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
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.
[Read more…] about Strategies for Hidden Veggies III- Waffles
This is the new favorite way to eat oatmeal at our house. Recently, someone posted a blog post on Facebook about how to do this. When I went back to find it, I couldn’t turn it up. So I had to try it on memory, and what I came up with worked well. I hope you enjoy it. If you know who originally posted that recipe, please let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.
(Edit: the blog post I saw is here. Thank you velcromom for letting me know!)
This recipe will work with oatmeal that has fruit or sweetener added but it won’t work well if the oatmeal had a lot of extra fluid, like milk or cream, added after cooking. It’s better to cook the oatmeal, place what you want to set aside in the fridge and then add the extra cream or milk to what you’ll be serving for breakfast that day. I love planned leftovers!
Fried Oatmeal
From the Menu Mailer
Volume 4 Week 15
[Read more…] about Cheap Eats- Budget Breakfasts VI: Fried Oatmeal
I am often appalled at the price of hot cereals, especially gluten-free hot cereals. If you have a blender or a grain mill, you can make them for a fraction of the cost of the commercially produced products and they will be fresher. Rice farina is the perfect example of this. Bob’s Red Mill sells it for $17.72 for 7 pounds, which comes out to $2.53 a pound. You can get whole rice for the normal price of 40 cents a pound around here, probably less if you go to an ethnic market, and then do about 3 minute’s worth of work yourself to save the $2.13 difference. I have also done this with sorghum and had excellent results.
[Read more…] about Cheap Eats- Budget Breakfasts III: Rice Farina
