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Homemade Corn Syrup Replacement Recipe

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One of the biggest problems with holiday foods is avoiding the high fructose corn syrup in products and the corn syrup in your Christmas baking.  Even when you decide to make compromise foods, many of them call for corn syrup.  That cuts whole classes of recipes out.

After talking with some online friends, I found that some use agave successfully for replacing corn syrup in some dishes, but I couldn’t find where anyone said it had worked well on candies.  So I started googling and I found several recipes online to make a corn syrup replacement.  This recipe worked the best for us, and is now my go-to so I can make pecan pie and caramels and nougats for Christmas parties.

 

Corn Syrup Replacement

From the Christmas Menu Mailer
1 cup sugar
¾ cup water
¼ tsp cream of tartar
Pinch salt

Combine everything in a saucepan and bring to a boil.  Reduce to a simmer and cover.  Cook for 3 minutes (this washes down any remaining sugar crystals on the sides of the pan back into the solution so it won’t crystalize later).  Uncover and cook to softball stage.  Pour into a clean, hot mason jar and cool completely.  Will store for a long time in the fridge.

Baby Steps- Transitioning to Traditional Foods in March

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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

Whoopie Pie

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This cute little guy is the whoopie pie that is in the Valentine’s Day Menu Mailer.  He’s about 2 inches tall, a portable treat that’s perfect for little hands.  They are gluten and dairy free, and they can easily be made egg-free by using an egg replacer for the cookie.  The whoopie pies are for the kid in all of us.  The frosting is thick but is low in sugar.  I am thrilled that I finally figured out a method to make frosting that doesn’t require white powdered sugar or dairy to thicken it, and this recipe only contains a small amount of powdered rapadura for the sweetener.  Another method is used to thicken the frosting.

The Valentine’s Day meal has a beef recipe, two side dishes and two desserts. The main meal is an Asian-inspired steak, pilaf and vegetable dish.  The steak was just as good cold on a salad the next day as it was hot.  This recipe is now my personal go-to recipe for all cuts of steak, we enjoyed it so much.

The other dessert is called Chocolate Euphoria.  It is an ingenious custard that will only take a few minutes to make and doesn’t require the oven or a water bath.  It’s a great finish to a meal where you’re hosting company because they’ll think it took you a lot of time, effort and fuss to make it. You can smile and thank them for the compliments instead of telling them it only took about 15 minutes to make!

The Mailer also contains four other dinners and one breakfast.  You can purchase the mailer here.

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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.

Navigating Events with Food When You Eat Differently

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The Holidays can strike fear into anyone who feeds her family in a particular style, such as low-carb, traditional or whole foods, or has a child with food allergies or intolerances.  There are mounds of forbidden food everywhere you go.  You receive invitations to events that contain a sea of smiling faces, some thinking they know better than you what your kid needs to eat.  “Just a little taste won’t hurt!  You’re just too controlling, let them live a little!”  They sneak your child bites while an accomplice across the room ties you up in conversation.  There’s dearly loved Great Aunt Matilda who would never feed your celiac child an un-approved bite, but wants to hold her plate of gluteny-goodness in one hand while she kisses and loves on your little one in the other, not realizing the damage it could do.  You desperately don’t want to hurt her feelings, but you don’t want your little guy throwing up for days or wetting the bed for a month, either.  Then there’s those who mean no harm, but just haven’t heard the news yet or don’t realize that what they’re giving your child could make them sick.  You can’t glue your kids to your legs the whole event; they just want to go play with the other kids.  Yet you fully realize that in the room runs the gamut from people who are helpful and supportive to people who would gladly sabotage you.  It’s enough to make any mama grab their kids and run screaming from the best of events!

Then comes the reactions to the food you have brought.  No matter how beautiful or ‘normal’ the dish, people turn their noses up at it with a collective “Ewwww!”  To them, different = disgusting and their minds snap shut just as quick as their jaws when offered a bite.  Your plate is the only one who comes home barely touched beyond the servings you spooned out for you and your kids and the one serving your supportive aunt or adventurous brother-in-law took.  Your husband’s extolling your cooking abilities to the family is met with blank stares.  Many people assume because you have made something different, your food doesn’t contain sugar/flavor/spices or any other myriad of attributes or ingredients they deem ‘normal.’  I once had to tell someone at a church event that store-bought gluten-free cookies weren’t health food and they did contain white sugar, they just didn’t contain the protein that would make me sick.  He turned his nose up at my plate of store-bought cookies until he learned that they weren’t ‘nasty health food.’

To many people food equals love, and love could never hurt.  The denial or changing of food, no matter the reason, evokes a very visceral reaction in some people that comes from places you can’t even begin to fathom.  [Read more…] about Navigating Events with Food When You Eat Differently

Sanity Savers- Batch Cooking

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Let’s face it.  What mom has gobs of free time on her hands?  Since having children, the only free time I’ve ever had was when I was too sick to enjoy the time off.

When people are new to TF, one of the first questions they ask is how to reduce the amount of time they are spending in the kitchen.  Ferments, cooking and baking from scratch, making stock and cooking 2-3 meals a day plus snacks can eat up a lot of time if you let it.  Beginners feel overwhelmed by trying to squeeze more time out of an already busy day.  I normally give the same words of advice to everyone that asks:  [Read more…] about Sanity Savers- Batch Cooking

Garden Planning 2010

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Here’s the varieties I’m looking into planting this year in my garden.  I’m trying to pick  high-yielding veggies appropriate for our zone, which is 6a/7a.  My seeds come from Fedco, Bountiful Gardens and Baker Creek.  I also do some trading with friends.

  • Kale- dwarf Siberian, red Russian and white Russian.
  • Broccoli- calabrese and rapini
  • Cabbage- Brunswick
  • Chinese cabbage- extra dwarf pak choy, ching chang, yod fah, Chinese kale, gailan
  • Cauliflower- Violetta
  • Cantaloupe- Jenny Lind
  • Cowpea- Six-week pinkeye purple hull
  • Tomato- my cold weather tomato will be Crnkovic Yugoslavian.  Amish paste is my standard canning tomato.  I will also grow Rutgers and Homestead and try Tomato Spear’s Tennessee Green, Roma and royal chico for the first time.
  • Carrot- Autumn king, Atomic red, tonda di parigi, Amsterdam, and cosmic purple.
  • Beet- early wonder and cylindra
  • Winter squash- bush buttercup, table queen bush and sugar loaf delicata
  • Summer squash- black beauty zucchini and yellow crookneck
  • Fennel- zina fino
  • Garden pea- sugar ann
  • Cucumber- sweet marketmore for slicing and Boston for pickling
  • Beans-provider snap bush, cannellini, king of the early, Tennessee greasy grits
  • Peppers- Leutschauer paprika, Anaheim, tam jalapeno, long thin cayenne, California wonder, Toppo rosso
  • Radish- daikon and white icicle
  • Turnip- purple top white globe.
  • Spinach- bloomsdale and winter giant
  • Lettuces-anuenue, little gem, parris island cos romaine, winter bibb, mangetaspreen, dandelion, stinging nettle, deer tongue, pirat butterhead, black seeded simpson, tango, winter marvel, majestic red, pablo, strawberry spinach (which really isn’t spinach) and anything else I can seed swap for.  We like a wide variety.
  • Chard- five-color silverbeet
  • Onion- Texas early grano
  • Okra- Clemson spineless
  • Leek- musselburgh
  • Kohlrabi- gigante
  • Potatoes- Kennebec
  • Sweet potatoes- I’m not sure yet, but I have until May to decide.
  • Garden berries- ground cherries and huckleberry

I’m not doing corn this year due to space limitations as compared to yield.  Collards are one of the few veggies I will not eat.  I think I’m going to leave out the rutabagas, too.  I also decided not to grow another monster Candy Roaster squash plant this year due to the space, as well as any grains.  Now I must plot the garden out then pick both culinary and medicinal herbs based off of how much space remains once I fit all of the veggies in. Then I will make a list of how many plants to start and on what date.

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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.