just made these for dinner. I used 2x the amount of flour called for, and naturally used spelt flour. I bet you could use any flour in there, or even bean flour for a denser texture. They look like oatmeal cookies!
Served with white bean and olive hummus, chopped jicima and carrots and a side of while grain rice. yum.
We got into the holiday spirit last week with some juicing and bread making. I enjoy finding creative ways to use the juicing pulp, such as to make carrot ginger bread, which is my new fav:
Bread recipe:
3 cups spelt flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp each: cinnamon and nutmeg
1 cup unrefined sugar
1/2 tsp salt
Mix dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside
3 eggs
2 cups carrot pulp
1/2 cup blackstrap molasses
2/3 cup freshly juiced carrot juice (if there is a little ginger, even better)
2/3 cup butter or coconut oil
Mix wet ingredients, creaming eggs and butter first. Add wet ingredients to dry and mix until ‘just mixed’. Pour into 2-3 bread pans or cake pans and cook for 45 minutes at 400. Serve with some powdered sugar or homemade whipping cream with orange zest on top. SOOO good!
Sometimes Matt and I really strike gold in the kitchen. We’ve been toying with some new ideas for holiday treats, and have wanted to experiment with a new pumpkin pie recipe. Not that last year’s recipe with coconut milk was a problem, but I’ve made it so many times I’m kind of over it…. plus, I don’t think it had enough density for Matt.
Last Saturday night we really hit the jackpot. I must give credit where credit is due…it was pretty much Matt’s concoction, which impressed me because he normally doesn’t like sweet potatoes, so his eagerness to use them instead of pumpkin puree was pretty cool. ……ahh, it’s the little things in a relationship, isn’t it?!
Here is the recipe:
Sweet Potato Almond butter pie
Low Sugar, high fiber, wheat free, milk optional:
Crust (adopted from Bob’s Redmill baking book):
1 cup spelt flour
3/4 cup cornmeal
3 tbsp fine sugar (we used an evaporated cane juice)
1/4 tsp: salt, baking soda
4 tbsp butter, chilled and chopped into pieces
1 egg
1/4 cup almond or rice milk
Place all dry ingredients in food processor and pulse to blend. Sprinkle butter over mixture. Pulse until just mix. Stir and pulse until it looks like crumbs. Pour into a bowl and add almond milk and mix until it just begins to clump together. Roll the dough into a ball, flatten the ball, and cover with plastic. Refrigerate for 30 min or so.
Meanwhile, the filling:
1 large sweet potato, baked and peeled
1 cup almond/rice/cow milk
1 egg + 2 yolks
1/2 cup almond butter
1/4 cup unrefined sugar or molasses
1 tsp each: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger
1/8 tsp salt
Blend the pumpkin and milk in a blender or food processor. Whisk eggs and add to pumpkin/milk combo. Add almond butter and whisk. Add sugar and spices and salt. Whisk until smooth (it’s a lot of whisking, really). Set aside
Once chilled, pull out dough and roll so that it makes a square or circle (we used a square dish) large enough to be a pie crust. It ends up being kind of thick and dense once cooked, just so you know. Grease a pie tin, and add the rolled dough.
Pour filling and pinch edges of dough.
Bake uncovered for 40-50 min at 350. SOOO good!
In a few short minutes my mom will be here for a vist. Great! I love my mom to pieces and mostly we get along swimmingly well :0
However, the issue of food and my mom is always a controversial one, especially since my attempts to go “off white” started interfering with her ability to please her little family through some of our tradition eats.
Nothing is more political in the Fellows family household than food. It’s a form of control, manipulation, celebration, argument, attention, and generally a charged subject. As much as I think fondly upon family dinners and mom’s cooking, there is just this underlying feeling of judgement that comes out in bizarre food comments…
…like when my mom came to OR to help me moved and referred to my almond butter as “looking like poop” when I bought some for breakfast one morning. Nice. Thanks mom.
I repied (read: sarcastically): Well, I could say a few things abotu your 32 0z of Starbucks coffee you get every day, but I don’t (even though I basically just did). You get the point.
So, back to today. Mom’s a picky eater at other people’s houses anyway, and always claims not to be hungry at mealtime when she doesn’t feel comfortable eating at your house. This includes her daughter’s house….so after some extra kitchen scrubbing this morning, I decided to go with something benign: Salad. Who can complain about a nice chopped salad.
The chopped salad is like the Switzerland of food options with my family. We all eat it, you don’t have to be a food radical to make it, and I won’t mention the locally grown produce I used to put it together with (another family irony: they’ve had a garden for years but think the Organics/local movement is a bit of radicalism…whatever).
Mom’s bringing the meat (once a mom, always a mom -can’t come empty handed!), so perhaps today’s meal will be more like a Peace summit than a warzone.
For those who want the salad recipe:
Switzerland Salad (name for the metaphor, not the actual country):
3 hearts of romaine, thinly chopped
3 small sweet peppers (or 2 bells), chopped in small pieces
2 tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1 grey zucchini (or green), sliced and finely chopped
8 green olives, chopped
1/2 can organic black beans, rinsed
Dressing:
4 tbsp EVOO
1/3 cup each: cilantro and scallions, finely chopped
salt, to taste
Mix all the veggies, and then mix the dressing separately. Add dressing to salad, thoroughly mixing.
I love making energy bars. Every time is different. This one made the house smell like pumpkin pie spices. I bet you could even use pumpkin in the recipe and make a pseudo-p. pike bar for the fall. YUM.
I admit, using rice flour isn’t really as tasty as spelt would be, but it’s all I have in the house. We have much less cupboard space and less $$ for food shopping than in the past, so i’m trying to use what I can before I go buy more. Not a bad mindset, anyway. When I moved it was embarrassing how many 1/2 used bags/boxes of food I tossed out or gave away and how many grains I’d purchased with loving intentions that never manifested.
Davis is different. It’s all about finding the abundance in what I have around, which pretty much sums up these energy bars:
1.25 cups rice flour (spelt is better, less grainy)
1/2 tsp: salt + baking soda
1 tsp: nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon
MIX ABOVE IN A SMALL BOWL, SET ASIDE
1 egg
1.25 cups apple sauce (or bananas, or pumpkin)
1 stick butter, slightly melted
1/3 cup blackstrap molasses
CREAM THE ABOVE TOGETHER, MIXTURE WILL LOOK SLIGHTLY CURDLED
Mix the try with the wet ingredients. Stir in 1.25 cups oats, 1/3 cup chopped dates and 1/3 cup almond butter.
Once mixed, bake in a greased 9×12 pan for 25 minutes on 350.
Watch how fast they disappear, especially when people smell the aroma. Myself, I opted to eat the dough instead, saving the baked treats for our climb of Mt. Jefferson….oh, once a sugar junkie, always a sugar junkie – dough is too tempting to leave alone!
Hi everybody, for all those who resonated with the post about being ‘enough’, please read this article, sent to me by fellow blogger, Mark T.
My original post has sparked a lot of great conversation with friends and well as those great internal conversations I have with myself and my higher “Self”.
I especially resonated with the article’s gentle reminder that finding things in life which bring me intrinsic joy is part of simply being on this planet and co-creating positive energy.
Just today in my yoga practice I was able to pause for a moment and simply appreciate the fact that I have the priviledge of practicing yoga with a great teacher, in a great space, with my leisure time. How amazing. The practice was enough to nourish me. Funny thing too – despite being physically hungry (class was during my usual dinner time), it didn’t bother me because I was satisfied on a level deeper than the physical need for sustanence. To be sure I enjoyed dinner afterward (recipe included below), but the longing I often feel for food and for inner certainty was gone. How nice.
When I did come home to eat, here is what I had waiting for me:
Tuscan-inspired”Branzino all’ Isolana (AKA fish with Vegetables)
**adaptation from the cookbook Good Tastes of Tuscany that I picked up for Matt in Italy last year.
2 large trout (or whitefish of your choice) fillets, chopped into 4 pieces
4 potatoes, diced
2 beefsteak or heirloom tomatoes, diced
2 leeks, thinly sliced
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup of pitted olives
3-4 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
2 tbsp basil
2-3 tbsp EVOO
Salt, pepper to taste
Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees.
Put all the veggies, EVOO, spices and olives in a baking dish. Bake for 20 minutes, uncovered. Add the fish, lemon and a little more salt/pepper. Bake covered for 25 minutes.
Serve with piping hot risotto and a side salad – perfecto!
This week I’ve really been in the mood for summer eats….maybe its the hint of fall in the air that is making me want to savor what is left of summer… whatever it is, last night I just couldn’t face the notion of one more salmon fillet for dinner.
Inspired by a recent cookout in Vernonia with friends, I thought about making Salmon burgers – something I’ve never done because it never came to me that I could easily turn a fillet into a burger in minutes.
Thanks to the internet and some creativity on my part, the Off-White Salmon burger was born. Here it is on U-tube (recipe to follow):
12 oz salmon (2 6-oz fillets, thawed) – chopped into 1/2″ cubes
1/3 cup oats
2 tbsp each: minced scallions, yellow onion, red bell peppers
1 tbsp each: fresh sage, fresh parsley, minced
2 tsp: cumin , sea salt
In a food processor, add 1/2 the salmon and mix until fine. Add all other ingredients, pulsing and scraping off the sides a few times so the texture is mixed between coarse and fine.
You’ll have enough mix for four 4-oz patties, approximately.
Grill at med temp or cook on the stove ( this is what I did) on med heat w/a little butter in the pan for 3 minutes/side.
Goes well with quinoa salad and sweet potatoes!
Enjoy!
Summer is just perfect for making juices of all shapes, sizes and varieties. True, you need a juicer (or a friend with a juicer who is willing to share their time and appliance), but the investment is worth it.
My trusty juicer is simply a Jack LaLaine juicer, circa 1995. Lucky for us, a client gifted this apparatus because they didn’t use it and we got it just in the nick of time before it mades it’s way to the goodwill. I bet that a little time on Ebay, Craigslist or even Freecycle (www.freecycle.com – look for your town) will give you some low cost options for juicers.
Once you have a juicer, there is no stopping you. Juicing can add the vitamins and ‘phytonutritents (translatet = plant chemical that are so vital for our health and can’t be duplicated in a lab, despite tremendous efforts), and help build your taste buds for the bitter greens, like kale.
Also, like we demo in this video, juicing those excess veggies and fruits from the garden helps you minimize waste. Juices in grocery stores are spendy, and you can easily pay $3-$4/12 oz juice whereas the yield in this video was OVER 32 OUNCES of juice!! That’s like having $8-$12 right in your pocket!
Aside from the juice demoed, which is a great beginner juice or a way to ween off of pure fruit juice, here is another option:
Rebecca’s off-white juice of the week:
Green based juices help curb sugar cravings, ehnance skin health, and contribute to optimal digestion. I’m interested in thiem this week because of all the not-so-ideal eating I’ve done inthe past two weeks: tortilla chips 3 days last week, a sandwich on wheat yesterday (with cheese, gulp), and even a diet soda. Not like these foods are criminal, but if you have a wheat and dairy sensitivity and are an O blood-type (shouldn’t eat toto much corn, if that is even possible in our modern food culture), then your body needs a break.
You can think of this juice recipe like the V-8 commercials in the 90’s: the guy walks into the office sideways because he’s off balance, and all he needs is his v-8 to get back to health.
Move over V-8, there’s a new recipe in town:
1/2 bunch parsley
5 carrots
1 bunch kale
2 green apples
2 large cucumbers
This juice yieled about 48 oz because the cucumbers were HUGE and naturally very watery.
I’ll drink 6 oz 2-3x/day until it is gone, keeping the juice for no more than 2 days. If my stove worked (replaced on Friday, thank GOODNESS), I’d make pulp muffins but since it’s not that pulp is headed to my AM frittatas or to my AM smoothie, which ever i choose.
2 C Bob’s Redmill GF flour, 1 TB b. soda, cinnamon, 1 tsp salt, 1 C rice milk, 1 C H20, 2 TB agave, 1 cup blueberries, 1 egg. Whisk dry ingredients, set aside. Whisk wet ingredients and mix into dry. Makes 12-15 med pancakes….adapted from Bob’s Redmill baking book
A Man (okay, 2 men), a can (of coconut), a pan and a PLAN:
Creativity sparked us tonight when Henry came by with 2 bananas and a container of walnuts asking us to make the flour-free pie crust I’ve been boasting about.
Our mission: to create a raw pie (as we realized the oven is broken and won’t be replaced until mid August) out of what we had available in the house.
To begin our mission, we mashed 2 bananas with 2 cups of chopped walnuts:
P
Next, we asked ourselves what we could put into this pie that was on hand that would make a tasty, refined sugar free, interesting raw dessert.
Perusing the pantry yielded the following mix:
The cream + 2 tbsp ‘milk from a can of organic coconut milk
1 egg
1/2 tsp GMO-free cornstarch
1 banana
Next, we added about 1 cup of shredded coconut shavings to the top of the pie and placed it in the freezer for 1 hour.
Henry can’t wait!
The result: YUMMYY!!!! And it was all done in this 1 simple little skillet (we don’t have any pie tins at the house in Davis…yet!)
Next time we would prefer to bake the pie, as the crust will harden more as ill the pie filling. Henry’s going to make a banana cream pie this weekend so I promise to follow up!
If you were to bake the pie/crust, I would do so at 400 for 15 min for starters and see where you are at with the pie, as cooking time will depend on what the pie filling is.
Bon Appetit!
Off White Living 