baking

Strategies for Hidden Veggies III- Waffles

January 18, 2011 by KerryAnn 6 Comments

In the first two posts in this series, we examined how to replace flour in a baked good recipe with a vegetable. This time we’ll learn how to replace a liquid with a puree while still soaking the flours in order to make the baked good traditional foods.

In the same vein as the books that promote purees, many baked goods can have some mashed banana, applesauce, sweet potato, pumpkin, butternut squash or the like added to the recipe in place of the water or milk. The problem with many of these recipes is that the vegetable or fruit takes the place of the milk or water, and it’s then difficult to convert that recipe to being soaked. To overcome that problem, I carefully choose recipes that call for enough liquid to work with. I then soak the flour with the minimum amount of liquid needed to get it wet and add the rest that the recipe calls for in fruit or vegetables. This is made much easier if you are baking gluten-free goodies, since most of the recipes call for at least a small amount of starch. Since starches do not need to be soaked, this frees up extra liquid in the recipe to convert to a vegetable or fruit and still have the finished product turn out with the correct texture. Since starch makes waffles crispy, this is the perfect recipe for conversion.

I use this strategy most often when there’s just a little applesauce left in the bottom of the jar, or there’s one lone banana that needs to be used.

I tip my hat to Sue Gregg, whose cookbook is the first place I heard about grinding grain in the blender with liquid so you don’t have to have a grain mill to have the benefits of freshly-ground flour. I used her method to make pancakes for a long time until I could afford a grain mill.

Strategies for Hidden Veggies I- Black Bean Brownies

January 8, 2011 by KerryAnn 3 Comments

I periodically spend time thinking about ways to hide veggies in most foods, and I’m always on the look-out for ideas. After looking into purees and the books that promote them, I decided that most of them were a lot of work for little vegetable content per serving in the finished product. While I applaud any efforts to get veggies into children, I felt like many of these recipes were too much work for too little results to be the main thrust of my efforts. Many of the published recipes I found only had 1/2 – 2 Tbs of puree per serving and the purees often have water added so you’re getting very little in the way of vegetables. Many of them showed a remarkable lack of variety or weren’t recipes acceptable for a traditional foods diet as they contained unsoaked flours, soy flour, or other undesirable ingredients. Many of the recipes used applesauce to replace the fat or a puree to replace the egg. While it is better than nothing, I felt like I could use different methods to achieve better results while keeping the recipes true to traditional foods. I decided for the most part that the recipes that didn’t try to hide the vegetable flavors but instead complimented them and recipes where the vegetable replaces the flour were good candidates. This is easily accomplished in many brownies, cakes, pies, blondies and even dishes such as custards and puddings. Even some cookies, ice creams and sherbets will work! For breakfast, many pancakes, waffles and other baked goods are a snap to convert, especially those with liquid batters.

By far, I feel the strategy of using vegetables to replace the flour in a recipe is the best way to get veggies into a recipe. Many gluten-free recipes contain bean flours, so using pureed beans to replace the flour while reducing the liquid works very well. It is possible to produce flourless recipes this way! And, by soaking and cooking the beans correctly, you make the recipe traditional food and you eliminate the gastric distress that comes with using unsoaked bean flours. In some of these recipes, adding extra eggs is possible, further increasing the nutrition. The beans increase the nutrition content while decreasing the carbs, so it is a wonderful strategy. Especially good for filling little bellies and keeping them full until the next meal.

This recipe, using black beans, is the first recipe I will post in this series. It is a plain, chocolate brownie. Cocoa powder covers the color of the black beans. For blondies, a white beans such as navy or cannellini work beautifully. In the coming weeks, I will post cakes, blondies, dressed-up brownies and more using this method.

Black Bean Brownies

From the Menu Mailer Voume 4 Week 24

½ cup rapadura
4 large eggs
3 Tbs cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
2 Tbs coconut oil or butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla
1 (14.5 ounce) can or 1½ cups cooked black beans, drained and rinsed

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8×8 pan and set aside.

Place the eggs, rapadura, cocoa powder, baking powder, coconut oil and vanilla in a blender or food processor and blend until well-combined. Add the beans and blend until thoroughly combined and smooth. Pour into the pan and bake 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Allow to cool before slicing.

This post is part of Food Trip Fridays and the Beans and Lentils Linky.

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Busy Summer on the Mini-Homestead

July 22, 2010 by KerryAnn Leave a Comment

This summer has proven to be incredibly busy, much busier than I expected. A few weeks ago, I felt like the Lord was tapping me on the shoulder and telling me to get organized quickly and declutter as much as we can. We have some elderly family members who might need assistance, and we need to prepare for that possibility. So I have kicked myself into high gear, trying to school on our year-round schedule, do my job and handle the garden and daily chores in addition to the extra workload this presented. And we have managed to accomplish everything on a shoestring budget while we save for some needed car and home repairs.

Despite spending time gardening and even expanding our garden, we have lost most of what we planted. What the Mexican bean beetles and squash vine borers didn’t destroy, the chickens did when the town mowed down a post of our garden fence when they were tending the ditch with their machinery. The chickens got in and decimated what was growing in short order. What we have left is some green tomatoes we hope will ripen, about 5 sunflowers that are now over 10 feet tall, and we’re waiting now to see how the potatoes did. The onions are still tiny, despite supposedly being close to time to be pulled. We have replanted the winter squash on Monday and we’re now organizing to put the fall and winter garden in.

The last few weeks I have spent time at the farmer’s market, buying wholesale. The Lord has plopped some incredible deals on produce in our lap. While canning I worked a full week of VBS at our church and managed to wear myself out between the two. We processed our extra roosters over a period of two weeks and sent them to freezer camp. We cleaned out the freezer that needed defrosting and got everything organized in an effort to have enough space to hopefully purchase half of a cow this fall. I found I had one whole shelf full of stock bones that I need to use. I also got all of the remaining meats grouped by type, to better help me plan our meals and use what we have wisely.

I have started setting up ‘centers’ for everything I do at home, where everything needed for that project is centrally located to where the work is performed. I have created centers for laundry, baking, dry goods in use, personal care, herbs, school and work, gardening and more. This inspiration came from listening to Vicki Bentley at the NCHE conference Memorial Day Weekend. Vicki is an excellent speaker, and if you ever have the opportunity to hear her, I highly encourage you to do so. I would be willing to drive to a conference just to hear her speak, she gave so much inspiration, encouragement and practical advice. (You can purchase MP3s of Vicki’s presentations from the conference here.) Her chore and star chart information alone has been a huge help to me in getting my kids motivated to do chores and take initiative without being asked. Vicki said in one of her presentations that if you spend just 5 minutes looking for one item every morning and every evening, you waste over 60 hours a year. I have found that I am going up and down the hallway and the stairs too often because things are not centrally located, and I wish to free up that time so I can accomplish more.

For the baking and dry good centers, I took one cabinet and placed my measuring cups and measuring spoons along with mason jars of xanthan gum, salt, baking soda, baking powder on the bottom shelf. In racks hanging below the cabinet are all of my spices. Each spice has a label on the lid so I don’t have to hunt for the correct one. The rapadura, flours and dry goods are located behind me on a baker’s rack. Each item in stored in a quart to half-gallon size mason jar with a labeled lid. I do not have to take extra steps in the kitchen, saving me time and energy. We also reorganized and deep cleaned the kitchen.

For the laundry center, we reorganized the laundry room so that we now have a rotating system for the clothes hangers, separated by type. Each day when we get dressed, the empty clothes hangers get hung on each bedroom doorknob. One child is tasked with the chore of retrieving all of the clothes hangers, taking them downstairs and putting each hanger where it belongs. This has solved the problems with wrinkled clothing and additional ironing time because it had to be hauled up the stairs after coming out of the dryer while we hunt for the clothes hangers that fit the item. And you know any time kids haul a piece of clothing, it’s bound to wind up wrinkled. 😉 All of the different clothing and fabric types now each have their own bin to facilitate quick sorting and washing of the laundry. We finally installed the utility sink that we purchased in 2007 in the laundry room.

For our school supplies we use daily, we repurposed a rolling cart which is now located within reach of my computer. We also located a bookcase and the filing cabinet beside my desk in order to facilitate school, bill paying and handling my job. Now, when mail comes in, I can handle it immediately and drop it right into the correct file folder in the filing cabinet. Paper doesn’t have to be handled twice, nothing gets lost and I don’t worry about any bills or other important paperwork getting missed. We located a locking cabinet with doors in an unused area of the living room that holds shoe-box sized rubermaid containers. These boxes contain our items that are in pieces, such as the math blocks and flashcards, as well as the games and the small-piece items such as K-nex and Legos.

I updated my household binder (Flylady style) and created binders for family recipes, every mailer I have published, our school records, and the gardening and homesteading records. I also have one binder where I keep info on ideas or things I want to try, build plans for potential projects and the like.

I obtained two rolling carts, one for each child. These carts now hold the library books and are parked beside the homeschool cabinet. These carts are incredibly handy and stop the problem of having to haul the books to the car and into the library, breaking my back. This has just about eliminated our hunting for a book that is due and it keeps the books out of the kid’s bedrooms.

I created two memory card boxes. I used the Simply Charlotte Mason Memory System and made one for our scripture verses and made one for the myriad of other things I wish my children to memorize. We have included everything from family members phone numbers to poems, science and history facts, songs and more. These boxes set atop our rolling school supply cart.

I still have to get the dining room chairs recovered so we can reclaim our dining room table. We are also looking for an effective storage solution for our canning jars, both full and empty. Both of these projects are likely going to take some cash, so I’m looking for the most workable solution that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

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KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet. KerryAnn has over nine years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader. Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love. Each mailer contains one soup, five dinners, one breakfast, on dessert and extras. You can learn more about our Menu Mailers at the CTF website. For a free sample Menu Mailer, join our mailing list. You can also join our forum to chat with other traditional foodists and learn more.

Dollars to Donuts

February 21, 2011 by KerryAnn 16 Comments

We recently had a day that needed a special breakfast but I was having trouble coming up with the right thing to fix. I started brainstorming out loud with my better half, from across the room. We both buried ourselves into Google on our respective computers, looking for a good recipe to try. The word ‘donut’ fell out. We both smiled. We have had donuts only a couple of times since we went gluten-free. I have purchased the Kinninnick donuts twice from the salvage for special occasions, when we could get a box for $1. But I don’t like to use them often, because they contain ingredients that aren’t real food.

The ingredients in Kinninnick vanilla donuts are

Icing (sugar, water, glucose, vanilla), Sugar, White Rice Flour, Tapioca Starch, Water, Whole Eggs, Sweet Rice Flour, Palm Fruit Oil (non hydrogenated), Frutooligosaccharide, Yeast, Pea Protein, Egg Whites, Xanthan Gum, Fruit Concentrate (dextrose, dextrin, fibre), Salt, Rice Bran Extract, Cellulose, KinnActive Baking Powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, pea starch, mono calcium phosphate), Glucono Delta Lactone, Sodium Bicarbonate, Nutmeg

Last time I checked, I wasn’t able to grow lactone or pyropho… pyra…… in my back yard. Yeah. And, for sake of comparison, here’s the ingredients in a Dunkin’ Donut:

Donut: Enriched Unbleached Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron as Ferrous Sulfate, Thiamin Mononitrate, Enzyme, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Palm Oil, Water, Dextrose, Soybean Oil, Whey (a milk derivative), Skim Milk, Yeast, Contains less than 2% of the following: Salt, Leavening (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda), Defatted Soy Flour, Wheat Starch, Mono and Diglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Cellulose Gum, Soy Lecithin, Guar Gum, Xanthan Gum, Artificial Flavor, Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative), Enzyme, Colored with (Turmeric and Annatto Extracts, Beta Carotene), Eggs; Crunch Topping: Sugar, Coconut, Yellow Corn Flour, Caramel Color, BHT (antioxidant); Glaze: Sugar, Water, Maltodextrin, Contains 2% or less of the following: Mono and Diglycerides, Agar, Cellulose Gum, Citric Acid, Potassium Sorbate (Preservative), Artificial Flavor; Apple Filling: Water, Sugar Syrup, Corn Syrup, Evaporated Apples, Modified Food Starch, Contains 2% or less of the following: Natural Flavors, Citric Acid, Sodium Benzoate and Potassium Sorbate (Preservatives), Salt, Cinnamon, Malic Acid, Nutmeg.

I don’t think I need to say much about that list, it speaks for itself. And Krispy Kreme won’t even give an ingredient list online that I could find. Just a statement that they don’t use trans-fats in their shortening blend. Ahem.

So I set out to make healthy donuts my kids would love. [Read more…] about Dollars to Donuts

Sourdough Five-Minute Methods

February 17, 2011 by KerryAnn Leave a Comment

One of the beauties of certain types of bread baking is that you can make your dough and stash it in the fridge until you’re ready to bake it. You can mix the dough, pop it in the fridge and walk away for 8 hours to a day, then come back and punch the dough down and shape it when you’re ready. Allow for a second rising or not, depending on what you’re making, then bake. This is such a major help to a busy cook! You can make the dough, using sourdough instead of yeast, when you have time and let it slowly rise and ferment in the fridge until you need to use it. This makes the finished product entirely fermented, which is a major advantage over other recipes that need a lot of unsoaked flour added to the dough in order to make the end product have the right texture.

This method has become a boon to me. Instead of having to make sure I begin early enough in the morning and have enough time to complete it by dinner, I can complete it at my convenience and let it hang out in the fridge until I have another few minutes to handle it again. No more having to stop and check several times a day, making sure that the dough is rising at the right pace so that dinner won’t be late or the dough won’t over-rise.

The only draw-back is that it does require advanced planning. I cycle my baking on loaf bread and pizza crusts so that I do a large amount of one item at one time, on a day when I have time, and then freeze the extra. I make multiple pizza crusts at once, par-bake them and then freeze the extras so I always have them on hand. The most tedious portion of doing it this way is the baking, since I only have one pizza stone, but it really isn’t difficult at all if you’re already planning on spending some time in the kitchen anyway.

This is all based on the rising method presented in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Instead of using yeast, sourdough culture is used so that it will be traditional. I first encountered this method in gluten-free sourdough form on the Everything Free Eating blog’s sourdough bread recipe. If you are looking for a good bread recipe, I highly recommend hers, as it’s the one I use myself.

The only recipe I don’t do this with is my pancakes. Due to the leavening, the rising effect would wear off if you allowed it to sit long-term in the fridge.

So, if you’re a busy cook and you’re using sourdough, I recommend you give this method a try to see if it will allow you more freedom on how you can handle your bread. Personally, the whole concept has been liberating in that it has freed me to be able to use sourdough in more of my cooking. It no longer feels like a major time commitment to be able to enjoy breads as part of our diet.

Disclaimer: I do not have an affiliate relationship with Amazon and I receive no profit if you click any of the above links.

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Teriyaki Salmon

March 24, 2011 by KerryAnn Leave a Comment

Teriyaki Salmon
From the Menu Mailer

4 salmon fillets
½ cup coconut oil, melted
5 cloves garlic, pressed
2½ tbs grated ginger
2 Tbs lime juice
2 Tbs sesame oil
2 Tbs rice vinegar
2 Tbs raw honey
1 cup tamari, soy sauce or coconut aminos (soy sauce substitute recipe is in the Often Used Recipes eBook)
½ tsp pepper

Place salmon fillets in a glass baking dish. In a small bowl, whisk remaining ingredients until combined. Pour over salmon and turn to coat. Cover and refrigerate 2-3 hours. Grill over hot coals 5-7 minutes per side, bake for 12-15 minutes at 350 degrees or pan-fry 3-5 minutes per side, until the fish flakes when tested with a fork.

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