Sites We Like

Hey guys...

I just wanted to tell you I updated the side bar with some of the sites that people (mostly Shayla... who is oh-so-wonderfully keeeping this blog alive!) have mentioned recently. Did I miss anything? I like having that up there. I really do click on it occasionally for good ideas. Anyhow... if you have any more good sites, and you have the time, you should add to it!

Thanks everyone.

I will participate more in this blog/emails soon. I am still feeling CRUMMY!!!

Great Site

Hi again...

A friend of mine told me about this site and I have spent a lot of time looking around and reading his blog.  He is well-informed and writes well.  I love the content because it matches my philosophy almost exactly.  It also has some good recipes and other nice posts about preventative dental care through nutrition to nutrition book reviews.  He also does a weekly goal to help people live healthier one baby step at a time.

Click here to go see Word of Wisdom Living

Spinach Pesto

We do cheese still on a rare basis, and this was good enough to share if any of you are going to do cheese.  In fact, I might say it was one of the tastiest pestos I've had.  We loved it!  


Those of you who are more experienced, how do you think this would be with nutritional yeast substituted for the parmesan cheese?


Spinach Pesto

• 1 Cup Fresh spinach
• 1/8 cup walnuts (or other nuts)

Pulse in food processor until blended.

• 1/3 Cup olive oil
• 1/2 Cup parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper

Blend altogether and use to top pasta. 

©2011 Super Healthy Kids. Amy Roskelley provides resources on feeding your family healthy food. Visit Super Healthy Kidsfor more ideas 

Faux Caramel Sauce

My distant cousin just sent me this recipe and I intend to make it as soon as I get more dates (I completely ran out from making date balls so many times... haha).


1/4 - 1/2 cup almond milk (or other nut milk)
1 cup dates (pitted and tightly packed)
1 tsp vanilla
dash of salt

Blend in a high-powered blender until smooth. Serve with sliced apples. You can't believe how much this tastes like caramel!

Raspberry Syrup

3 cups raspberries (I just put the whole bag of frozen raspberries in)
3/4 cup sugar (I used agave)
1 tsp. lemon juice

Blend.  Serve on pancakes, waffles, french toast, oatmeal, 8 grain hot cereal, homemade or plain yogurt, on cream puffs or cheesecake... ok, I'm getting carried away.  But really, it would make anything taste better.  This is the first thing I made in my Blendtec and I have put it on pretty much everything since then.  It is to die for!

Mango Popsicle

Popsicle time is here!

4 mangos
1/4 cup soft coconut oil
2 tbsp honey

blend. put in Popsicle trays. Eat when frozen.

You can do any fruit you want. When I use berries I add spirulina or blue green alge to it. It hides the green color better.

Raw Banana Dessert

From the same lady who brought us the Happy Shake comes another great recipe: Her Banana Roadkill is deelish!  You just squish up two bananas between sheet of plastic wrap and form in the shape of a cookie then sprinkle honey, cinnamon, walnuts, goji berries and it was supposed to be cacao nibs, but I ran out and I'm pregnant and wanted some chocolate.  So I did regular milk chocolate chips :) freeze.  Break into pieces and eat!

Date Balls

I got this recipe from my cousin, Jamie, and I am in love!!  I made them yesterday and Jocelyn snitched 3 of them while she thought I wasn't looking.  I don't know if they are a dessert or just a snack, but they are raw (the way I made them).  I have never tried Emily's Date Balls, so I'm not sure how similar they taste.

1 cup dates
3/4 cup almonds
pinch salt
1/2 cup oats (optional, but good fiber)
Dark chocolate chips (optional)
Craisins (optional)
Dried Apricots (optional)
Cinnamon (optional)

Make sure your dates don't have pits and combine all the things you want to use in a high powered blender or food processor.  Blend until everything is in small pieces.  Feel the mixture.  If you push it together and it crumbles apart, put more dates in.  When it stays together, roll them into balls and set out on waxed paper for a while until they become less sticky.  You can also roll them in coconut, raw sugar, whatever.

I did everything except the dark chocolate chips and I gotta say, it didn't need the chocolate.  I didn't roll them in anything.  I did put quite a bit of cinnamon in and they were deelish!

Produce for Kids

Another great resource I came across this morning:

Produce for Kids

They have a bunch of recipes to help you try and get more produce in your kids

Multi-grain hot cereal

I finally had the time to track down all the different grains needed for this multi-grain hot cereal from The May Files blog, and we are fans!  If you are in the Orem area, Sunflower has amarinth, kamut, and millet and Real Foods has amarinth, whole barley, rye, spelt, and red quinoa.  I didn't go to my usual, Winco, but I know they have some of these things too.

It looks a little bit like birdseed here, and quite honestly, if you make it in the microwave it tastes a little bit like bird seed.  But if you make it in the rice cooker as she suggests, it comes out perfect.  It may as well be oatmeal, but you have 8 different kinds of whole grains.  Jocelyn loves xylitol and cinnamon, Cory likes his with raisins/craisins and agave or maple syrup.

Here is the recipe and some of her directions that are helpful.

She also has a recipe for blender pancakes that you can use this grain mix in.  Here is her original blender pancakes recipe and here is the one that she uses this mixture for.  She just uses one cup of this multi-grain mixture instead of the 3 grains listed in the original recipe, and that's the only difference!  It's so very handy to have all those grains pre-mixed and be able to get breakfast on the table quickly.

Informative videos

A friend of mine just sent me this link and I thought it had some good information on it.  I thought the super foods videos were good.

Click here for the link

Happy Shake Recipe

I just realized I never posted the actual recipe, although I did explain where to get it.  But here's an easy link to try if any of you are interested.  I have this for breakfast every day and I crave it when I miss a day!  Click here for the recipe.

Paella

A very successful dinner last night! I was a bit worried about all the different flavors, but they actually went really, really well together. The whole family had more than one helping and there were smiles and compliments all around. It's a keeper for sure! I was actually thinking it would be a good recipe to make with guests over.

I got it from Betty Crocker's Easy Everyday Vegetarian Cookbook.

Paella

1 cup uncooked brown rice
1 pound of asparagus, cut in 2 inch pieces
3 cups fresh broccoli florets
2 teaspoons olive oil (I omitted this and it was fine)
1 medium red bell pepper, chopped
2 small zucchinis, chopped in bite size chunks
1 med. onion, chopped
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon tumeric
2 large tomatoes, chopped
2 cans garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
10 oz. frozen peas, thawed and drained

Cook rice as directed on package. Set aside and keep warm. Heat some water in a large pot (all of those veggies will NOT fit in a skillet- go for a soup pot!) Add asparagus and broccoli- steam about 4 min, and drain any excess water. Add oil to pan if using, add pepper, zucchini, onion, salt and tumeric. Cook about 5 min more. Stir in remaining ingredients including rice. Heat through and serve.

Yummm!

Egg Salad Sandwich-Healthified

I don't know how many of you are doing eggs anymore, so I don't know how relevant this will be to any of you.  Even if you don't do eggs anymore, I thought I'd share this neat tip that I learned from Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious.  We are doing homegrown from a lady down the street, periodically in our diet, although we don't have them too often anymore, and I never use them in baking anymore... super excited to try Ashlee's fake egg trick with the flax seed!

When I was growing up Egg Salad Sandwich was just eggs and mayo and a few spices...not much nutritionally.  I had some eggs leftover from Easter and wanted to make a better Egg Salad Sandwich with more veggies. So I chopped up some celery, olives, and pickles to add to the egg mixture.

This is the tip from DD:  cauliflower puree is such a great way to make any kind of white sauce and it hides really well.  So I mixed up the egg and veggies and then put in 1/2 cup cauliflower puree (I just keep it in 1/2 cup quantities in the freezer for convenience) and then only enough mayo to make it the right consistency.  I really only used about 2 Tbsp. of mayo, compared to 1/3 cup (ish) that I would have used before.  Then I also added some of "Aunt Grace's Mustard".

 It is pretty much THE BEST homemade mustard you've ever tasted and it is a family recipe that I would tell you the recipe, but then I'd have to kill you...just joking.  but not.  Anywho... I also put in some Mrs. Dash and Paprika and served on homemade wheat bread.

Cauliflower helps to make a good "cream-based" soup or to make anything seem creamier without using any dairy.  In DD, she uses it in her Mac 'n Cheese (which we don't do anymore because of the cheese, but it was my favorite mac 'n cheese recipe, pre-ETL and pre-DPYC).  I made a ton of cauliflower puree last summer thinking that it would last me forever, but I throw it in a lot of things so I've gone through it pretty fast. She also uses Carrot and Butternut Squash puree a lot.  There's a good ketchup recipe that has carrot puree in it as well.  DD is not necessarily a healthy cookbook, but it does show you how you can use more veggies than you would have thought, and I've learned some little tips and tricks from it that I've been able to use in other recipes.

P.S. Just watched Food, Inc.  Very disturbing.  It just backs up everything I've read, but coming from a new voice it made it fresh again.  1 in 3 kids born after 2000 will have early onset diabetes?!?!?!?!?! That is insane.  Cheers to you wonderful ladies making the world healthier for you and your families!!  Thanks for the inspiration you provide me with to keep going!

Bok Choy

Well... to please a 5 year old boy last night we had Sushi at our house for dinner. He and Corey were huge fans, Aly and I? Not so much. But on the side we had THIS Bok Choy recipe, and that was something the entire family agreed was delish! It's such a mild tasting green in comparison to kale etc. Corey had an entire head himself (two days doing ETL and going strong!), and the boys and I split another one. I'm sure you all already know this, but bok choy is incredibly high in calcium, and the calcium is very well absorbed by the body.

Hope you are all having a great day!

A New Technique/Tex Mex Crock Pot Beans/Cornbread

Wow! Guys! Have you ever made and "egg," out of flax seed and water? I had heard of this before, but hadn't tried it until last night. It was amazing! You bring 6 tablespoons of water to a boil, add 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed or flax seed meal, reduce heat to med-low and whisk with a fork until it forms an "egg." It was crazy! It was like pushing an uncooked egg around in my pan. Wow! I'm not sure whether it is intended to act as a binder or a leavener in recipes... I am guessing binder though. I used it to make a cornbread recipe we had with dinner last night, and the bread turned out wonderfully. I was so pleased! Sometimes vegan baking is so... meh... you know? This just tasted like yummy cornbread. Enough gab. Here's what we had for dinner last night:

Tex Mex Crock Pot Beans: (from Betty Crocker Easy Everyday Vegetarian Cookbook)

1 pound dried pinto beans (2 cups) sorted and rinsed
1 large onion, chopped (1 cup... I think it totally needs it all if not a bit more)
2-4 large cloves garlic, minced
1 jalepeno, seeded and minced
6 1/2 cups water
1 tablespoon chili powder
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper

High Heat 7-9 hours. (If you soak the beans overnight before cooking you can reduce the time. I also think you need to keep an eye on the water level. We usually have to add a bit more and reduce the heat.)

Cornbread original recipe HERE

2 tablespoons ground flax seed
6 tablespoons water
1 cup whole grain flour (I used a combo whole wheat and spelt)
1 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup "milk," (we used rice)
1/4 cup canola oil

Boil water. Add flax. Simmer on med-low till thickened. Set aside. Combine dry. Pour in milk, oil, and flax "egg." Stir until combined. Bake at 425 degrees in prepared 8 inch baking dish 20-25 min.

We ate this classic beans and cornbread meal with tons and tons of steamed asparagus with mrs. dash lemon pepper. Yummy!