Between these Sourdough Pancakes and the Soaked and Veggied Blender Waffles, my kids are totally in love with breakfast again! I haven’t heard a request for cold cereal in ages, and I couldn’t be happier.
[Read more…] about Fermentation Friday: Sourdough Pancakes
Our Food Storage 101 article on our website was so popular, we decided to expand it into a blog series! Over the next several weeks, we will walk you through the whys and hows of food storage, whether you wish to have a week or a year of food on hand.
Why Should I Store Food?
There are many reasons why people choose to practice some form of food storage, and none of them are wrong. So many people are concerned right now. Since I began working with food storage in 2007, I have seen many reasons to choose to stock a deep pantry.
In 2009, our family sustained a major hit in the form of income loss when my husband, along with 90% of his co-workers, were laid off. Three months prior, everyone in the company had taken a salary reduction in a move to delay those lay-offs. We knew it was coming, we just didn’t know the day. Thankfully, we had one year of food storage in place when the lay-off happened. [Read more…] about Real Food Storage- Deep Pantry Principles for Traditional Foodists
On Surfin’ Saturday, I share links from around the web. It’s not always food related and not always blogs. It’s anything I find inspiring or helpful for any part of life.
Food
Last year on the forum, we started a Baby Steps section to help people new to traditional foods. Each month, I will be posting those baby steps to the blog in case you’re wanting to start your own Traditional Foods journey.
For March, our theme is to begin reducing sugar intake now that we’ve upped the vitamin and mineral content of the meals.
[Read more…] about Baby Steps- Transitioning to Traditional Foods in March
Produce is always cheapest when you buy it in season for your location. While I can not list every single area of the country and what is in season, this is a general over-view of what is currently in season for most of the United States. If you only buy local produce, not all of this will be available to you, but if you do purchase from stores, this is what should be the least expensive and the most fresh right now, even if it’s being trucked in from another state. Use this as a guide for purchasing large amounts from non-local farmer’s markets for canning, freezing, lacto-fermenting, dehydrating and preserving. If you can purchase locally and it is within your budget, please do. However, if you are new to eating seasonally or don’t have a local farmer, this list will help you make the best purchasing decisions.
Artichoke
Asparagus (early)
Avocado, Haas [Read more…] about What’s in Season- March
If you haven’t already done so, don’t forget to enter our Menu Mailer giveaway here. It closes on Wednesday, March 9th at 11:59 PM EST.
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I’ve been gluten free for four-and-a-half years now. In that time, I have watched a myriad of products come onto the market. It’s rare that I try a product new to the GF market and am completely disgusted.
Tonight, that happened.
And not only was I disgusted, I was downright mad.
Wednesday, I took the kids for their dental check-up. On the way home, we swung by the store. I was completely excited when I saw Lundberg’s new Brown Rice Couscous. I have a couple of favorite recipes for couscous that I had back when we went gluten-free. I had held on to them, hoping that eventually someone would debut a gluten-free couscous. So I happily grabbed two boxes from the shelf and danced all the way to the check-out line. I planned on making my favorite chicken dish for dinner on Thursday night and the couscous dessert this weekend. It would be a special treat. If the couscous was good, it would be the meal I would request for my birthday coming up shortly.
So, tonight I started making dinner, very excited to once again have a favorite dish available for special occasions. I popped open the box and my heart sank. I took one look at the ‘couscous’ and immediately felt like I had been duped. It’s not really couscous. Couscous is a pasta. This product is nothing more than cracked rice! It’s simply grains of rice that have been cut unto three or four pieces each. I was mad that I had paid so much money for something I could have simply made in my grain mill for a quarter of the cost! It works out to be over $5 a pound!!!
Well, disappointed or not, I decided to go ahead and fix the dish. The couscous is toasted, so it does have the nutty flavor I remember. And the pieces are cut to the right size. So it gets good marks on flavor and mouth-feel. It cooks just like whole rice, so it gets good marks for the ease in fixing it. It also gets good marks for being certified non-GMO. But it gets a big, fat zero from me for value for the cost and false advertising, and that over-rides all of the other considerations. I will not buy this product again, and I have written to the company to express my disgust. Couscous is a pasta, not a cracked grain!
So, I recommend you save your money and run your rice through a grain mill instead. It will be far cheaper and you won’t be supporting a company that is engaging in some false advertising while charging a quadruple price for it!
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Disclaimer: I have received no payment or free product in exchange for this review. I have no financial interest in the product or the company.
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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.
2 Responses to “Product Review- Lundberg Brown Rice Couscous”
1. Tas says:
February 25, 2011 at 03:02 | edit
Maybe they were getting mixed up with burghal which is cracked wheat.
2. KerryAnn Foster says:
February 25, 2011 at 19:35 | edit
That’s possible, Tas, but I sure hope their research department would have better sense! Lundberg is normally a very good company.
