Zucchinni and Sun Dried Tomatoes

Tonight I took dinner over to Nana’s house so that my wonderful husband could watch an NBA play-off game on TV. (We have the most basic cable channels you can get. They are a “package deal” with the high speed internet service we have.) Nana doesn’t cook very often since most nights she is eating at our house so I had to use my imagination to create a meal which required very few pans and/or spices. I decided tacos, refried beans and some stir fried zucchini would fit the bill – especially since I already had made guacamole and salsa. The trick was to figure out an appealing way to prepare the zucchini without any interesting spices. (Since Nana doesn’t cook, her selection of spices is not only VERY limited, it’s also VERY old – and probably not very tasty.) So, I quickly grabbed a yellow pepper, an onion, the zucchini and some sun-dried tomatoes that had been looking at me very accusingly for quite a while. I love sun dried tomatoes – just right out of the bag – and had bought some quite a few weeks ago at our old produce market. I had eaten a few and then forgot about them – until today. So, once at Nana’s I sliced the pepper and onion, water sautéed them until tender. Next, I added the zucchini and some salt and pepper. I occasionally stirred the zucchini until it just started to turn tender, and then I added the chopped sun dried tomatoes. Boy, not only was it delicious but it was also very colorful. Sometimes a little creative ingenuity is all that is needed to make a new dish that every one loves.

Yellow Squash Casserole - easy as pie!

I just stepped out of the kitchen after preparing a wonderful yellow squash (crookneck squash) casserole. The whole house is full of the delicious smell of sautéed onions and mushrooms and Italian seasonings. Normally, I sauté all of the ingredients together in one pan, toss in the bread crumbs and vegan cheddar style cheese, mix and then slide it into another casserole dish to bake for a little while. Not tonight. I decided to use my largest cast iron skillet and bake it in the oven in the same pan I did all of the sautéing in. All of the taste, with less of the clean up. And, since the cast iron skillet is larger in diameter than my casserole dishes, it should bake in a fraction of the time. My children are already asking how long until daddy gets home. I think the smell has perked up their appetites as well – or it could be that my son just wants some help from dad with the capture and breeding of his favorite toads!

The casserole is really easy to prepare – simply sauté a sliced onion, add 8 ounces of mushrooms and sauté a little more. Then add sliced crookneck squash (about 3-4 medium sized ones). Let the ingredients cook for a few minutes until the squash softens up. Then, turn off the heat, add some Earth Balance (about 2-3 Tablespoons), ¼ cup of cheddar style vegan cheese, 1 teaspoon of Italian Seasoning and enough bread crumbs to make it all the right consistency. Top it with cracker crumbs or some more grated cheese and bake it in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes. Pretty easy – and the family will think you slaved over it for hours. I normally make it the center dish and tonight we are having spinach with garlic and speckled butter beans on the side. Should I dare say what we are having for dessert? Warm sautéed pears – my daughter’s absolute favorite!

The value of persistence and repetition!

Last night we had our Pasta Fagioli that I made the day before. Some soups just really taste better when they sit for a day. I recently changed the recipe on the website to include directions for what I do when I am using my pressure cooker. It also makes enough for several meals. Remember, cook once, eat twice! I had planned on having a nice salad on the side but I had also just cut up a delicious cantaloupe. Yes, Florida Cantaloupes are just coming on the market and we are gorging ourselves on them. Right now, they are dropping in price and increasing in taste. There’s just something about getting a lope from the fields only 2 hours away, versus getting one from a country half a world away! You might not be near Florida but as the warmer weather spreads through the country, the fruits and vegetables make their march too. Soon, we will be enjoying Georgia fruits and veggies, and eventually by the end of the season, we will be munching our way through New Jersey produce. We always try to really enjoy and overly indulge in the fruits and veggies that are more local – somehow they just taste better. We also try to stock up and freeze what we can while the prices are lower. Frozen cantaloupes taste great in smoothies and as the price drops, we will be busy slicing and freezing. The funny thing is last night I served my darling daughter cantaloupe instead of a salad and she was rather disappointed – and I was rather surprised! It was just a few months ago that she would rather eat just about anything than a tossed salad. Then I discovered two things – the beauty of a chopped salad and how important it is to serve a dish MANY times before I expect the children to like it. Now, she likes salads. I guess I am never too old to learn the value of persistence and repetition!

Five minutes to spare!

Wow – It’s almost 5 o’clock and I am actually getting to sit down at the desk for a couple of minutes! Today was a good day – actually got quite a bit done – including school with the children. I also made fresh bread (which is baking in the oven now) and Pasta Fagioli (for dinner tomorrow – it always tastes better after it sits for a day.) Tonight we are having some Tofukey bratwurst that I bought on sale and we all love. I’m also planning on some sweet and sour cabbage and some leftover lentils. We tend to eat quite a bit of cabbage – probably because it’s not only incredibly healthy, it’s also normally pretty inexpensive. Our local produce store normally sells cabbage for about 45 cents a pound or less – and that’s a great price for budget conscious healthy eaters. When shopping and planning for our meals, if I can find fruit or vegetables for 99 cents a pound or less – we get them. Just the other day we found D’Anjou pears for only 99 cents a pound. This has been a great year for tasty pears and we eat them plain, diced on our salads, sautéed with a tiny bit of Earth Balance and brown sugar, and we enjoy them in pies and cobblers. Cobblers are what I call desert when I am too lazy to make a crust and just top the pears with the crumbly topping I normally put on our pear pie. With my pressure cooker, I can get the sweet and sour cabbage ready for the table in less than 5 minutes. I don’t know what I would do without my pressure cooker – except not have time to sit and blog for 5 minutes so close to dinner time.

Sea Veggies in Pressure Cookers

Pressure cookers are fun, easy and a real time saver. But they are also a wee bit persnickety! Tonight while making some fresh garbanzo beans, I decided to add a few sea vegetable flakes to them for extra seasoning. I have recently learned quite a bit about the importance of iodine in our diet and sea vegetables are an easy and tasty way to add a natural occurring source of iodine. (No, I am not really weird – just health conscious and if I can improve our diet and nutrition without spending much money – I do it. I don’t like supplements – I like getting what we need from whole foods. Besides, I love sea weed salads when I go out to eat and I love vegetarian sushi – although I can rarely afford it.) Anyway, so I tossed in the soaked beans, added the water and then added about a tablespoon of seaweed flakes. (Seaweed flakes are much less expensive than seaweed sheets and if you aren’t making sushi – go for the flakes!) Well, much to my surprise, my pressure cooker began to make some pretty strange noises. Just enough strange noises to make my children leave the kitchen in a real hurry – they are a little scared of my pressure cookers and convinced they are going to blow up some day. Quickly, I grabbed the jiggle valve and removed it from the cooker – only to see a lot of brown ooze coming out of the vent. Oh my! Sea Vegetables! I released the pressure, drained and rinsed the beans, cleaned the cooker and the pressure valve, and put the beans back on. Next time, I think I’ll pay a little extra for the sea weed sheets if I am going to use them in the pressure cooker!

Finally - they are eating salads!

It’s only been recently that my son has started begging for a green salad. Oh – music to a mother’s ears. For years, I have tried to get my children to eat a nice green salad. I have tried plain salads, many different greens, a wide variety of toppings and an even greater variety of dressings. Anything to easily get nutrient dense, raw foods in my children. Although they have always had to eat what I have prepared – it kind of took the fun out of family dinners when I watch their faces as they eat. Then – I went to visit a friend of mine and watched how she served salads to her children. The lettuce and all of the ingredients were finely chopped or grated. My husband says I chop them so fine he almost doesn’t even have to chew. Although I don’t quite chop them that fine, I do chop, dice, grate, toss and mix so that the salads are easily eaten with a spoon (no more struggling to get them on a fork) and the texture is quite appealing to the children. I have also found that I use much less salad dressing when I chop the salad. Once the lettuce, carrots, cucumbers and bell peppers are mixed together, I add their favorite toppings – black olives and garbanzo beans. My daughter is still a little resistant, but my son now says salads are his favorite thing to eat and he even likes to eat them with no dressing. That’s pretty good coming from someone who would be happy to eat toast and rice krispies at almost every meal – if I let him. Now my biggest challenge is to keep his little hands from trying to grab handfuls of salad as I am mixing them up. Someday he just might just lose a finger if he isn’t careful.

Plate full of green tonight!

We had a wonderful dinner tonight – full of green vegetables. Yesterday I stopped at the produce market and just couldn’t resist the first of the Florida okra. I had stopped for only some Kirby cucumbers, but ended up with a basketful of veggies – including some of the best okra I have seen in months. My kids love fresh okra. It wasn’t always that way. I have always loved fried okra and when we owned our own produce market, I finally started making it myself. Now, when I say fried – I don’t mean breaded and deep fried. I simply slice the okra and pan fry – without any breading – in a very hot cast iron skillet with a very small amount of oil. (I used to try breading the okra, but the breading always ended up in the bottom of the pan and my okra was naked. So, I started leaving off the breading and discovered how much we like it that way.) To make a long story short, my children’s love affair with okra took many, many, many meals before they became as enamored as I am. Now, I have to buy at least 2 pounds of okra to satisfy everyone’s appetite. I have found that quite a few of the vegetables and main dishes I serve the family take several presentations before they are well accepted. Taste buds can be trained and old unhealthy habits replaced with new ones, but it takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day – and neither was our overwhelming love of okra. I can’t wait for summer when fresh okra is available all the time!

Just returned from a week of fun camping!

As many of you know, we just came back from a long week of camping. We had a wonderful time enjoying the spring weather in Florida and the beautiful sunny gulf coast beaches. We managed to squeeze all of our bicycles in the back of our van so we even managed to do quite a bit of bike riding at several state parks while on vacation. Camping is an activity everyone in our family loves. Although I still have to prepare all of the meals while we’re gone, it just doesn’t feel like work when it’s done outside while enjoying God’s marvelous creation. As we sat outside the camper enjoying our dinners – made all the more delicious by our camping appetites – we talked about how different our meals are than most people’s meals. But, boy, we do love ours! We really ate well on this camping trip without a lot of hassle. I brought some bags of frozen vegetables (just kept them cold until we ate them) and a wide variety of produce that didn’t require refrigeration. We feasted on sweet potatoes, white potatoes (both fried and baked), cabbage, corn on the cob, broccoli, spinach, tomatoes, apples, pears, bananas and dried fruits and nuts. I also made some healthy muffins, bean spreads, spinach dip and salads before we left. A small investment in ice kept it all nice and cold and delicious. Last year I wrote an article on 10 Tips to Healthy Eating While Camping – which outlines a lot of what we do while on the road. The most important thing is that we had lots of fun and could have stayed another 7 nights!

What the world eats!

Someone at work sent an email with pictures of what typical families from around the world eat in a week and how much they spend. It was really an eye-opener to see the differences between various cultures. I was amazed at how little produce there was on most people’s menus. (You can view the photo essay by clicking here http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519,00.html ) We are a blessed country in that we have a wide variety of foods available to us - so you won’t hear me complain at all. However, what a shame that there is so little recognizable food on most people’s dinner plates. No wonder we have such an epidemic of lifestyle diseases. Go green – eat fruits and veggies and leave the highly processed foods alone! Let’s try to make our menus look like a poster advertisement for farmers!

Delicious warm pears for dessert!

We have really been enjoying the cooler weather. It has increased our appetites – especially for warm and tasty deserts. We have also been enjoying pears this season. We have had a hard time finding great apples this year – but the pears have been out of this world! While camping, we “discovered” a very easy, very delicious dessert made with fresh pears – although I would imagine canned pears would work also. We simply peel, or not depending on my mood, and slice pears. Slip them into a sauce pan with a tiny bit of Earth Balance and brown sugar and heat thoroughly. You want to make sure the pear does not lose its texture – but just heats nicely through. Walla! We scoop out the heated pears and their juice and enjoy. I guess if you wanted to be decadent, you could top with a soy vanilla ice cream – but so far, the pears have been so wonderful that we have not wanted to dilute their flavor with anything else! This has worked well with both Bartlett and D’anjou pears. We love to eat these two varieties of pears right off of the core, like an apple, so we always have them on hand. They are also a great addition to a tossed salad!

Buffets - Food everywhere but nothing good to eat!

We went out to a buffet last night for dinner. It’s been a REAL long time since we’ve done that. As a matter of fact, the last time we did that was when we evacuated for the hurricanes in 2004. And now I remember WHY it has been so long since we’ve gone out to a buffet. Last night we abandoned the camper in freezing weather for the comfort of a heated hotel room. Since it was a little difficult to cook in a hotel room, we decided (on the advice of the friendly hotel clerk) to try a buffet for our dinner meal. We thought it would be fast, easy and convenient and would give us a good selection of fruits, vegetables and salads. Boy – were we ever wrong. There was indeed a wide variety of salad items and cooked vegetables – but nothing was what I would call good. All of the salad toppings were loaded with fat and cholesterol. And, after sampling most of the vegetable selection I now know why most people can’t understand how I can base my entire diet around fruits, vegetables and grains. All of the vegetables were completely overcooked and soggy – and if there was any flavoring added it was in the form of chopped meat or cheese products. Although my dinner was really quite horrible – I am very grateful for the experience for several reasons. It really opened my eyes to the struggles that most people face when making the transition to a plant-based diet. I can’t imagine eating a plant-based diet if it tasted like the foods I tried on the buffet. But there is hope! Vegetables don’t really taste like that! A few quick recipes, seasonings, and proper techniques and a plant-based, whole food diet is WONDERFUL! That is what my website is all about – empowering people to eat and truly ENJOY whole foods. Sampling the foods at the buffet also helped me see how easy it is for most people to inadvertently overeat. When we are hungry, what our body really wants is some high quality nutrients it can use for fuel. We will continue to eat and eat and eat to find those high nutrient dense foods. If none are available and all we have available is low nutrient, highly processed foods, our bodies will continue to search for a good fuel source. Junk foods and processed foods may be satisfying to our mouths, but not to our bodies. I sampled so many foods at the buffet trying desperately to find something satisfying that I felt totally stuffed when I left – yet not satisfied at all. That is also what my website is about. Whole foods are INCREDIBLY satisfying and appealing to our tastebuds and mouth – if we just give them a proper try.

Camping - at a Hampton Inn?

Another camping blog – sort of….I am actually sitting in a Hampton Inn right now enjoying a warm room, soft bed, my own bathroom and wi-fi. Why you might ask. Well, a cold front came through and it is supposed to be near freezing tonight. We bailed! We woke up this morning to 38 degree weather, a stiff wind from the northwest and a son coming down with a bad cold. It was time to break camp and move on to another state park for the next 4 days. We were moving south, but not as fast as the cold front. The thought of another frigid night and day was a little too much for all of us. So, we packed up, drove to the next state park, dropped off the camper and went to the closest hotel for the night. Tomorrow we are planning on going back and finishing the camping trip as the warming trend sets in. It’s going to be hard to leave this great room with all of its amenities – but the call of the wild remains strong. We still have salamanders left to hunt and woods left to explore.

Hot fresh pears - campfire dessert!

Camping and outdoor living are one of the things we like best. Sometimes our eating habits suffer when our routines are changed or we feel we are on vacation. They don’t have to though. This week we’ve managed to be fairly creative with our menu while still enjoying the bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables. We have had our share of roasted marshmallows, but they weren’t the only sweet and hot desert item on our camping menu. I had brought along some nice pears to enjoy – ripe and sweet right off the core. However, the weather turned pretty chilly and I was really craving a nice hot dessert. Pears! All I did was chop the pears, with the skins on, and slightly cook them with a tiny bit of Earth Balance and a little brown sugar. We were all hooked! Sweet and warm and just what we needed around the campfire on a cold evening. Oftentimes I have overpacked for camping trips and not allowed my imagination and creativity to run wild with the foods I did bring. I’m still learning – and enjoying the process. Sometimes my creativity results in a miss and sometimes it results in a glorious hit. Basic foods with a minimum of preparation always seem to taste the best – even if you aren’t enjoying them out of doors.

Whole Grain bread - or not?

They fooled me – didn’t think it was possible – but they did! Who? The bread manufacturers and labelers did. I couldn’t believe it!!!! What am I talking about? Well, last week, right before we left on an eight night camping trip, I taught a cooking class. One of the topics I covered was how to select whole grain breads and how easy it is to be fooled – especially if you believe what it says on the front label of the bread. For the class, I bought 8 loaves of bread – 7 of which were really whole grain or whole wheat and one was not. Without reading the ingredient labels and by going only by the front label, I had them try to discern which loaf was NOT whole grain. A few of them got it right, but most of them didn’t. The one loaf which wasn’t whole grain was labeled 7 Grain bread – all of which were seeds or berries sprinkled on the top of a healthy looking loaf of white bread. Boy, was everyone surprised. The least healthy looking loaf of bread, and the softest one, was probably the best. It contained whole wheat flour and NO high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) – only brown sugar. I would much rather feed my family good old fashioned brown sugar than HFCS any day of the week. Brown sugar does not interfere with one of the body’s hormones called leptin. Leptin is the hormone which signals the brain that you’ve had enough to eat and are satiated. HFCS is one of the ingredients that block that hormone from reaching the brain – causing us to eat and eat and eat – without seeming to ever get full. Does that sound familiar? I certainly have struggled with that in the past, but switching to a whole food, plant-based diet with minimally processed foods has cured me – and it will you too. However, back to how I was fooled!!!! Getting ready for an 8 night camping trip in the same week I held a cooking class caused me to cut a few corners. Normally I bake a couple of loaves of bread a day or two before we leave- but not this last week. I decided that was one area that I could sacrifice home made – after all, I had just taught a room full of people how to select a loaf of healthy bread – certainly I could do the same. So, off I went to gather a few items at our local discount club – some apples, potatoes, grapes, maple syrup and bread. The store had two loaves of bread packaged into one bag, so the ingredient label was nearly impossible to read. So, I went on someone else’s recommendation, the labels on the front of the loaves and the healthy grains sprinkled all over the top of the lovely bread. I felt the bread and it felt a little stiffer than the soft whole wheat bread setting next to it. It looked healthier with all of those seeds on top. Someone had recommended it as a nice whole grain bread. The front label read like an honor roll of whole grain goodness – “low fat”, “heart healthy”, “American Heart Association recommended as part of a heart healthy diet”, “a diet high in whole grains can lower your risk of heart disease and certain cancers” and a plethora of other wonderful sounding, health enhancing goodness. WOW! Taking that short cut and not preparing homemade sounded great. What a better choice this stiff bread was than the Whole Wheat soft bread sitting beside it with no glowing endorsements on the front. WRONG!!!!!!! On the first day of our trip, as we sat at the table fixing our sandwiches, I read the ingredient label! OH MY! The number one ingredient was “enriched wheat flour”!!!! No Whole anything in the ingredient label. Boy did I feel rather schnookered that day. I had fallen for the oldest tricks in the book. Thank goodness noone but family was around to see it. Needless to say, the first trip we made to the grocers, I replaced that bread with a REAL whole grain bread. We are happy and so are the fish and turtles who are getting quite a nice handout of that “healthy bread”.

On the way to camping in Georgia

Camping is so much fun for our family. There is just something about being outdoors in the beautiful weather that we all love. This is the time of year when we begin enjoying the great outdoors. In the summer, it’s a little too hot and humid to want to be outside all day. The fall, winter and spring are great times to soak in the glory and splendor of the day and night. Normally we stay in Florida but this year we decided to venture into Georgia – partly to see if we could see any leaves change before the weather got too cold to camp. We left on Saturday and enjoyed our 6 hour drive into the interior of Georgia. We were playing games in the car and got to laughing so hard at the unintentional humor of our soon to be 7 year old son. We were playing Brainquest as a type of trivia challenge – with homeschooling everything becomes a teachable moment. The question was if boots is the plural of boot – what is the plural of foot. I guess I worded it a little differently in an attempt to explain plural. I posed the question as if you have one boot it’s b-o-o-t, if you have two boots, its spelled b-o-o-t-s. So, if you have one foot it is spelled f-o-o-t, so if you had two, what would it be? In an attempt to answer before his sister, our son yells out shoes, s-h-o-e-s! He might not have given the answer we all expected, but he was right on track! We thought that started our trip out well – we haven’t stopped chuckling and enjoying our time together since. It’s wonderful to spend the time enjoying being a family – even when things aren’t quite what we expect. Often, the unexpected is much better than what we expected.

Fresh Brussel Sprouts - YUMMY!

I broke my golden rule today and spent more than 30 minutes in the kitchen tonight making dinner. It wasn’t a complicated recipe but fresh Brussels sprouts that made me spend the extra time. I am a sucker for really fresh produce and today was no exception. I went to our old produce market to buy just a few things. My kids always laugh at that, they know I can NEVER buy just a few things at the produce store. Everything fresh and in season just naturally calls my name. Today, it was Brussels sprouts. It’s the right time of year for really fresh sprouts and the ones I saw were nice and green and small. No yellow spots or over-sized sprouts for me. Most people turn up their noses at Brussels sprouts – probably because they’ve only been served over-cooked and merely boiled sprouts. We love to take fresh Brussels sprouts, cut them in half, remove the inner v-shape and sauté them with lots of garlic. Yummy! Frozen ones just aren’t nearly as delicious – but it does take a while to prep the fresh sprouts – at least when you are prepping about 2 pounds. If there is one thing we don’t skimp on in our monthly budget, its fresh produce. There were only 4 of us at dinner, and there weren’t very many leftovers. When the vegetables become your main course, it’s amazing how much you can eat! Tonight we had baked eggplant slices, fresh and delicious corn-on-the-cob and Brussels sprouts and fresh raspberries for dessert. No processed foods on our plate – just a few tasty morsels of God’s grand garden.

It's Been A While!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to sit down and write what is happening in our lives and hearts. I often think of all the things I want to share, and then get so involved in living, I hardly take a breath to pause and reflect. I am rethinking my family schedule and going to make sure there is more time for writing and sharing. There’s just something special about inviting others to join in and celebrate LIFE with us!

It was a great weekend this last Saturday and Sunday. The weather was a little gloomy, but we had a great time anyway. I held my first cooking class at Paradise Health and Nutrition on Minton Road. This was a new location for my cooking class, although I shop there frequently. The people who attended the class were wonderful and friendly and encouraging! We had a great time together learning how to cook Mushroom Stroganoff with Soy Curls, Vegetarian Chili and Tofu Cubes with Brown Gravy. (YUM,YUM,YUM!) Three dishes is less than an hour – we were cranking! I love talking about food almost as much as I love eating and preparing it – so I was in heaven – getting to combine two of my passions at once. The staff at Paradise was also incredibly accommodating and helpful. I love shopping there because I always leave feeling better than I did when I entered the store. There are VERY few stores you can say that about anymore.

Today, we are enjoying the sunshine – finally! The kids have been outside as much as I will let them chasing bugs, snacking on grapes and generally creating adventures of all kinds. We had a picnic for lunch, although it is still warm – much to my chagrin. Pretty soon we will be embarking on another camping trip – this time for 8 nights. We can all hardly wait to go north – to Georgia – and hopefully encounter some cooler weather. Last weekend we camped at Fort Clinch State Park. The park was absolutely gorgeous and the weather very pleasant. We were able to enjoy a half-mile long fishing pier, deserted pristine beaches, a Confederate army reenactment at the Fort and a relaxing family time together. I am so grateful to God that He has blessed us with health and vitality as we enjoy His creation and all of it’s majesty.

Three Sisters Stew

It just seems to get longer and longer between blogs. Life has been busy between cooking classes, school, editing cookbooks, writing articles, videotaping cooking lessons, field trips, experimenting with new recipes and life! But without all of these activities, we’d be busy anyway. I just had to sit today and write briefly about our latest meal we invented. Okay, perhaps we didn’t invent it, but we modified a recipe to fit our own taste buds. The weather here has started to cool off – okay, drop about 2 degrees from our normal summer afternoon high – and we are thinking about autumn. We started making camping reservations and that is always our signal that summer is ending. We decided to start about a month early this year by heading north. We made reservations at Fort Clinch State Park in Florida for October and at two Georgia State Parks for November. Somehow, we are hoping that we just might find some autumn leaves in November in Georgia. In the meantime, we are busy decorating our house with harvest decorations. The children did find one red leaf today in the front yard, which they are ready to press and save. In preparation for Thanksgiving – you have to plan things REALLY early when you write for newsletters – we decided to experiment with a Thanksgiving stew. (Most of you who know me thought I would never get back to my original point!) We based our recipe on the Three Sisters from the Native American culture – corn, winter squash and beans. These items were grown together early in North American history because they are symbiotic – nourishing each other and the soil and making good use of cleared fields. Anyway, the stew turned out marvelous! So basic and easy to make that I am sure it will be a staple in our house every autumn – if not year round! It’s too good to make only during one part of the year. Click here for the recipe.

Emails from Friends!

A good friend of mine sent me a funny email today and for the first time in a long time I took the time and answered it. In the past, I have gotten emails which ask a long list of questions about yourself to answer and pass on to friends. I’ve always loved everyone else’s responses, but never filled out one for me. Today was different. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was avoiding cleaning the bathrooms and making dinner. Any excuse to put off the inevitable seemed like a good idea. So I sat at the computer for about 15 minutes and totally indulged myself. Hopefully, it will brighten my friend’s lives too since I tried not to take myself too seriously. It’s been a rough couple of days trying to get it all done and keep everyone’s attitudes cheerful and joyful, including my own. Homeschooling requires me to sacrifice my self everyday, as do many other things in life. I love it, I wouldn’t change it, but I sure would create more hours in my day if I could. But of course, as soon as I created them, they would be filled up and I would be left desiring even more. I guess I’m that way about most things. There never seems to be enough. Although, perhaps that’s not really true. There are certainly some things I could do with less of – like sagging skin, hot flashes, summer heat and spelling questions from my children when I am trying to write. Oh well, off to the bathrooms and dinner – one can only put off the inevitable for so long!

The Science Experiment

As a science experiment for my kids, we starting experimenting with sprouts. As a homeschool family, we experiment with lots of things – although I don’t think we’ve ever experimented with something so tasty before. Okay, I’ll admit it – I have NEVER been a big fan of sprouts. Alfalfa sprouts have always tasted too “green” to me and mung bean sprouts normally go bad before I can use them in our favorite stir frys. So, when Andy begged at the health food store for seeds and a sprouting lid, my husband thought it might be fun and educational. It has been, but I think Andy hasn’t gotten to experiment much with it – my husband has taken it over. If it’s a bean or a seed, he’s going to sprout it. Perhaps this is a phase that will pass, but we sure have been enjoying them. We started with mung beans which sprouted nicely. We used them in our smoothies and salads. They tasted quite good, and according to my husband and about 1,000 websites, they are incredibly good for us too. Next, we tried sprouting wheat berries. I wasn’t sure what to do with them at first. I searched around the internet and everything I found sounded way too difficult to try. So, I did my usual thing and decided to add them to a recipe I was already comfortable with. I threw them in the VitaMix and then added them to my regular bread recipe. The sprouts came out of the VitaMix like a glob of gooey glutenous mess – a perfect addition to bread dough, I hoped. And I was right! What a wonderful feeling! The bread rose higher than it had ever risen before and had a delightfully delicious taste and texture. WOW! Emily said it was the best bread I had ever made! It was good and I have more wheat berries sprouting right now in the kitchen. Sometimes experiments turn out really good – and sometimes they don’t. The key is to be willing to keep trying.

Click here for the recipe.