kids

Dollars to Donuts II- Chocolate Donuts

April 18, 2012 by KerryAnn 16 Comments

For information on the pans and techniques for making these donuts, see our first post in this series, Dollars to Donuts. This recipe is grain-free and nutrient dense. There is one egg and over one tablespoon of fat in each donut, and the recipe has a low-sweetener option. I prefer making the low-sweetener variety using Nu Naturals Stevia. I get my stevia from Iherb.com. You can get a discount on your first order with coupon code KED184.

Chocolate Donuts

1/2 cup coconut flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/3 tsp salt
1/3 – 1/2 cup rapadura/sucanat and 1/4 tsp stevia or 1 cup rapadura (2 cups if your family has not adjusted to low-sugar)
6 eggs
1/2 cup coconut milk, dairy milk or water
1 Tbs vanilla extract
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
1/4 cup butter, melted (or additional coconut oil)

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Generously grease your pan, if you are using stoneware, and set aside.

Sift together the coconut flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt. If you are using powdered stevia, sift this in as well. Set the bowl aside. In a separate bowl, whisk together the rapadura, eggs, milk, vanilla and oil. Whisk the wet into the dry ingredients. Add a little extra water or milk, if needed, to get the batter to come together and be wet enough to pour. Quickly pour into the greased pan- I made this easier by transferring the batter to a pyrex measuring cup so I could measure and pour without blobbing the batter all over the little divet-thingie in the pan. The coconut flour will absorb the fluid as it sits, so get it into the pan so it is easier to work with. Jiggle the pan a little to get the batter to level out.

Bake for 20-22 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean for a stoneware mini-bundt pan. For a traditionally-sized donut pan, the baking time would be reduced to 15-18 minutes.

Glaze- I make my donuts to be very low sweetener, then mixed a little powdered sugar with some cocoa, vanilla extract and enough unsweetened almond milk to make a glaze and drizzled it over.

This post is part of Monday Mania, Traditional Tuesdays, Tasty Tuesdays, Slightly Indulgent Tuesdays, Grain Free Tuesdays and Show Me What Ya Got.

Coping Through an Extended Illness When You Have Toddlers

June 24, 2011 by KerryAnn 2 Comments

I’m often asked how I got through an extended illness with two small children to care for, alone, for just about 24/7. Hubby was home only one or two days a week when I was sick. I pretty much had everything on my own and for a large part of it, I was either vomiting 24/7 or the first half of the day. My oldest was 1.5 when I went through hyperemesis with my son. Then they were 1.5 and 3. 5 when I became seriously ill for a couple of years with celiac. Here’s what I did in an effort to cope.

[Read more…]

My Story

June 13, 2011 by KerryAnn 49 Comments

Note: I am neither a dietitian nor a doctor. I do not dispense medical advice nor do I offer any information on treatments nor cures for any medical condition. Always consult a physician before proceeding with any treatment. Our full disclaimer is at the bottom of this page.

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In June and July on the blog, we’re going to discuss gut health. Gut health is a hot topic in the traditional foods world because so many people are not healing despite a traditional foods diet. I became seriously ill and healed my gut before the currently fashionable diets came out. This is my story.

A very wise man in my life often tells me, “A problem well stated is half solved.” Five years ago, we knew all of the problems, but had none of the answers.

I was born 7 weeks early to an undernourished mother who was 95 pounds when I was conceived. My childhood was rather uneventful health wise, other than huge tonsils and repeat ear infections. I grew normally and had none of the digestive problems associated with celiac disease.

I was diagnosed with PCOS in 2001 and was told I’d never had kids. I changed my diet to traditional foods after seeing my cat, Blue, have an ‘incurable’ and life-shortening health problem healed by a species-appropriate diet. I was told he wouldn’t live long and would require expensive, difficult medication until his death.

It had worked for him why can’t it work for me?

[Read more…] about My Story

Kid-Happy Breakfasts: Banana Tacos

May 16, 2011 by KerryAnn 12 Comments

I confess. I’ve been in a rut. An oatmeal rut.

Mindlessly fixing the same bowl of oatmeal, day in and day out. Why? It’s easy, it’s convenient. I can make it in the crock-pot the night before while I’m wide awake and I can go on auto-pilot the next morning. It’s nice not to think when I get out of bed. I’m not a morning person and I don’t drink coffee in a vain attempt to make myself a morning person. It never worked, anyway.

I’m perfectly content to eat a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast every morning, six days a week, for months on end. My kids are not. The complaints grew until one morning I looked up from my empty bowl to see their little upturned noses over their untouched servings.

Que the revolt. The natives were restless and I’d better do something.

So the next day I got in the kitchen and cooked up this kid-pleasing breakfast and issued a promise that I wouldn’t serve oatmeal more than three mornings a week. The chief cook and bottle washer is safe. For now.

Banana Tacos

From the Menu Mailer

If your kids don’t like bananas, you can use another fruit. I couldn’t cook these fast enough, my kids ate them and got back in line at the stove while I cooked. They’re requested it to become a weekly feature on our breakfast or snack menu. If you don’t want your child eating two bananas in a day, do one rolled up with the banana and any additional crêpes rolled up with the nut butter, omitting the banana.

¼ cup coconut or dairy yogurt
1 cup warm water
½ cup flour of your choice (I used sorghum)
2 eggs
½ Tbs rapadura
stevia to taste
1 Tbs melted coconut oil or butter plus extra for cooking
pinch salt
heavy dash cinnamon
about ½ cup nut butter, optional
4-8 bananas

In a blender, combine yogurt, water and flour. Blend until smooth. Cover and allow to soak for 8 hours or overnight.

The next morning, add the eggs, rapadura, stevia, 1 Tbs melted oil, salt and cinnamon to the blender and blend until smooth. Set aside.

Heat a skillet over medium heat. Spread a thin layer of oil over the bottom of the pan using a pastry brush. Pour 2-3 Tbs of the crêpe batter into the hot pan and spread it into a 4-inch circle. Cook about 2 minutes on one side. Using a spatula, loosen all of the edges then gently flip and cook another 1 minute on the second side. Repeat until the batter is used up, keeping the pan lightly oiled with the pastry brush between crepes.

Spread each crêpe with a thin layer of nut butter and place a banana on top. Roll the crêpe around the banana like a taco shell.

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Product Review: Time 4 Learning

March 25, 2011 by KerryAnn 2 Comments

If you don’t have children, check out our Recipe Index and take a look at some of the yummy recipes we have posted in the last year.

If you have children, today’s resource can benefit you regardless of which route you have chosen for their education. Time4Learning.com works for home schooled, private schooled or public schooled children, whether they are ahead or behind other children their age. [Read more…] about Product Review: Time 4 Learning

Fermentation Friday: Fermented French Fries

March 13, 2011 by KerryAnn 42 Comments

We’ve fallen in love with this recipe and this is the only way I will make fries in the future. My kids inhale these and ask for more, no matter how many I make. They are just like I remember fast food fries to be- crisp on the outside, hot and soft on the inside. And since they’re fried in tallow, I feel good about my kids eating them.

When I developed this recipe, I’d been in a fermenting funk. I was having a hard time coming up with something creative. Don’t get me wrong, I love my sauerkraut and kefirs. But I needed something…. more. Different. Something my kids would love. One of my dear friends, Loztnausten, had a post about making shoestring french fries and one on fermenting fries. I had read it long ago, but I kept on having the ‘too much work’ mantra scroll in my head. Hand-cutting all of those fries…. I wanted a food processor with a blade that could do it for me, but it was out of my budget. If I wanted french fries, I would ask my husband to make them for me as a treat, when I was working a late night and he had some free time and was looking to dote on me by whipping up something special and junky in the kitchen for us to munch on while I slaved away on the computer. Last January my husband made some french fries, using the mandolin slicer I had recently acquired from a friend. He asked me to look up what temp to cook them at, as his last batch had turned out too oil-logged. We knew he needed a higher temperature, so I surfed over to Everything Free Eating to see how LZ does her fries and I again saw the fermented fries post.

A light bulb went off.

The Research

I did a little research. In this paper, fermentation with a lactic acid bacteria (LAB) resulted in a reduction of the acrylamide in french fries by as much as 90% after 15 minutes. Fermenting in an anaerobic environment is the best way to encourage the production of LAB at home so your can achieve this same result without needing a lab coat, a college degree and an industrial process to cook your diner.

Why do we want to reduce the acrylamide? It’s a carcinogen. Anything that browns while it cooks- bread, potatoes, chips, biscuits, pretty much any baked or fried good, forms acrylamide as it browns.

How does LAB fermentation work to reduce the acrylamide? A quote from Science Daily tells us

“Acrylamide is formed as a reaction between the amino acid asparagine and simple sugars such as glucose and fructose. Put simply, the lactic acid bacteria remove these compounds and inhibit the formation of acrylamide.”

If you’d like to read more about how LABs consume these simple sugars, this book is a good place to start studying. The paper mentioned above, Lactic acid fermentation reduces acrylamide formed during production of fried potato products, was published in the journal Aspects of Applied Biology. It says in its summary:

“Lactic acid bacteria (LAB) metabolise simple sugars rapidly, producing lactic acid which lowers pH and reduces the Maillard reactions initiated by heat. This method can be used in industries producing fried potato products to reduce their problems with acrylamide formation. Applying the LAB method to French fries shortly prior to the pre-frying step reduces acrylamide formation as much as 90%. Browning reactions consequently are reduced. Sensory analysis shows loss of colour and burnt smell and taste without affecting quality of final potato sticks. A fermentation time of approximately 15 minutes is needed given a dense LAB culture. The results from large scale industrial- batch as well as continuous experiments – indicate that LAB fermentation provides the best means for acrylamide mitigation in the production of fried potato products.”

The Application

So the research says that LAB thrives best in an anaerobic environment. Anaerobic means that oxygen is not present; aerobic means that oxygen is present. In order to get LABs to proliferate, I needed to provide an anaerobic environment that would encourage their growth while discouraging the growth of all non-beneficial species, especially the aerobic ones.

So, how can be get an anaerobic environment in home fermentation? That can only be accomplished with a seal that prevents oxygen from entering while an airlock allows carbon dioxide to escape. Without an anaerobic environment, the LABs will not flourish and the acrylamides will not greatly diminish. Open air fermentation will not reduce acrylamides to the same extent due to the lack of LABs. As the bacteria produce carbon dioxide and use up the oxygen, it reduces the population of undesirable, aerobic bacteria and allows the LAB to flourish in the oxygenless environment. The Pickl-It provides this type of environment, as it as an airtight seal and an airlock for the growing carbon dioxide to escape. An open bowl provides a continuous supply of oxygen, never increasing the amount of LAB present and giving an environment that is ideal for the undesirable, aerobic bacteria to flourish. A mason jar would not, either, as it has to be burped regularly to allow the building carbon dioxide to escape. Any time you burp a mason jar, it allows oxygen to rush into the vessel, starting the process all over again. Not burping the jar would cause explosions, as I have had happen in the past. An air-tight vessel with an air lock is the only way to see the LABs flourish and therefore reduce the acrylamide in the potatoes.

This makes sense to me. The examples of ancient fermentation crocks I have seen contained wooden lids and were buried while they ferment. A good example is Korean Kimchi. Ditto for the Icelanders and their fermented shark, called Hakarl, which sits in the ground for 6-12 weeks to ferment. You don’t get air circulation under the ground.

You will notice in the study, that the concentration of LABs used to reduce the acrylamide by 90% was a 1% solution. In order to reach a concentration of 1% in your own kitchen, you need your potatoes to be in an environment where oxygen can not enter for 3-6 days, according to the Handbook of Fermented Functional Foods. If you preview this book on Amazon using their Look Inside! feature, you can read about it on page 402 of this wonderful and very detailed book. Other parts of this book are available on Google Books, if you’d like to read the beginning of the book.

The Recipe

Mmmmm… crispy outside, soft inside, and just the right amount of salt!