Epic Homemade Muffin Cereal

Okay, guys. This is EPIC! I was looking for a good soaked grain muffin recipe, and I found this one and decided to give it a try. http://gnowfglins.com/2010/04/21/erins-spiced-oatmeal-yogurt-muffins/ It seems like a pretty cool website, too - not just for the recipe, but in general. You should check it out.

Anyway, the muffins turned out a little crumbly and dry, and they were slightly overdone around the outside edges, although that might just be our oven. I've been having trouble getting used to it - it seems hotter than most ovens I've used. But moving on... Kaira and I enjoyed the muffins over a couple of days, and while we were enjoying them I left them sitting out on a plate in the open air. The crumbs, which were all over the plate, because did I mention the muffins came out CRUMBLY? Like super super crumbly? The crumbs dried out, and I thought, hmm, I wonder if I can pour these in a bowl of milk and eat them like cereal? And OH! It was GOOD!!!! Way better than the muffins, though again that could have mostly been the fault of my oven. Also, they might have been more moist if I had used honey or maple syrup as the sweetener instead of whole sugar. Maybe I'll try that one day.

So anyhow, today I made another batch and I just baked the whole thing in a huge stoneware rectangular cake pan thing. Like a batch of brownies. And when they were done I ran a spatula through it and crumbled it to bits, then put it back in the oven at 150 degrees for several hours to dry the crumbs out. And YES! Successfully made cereal. On purpose this time!

I'll try to get some pictures up here one day. But WOW! And this is unprocessed, GOOD FOR YOU cereal! Not slow suicide in a box. :) It's amazing!

Great day, plus an amazing recipe for EPIC CHOCOLATE ALMOND COOKIES!!!

I had an amazing day today. We have some new friends, Joshua and Sarah, that we met a couple of weeks ago at Southside (our church). Apparently they've known Wesley's uncle/our pastor for quite some time, but our paths have only just now finally crossed - and I'm so glad they did! What a BLESSING!!!



We had a great time the other night starting a game of Lord of the Rings Risk, which we finished today. And even more exciting, both Josh and Sarah are writers, so we got to spend a ton of time discussing our books, our reasons for writing, characters, plot outlining, and all that good writer stuff. :) They also really reminded me WHY we do this - we're writing not just to entertain, but to share a message. We're essentially teaching God to the world through the art of story, and as teachers of God's message we bear a tremendous responsibility to do our absolute best. It was very motivating, and I think we're going to be a great encouragement to one another, not to mention how wonderful it is to have like-minded people to bounce ideas off of... I'm so excited about this new friendship!!!

They were here all day, so we did some other stuff too - among which was BAKING! :) Sarah is very sensitive to gluten, so she eats only gluten-free foods... so we made THESE. They were SO GOOD. I should have taken pictures. Sorry about that.

Anyway, Sarah and I adapted this from a recipe I loved from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, written by Sally Fallon. (You can find the original recipe either in the book, obviously, or copied down on another blog here: http://kellythekitchenkop.com/2009/10/gluten-free-almond-cookies-made-with-arrowroot-flour-real-food-wednesday.html)

Here is my and Sarah's variation: Epic Chocolate Almond Cookies :)

1 1/2 cups almonds
1/2 cup softened coconut oil
1 cup arrowroot flour
1/2 cup whole sugar
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
4 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract

Place almonds in a blender or food processor and process to a fine meal. Add remaining ingredients and mix until well blended. (I didn't have enough almonds, so I made up for it with extra arrowroot flour. My dough turned out pretty dry, so we added some water to moisten it.) Form dough into walnut-sized balls and place on cookie sheets. Press down on the cookies to flatten them a little.

Bake at 300* for a total of about 20 minutes. Let cool completely before moving to an airtight container. Store in refrigerator.

Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

The other day Wes took me out to play miniature golf. We had a nice little bet going, too. If I won, we would get some Italian food and watch a sermon online together. If he won, we'd go to the store and get a package of crescent roll dough so I could make mini cinnamon rolls.

Well, Wes won, but we didn't go to the store right away. We came home to let Rachel take a nap. And she slept a little longer than we expected her to. As it turned out, Wes was planning to take me out to an Italian place anyway, whether I won or not. (I was very happy about this!) But we were running out of time before church, so we woke Rachel up and drove to the restaurant. I say all this to explain why we didn't end up going to the store to get crescent roll dough. And after church my brother came home with us and he and Wes hung out and played XBox.

While they were gaming, I thought I'd just try to make some cinnamon rolls from scratch and surprise Wes. (They thought I was just making Epic Cookies - which I was, but in between batches I was finding and making THESE.)

http://iowagirleats.com/2011/05/13/no-yeast-required-cinnamon-rolls/

They are SO GOOD!!! I didn't have cream cheese, so I just made regular frosting with powdered sugar and water. (I doubt Wes would have liked cream cheese frosting, anyway.) I also didn't have brown sugar, so I just used white (organic), and I didn't have quite enough butter for the recipe, so I used some butter and some coconut oil. What else... Oh, I didn't have buttermilk either, but I did have some raw milk that had started to sour, so I used that plus a little bit of vinegar - and it turned out I had EXACTLY one cup of milk, which was what the recipe called for. :) I was very happy about that.

Wesley LOVED them! He said they were even better than the mini cinnamon rolls I used to make with packaged crescent roll dough. I'm so excited, because I'm trying to make as much food as I can from scratch now - this was kind of a special thing since he requested them, so I didn't mind, but I'm so glad things turned out the way they did! Now I have this great recipe that I'm sure I'll use whenever I make cinnamon rolls from now on.

Yummy rub recipe

Last week we hosted Lifegroup at our apartment (members of our Lifegroup, a small group from our church, take turns hosting), and Wes wanted to cook a nice dinner for everyone, so I bought a nice brisket at Central Market and Wes was going to fix it in the slow-cooker like a roast. But we didn't have any barbecue sauce, which is what he's used to using for roasts. (I was glad - most barbecue sauces are pretty unhealthy anyway, and we haven't found a healthy one that Wes likes yet.) Anyway, I went online and searched for seasoning recipes for brisket, and I found one to try. I had to modify it a little, as we didn't have all the seasonings it called for... but it was fantastic! Here it is:

5 tsp. paprika
2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. black pepper
1/2 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp. chili powder

I used organic everything, of course. Except salt, which obviously can't be organic because you don't grow it, lol. But I did use nice pink Himalayan sea salt. :) It was so delicious! And today I used it again to cook Wes a nice grass-fed steak. (The steak was also delicious.) I mixed up a batch and put it in a little glass bowl so we can just use however much we want and it's already mixed up for whenever we need some. Unless we go and make a huge brisket again, which used the entire batch by itself.

Anyway, just wanted to share. You can find the original recipe here: http://www.ehow.com/way_5378918_texas-brisket-rub-recipe.html

Stuff I'd Like to Do This Year

Thought I'd make a list of some stuff I'd like to do this year - maybe it'll help me remember so I'll actually do it, lol.

March - make clarified butter
April - make sourdough bread (goal - get a good sandwich bread that Wes will like)
May - learn to make kombucha
June - make filmjolk yogurt
July - learn to make mustard
August - make (good-tasting) cream cheese
September - learn to make kefir
October - learn to make mayonnaise (that tastes good)
November - make (good-tasting) cultured raw butter
December - learn to make vinegar

Other things I'd like to do before the end of this year:
Finish the first book of The Legend of Talis
Learn about essential oils and massage
Go a day without talking
Go a week without asking for anything (selflessness)
Create a home-organization binder
Finish a scrapbook

Homemade Chocolate!

I am currently experimenting with making my own chocolate! I love chocolate - especially on those really emotional days when nothing seems to be going quite right. But since I'm trying to eat healthy, traditionally-prepared foods as much as possible, it seemed a good idea to try to learn how to make my own chocolate. So I started looking online for chocolate recipes using coconut oil and natural sweeteners.

I'm still in the experimenting process, but I'll update this post as soon as I have a successful recipe to share!

UPDATE:

Okay, that didn't take long! And this recipe is sooooo easy! Equal amounts of cacao powder and melted (gently melted, not boiling) virgin coconut oil. Mix by hand. Add pure maple syrup to taste - it doesn't take much - and mix again. Refrigerate. Eat!

When I made it, it turned out sort of soft and fudgy - sooo delicious! If I'd left it in the fridge longer it might have hardened more like a chocolate bar - I don't know. I couldn't wait to try it, lol.

Next on the list - homemade milk chocolate!

UPDATE:

Decided not to attempt milk chocolate, since I haven't been able to find a recipe (yet) that uses cocoa powder and real milk. (They mostly seem to call for cocoa butter and milk powder.)

Made the other recipe again and found out that yes, it does eventually harden completely in the fridge. :) But because the melting point of coconut oil is 76 degrees Fahrenheit, it melts again very quickly in your mouth and gives the chocolate a wonderful soft texture. Yum!

Cottage Cheese Pancakes

Well, my last trip to the grocery store I decided to buy some Organic Valley cottage cheese after discovering that although the milk in it was pasteurized, it was NOT homogenized and was therefore acceptable to me as being healthy enough, lol. But it sat in the fridge all last week, unopened, because to be honest I couldn't think of anything to make with it. I like cottage cheese just by itself, but I had really been hoping to incorporate it into some kind of meal for my family, and with Italian food not being an option (Wes's stomach tends to react poorly to all things overly tomatoey) I didn't really know what to do.

So this morning I searched the web and found a recipe for French cottage cheese pancakes. I changed it up a little to make it healthier and came up with this:

1 cup cottage cheese
3/4 cup arrowroot powder
3 eggs
4 tablespoons whole sugar
3 tablespoons milk
4 tablespoons melted butter
Splash of vanilla extract

I combined everything in the blender and cooked it like I would regular pancakes. They were a little different - kind of mushy on the insides, I guess because of the cottage cheese, so it made me feel like they weren't quite cooked all the way even though I think they really were - but after I ate two or three they really started to grow on me. I think they'd be really good served with crushed blueberries and rolled up, but I didn't have any blueberries to try that out. Maybe next time. Ooh! They might be good spread with Just Fruit jam, too. Hmm...

I did find that they turned out a little less mushy in the middle if I cooked them at a lower temperature. Our stovetop has knobs that range from 1-9, not including the "lo" and "hi" settings, and I usually do pancakes at like a 6, but for this recipe I ended up turning it down to a 3 before they really started turning out good.

Boxed cereals

What do I think of boxed cereal? Well, it tastes great, is easy to fix, and has always been one of my favorite snacks/meals/desserts. But recently I've been reading some information about processed foods (and grains in general) that has led me to believe that even the so-called "healthy" cereals do more harm than good to your body.

Grains, seeds, and beans all contain nutrient inhibitors. As I understand it, these are the things that preserve the nutrients in the seed until it germinates. But if you eat any of these foods with the nutrient inhibitors still in them, they will, as their name implies, inhibit the nutrients from being absorbed by your body. This is why grains, seeds, nuts, and beans need to be either soaked, fermented, or sprouted in order for their nutrients to be accessible to your body.

In addition, boxed cereals are so highly processed that most of their nutritional value is destroyed. Of course, all kinds of synthetic vitamins and minerals are added to cereals to try to boost their nutritional value, but artificial nutrients aren't absorbed into the body nearly as well as natural ones. Which makes me wonder why we don't just eat the stuff God made for us to eat. I mean, it's getting more and more obvious as the scientific research keeps coming in. Natural, unprocessed food is always the healthier way to go. Processed and synthetic foods are constantly being found to cause all kinds of health problems and diseases. So yeah, it looks like God really did know what he was doing when he made all this. Lol. But it just amazes me how long it's taking us to figure that out.

For further research, a well-written and very informative article on cereal can be found here: http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/why_i_don%E2%80%99t_eat_boxed_cereal_%E2%80%94_not_even_the_%E2%80%98healthy%E2%80%99_ones%E2%80%A6.html

And a great article on soaking grains can be found here: http://www.passionatehomemaking.com/2008/04/whole-grains-grinding-soaking.html

Here's a good one on white rice vs. brown, based on the understanding that brown rice, while containing many more nutrients, is also full of nutrient inhibitors, and is very difficult to digest: http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/2010/07/what-white-rice-better-than-brown/

Introduction - is eating healthy worth the cost?

Before my first child started eating solid foods, my thoughts on healthy food were basically this: it's better to eat cheap than healthy, because I can use the money I save to help others.

I saw nothing wrong with this idea. It was selfless, after all, and my motive was good. It had little to do with the taste of the food or the ease of preparation. It was just about saving the money for what I thought was something more important.

But then I started doing some research when Kaira started eating, and I haven't stopped yet. There's so much information out there! I was blown away by what I was learning. And eventually I started thinking ahead a little more and came to a new conclusion: if I take the best care I can of the body I have, I will have more energy with which to serve the Lord, and will be in better health, meaning (possibly) less money wasted later on in life on medical problems of all sorts.

I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of health problems in America stem from our horrible eating habits. Thus, it seemed logical to start a new category in the Learning Surrender blog - Health and Nutrition.

After all, healthy eating is, in a way, related to surrender, isn't it? We want to eat what tastes good - and often the foods that taste the best to us are also the most toxic to our bodies. It's a constant struggle against the desires of the flesh, and it is no easy thing. But it is, I think, a fight worth fighting. Not only will you feel more energetic and less "bleh" all the time, but you will also develop determination and discipline, both useful traits as you seek to walk by the Spirit of God.

So I guess that's it for the introduction. Thanks for reading!