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Sugar and Immunity: Pumpkin Pie

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CTF is preparing for the Fall and Winter holidays by discussing how sugar and carbohydrate intake affect immunity and how you can help keep you and your children well through the festivities.  We will offer daily recipes at the bottom of each post.  We will return to the Bone Broth Marathon at the completion of this series.

These posts are longer than my usual, to-the-point-here’s-the-recipe posts.   If you’re just here for the recipes, scroll down.  It’s at the end of the post.

Insulin’s Effect On The Immune System

In the last post, we showed that when you consume carbohydrates or sugar, you blood glucose rises.  When glucose rises, a hormone called insulin goes up. Insulin is the hormone that allows the glucose to be taken up by the cells of the body so the blood level of glucose can decrease. Elevated levels of insulin discourages Vitamin C uptake by the cells, encourages the storage of fat and suppress the release of growth hormones, all of which leads to a depressed immune system.  It can also cause an exaggerated drop in blood sugar, called hypoglycemia. [Read more…] about Sugar and Immunity: Pumpkin Pie

Crock-Pot Pumpkin Pudding

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Every year when the evening temperatures start to drop and the pumpkins begin to ripen in the garden, I crave this pudding.  I make it often through the winter, as long as I have pumpkin in my root cellar or freezer.

This is not a creamy pudding.  It is thicker with a cake-like texture. It’s almost a cross between a pudding and a pumpkin pie. The outsides of this pudding will brown, so if your children are picky, you might want to serve their bowls out of the middle of the crock-pot. My kids and I like this pudding best when it’s cold, but it’s also good hot.

I imagine egg replacer would work in this pudding, if you are egg free.  If you try it, please post a comment so I know how it works.

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Hidden Veggies: Pumpkin Bean Fudge!

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After I posted yesterday about Adrienne’s Silky Smooth Bean Fudge at Whole New Mom, I started thinking about my long lost love. Pumpkin fudge. I haven’t had it since going GFCF in 2006. Every year, we’d get a small slice at the State Fair in Raleigh and enjoy it. It is a dearly missed treat.  Every Fall around the time we have our local County Fair, I start craving some.

So I got in the kitchen and started working. 15 minutes later, here’s the results.

This year, I’ll be prepared when those Fall cravings hit and in a most healthy way, too!

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Curried Pumpkin Soup

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Jeff and I love this soup. The combination of pumpkin, coriander, coconut milk and curry is beyond fabulous. Don’t skimp on the rapadura, it offsets the spiciness and really makes the flavor pop.  This is a large pot of soup, it makes at least 12 servings.

Curried Pumpkin Soup
From the Menu Mailer

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Strategies for Hidden Veggies III- Waffles

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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

Stretching Soups

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I posted my curried pumpkin soup a few days ago that I made this past weekend.  It was slated to be polished off for today’s lunch, but I didn’t have enough to feed the three of us.  I had about 2 servings left in the mason jar and two hungry children plus myself.

This morning I did my Flylady zone work (we’re in the kitchen this week) and found a small amount of green lentil flour I had left over after grinding some for another dish I’ve been working on.  A light bulb went off.  Lentils work wonderfully to thicken liquids.  With a strongly flavored soup like the curried pumpkin, I was pretty sure it would hide any lentil flavor.  Whole red lentils have no shell and they dissolve when cooked.  Green lentils will hold their shape when cooked.  But when ground into flour, it doesn’t matter what type of lentil you’re using, it works beautifully as a thickener.  Using cooked red lentils would have worked for me if I had the time to cook them, but it was already lunch time and the kids were asking for something to eat so I went with the flour.

I put a small amount of the soup in the bottom of a saucepan.  I whisked in the leftover tablespoon of lentil flour until smooth.  Then I whisked in the remaining soup, enough extra stock to make it three servings, and a little coconut milk I had leftover from breakfast.   I brought it to a boil, reduced to a simmer and cooked it long enough to make sure the lentil flour was cooked through.  It thickened nicely.  I did have to adjust the spices since I added stock. The kids didn’t notice any difference and they ate it without a word.  SCORE!

Like rice, lentils are low in phytates.  I don’t worry about the occasional use of a small amount of unsoaked lentil flour as long as it is well cooked to void any digestive upset uncooked legume products might cause.  If you aren’t working on the fly and you can prepare ahead to soak your lentils, I would have whisked the lentil flour with a tiny amount of acidic water (1 cup water to 1 Tbs lemon juice or whey) and allowed it to sit a few hours before cooking lunch.

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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.