Stuff we been doin'

Going swimming

Building forts

Almost walking

Making (and eating) homemade donuts

Growing hollyhocks

And that's what we've been up to over the last week. :-)

Killer stir fry

Not my picture

I found a way to make the best stir fry ever. Stand aside, wok! You've just been outclassed by the Iron Skillet.

I had this theory that I could use my iron skillet to make stir fry, because it heats more evenly than my frying pan, and it stays hot longer.

So I cooked my meat in it, took that out, and tossed in my veggies. They actually achieved that elusive "crisp tender" stage that the recipes talk about. I'd never before achieved it.

Then I dumped out the veggies and made fried rice. Awww yeah.

I also used my skillet to make this oddball dish where you cut up your chicken, toss it in taco seasoning, then stir fry it in Italian dressing. Then you put that in a casserole dish, and cover it with layers of green onions, black beans, frozen corn, and salsa. You add cheese on top and bake it, then eat it over rice. It was extremely flavorful. I can't wait to make it again.

Tonight I made "milk and honey" cookies. So called because I used honey for half the sugar. It's just a chocolate chip cookie recipe with no chocolate chips. They came out with a delicate, honey flavor and taste excellent dipped in milk.

So that's what I've been doing lately. Eating food, and thinking of more ways to eat food. :-)

Breakfast cookies

Today was baking day. I wanted to make a cookie that would offer a bit more energy than just a sugar rush. I had some extra bacon that I needed to use up, and I remembered Breakfast Cookies. Fortunately Taste of Home had a recipe. Here's theirs:

Breakfast cookies:

1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
10 bacon strips, cooked and crumbled
2 cups cornflakes
1/2 cup raisins

Directions

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg. Combine flour and baking soda; gradually add to creamed mixture. Stir in bacon, cornflakes and raisins.
Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls 2 in. apart onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake at 350° for 15-18 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool for 2 minutes before removing to wire racks. Store in the refrigerator. Yield: 2 dozen.

I didn't have any cornflakes, and the comments on the recipe complained that they made it too crunchy anyway. So I used 2 cups of oatmeal. Essentially these are oatmeal raisin cookies with crumbled bacon.

It makes for sweet cookies with curiously tasty and crunchy salty bits. The bacon flavor is a bit weird at first bite, but then it tastes really good. I don't think I'd dispense them as breakfast, but as an afternoon snack, they can't be beat.

Salad confessions

I have a confession to make.

I have no idea how to make a salad from scratch.

My idea of a salad from scratch is one of those premade bagged deals with the dressing and tortilla strips.

So, assuming I wanted to have some lettuce on hand for salad making, what should I get? One head of iceburg? Romaine? (Can you eat all of the Romaine or only the hearts?)

I'm a salad noob. I have no idea how you do it. And I'm craving greens something fierce.

Also, can you make bean sprouts from any old beans, or does it have to be soybeans?

No Stroganoff

A couple people asked how my stroganoff turned out last night.

Except, er, it turned out that I made something else.

I made THESE bad boys!

Ground Beef and Bisciuts from Taste of Home.

I didn't have the mushrooms and consumme that you need to make stroganoff, which I didn't realize until 5 minutes before I started cooking. So I typed "ground beef" into the search on Taste of Home and picked the first thing that looked tasty.

It kind of tasted like the Sloppy Joes in a Pan that we used to make off the Bisquick box. The recipe calls for canned biscuits, but I just whipped up a batch of baking powder biscuits. It was delicious. Even the munchkins ate it, which is a change from the norm. :-)

Wheat makes me mean

So I've chronicled our experiments with going off wheat, mostly trying to cure Alex's chronic cough. (Which I believe is caused by sugar.)

Anyway, I don't eat much wheat anyway, because I've never really liked bread, except as toast. Right before we had officially gone of wheat, I had noticed that if I had had no wheat that day, and ate, say, a muffin, I'd have a dramatic mood swing. Always toward the angry. (Why can't mood swings be into the happy and nice?)

So I haven't had any wheat in days, and this morning I made pancakes. The kids had been asking, and I thought, eh, what the hey. So I had one pancake with jam, thinking that if I alternated it with bites of oatmeal, my body would never notice.

An hour later, I stepped out of the shower and suddenly I'm screaming at the kids in rage. And I kind of shook myself and went, "What in the world is this? A mood swing?" Then I remembered that pancake. So I slowly blew-dry my hair and prayed and prayed for God to help me to get a handle on this mood. By the time I was done, I felt in control again.

But yeah. Wheat is baaaaad for me. I can't do the mood swing thing.

And for my aunt, who was asking about gluten-free, here is my standard personal gluten-free menu. (The kids and Ryan don't stick to this quite as close as I do.)

Breakfast: 2-egg omelet with cheese, bowl of oatmeal with bananas or strawberries or raisins.

Lunch: Hotdogs wrapped in lettuce leaf, corn tortilla chips, fruit or carrot sticks with homemade Ranch dip.

Snacks: Peanuts and raisins, homemade granola bars, fruit, carrot or bell pepper strips, or smoothies.

Dinner: Anything you like, as flour doesn't generally factor into dinner for us. Stir fry over rice, or baked chicken dishes, or enchiladas with corn tortillas, or baked beans with green beans, or chili thickened with masa, or various soups with rice instead of noodles.

Amazon does sell einkorn noodles, einkorn being the ancient relative of wheat with far less gluten, and reportedly it doesn't bother gluten-intolerant people. There's also brown rice noodles, which aren't quite so expensive.

And googling "gluten-free" turns up thousands of blogs and recipes run by people who are gluten-intolerant, explaining how to get around it.

Food experiments

Some people on Facebook who are into mad scientists and steampunk referred to their kids as "experiments", which I found hilarious. I feel like Alex has been the subject of many experiments (harmless, of course!)

Mostly pertaining to that cough of his. I thought I had it pegged to wheat, then I found out that wheat converts pretty much to pure sugar once you eat it. I made a pumpkin pie and let the kids have a couple slices. Lo and behold, his cough worsened within hours. It's starting to look a lot like a sugar allergy. Which is a lot less of a problem than any of the other potential allergies--I can deal with sugar.

I should have figured it out when his cough started after eating a ton of jellybeans at Easter. And he's always responded well to probiotic. All symptoms of a sugar allergy.

Yeesh.

It's taken me how long to figure this out? Of course, I have kind of been preoccupied with a new baby, so I suppose that contributes.

Wheat-free

Alex has been coughing and coughing since Easter. Over the ensuing months, I've experimented on him, trying one thing after another to get rid of the cough.

We've moved his bed. We've loaded him up on probiotics. We've limited his sugar, and lately, we've limited his wheat.

Sugar and wheat limitation have had the most dramatic effect on his coughing. He's been off wheat for about three days, and his cough is limited to a little bit right before bed, and a little bit when he gets up. Before, he was coughing all night, usually making himself throw up.

I was afraid he had whooping cough or something, but he has no other symptoms besides the cough. It's made him hard to pin down.

Anyway, I think he has a bit of a wheat allergy. Then my mom found this book:


Wheat Belly, by William Davis.

He's a cardiologist who observed huge, dramatic turnarounds in thousands of patients who came to him for treatment, and all he had them do was stop eating wheat. No other diet or exercise changes. And he's seen cures in diabetes, arthritis, dementia, and all kinds of other things. It has to do with our modern wheat being so genetically modified that it's more or less unsafe for human consumption. There is no such thing as "healthy whole grains".

I'll post some excerpts from it later on. Right now, the order of business is trying to figure out what to feed picky children when you're pretty much going gluten-free. When peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were a food staple, it's hard to change. So tonight I'm looking at some kind of pizza with a cornmeal crust.

(I tried grinding some flaxseed, then found out that there are two kinds of flaxseed--dark and golden. Dark flaxseed is extremely bitter. Guess which one I have!)

I have some rice flour, but it tends to make really goopy dough. I'm experimenting with adding it to cornflour to make the cornflour a little less grainy. I'm considering picking up some other kind of flour, like amaranth or gram (which is chickpea), but I'm afraid of paying something like 4 bucks a pound.

Ice cream cone crepes

The older two munchkins were outside, so I put the baby down on the mat where she could watch them. Entertainment for hours! She wants to crawl soooo bad.

Last night I wanted a waffle cone in the worst way, so I went sniffing about to see how to make an ice cream cone.

I discovered this recipe where you just roll up crepes.

Mine looked more or less like that, only more randomly-sized and without the perfect scoops of ice cream in them. But they tasted FABULOUS. Exactly like a waffle cone! Everybody ate the extra crepes plain once the ice cream ran out.

Recipe:

2 large eggs
1/2 cup (100 grams) granulated white sugar
4 tablespoons (57 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
2 - 3 tablespoons milk
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/3 cup (50 grams) all purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
Vegetable oil and pastry brush

Oil your griddle set it to medium-low heat, pour on 3 Tbsp batter and tilt griddle to spread it around. Flip after 3-4 minutes. Once golden brown on both sides, roll into cone shape and cool on wire rack. I cooled mine in coffee cups. Lots more details at the site.

Ice milk: poor man's ice cream

Still-mixed ice milk is like poor man's ice cream. Or maybe lazy man's ice cream.

This is my bowlful of frozen ice milk. Here's how you make it:

4 cups milk
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

OR

4 cups milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4th tsp salt

(Tastes great and has less sugar!)

Stir together until sugar is dissolved. Pour into baking pan (9x13 works well) and place in freezer. Beat with hand mixer every 40 minutes for 2 1/2 hours until frozen. The smoother you beat it, the finer the ice crystals and the smoother the ice cream.

I put mine in the freezer and then took a 2 hour nap, so it was mostly frozen by the time I got back to it. I grimly attacked it with my hand mixer and splattered it all over the kitchen before transferring it to a bowl. But it came out fluffy enough. Kind of coarse, like a slushy. But my husband and kids like it, and it was fast.

Also:

Caterpillar arms.

Summer salsa

Here is Claire, sitting in Daddy's lap and drooling all over his arm.

Ryan has been asking me to make him some salsa all week, and today I determined that I would make him some if it killed me.

At Mom's last week, I had picked about ten tomatoes, large and small, to make into salsa. So i sliced those up, chucked them on the jelly roll pan that I don't care about, and cooked them at 475 for about 30 minutes, until they started to get black. I turned them halfway through, and chucked on a sliced jalapeno, too, to get that roasted. Turns out it wasn't a very hot jalapeno, and I should have used more. Alas. Anyway, here's the recipe:

Modeled after Baja Fresh's salsa:

7 tomatoes, sliced
1 jalapeno, seeded
1 garlic clove
2 tablespoons diced onion
juice from 1 lime
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup water

Roast the tomatoes on a grill (or in the oven) until black, turning halfway through. At the halfway point, add the jalapeno.

Do not roast the onion or garlic. When the jalapeno and tomatoes are blackened, combine all ingredients in blender and puree until the desired consistency. (I ran it about 4 seconds on low.) Chop 1 last raw tomato and stir into salsa. (I forgot to leave a tomato. Oops.)

It was HEAVEN on a CHIP. I forgot how good fresh roasted tomatoes are. It's just a bright, sparkling flavor. It's like in the cartoon Ratatouille, when he eats the food and the fireworks go off. I'd show you a picture, but my picture just looks like red sauce. Not very appetizing.

Grandma's Strawberry Pie

It's strawberry season, and no summer is complete without a strawberry pie.

It doesn't look as appetizing with half of it missing, but it was delicious.

Here's the recipe:

Grandma Joyce's Strawberry Pie

3 cups fresh strawberries
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
2 Tbsp cornstarch
2 drops red food coloring
1 tsp strawberry extract
baked pie crust of your choice

Bake pie crust, set aside. Pour 2 cups chopped strawberries into crust. Mash remaining 1 cup, set aside.

In medium saucepan, bring water, sugar and cornstarch to a boil. Add food coloring, extract and mashed strawberries. Pour into pie crust. Refrigerate several hours.


I don't have any strawberry extract on hand, and it still tasted wonderful. I also put a layer of cream cheese on the bottom of my pie crust, before I added the chopped strawberries. Heaven on a plate!

More plum jam!

It's that time of year again: plum time!

My mom's plum tree is once again so loaded with plums that I picked an entire basketful off two branches.

I cut up eight cups of them to make into jam, and I still probably have another four cups. I need to use them, but there's not quite enough to make into jam and my plum cobbler was so sour, nobody but me would eat it. (Although my plums are a bit more ripe this time around.)

Pitting plums is the pits. I finally just sliced them in quarters, like I was cutting up an apple, and cut around the pit. That seemed to work pretty well.

I cooked the heck out of it and it actually seemed to set up this time. I also know a bit more about the science of jam-making, like how you have to let it steam while it cooks for quite a while, because that evaporates the water out of it.

So my jam consisted of:

8 cups plums
6 cups sugar
1 bag of Pectin
Mix the plums and sugar together and let stand for 3 or 4 hours. Then bring to a boil, reduce heat and let simmer 5-10 minutes (or until the dishwasher is done washing your jars). Add pectin, return to a boil and boil for 1 minute. Pour into hot jars and seal with sterilized lids.

Anyway, yesterday was bread and jam day, and by six o clock, I was exhausted. I pretty much went to bed at 6, getting up only to put the kids to bed and do some computer stuff before returning to my repose.

So much to can!

My mom loaned me this Better Homes and Gardens Canning magazine. I sat and read it this afternoon, and I'm inspired.

How to make spiced peaches and chow chow and pickles and every kind of jam imaginable! Jam with wine and brandy and herbs and spices!

I'm really curious about spiced peaches, ever since they featured in the book and movie Holes. (It's an awesome book, by the way.) They dubbed it "Sploosh" and I'd love to make some Sploosh.

Peppermint tea

My munchkins have come down with headcolds and croupy coughs. Upon doing some research into what sorts of things might help loosen up their coughs, I came upon a site recommending peppermint tea. Peppermint has a high menthol content, which helps to soothe inflamed nasal passages and throats. Plus it instantly eases stomach aches. There's lots more that it does, but that was the primary reason I was interested in it.

This is my peppermint bush. It started out as a small pot of half-dead peppermint I discovered thrown behind a bush in our apartment complex. I planted it, and it's turned into a shrub. There's plenty to make into tea.

This is my tea ball, packed with peppermint leaves.

There's lots of ways to make tea, but I'm going for the "southern iced tea" method, which is to boil water, take it off the heat, chuck in the tea bags and let it steep. With regular tea, you then dilute it with water and sugar, but I only have one tea ball, so mine isn't quite that strong.

Boiling hot water, removed from heat.

When you steep tea like this, make sure you keep a lid on it. With peppermint, the essential oils will evaporate right out.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, check out your tea:

It's a lovely greenish amber color. It tastes like mint-flavored water. It's wonderful with honey, but my munchkins don't like honey, so they've been getting it plain. It loosens up croupy coughs so fast, though, that they don't complain a bit. They've been sucking it down as fast as I can make it, especially at night when they wake up coughing.

We've been watching a lot of videos these last couple of days. Netflix Instant doesn't seem to have any Disney anything. And you know, with no Disney movies or cartoons anywhere in the roster, family entertainment is a sad, sad place.

Strawberries!

I went to the farmer's market yesterday to get some nice fresh produce. Mostly I wanted strawberries.



Not my photo, because a day later half of them are gone and they're starting to look wilted.

Anyway, they're juicy and flavorful now, if still a little on the pricey side (I hunted around, and found the same 3-box carton at various stalls for 8 bucks, 7 bucks, and 6 bucks. I went for the 6 buck option.) They've gone into smoothies, along with oranges and bananas, as we seem to have a small cold running through the household.

But it got me itching to make some jam. Strawberry jam, one of the finest things in life. All I have in the house is peach butter and marmalade. The marmalade is a bit rich for daily consumption, and I can't stand that peach butter (I smelled it for far too long with morning sickness).

I'm also pondering strawberry-rhubarb. Maybe a batch of each? I've never eaten rhubarb, but it's all the rage in blogland right now.

You know, there's so many things that I've tried because of blogs. They've really broadened my world.

Pondering cake

Pondering using this tutorial ...

...to make rose-topped cupcakes for my daughter's birthday next week. I know I have some tips like that. I Am Baker makes it look like a snap.

Question: can I accomplish this with a screaming baby in the background? Hmm ...

Ten pounds! and sweets

I weighed Claire today, and she's up just over ten pounds now. She was 8.2 when she was born. Not bad for being three weeks old.

Patrice over on Everyday Ruralty does the Wednesday Words for Weight Loss every week. A few weeks ago, her daughter suggested a question about, "Something sweet that is healthy that you can eat and not feel guilty."

I've tried and tried to come up with something that might fit that category. Most baked goods are out of the question, because they have flour and yeast and sugar. I suppose if it was something weird like barley flour, no yeast and some weird natural sugar, it might be okay. Anyway, after three weeks of pondering, I finally have two sweet things that I think qualify:

Granola bars

People go crazy with their granola bar recipes, composing them of strange toasted grains, stuffing them with weird dried fruit, and binding them together with honey and maple syrups. I suppose you could eat these without guilt. They're not cake, but hey, you can mix chocolate chips into them, right?


Fruit (not my photo)

Fruit is full of vitamins and fiber and all kinds of goodness. Although there is a limit to how much you can eat (unless you're immune to laxatives), you can pretty much eat fruit with no guilt.

I keep trying to think of something else that you could eat huge amounts of that wouldn't make you feel guilty (or sick). Try as I might, I can't justify chocolate. I know the dark chocolate people have been working overtime, pimping the antioxidants, but you know what? Chocolate is still chocolate.

Blueberry cobbler

Last week when the kids were so sick, Mom gave me some frozen blueberries to feed them.

The kids decided that they didn't like blueberries, so I've been slowly eating them all myself, on yogurt and mixed with cereal. I noticed we were getting low and felt bad about it, so I decided to make something that everybody would enjoy: a cobbler!

I was going to make a pie, but it looked like too much work. So I started researching cobblers.

There's a hundred bazillion types of cobblers, so I just went with my favorite tried and true recipe, and added a bit of seasoning to the blueberries to make them more like pie filling.

Blueberry cobbler recipe

Filling:
3 cups blueberries, frozen or fresh
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Juice of half a lemon, about 1 Tablespoon

Topping:
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg
Half a stick of butter
Juice from other half of lemon, about 1 Tablespoon

Butter 9x9 baking pan. Heat oven to 350. Toss all filling ingredients together in a bowl. Pour into baking pan.

In separate bowl, mix flour, sugar and baking powder with fork. Lightly beat egg, toss in flour mixture until it looks like flaky crumbs. Scatter over berries. Melt butter, mix with lemon juice. Drizzle over top of flour mixture until mostly covered. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until browned.

It turned out wonderfully, and we ate most of the pan directly after dinner. Nobody complained about eating blueberries when they were in a cobbler, that's for sure.

Experiments

I've conducted two experiments lately.

First, over on Pioneer Woman's photography blog, they had an article about "giving up your flash for Lent". I read it, and read the basic tutorial on setting your camera to manual and adjusting your shutter and aperture settings yourself.

I took a lot of really dark pictures, but I did get a couple that I liked.

Like this one. (I even froze the dirt falling out of her little hand!)

Unfortunately, I'm not savvy enough to understand the strange hieroglyphics on my camera's screen. I need to study the manual a few more times. And that leads us to ...

Second Experiment: winging ice cream.

My mom has the best ice cream cookbook. We actually trade it back and forth all the time, but at the moment, she has it. There's some really nice non-cooked egg-full vanilla ice cream recipes, if you're using homegrown eggs and are pretty confident that they're fresh.

But there was another one that used just half and half and whipping cream, with no eggs. I figured that such a thing would be simple to find on our health-conscious egg-hating internet.

HA.

Every non-egg recipe I found contained something like sweetened condensed milk, or cream cheese, or any number of other super-rich ingredients. I just wanted something with sugar, half and half, and whipping cream. Finally I gave up in exasperation. I had a half pint of whipping cream and a quart of half and half. I figured if I mixed that with enough sugar and vanilla, it'd start tasting like ice cream eventually.

My recipe:

2 cups sugar
2 Tablespoons vanilla extract
1 half pint whipping cream
1 quart half and half
1 cup milk

I creamed the sugar, vanilla and whipping cream until it was stiff, that being the fun of using whipping cream. Then I poured in half and half while running the hand mixer, until the mixing bowl was so full that I was starting to splatter my countertop. Then I poured the rest into the ice cream drum, along with all the rest of the half and half and the milk, jammed the hand mixer down in the drum as far as it would go, and ran it until the mixture frothed.

I had read that you want to stir it until the sugar dissolves or it'll make huge grainy ice crystals, so I stirred it for a while with a wooden spoon until it didn't sound grainy anymore. Then I stuck it in the machine and ran it according to the manufacturer's directions. Because all recipes say that.

It was deemed a success by all and sundry. It was nice and rich, and I didn't miss the eggs at all. I'm hoping that it will stay fluffy as it freezes, but generally my ice cream sets up like a brick and requires ten minutes of defrosting before you can chip any off it. Ah well.