gmo. We use Rumford brand.

Mix flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Stir in the dry ingredients. Cover, and chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.  Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut into shapes with a round cookie cutter. Place cookies 1 inch apart on lined cookie sheets. Bake 6 to 8 minutes.

 

 

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Taking Holiday Break

Hi, everyone. Hope you have had a wonderful holiday season so far. I've decided to take a couple of weeks off from blogging. I will start back up next Monday with the results of our whole wheat sugar cookies with naturally dyed icing!

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Whole Grain Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Speaking of cookies....these oatmeal raisin cookies are the best! I didn't even think I liked oatmeal cookies until I had these bad boys. The first time we made them, we followed a normal recipe, and then we started to tinker. We ended up with the best tasting whole grain, low sugar, organic cookie out there. They are dynamite! Chewy, gooey, a tad crispy on the edges. I could eat them every day. They might not be health food, but they are pretty good for you as far as cookies go. If you use coconut oil instead of butter and substitute all maple syrup for the sugar like we did the last time we made them, I think they could actually be classified as health food. 

Ingredients:

1 stick of butter OR 1/2 cup coconut oil
1 egg
3/4 cup sweetener (can be any combination of sugar, maple syrup, molasses, agave, etc)
1 cup whole wheat flour (regular, pastry, or white whole wheat)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
splash of vanilla
1/4 cup of raisins (or more!)

Preheat oven to 350. Cream the butter, vanilla, egg, and sugar and/or maple syrup and/or molasses together in one bowl. Mix all the dry ingredients in another bowl.

Then combine the two bowls.

Plop some blobs onto a baking sheet and put them in the oven for  10-15 minutes.

 
This is what you end up with. Yum yum!

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But I Can't Cook!

If I had a dollar for every time I've ever heard someone say "I can't cook," I'd be a wealthy momma.  Anyone can cook! Anyone who can read can follow a recipe. What people usually mean when they claim otherwise is "I'm afraid to cook."

It can be intimidating. You have to being willing to utterly miserably fail and able to laugh it off. I have had my fair share of dinner disasters, and some of them have been really bad! Recently there was a casserole where the noodles swelled and soaked up all the sauce, leaving it dry and somehow still kind of slimy...ick... and a crock pot dish where I didn't cook the beans long enough so Jon and I ended up with horrible stomachaches. (Evie was smart enough to refuse to eat it!) Try to remember that if something you make is awful, 95% of the time it was the recipe and not something you did. Especially if you got it from a food blog where every Tom, Dick, and Harry is posting recipes with no editor and potentially making errors that could totally mess up your meal.

Sometimes, oftentimes even, the food you prepare turns out so wonderful you won't believe you created it. There is something magical about combining random things in your kitchen and ending up with a delicious, nutritious meal. It gives me a sense of pride that is different than what I've felt before. It can be very empowering to take back control over what you are eating. Right now most of us are dependent on giant processed food corporations, and that's how they want it. I promise you can live without Kraft. And believe it or not, you will even come to a point where you don't miss it.

I keep lists of recipes I want to try, both online on Pinterest and in a spiral bound notebook where I put clipped magazine recipes or photocopied cookbook pages. When it's time to go grocery shopping, I sit down and pick seven or so recipes that I want to try and make my grocery list based on the ingredients. I try to pick things I already have most of the ingredients to make, and recipes that have overlapping ingredients. For instance, I will pick two meals that use black beans so I can cook up one big pot and save time on the second meal. There are a few favorites which we eat over and over again, but I try to put new things on the list every week to keep meal time from getting boring.

I still don't pick any really complicated recipes or ones that call for a bunch of crazy ingredients. One thing that is awesome about cooking is that most recipes are very forgiving. If you don't have white flour you can use wheat. You can skip spices if you don't have them. You can use other spices once you get comfortable with how each one tastes and know what will work well. If you don't like red pepper, use yellow. It will still be delicious! One of my favorite tricks is to google search "cornstarch substitute" or whatever it is I don't have. I can almost always find a suitable sub! The great thing about finding recipes on the internet is that you can search through dozens of recipes until you find one that uses ingredients you have.

Cooking isn't something you are born good at, it's something you learn. And you can teach yourself! I fondly remember the months of baked potatoes, white flour spaghetti, and take out when I first moved out on my own. That was literally all I knew how to prepare. I remember the first cookbook I ever used. I believe vegan brownies was my first dish, made for a potluck at work. Everyone kept telling me how great they were and I was amazed. I went on to make many of the simple recipes in that book and slowly started cooking more and more. Even so, most of the cooking I did up until about a year ago consisted of mainly several processed prepackaged foods thrown together (beans and rice box mixes, fake meat and mac and cheese, etc.)

When we started this whole healthy eating venture, everything changed drastically. For a couple of months I was overwhelmed and felt like it was impossible to make everything that I couldn't find a good store bought version of from scratch. It seemed like it took me literally all day to prepare dinner. I'm not gonna lie, it sucked.

These days I think I've pretty much got it down. I have many brands memorized and don't have to spend 20 minutes reading ingredients every time I want a jar of pasta sauce. I have my favorite recipes for things we make from scratch (pancakes, tortilla shells, gravy) so I don't have to search for one each time we make it, and we try to keep the kitchen stocked with our most frequently used ingredients, some of which were totally foreign to me not long ago. You can do this too! It doesn't happen overnight, it happens slowly but surely.

Start small and be brave. It's so worth it.

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Give Artificial Dyes The Boot for Christmas

Artificial food dyes are derived from petroleum. Yuck. Red dye 40 is made from crushed beetles. Double yuck. Food dyes have been linked to hyperactivity in children, and yes, once again, to cancer. The FDA even lists Red 3 as a known carcinogen but has made no move to ban it from our food supply. In Europe, a warning label is required to be placed on all foods containing artificial dyes. (It's not just in Fruity Pebbles...read your ingredient labels. You might be surprised to find dye in all sorts of savory foods as well!)

From the website of Dr. Mercola:

“This is why if you eat a Nutri-Grain strawberry cereal bar in the United States, it will contain Red 40, Yellow 6 and Blue 1. But that same bar in the UK contains only the natural colorings beetroot red, annatto and paprika extract. In fact, the UK branches of Wal-Mart, Kraft, Coca-Cola and Mars have removed artificial colors, sodium benzoate and aspartame from their product lines as a result of consumer demand and government recommendations. In the United States, however, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to allow these toxic ingredients in countless popular foods, including those marketed directly to children.”-Source

It's hard to connect something as innocent looking as a Christmas cookie with poison but that's what it boils down to. Making and decorating sugar cookies with the little bottles of food dye has been a family tradition of ours for as long as I've been alive. Actually we used food dye all the time. I can remember my mom dumping loads of that stuff into our food...yellow to make our homemade egg noodles brighter, green and red mashed potatoes on Christmas, and everything we ate on Saint Patrick's day glowed a sickly green.
This year marks a new beginning. Christmas cookies safe for my baby to eat. It feels like a tall order and to be honest, I'm pretty nervous about it. I know I can please her little pallet and eyes but what about the rest of the family? Bucking the way we have been doing things for at least 30 years and doing so at the most special time of the year feels almost sacrilegious. What's the worst that could happen? Well, I can't think of much that would be worse than seeing my little girl chowing down on some crushed bug petroleum cancer cookies, so I guess whatever alternative we come up with will be just fine.
So what are our other options? The rich among us can simply shell out more money (and I mean a lot more) for natural stuff such as Williams Sonoma Sprinkles and India Tree Natural Food Coloring.
The rest of us poor schmucks will be slaving away in the kitchen as usual, making our colors from scratch. I haven't decided yet if I'm just going to do the fruit syrups like I did with Evie's birthday cake icing or actually try to make concentrated dye yet. I will, of course, post the results of our grand experiment. I don't know about you, but I feel a Christmas miracle coming!

Concentrated Dyes
Fruit Syrups
Homemade Sprinkles
Organic Dyes

This is a great video about making your own dyes. It's a little hard to watch because the camera is jiggly, it made me a little car sick, but it was worth it. I tried to go to the Crunchy Housewife site to see the written directions, but for some reason the page wouldn't load. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Please let me know how it works out for you if you try any of these natural dyes!



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Snacks and Packed Lunches

A reader recently requested help with ideas for healthy snacks and lunches. For us, the key to lunches is planning ahead and being able to fly by the seat of your pants when you have forgotten to plan ahead. Double your dinner recipes as often as you can and freeze the leftovers in serving size portions to use for future lunches. Almost anything can be frozen, and it doesn't take any more time to boil two pounds of pasta than it does to boil one.

I found a BPA free divided lunch container at Aldi a few months ago for $2.50 and it has held Jon's lunches ever since. I love the challenge of filling up all three pockets. It's much more fun than just throwing a sandwich into a baggie. Sometimes I sneak and buy some snacks that he loves, like roasted peanuts or garlic sesame sticks. I seriously get a kick out of hiding them and then sneaking them into his lunch box for a surprise. Maybe I'm a nerd or maybe I just have too much time on my hands, but I have found that preparing his lunches is something quick and simple I can do to show him that he is special to me. Sometimes I have nothing prepared and have no idea what to pack and end up with a random mix of foods. I'm quite sure he has opened his lunch with a raised eyebrow a few times, but the surprise is part of the fun.

Here are some lunch and snack ideas which work for adults or toddlers. They are all quick and easy to whip up the night before. Remember, don't be afraid to mix and match. If you don't know how to make something, google it!

• hummus with veggies or chips (homemade hummus is far tastier and less expensive than store bought)
• baba ganoush (eggplant dip) and veggies or chips
• hard boiled eggs with hot sauce
• salad (duh!) (put the dressing in the bottom of a large jar and the salad on top, then shake it up when it's time to eat and your lettuce won't get all slimy!)
• whole wheat muffins
• whole wheat pancakes or tortillas with cream cheese or peanut butter
• ants on a log
• apples and peanut butter
• cottage cheese and pinapple
• fruit salad
• nuts
• pumpkin seeds
• sunflower seeds
• leftovers from dinners
• smoothies (you can make big batches and freeze)
• soup (don't you dare buy that crap in a can!)
• fresh fruit- apples, bananas, mangoes, peaches, pineapple, berries, kiwi, etc. Try something different every time you go to the store. 
• rice cakes with cream cheese and bananas
• chips and salsa
• pinto or black bean dip and chips or veggies
• guacamole and chips or veggies
• raisins and sunflower seeds (my mom and I used to eat this when I was little. Looking back, I realize it was one of my favorite snacks and I was so excited when we had it. I can even remember the container she kept it in. Even though we usually ate cookies and donuts and other terrible stuff, that snack was my favorite.)
• plain yogurt and fruit sauce
• sliced apples and cheese (another favorite from my childhood) 
• nut butters (you can make a butter from any nut or seed...just grind up in a food processor or high speed blender. that's how peanut butter is made! you may have to add a little extra oil or water to get it to mix up completely. try almonds, pumpkin seeds with garlic, cashews, etc)
• applesauce
• homemade granola bars
• dried fruit
• whole wheat sandwhiches with peanut butter or other nut butter and banana slices
• trail mix or granola (buying ingredients in bulk and mixing your own is usually cheaper, and you don't have to pick out the things you don't like)

I'm not going to get into the details right now, but I have to say a word about cottage cheese, yogurt, etc. I know this seems insane, but you DO NOT want to buy the low fat or fat free versions of any food. You want the regular old full fat stuff. Why? Well, the low fat and fat free foods are often pumped full of chemicals and flavor enhancers to make up for the missing fat. These chemicals make you gain weight and poison your body. I know we have all been raised to believe fat is evil, but that's just not true. Of course you don't want to eat it all day every day, but in moderation, fat is really good for you...especially for your brain! Refined oils and trans fats are bad, but the natural fats that occur in dairy, nuts, avocados, olives, etc. are our friends. Mind blown? Welcome to the club. You can read more about this here.

Also, the 100 Days of Real Food blog has awesome lunch tips and pictures of several packed lunches. I love the visual inspiration. She always makes the food look so cute, which I'm sure helps encourage the kids to eat it. I love this whole blog, it really helped us when we first started our healthy eating.

What are your favorite snacks and sack lunches?




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Evie's First Birthday and Whole Wheat Organic Sugar Free Cake

Whew. What a week! I am glad birthdays only come once a year. Now I know why my mom always looked like she'd been hit by a bus in my birthday party pictures.

I was getting a lot of pressure about how first birthdays are "supposed" to be. An entire cake for the baby to smash and eat all by herself, (a "real" cake!) and brightly colored icing to smear all over her face. Okay, but in my world, it also has to be whole wheat, no sugar, and no artificial dyes. Hmmm.

I ended up tweaking this carrot cake recipe to my liking and it was delicious. For the icing, I just put a block of organic cream cheese in the blender with a couple tablespoons of maple syrup and voila! I made two fruit syrups for the colors, one from mango and pineapple for yellow and one from blackberries which turned out kind of dark red. They yellow wasn't quite bright enough once I mixed it with icing so I added a bit of the spice turmeric, which worked like a charm and you couldn't taste it at all. You can read how to make the syrups here.

Here is the final recipe I came up with:

2 cups organic whole wheat pastry flour

1 teaspoon baking powder (make sure your brand is aluminum free!)
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
3/4 cup organic unrefined coconut oil
3/4 cup maple syrup
4 organic free range eggs
2 cups grated organic carrots
1 cup organic raisins

Combine the first 5 ingredients in a large bowl. Add the eggs, maple syrup, and coconut oil. (Coconut oil becomes a solid at normal room temperatures. If yours is solid, you will have to melt it over very low heat before you can mix it in.) Lastly, add the carrots and raisins and mix again. Bake at 350 for 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

For the party, I cut this recipe in half by 1/4 because I was just making a small heart shaped cake.

I seriously stressed myself out over what to feed the adults. It was going to cost a bajillion dollars to make enough of the above recipe to feed all our guests. I thought maybe I would just get an organic cake mix but then I read the ingredients and it was basically just white flour, white sugar, and baking powder and I would still have to add the expensive stuff myself so that was no help. I decided to just make a normal cake from scratch with as many organic ingredients as we already had in our pantry. So it ended up that everything was organic except the flour, and I did use white flour that we had left from our white bread days. I used organic cane sugar. A cake is a treat, not something you expect to meet your nutritional needs, so having white flour at a birthday party is not going to kill you. I didn't have enough time to perfect a whole wheat recipe with ingredients I could afford and I was honestly terrified that everyone would be standing around choking my crappy cake down thinking to themselves "I knew healthy meant gross." Hopefully next year I will be able to pull it off, but for now I just take comfort in the fact that at least my cake didn't have any bogus food additives or genetically modified ingredients. It was a cake my grandma would have been proud of. (Even though I burned the bottom a little!)

I got to thinking about the evolution of birthday cakes. Back in the day, they were baked from scratch by someone who loved and cherished you. Then along came cake mixes, which were also made with love, just less effort and time. Now, we have store bought cakes. Almost all of the cakes I have seen recently have been made in a store bakery. I know this sounds like some corny hippie crap, but there is something so sad about a Walmart birthday cake. Aside from the horrifying ingredients... something deeper. A cake is a symbol of love, a celebration of your existence. Something someone made in order to say "I am so glad you were born." The people working in the bakery at Walmart are probably getting paid minimum wage and hate their jobs. I can hear them thinking "If I have to make one more Sponge Bob cake I'm going to shoot myself." Maybe store bought cake contains some residual resentment. Maybe that's totally stupid, but I don't think so. I think it's just one example of what is wrong with what we eat. Corporations who care about profits, not people, mix and box most of the food we eat today. They are more concerned about sales and preventing spoilage and profit loss than they are about nourishing the people who buy their products. There is no love in our food.

 This is where buying locally, buying organic, and buying from small family owned companies can make a difference. Small organic farmers and companies take pride in making healthy food and carry the intention of making a nourishing product. Of course they want to make money too, but without putting profits before people. Cook from scratch whenever possible. It is so worth it.

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Cook Breakfast While You Sleep

Well, Evie's first birthday party today! My plan was to blog about it tonight and share the cake recipe, but it turns out that I greatly underestimated how tired I would be. So that will be next week.

This week I decided to share an overnight slow cooker breakfast recipe that we love from another blog. It was freaking amazing to wake up both Saturday and Sunday morning with breakfast already made! And it was delicious too. The first night we made pumpkin pie oatmeal. You can find the recipe here. I actually baked a pumpkin and used its poor old guts instead of using canned pumpkin like it calls for in the recipe, which was surprisingly labor intensive. We ended up sleeping in, so it cooked for about 10 hours and was still perfect, so don't worry about leaving it on too long.

The next night we decided to try apple cinnamon. We followed the same recipe, just used one cup of chopped apples instead of the pumpkin, and added some raisins. Next time I think I will add more apples. If you are used to eating super sugary stuff and these aren't sweet enough for you, you can always add a bit of maple syrup or stevia or (gasp!) sugar.

We will definitely be having these meals again, and many other variations I'm sure. Let me know if you come up with something tasty!

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Genetically Modified Organisms

This is a topic I have been reading about for months. It's one of those monsters that creeps into the back of your mind and is kind of always there, freaking you out so much that you just force yourself to not think about it. Researching for this post has been a nightmare. I can only read a little bit at a time without having to take a break and play on Facebook or look at cute pictures of baby animals. It's that intense.

What is a GMO? Genetically Modified Organism. I used to think this was like crossing a white rose with a red one to get a pink rose. That's not scary right? Unfortunately genetically modified foods are much more sinister. Scientists take DNA from one species and force it into the genetic code of another species, creating a whole new organism that would never have existed in nature. For instance, spider DNA has been put into goats with the hopes of being able to milk spider webs from the goats to make bullet proof vest material (I know this sounds like a bad science fiction movie!) You can fact check me over here at ABC News.

The danger to us comes in when our food sources are genetically modified. Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) is a toxin produced by bacteria found in soil. Scientists were able to isolate the gene that produces the BT and force it into the genetic code of corn. Now every single cell inside the corn produces Bt toxin on its own, so any insect that tries to eat it dies because the BT makes the insect's stomach explode. This was also done with soy and cotton. Monsanto, the company behind these horrible ideas, assured us that Bt would only kill insects, not us.

"They claimed Bt-toxin would be completely destroyed in the human digestive system, so it would not have any impact at all. However, such was not the case. Doctors at Quebec's Sherbrooke University Hospital were shocked to find the toxin circulating in the blood of 93 percent of the pregnant women, 80 percent of their babies' umbilical blood, and 67 percent of the non-pregnant women they tested.¹⁰ Clearly, Bt toxin is not destroyed in your GI tract."- Source

A theory which is gaining more supporting evidence every day is that after eating this corn and soy, our stomachs begin producing Bt. We are becoming walking pesticide factories, poisoning ourselves on a daily basis. Remember how Bt kills? It explodes the stomach. Many researchers believe the skyrocketing numbers of autoimmune disorders such as irritable bowel syndrome and food allergies are the result of eating genetically modified soy and corn. Researchers have found small cracks in the walls of our intestines that should not be there, which allows undigested bits of food to get into our blood stream. When the immune system sees these invaders, it attacks. This explains why food allergies are becoming so prevalent, even in non GMO foods. Anything that leaks into the blood stream is seen as a threat and will set the immune system alarms off.

Have you ever wondered why we are so sick? There are obviously many things that contribute to our sorry state these days, but one of the biggies is GM foods. Many holistic doctors are reporting that when they "prescribe" a completely GMO free diet for their patients, all kinds of symptoms disappear. Everything from migraines to food allergies to exhaustion to infertility have been reported to improve or completely disappear when GM foods are removed.

A new study was just released that is so frightening it cannot be ignored. Again, my disclaimer that I hate animal studies, they are cruel and horrible and often useless. However, these animals have already suffered and died for us, so the least we can do is take note and change our lives accordingly. Warning, some disturbing pictures appear below. If you are sensitive you may want to skip them.

"Here are some of the shocking findings from the study:

• Up to 50% of males and 70% of females suffered premature death.

• Rats that drank trace amounts of Roundup (at levels legally allowed in the water supply) had a 200% to 300% increase in large tumors.

• Rats fed GM corn and traces of Roundup suffered severe organ damage including liver damage and kidney damage.

• The study fed these rats NK603, the Monsanto variety of GM corn that's grown across North America and widely fed to animals and humans. This is the same corn that's in your corn-based breakfast cereal, corn tortillas and corn snack chips." -Source

You might be wondering why the results are so immediate and shocking in the rats, but not in humans. Rats only live a few years, while we live about 80. Since GMO's were released in the mid 1990's, this means we have only been consuming them for 20% of our lives, while the rats ate them for their entire lifespan. The truth is that we have no idea what the long term effects on humans will be. In a few decades, we could all be walking around with tumors the size of basketballs, just like these poor little guys. That is, if any of us are still alive.

Corn and soy are dirt cheap, so companies use them for everything. Oil, sweetener, thickener, etc. It is estimated that 80% of all processed foods contain GMO's. That means anything in a box, bottle, or can. This time just reading labels won't protect you because GMO's do not have to be specified, so you never really know what you are getting. I just realized yesterday that there is corn oil in my chapstick! (It's even in infant formula. Shame, shame.)

The only ways to avoid GMO's are:

1. Buy organic. Certified organic produce cannot contain and GMO's.
2. Buy from a farmer you trust or grow your own food.
3. Look for the Non-GMO Verified symbol. Products with this symbol have been tested and certified to contain no GMO's. You will only find this in the health food/natural food section so don't bother looking for it on your Kelogg's Corn Flakes.

Why isn't the government protecting us? That's a big pile of stinky dog poo that I'm not going to wade through, but take a peek at the chart below to get an idea of where the smell is coming from. You can read about it in-depth here. Let's just say that many of the people in the high up government positions who should be looking out for us are former Monsanto bigwigs, and vice versa. Actually, President Obama promised to make labeling mandatory for GMO's during his first campaign, but instead he has done nothing except appoint Micheal Taylor, a former Vice President and lobbyist for Monsanto, as the Deputy Commissioner of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). Hmmmmm. Now don't go thinking I'm saying you should support Romney...click here for an article on his ties to Monsanto. The craziest part about this scandal is that Romney and Obama both insist on all organic food for themselves and their families. So while they are turning a blind eye to the poisoning of our citizens, they feast on the purest food available. I guess you don't have to worry about pesticides and GMO's when you are a multimillionaire. Must be nice! Here is a petition you can sign to tell Obama to end the ties between the FDA and Monsanto.

I know this is all seriously mind blowing and you might feel like your brain is short-circuiting right now. There is an amazing documentary called Genetic Roulette which breaks this stuff down so it is easier to understand. I highly recommend it! You can watch for free until Oct. 31st. After that, it's $19.95 to buy a copy of the DVD. If you miss the free viewing deadline, check the website frequently because they often have free weeks sponsored by natural food companies. The link to watch the movie is: http://geneticroulettemovie.com/

Warn your loved ones about GMO's! Remember that every dollar you spend is a vote. Are you going to support companies that are knowingly poisoning us for profit?



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A Short Intro to GMO's

Just a short video to whet your taste buds for the topic of genetically modified organisms. I've been working on a GMO post for weeks and it's overwhelming, to say the least. I love what Robyn O'Brien has to say and how she breaks it down into easy to understand information. Give it a listen and start the process of letting your brain digest this craziness before we dive in deep next week.




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Blueberries and Cream Oatmeal

When I was little I loved the instant packets of fruit and cream oatmeal. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that stuff is loaded with sugar and other icky things. It only takes a few extra minutes to make from scratch and it's delicious and good for you.

Checking the texture...

You can buy organic oats in several varieties...rolled, steel cut, etc. The nutritional difference doesn't matter much but the texture and cooking times do. Experiment and see what you like best. If you are a texture freak and don't like the way home cooked oats feel, try putting them in a blender or food processor BEFORE you cook them. They turn into oat flour. If you do this, you'll have to stir pretty much constantly while they cook with a whisk so they don't clump, but they don't take nearly as long to cook.

Who needs a spoon when you have a fist?

Cook the oats according to directions. Meanwhile, blend some plain yogurt and frozen or fresh blueberries in a blender for just a few seconds if you want blueberry chunks left or longer if you like it smooth. Once your oats have cooked, mix everything together and take a bite. If you find it to be a bit tart, add a little maple syrup. So good on a chilly fall morning.

Of course you can do this with any fruit. Bananas and cream and peaches and cream were my faves back in the day. You can do apple and cinnamon or brown sugar and maple syrup without the brown sugar. It still tastes great! I am ridiculously excited about an idea that's been floating around in my head the last few days... pumpkin spice oatmeal! I'll post the recipe if it's a success.

Yum.

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No Knead Whole Wheat Bread Recipe

I don't know about you, but we find the cost of real whole wheat bread without any crap ingredients to be cost-prohibitive. Five dollars a loaf is the norm around here and we just can't spend that on something that is gone in 3 days. So...I have tried out a million different homemade bread recipes. I have had some disastrous results. The kind that at first made me laugh out loud but eventually had me near tears. I even tried a bread machine. Nope. The bread kept coming out extremely dense, hard, yuck.

 I finally said screw these recipes and started experimenting. I think what I have here is near perfection. It tastes soooo good and has turned out well every time. It has a browned crunchy crust and soft fluffy center. We pretty much devour at least half a loaf right when it comes out of the oven.

I'm not a fan of kneading (in fact, I'm kind of lazy....shhhh). It doesn't help that I have a little munchkin I can't take my eyes off for 5 seconds. Once she is big enough to help me, it might be fun, but for now, no-knead is the only way to go in my book.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. It's super easy and comes together in a flash. The hardest part is waiting for the dough to rise.

Oh before we start, a tip about flour. Regular whole wheat is darker and more intense tasting. We like it a lot, but what we like even better is the albino version of whole wheat. It is still the whole grain but it is called "white whole wheat." It's lighter and tastes more like white bread, but it still has the whole grain intact. This can be tricky at first so make sure you read the package to be sure you are getting whole wheat, not unbleached wheat. Look for that magic word "whole." Our local Kroger sells a generic store brand and also King Arthur brand. Our local bulk food store, the Bulk Food Depot, has organic white whole wheat in bulk.

Okay, on with the show.

You will need:

3 1/2 cups whole wheat or white whole wheat flour
4 tablespoons vital wheat gluten*
2 tablespoons active dry yeast
1 teaspoon salt (we use sea salt)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 3/4 cups warm water

Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Fill a measuring cup with the warm water and then top it off with the olive oil. Slowly pour the liquid into the dry ingredients, stirring as you go. Once it is all mixed up, the dough will be very wet and sticky, unlike traditional dough.

Lightly cover the bowl or stick it in the cold oven to protect it from buggers and dust and let it rise for one hour. It will double in size and dry out a bit.

Next, shape the dough into a ball and separate it into two pieces. Shape them however you like...oval or round on a greased baking sheet or oven safe plate, or put them in a regular greased loaf pan, whatever you are going to bake them in. If you are not using a loaf pan, your ball or loaf will flatten out a bit while baking, so try to make it tight. Cover or return to cold oven and let rise again for another hour.

After that second hour has passed, preheat your oven to 450 (take the bread out if you were letting it rise in there!). Put a baking sheet on the bottom shelf to preheat as well.

Gently rub some water over the top of your loaves, sprinkle with flour if you want that arisan look, and cut slashes in the top. This allows the bread to keep rising even after the crust has started to form so you get fluffier bread. (Part of the reason I was getting dense loaves before was because I skipped this step since it seemed like a waste of time to me. I'm one of those people who has to know why I am doing something or I'm not likely to do it. Yes, I make my own life difficult!)

When the oven is heated to 450, put your bread (either in the loaf pan or on the baking sheet) on the top rack, and then dump a cup or so of water into the preheated baking sheet on the bottom rack. The water  steams the outside of the bread as it cooks.

30-35 minutes later you have perfect yummy bread. I like the crust really crunchy so I leave it in a little longer. Just try not to eat it hot with some butter....mmmm.....my mouth is watering thinking about it.

*What the heck is vital wheat gluten? Gluten is the protein part of wheat. It can be found in some grocery stores or online. It helps the dense whole wheat rise and fluff up. Don't skip this ingredient or you will have brick bread!

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White Bread Blues

I love bread. It might be my favorite food. Soup, chili, spaghetti, you name it, I want bread with it. You could call it an addiction, and you'd probably be right.

I have known white bread is bad for a long time and thought I was eating whole wheat bread because the bread I bought at the grocery store was brown. Ha! If only it could be so simple. It turns out that the "wheat" bread on the shelves is actually white bread with caramel coloring. Yep, you read that right. Technically all bread is wheat bread, because it all comes from wheat flour. White flour has had the nutritious parts of the wheat stripped away and is then "enriched" with fake chemical vitamins and minerals which are actually really hard on our bodies. And the caramel coloring? It's not heated sugar like gradma used to make. It's a chemical cocktail including 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole, which have been proven in govermnent-led studies to cause cancer in animals. This coloring is also in soda and many other processed foods.

Even if the bread label says "100% Wheat" it could still be made with white flour. It has to say "100% WHOLE wheat." If the word "whole" is not there, don't buy it. (Whole grain is also okay...that just means they used whole grains other than wheat such as oatmeal, bulgur, etc.) Be sure to read the ingredients. Just because it really is whole wheat doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of crazy toxic food additives lurking in there. Companies often try to make wheat bread fluffy and light like white bread, which is difficult to do without help from our friend the chemist.

Here are the ingredients in a typical so-called wheat bread:

INGREDIENTS: Enriched wheat flour, [flour, barley malt, ferrous sulfate (iron), “B” vitamins (niacin, thiamine mononitrate B1), riboflavin (B2), folic acid)], water, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, yeast, soybean oil, contains 2% or less of: salt, wheat gluten, soy lecithin, calcium sulfate, dough conditioner (may contain: sodium steroyl, lactylate, datem, mono and diglycerides, calcium dioxide and/or dicalcium phosphate), cornstarch, wheat starch, ammonium chloride, ammonium phosphate, caramel color, natural flavor, enzymes, calcium propionate and TBHQ (to retain freshness) 

Yikes! Google some of that stuff and I bet you won't want to eat it again. TBHQ is a form of butane. Even just the amount of ingredients is shocking considering you can make bread at home with only four ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and oil.

If you can afford high quality whole grain bread, go for it! If it's it too expensive for you or just can't find any without scary food additives, don't despair...I am on the verge of whole wheat no-knead bread perfection, and I will post the recipe next week!



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Oven Roasted Crispy Kale

Can you believe I had never eaten kale until about 6 months ago? (The world's worst vegetarian!) The first time I had it, I steamed it with some garlic and lemon juice, and it was disgusting. I'm so glad I gave it another try in the oven. It's one of my favorite side dishes now! I actually crave it if it's been awhile since we've had it.

It's super easy and quick. All you do is:

• Wash your kale and trim it into bite size pieces. (Most people say to trim away the tough stem in the middle, but I like it.) 

Raw kale

• Spread the pieces out on a cookie sheet and drizzle a tablespoon or so of olive oil around and then rub each piece around on the cookie sheet to kind of coat them. You don't want them drenched, just a tad shiny.

• Sprinkle them with whatever spices you like. We do garlic powder, lemon pepper, and a little salt. 

• Pop them into an oven preheated to 350 for about about 20 minutes. Keep peeking in to see how they look. I like to let the edges get completely dark so they are super crunchy, but you might like them softer. 

Crispy kale. Yum!

They are so yummy, I swear I could eat them every day. I made this for a friend and her teenage niece one night and a few days later, the 16 year old texted me and asked for the recipe. If that doesn't spell success, I don't know what does!

Surprisingly, Evie likes them too. She and I can finish a whole pan all by ourselves! I tried to give her steamed kale before but she kept spitting it out.

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