Saturdays are for Pancakes

Lucy and her daddy have a started a saturday morning tradition. Pancakes. What's not to love? I get a yummy, carbified breakfast made for me and I get to watch these two enjoying their time together. Lucy is getting really good at mixing up the batter and telling daddy that when you see bubbles it's time to flip them. She is so excited to be able to help out. Of course she makes a huge mess but, you know what? It really doesn't matter. I'm not going to look back and remember how much pancake batter I had to scrape off of the floor. I'm going to remember these two. I'm going to remember these lazy saturday mornings when we have nothing to do but spend time together making pancakes.

you got a what?

I've gotten two very distinct reactions from people when the subject of acquiring a flock of chickens comes up. Either I get "oooh, I love chickens!! I would love to get some myself! Fresh eggs are great!" or I get **blank stare** "You got WHAT? Why would you do that?".

So here is a brief explanation of why we have chickens.

If you know me at all you know that food is very important to me. I think about it a lot. I love it. It makes me happy. What makes me even happier is fresh, just picked, local, organic and the best of all...home grown or home raised. I feel very passionately about, whenever possible, knowing where my food comes from. I feel nearly giddy thinking about the farmers market opening this summer. Being able to see the actual person growing the food, listening to them talk passionately about their plants like they are members of the family, knowing that that food didn't spend days or weeks on a truck or airplane to get to me, knowing that it was picked the day before or even that morning. Ahhh, bliss.

It is important for me to teach my daughter this as well. I grew up in a place where having gardens and small farms was the norm. I remember my uncle, who lived behind us, had a small chicken coop and a beautiful vegetable garden. We would go over there, pick beans, and go home to cook them for dinner. I don't want Lucy to think that food comes from the grocery store. I want her to experience the thrill of growing it yourself and eating it fresh off of the vine.

In a perfect world, I would live on a 50 acre farm and grow or raise most of the food we eat. That isn't possible at this point (I won't say it will never happen because, hey, ya never know) but there are few things I can do to get a little closer to knowing where my food is coming from. One easy way I have found is raising chickens. We were lucky enough to move to a pretty rural area where many people around us have small vegetable gardens and a small flock of chickens. But there has been a great number of people who are able to have a couple of hens in the city. The previous owners of our house also kept chickens and left their portable chicken coop. I'm in the process of getting a more permanent run built off of our shed as well but for now the ladies are loving getting out in the chicken tractor on sunny afternoons.

They're still little now but I am so looking forward to those fresh eggs that will be coming this fall. We got them 3 weeks ago as day old chicks. I chose a small variety...two Araucanas (aka easter-eggers because they lay colored eggs) and two black cochin bantams (not great egg layers but they stay little and have funny feathered feet). And nothing beats fresh eggs. I mean, like, go out to the coop in the morning, pick up your eggs and go inside to make an omlette. Um, yea, that's fresh.


Here's some pics of the ladies...

sugar and spice

I'm convinced. Little girls are so much fun. At just over 20 months my little sweetie's girly side is really coming out. She loves to pretend to cook, picks out her own shoes, rifles through her clothes and exclaims "cute!", and is thrilled when I paint her fingernails pink.

Last weekend we took a little trip to Ikea to pick out a table and chairs for her. She is having so much fun having little chairs that fit her perfectly. Her favorite is having her snack at her little table, coloring with her crayons on her little table and wiping down her table with a wet towel. Seriously, this girl asks for a wet towel a dozen times a day and runs around cleaning every surface she can find (including the dogs).












Oh, and I had some nearly rotten bananas lying around so I made banana bread. It was, by far, the best banana bread I have ever made! Here's the recipe...

Banana Bread

INGREDIENTS
4 very ripe bananas, smashed
1/3 cup melted butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon orange extract
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup chopped walnuts + some to sprinkle on top

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Sprinkle a few walnuts on top (I also added a bit of brown sugar for some extra yumminess). Pour mixture into a buttered 4x8 inch loaf pan. Bake for (about) 1 hour. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.





even better with some butter...

Is Kashi health food??

Kashi has become a common “health food” staple in my pantry over the past several years. While I try to stay away from packaged foods in general the Kashi bars are easy to grab on the go and most of them are pretty yummy. I’ve never purchased this particular GoLean Crunchy Bar but we have them in the office all the time and I have to admit that I have tried them.

I am a “package reader”…I read everything on the packages of food I’m eating because, hey, I like to think about what is going in my body. I don’t care so much about fat and calories as I do the ingredient list. I like my packaged foods to be made out of ingredients that I know and have heard of and I really stay away from anything with high fructose corn syrup and anything with partially hydrogenated oils. Yucky stuff.

So I was pretty surprised to read the list of ingredients on this “healthy” Kashi bar. Lots of things I have never heard of…

SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, EVAPORATED CANE JUICE CRYSTALS, BROWN RICE SYRUP, CRYSTALLINE FRUCTOSE, OAT FIBER, NONFAT MILK, CORN GRITS, KASHI SEVEN WHOLE GRAINS AND SESAME® BLEND (STONE GROUND WHOLE: HARD RED WINTER WHEAT, OATS, RYE, BARLEY, TRITICALE, LONG GRAIN BROWN RICE, BUCKWHEAT, SESAME SEEDS), MECHANICALLY FRACTIONATED PALM KERNEL OIL, RICE STARCH, WHEAT BRAN, POPCORN, CHICORY ROOT FIBER, VEGETABLE GLYCERIN, EVAPORATED CANE JUICE SYRUP, HONEY, CORN BRAN, COCOA, SALT, CHOCOLATE LIQUOR, CALCIUM CARBONATE, NATURAL FLAVORS, MAGNESIUM OXIDE, SOY LECITHIN, ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C), ALPHA TOCOPHEROL ACETATE (VITAMIN E), ZINC OXIDE, ANNATTO (COLOR), FERROUS FUMARATE (IRON), PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B6), FOLIC ACID AND VITAMIN B12.

First of all, that is a lot of ingredients! Something that stands out to me is that the MAIN ingredient is Soy Protein. Ewww. Not a great way to get your protein but I that should be a whole post on it's own. Next is that the next THREE ingredients are different kinds of sweetener. Hmmm. One "sugar" ingredient that stands out to me is Crystalline Fructose. What is that? It sounds weird so I did some investigating.

Apparently crystalline fructose is produced by allowing the fructose to crystallize from a fructose-enriched corn syrup. (This information is from the sugar website sugar.org) Ah, Whaaaat? That sounds a lot like high fructose corn syrup to me?!

In reading about this ingredient I discovered that crystalline fructose is made from corn just like HFCS and contains 99.5% minimum of fructose assay. That is an even higher percentage of fructose than what makes up High Fructose Corn Syrup (55% fructose). Does that mean that CF is even worse for you than HFCS? Possibly.

And here is the general makeup of this sweetner found on the website fructose.org.

Fructose ≥ 98.0% and £ 102.0%, after drying

Arsenic ≥ 1 mg/kg

Chloride ≥ 0.018%

Glucose ≥ 0.5%

Heavy metals (as Pb) ≤ 5 mg/kg

Hydroxymethylfurfural ≤ 0.1%, dry basis
Lead ≤ 0.1 mg/kg

Loss on drying ≤ 0.5%

Residue on ignition ≤ 0.5%
Sulfate ≤ 0.025%

What? Arsenic you say? Heavy Metals?

Here is what the LA Times said about the downside of Crystalline Fructose…

“A handful of animal and short-term human studies have supported the possibility that fructose could be responsible for obesity, diabetes, and other conditions, says Mary Ellen Camire, professor of food science and nutrition at the University of Maine in Orono, but the theory is still being debated among nutritional scientists. "We need more and better studies," she says.

Consuming pure fructose may have other strikes against it. A 2005 study by researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City showed that consuming more than 25 grams of fructose a day often causes gastrointestinal distress, including stomach pain and diarrhea. The majority of American adults consumes more than 50 grams daily, mostly through corn syrup added to processed foods and drinks.”


For big companies it seems to be about the bottom line. Money. Greed. These overprocessed sugars are cheap. They store for a long time on the shelf and because they are so ridiculously sweet it doesn’t take much of it to sweeten a product.

I’m convinced. Another reason to get rid of these so-called health foods in pretty packages and eat as many whole, raw, real foods as possible. Foods I can grow = good. Foods filled with ingredients I have to research to find out what they are = bad.

Love is in the air

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. We don't have anything "traditionally valentine's romantic" planned (ie dinner, flowers, chocolates, bla bla bla). But we do have my brother coming down to watch Lucy while we go to an afternoon movie! It was actually Jimmy's suggestion to see "Confessions of a Shopaholic". What a sweet husband. I'm sure he wouldn't have picked that if I hadn't mentioned about a thousand times that I wanted to see it. I am a lucky woman.

So today I am hangin' with my Lucy girl and we are baking up a storm. I got this recipe from Martha Stewart Magazine.

One Bowl Chocolate Cupcakes

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
3/4 cup warm water
3/4 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons safflower oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Sift cocoa powder, flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt into large bowl. Add eggs, warm water, buttermilk, oil and vanilla and mix until smooth.
2.Divide batter among 18 muffin cups, filling each 2/3 full. Bake until tops spring back when touched, about 20 minutes. Transfer cupcakes to wire racks and let cool.

Basic Buttercream

12 oz. (3 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 lb. confectioners sugar, sifted
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Beat butter with a mixer on medium-high speed until pale and creamy, about 2 minutes. Reduce speed to medium. Add sugar, 1/2 cup at a time, beating after each addition, about 5 minutes. Add vanilla and beat until buttercream is smooth. Use immediately or cover and refrigerate for up to 3 days.

They turned out good (patting myself on the back). Now for cleaning up that kitchen...