Log 3: Quest for the Perfect Cracker

This herby recipe made some pretty good crackers. Their flavor is pretty strong. I don’t particularly like them plain, but they are a yummy fit with my lentil dip recipe (with tangerine juice and lemon zest).

Recipe:

Soak 2/3 cup flax seeds (golden or amber) in 2 cups water (soak overnight)

Soak 1/2 cup chia seeds (black or white) in 5 cups water (soak overnight

1 cup celery (rough chopped)

1/2 lime (rind and all)

10 cloves garlic

1 medium onion (rough chopped)

2 Tb prepared pesto

1/2 cup cilantro

4 Tb pasta/pizza sauce (homemade)

Blend all in a high-speed blender, except cilantro (leave to end to blend just briefly to leave some cooler in the crackers). The batter should be runny but not drippy. Drop by tablespoonfuls on dehydrator sheets. This makes a huge number of crackers, I had to make them in two batches. Dehydrate between 105 – 115 degrees, after you turn them the first time, sprinkle sesame seeds (or whatever else you’d like) on them if desired.

What I like the most about these crackers is the texture. The batter is thin enough to just drop in spoonfuls and they spread on the dehydrator sheet themselves to a nice thickness.

Tyler’s Grade: B+

Log 2: Quest for the Perfect Cracker

This second cracker experiment wasn’t as successful as the first. I am also attempting to make a cheesey crackers, like a cheese-it. I found a baked cracker recipe and attempted to turn it into a dehydrator cracker to save the “rawness” of my cheese.

Recipe:

1 to 1 1/2 cup cheddar cheese, grated

1 cup almond flour (ground crispy almonds in coffee grinder)

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp sage

1/4 tsp thyme

1/8 tsp cayenne pepper

4 Tb ghee

1/4 cup flaxseeds

1 cup water

Soak flaxseeds in water for a few hours. Blend flaxseeds and ghee in blender until goopy. Add this to the rest of the ingredients. Scoop out on dehydrator sheets and spread out a little bit to thin out. Dehydrate until flappable, dehydrate again until crispy.

At first I thought these were another winner. Tyler even gave them a B grade. However, as I kept eating them, they started not to be as great.

What I would do differently: I will dry this recipe again, but take out the herbs and cut down the ghee. I think they were too oily.

Log 1: Quest for the Perfect Cracker

I am on a quest, a quest for the perfect, gluten-free cracker. The criteria:

1. They must taste good!

2. They must go well with cheese.

My first trial was with Dragon Crackers. I initially found the recipe in Food Drying with An Attitude by Mary Bell, who actually swiped it from Charlie’ Trotter’s book Raw. This golden flax-based cracker offers up a wonderful mix of spices (garam masala, cayenne, chili powder, onion and garlic), with just a hint of sweetness from maple syrup.

Tyler’s Grade: B

More experiments to come.

Chase likes them! Although he is not really a hard sell on much! :)

 

Kraut-making

Yesterday my friends Cheri and Stephanie came over to make old fashioned sauerkraut in my crock, which has stood unused for years due to several failed attempts. It was fun!

 

First there was tons of pounding with this abnormally large Sauerkraut Stomper (made by an Amish guy in PA). It was an arm workout. Breaking up the cabbage with the stomper brings out the water to make the brine in which the cabbage will ferment. I didn’t buy quite enough cabbage, so we added some carrots to bring up the level (which you need for a proper ferment in the crock), hence the orange color. 

Then we put in the weights, which hold down the cabbage about 2 inches under the brine.

 

We closed her up, added some water around that lip (which creates a seal with the lid) and volia, in 4 weeks I should have heavenly-tasting, highly-probiotic, and vitamin C-rich sauerkraut….we’ll see!

Cut Out Cookies

When Tate gets excited to make something in the kitchen, this family-cook is all over it! Besides oatmeal and pancake sandwiches, the thing that really ruffles Tate’s feathers is animal crackers. Perfect timing too. I was itching to make a recipe from the Fall 2008 issue of Wise Traditions in the article Cooking for Sequoia Academy: Improving the Quality of School Lunches. Stephanie Rivers single-handedly changed the way a small private school fed their students. The story is inspiring and her ideas are ingenious. Her recipe for Gluten-Free, Casein-Free Hazelnut Animal Crackers is a hit in our home! (And believe me, making a gluten-free animal cracker is tough, but her recipe worked out splendidly!)

Animal Crackers Hazelnut

½ cup crispy hazelnuts or sunflower seeds

½ cup coconut flour

½ cup masa corn meal or sprouted buckwheat flour

3/4 cup arrowroot or sweet rice flour

½ cup coconut oil or ghee

2 duck eggs or 3 chicken

1/3 cup Rapadura or date sugar

2 Tbs honey (optional, I didn’t add and it worked fine)

½ tsp xanthan gum

½ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon (optional)

½ tsp baking soda

¼ tsp cream of tartar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 to 4 Tb water

Grind the crispy nuts in food processor. Pulse in the remaining ingredients except the water. Add the water one teaspoon at a time, blending until the dough is smooth and soft. The texture should resemble sugar cookie dough. If it is too soft to handle, refrigerate it for about an hour until firm. Preheat oven to 300. Roll out the dough, using arrowroot or sweet rice flour to prevent sticking. Cut with cookie cutters and place on parchment or slipmate-lined cookie sheet. Baking times depend on thickness, but 15 minutes worked worked for us.

Tate likes the train cut outs the best!

Cold cereal?

Cold cereal was something I did away with many moons ago. I have been making Tyler granola for a few years, which is good in yogurt, but leaves something to be desired as a cold cereal replacement. Then I ran into a recipe for raw, dehydrated cereal while searching through the plethora of raw food cookbooks from the library. I actually found several recipes with the same concept, but I modified it a bit, mostly to reduce the sugar and add more fat.

I call these Cereal Crispies. What a treat to have quick, cold cereal again. A handful topped with raw milk and fresh berries….yummmm!! I make these about every 2 weeks now. The recipe below makes a lot (I doubled the original recipe because we go through it so fast); it makes about 3 dehydrator sheets worth.

4 cups buckwheat groats (raw are green), soaked for at least 1 hour (I usually do more, like 4 to 6 and then have been sprouting them a little, which is just leaving them out in the strainer and using the sprayer on them with water a few times until I see little nubs)

½ cup maple syrup

3 to 4 tsp vanilla extract

4 heaping Tbsp cocoa powder

4 Tbsp + coconut oil (soft or melted)

4 tsp sea salt (sounds like a lot, but it does taste good)

Place the soaked groats in a fine-mesh colander to drain. Rinse with water to get rid of extra starchiness. Place in the bowl of a good processor and add the remaining ingredients. Pulse until well combined but not thoroughly pureed. It should look somewhat like soupy oatmeal. Divide between lined dehydrator trays spread about 18 inch thick. Dehydrate at 115 degrees for 8 to 12 hours or until the top is dry to the touch and the liner peels away easily. The crispies should be quite brittle at this point, flip pieces over to continue drying on the other side for an additional few hours or until they are completely dry and crunchy. Break into pieces and store in an airtight container, or keep in the fridge to maintain maximum freshness, they should last up to a few weeks. Adapted from a recipe in Raw Food Real World Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis.

Cheese-Its?

I’m notorious for trying to pass a food off as something it isn’t. My friends still laugh about stories of me trying to get them to eat something not so yummy and saying it tastes “just like….such and such.” So I am hesitant to say these raw food crackers taste “just like” cheese-its, mainly because I can’t even remember what store-bought Cheese-Its taste like, but I can say this – they are dang good!

This recipe comes from Carol Alt’s book The Raw 50. Carol Alt is a supermodel and credits her diet of raw foods to her youthfulness (she is now around 50, and I have to admit, she is stunning). She boasts that she can replace almost anything sold commercially and this is her attempt to replace the Cheese-It. I think she did a good job, plus they are easy to make, one prerequisite for me.

Raw Cheese-It-Like Crackers

3 cups thawed corn (about a 16 oz bag)

2 cup shredded raw organic cheddar cheese, loosely packed

1 red, orange or yellow bell pepper, seeded and chopped

2 Tbs chopped red onion (white works)

¼ tsp cayenne pepper (optional)

¼ tsp chili powder

¼ tsp Himalayan salt (Real Salt or other sea salt works fine)

Combine all ingredients in processor and process until corn is pulverized and the mixture is well blended. Spread onto dehydrator sheets, dehydrate at 115 for approx 6 hours or until tops are dry to the touch. Flip the crackers over onto the dehydrator tray and peel off the liner. Dehydrate for another 10 hours +, until they reach desired crispiness and break into crackers.  

Avocado Pudding

My latest endeavor is to become better acquainted with raw food preparation. Raw foods have wonderful, healing enzymes and should be incorporated into every meal anyway, but during the hottest days of the summer, it is just not so fun to spend hours over a hot stove. Although we haven’t had really any really hot days up here in Evergreen yet, I am getting prepared.

“Uncookbooks” have been littering our downstairs for weeks and I have found some pretty interesting and yummy recipes. One I am particularly excited about is this Chocolate Avocado Pudding. I love chocolate, I love avocados and this pudding is nourishing enough to feed it to my kiddos as part of a meal! It is smooth, fluffy and totally yummy! The below recipe based on the recipe from Alive in 5 by Angela Elliott.

Chocolate Avocado Pudding

½ cup pitted dates, soaked 15 minutes

1 to 2 ripe avocado

2 Tbs raw cacao powder

1 Tb yucan syrup (optional and could sub honey or maple syrup, but honestly, you don’t need it, the dates are sweet enough)

1 tsp vanilla

1/8 tsp sea salt

Pull the dates out of the soaking water and reserve the water for later. Place the dates and the remaining ingredients in the blender and blend. Add just enough of the date soaking water to facilitate blending. Process until smooth. Chill in the fridge for 1 hour before serving.

“Ice Cream” for Dinner?

Spring, it changes things, doesn’t it? I feel like I want to do more of everything - cooking, singing, cleaning! The light messes me up too…oh, dinner is hours away, it is still so light out! But nooooo, it is 4:15 and it looks like it is the middle of the day! I did have dinner planned, beef/sausage balls with a thousand island-like dip made from sour cream, mayo and ketchup along with a raw carrot salad loaded with raisins and pine nuts – yum! But my kitchen is a mess, I am a little tired of being the kitchen and it is getting late. I had a fleeting thought, “movie night with ice cream and popcorn for dinner?” NO…I can’t do that! But wait, it would be “ice cream” and good popcorn! Luckily, the decision was made for me. I went to get my beef and sausage from the fridge and it was still pretty frozen, so that sealed the deal…ice cream and popcorn it is. Now, for those of you who know me well, it is not any ordinary ice cream.

Dinner Ice Cream

1 cup kefir cheese (cream cheese leftover from draining the whey from probiotic-superstar kefir)

3 egg yolks from my stellar backyard brood

1/4 cup (or there abouts) caspian sea yogurt (just because it was there and needed to be used)

1/2 cup raw cream

2 Tbs coconut oil

2 Tbs vanilla

1 heaping teaspoon spirulina (green superfood, masked by the cocoa color)

chocolate sauce mixture: 1/4 cup maple syrup, 1/4 brown rice syrup, 1/4 cup raw cocoa (warmed in pot to just melt)

Blend then toss into ice cream maker = dinner ice cream! Totally yummy to the tummy!

For dinner popcorn, I popped kernels in a coconut oil and coconut ghee (mixture of coconut oil and ghee from Green Pastures) mix, topped with tons of organic butter, celtic sea salt, and a Tbs of nutritional yeast – done. (OH – and Tyler snuck in a few quesadilla's for him and me, so I suppose that is a little more dinner-like.)

Well, according to my standards, the nutritional profile doesn’t look all that bad actually:

raw foods 

nourishing raw fats  

protein

something green

something fermented

sea salt

superfoods

Everyone enjoyed the treats…I mean dinner….over Toy Story 2. Awwwww Spring!

Snow Ice Cream and Snow Day update

I would say, Raw Snow Ice Cream is now one of our favorite desserts! So easy and delicious!

Raw Snow Ice Cream

4 Tbsp Rapadura sugar (or other unrefined dry variety)

1/2 cup raw cream

2 egg yolks (from pastured chicks)

1 to 2 tsp vanilla

pinch sea salt

Using an electric mixer, combine all the above ingredients until the mixture begins to thicken. Then add 4 to 5 cups lightly packed Spring-time snow (which has a little higher water content than winter) and mix until blended to your desired consistency. I would think this recipe is best consumed in Spring, instead of in the dead of winter anyway. Regardless, make the needed adjustments on the snow, we started out with 3 cups but ended up adding more to thicken it up a bit and reduce the sweetness. It was eaten quickly, not only because it needed to be, but because it was yummy to our tummies!

  

Snow update: here are some pictures taken around 3:30. The snow continues to fall steadily, we have around 18 or 19 inches as of right now, totally awesome! We love being snowed in!

 

 

 

 

Ch-ch-ch-ch-chia!

Chia seeds have surfaced as a superfood as of late. I am always amazed when “new’” ancient foods make it into our radar, this one happens to be a gift from the Aztecs. There are so many cool foods that we haven’t tapped into yet. A few weeks back, as I was enjoying my chia seed pudding, Tyler asked if these are the same seeds used in those hairy pets from back in the day…you know…ch-ch-ch-ch-chia! I laughed and hadn’t really thought about it, but come to find out, indeed, they are one in the same! Kind of funny! Anyway, they are the newest superfood. I am not totally sold on their “superfoodability” at this point, but I am having fun playing with them and think they are yummy! They are a little like flaxseeds nutritionally and have some of flax’s gelling properties, which I am totally digging!

A recipe I have been making lately is chia pudding, inspired by Elena of http://www.elanaspantry.com/ (find it under the dessert link and scroll down just a bit). Here is my version:

2 cups water

1 cup Caspian sea yogurt (a new find!)

1 cup raw cashews

2 Tbs brown rice syrup (a little more or add stevia to up sweetness)

3 Tbs cocoa powder

1 Tbs vanilla extract

4 Tbs chia seeds

In the blender, add the water, yogurt and cashews and blend until smooth. Add the rest of the ingredients and refrigerate overnight. The gelling properties of the chia seeds totally make it pudding-like – yum!!! Very tasty, easy and raw to boot!

Egg and Ham Cups

I have been seeing more and more easy, fun ways to cook with muffin tins lately. This breakfast was tasty and fast, with easy clean up (which has been on my priority list lately). Grease up a few muffin tins, take a slice of ham (I used turkey ham, but I am guessing anything sliced will work) and make a little basket in the tins (cut it around the edges if you want it to be cleaner), crack in an egg (pastured preferred), sprinkle on some salt and cook in a 400 degree oven for about 12 to 15 minutes (depending on how firm you want your egg). Voila! This idea came from Kid’s Fun and Healthy Cookbook, which has some creative ideas and mostly whole food based recipes.