Creamy Coconut Milk

My newest experiment in the kitchen is making coconut milk. I used the recipe from the Wellness Mama blog, and coconut I ordered from Azure Standard. I used a loosely woven kitchen towel to strain out the pulp. It drips through pretty slowly so some squeezing with my hands or pressing with a spoon was needed. The recipe makes a quart.

Don't throw away the pulp, it can be eaten or used in baking! I have been making it into makeshift muffins with mini chocolate chips, but there's no official recipe to post yet.

The homemade coconut milk was very sweet and great for making hot chocolate. 

The cream will rise to the top, and in the fridge it hardens to a solid. The cream can be eaten by the spoonful, melted back into the coconut milk if you heat it when you use it, or just chopped into small pieces that will end up in your glass of milk or bowl of cereal.

A 32 oz. carton of So Delicious brand coconut milk costs a little over $2 at Walmart or Winco, so I estimate that homemade costs less than half of purchasing, plus you get the leftover pulp to use.

Harvest Menu 2014

The last 6 weeks I didn't have a meal plan, due to being deluged with post-baby meals and also blessed to be traveling with family. We returned home from our latest trip to ripe tomatoes in the gardens and greenhouse, thus beginning the season of the BLT.

We currently don't have chickens laying eggs (perhaps soon?) but we do have rabbits to eat. I've not cooked rabbits before so I'm not sure exactly what kind of recipes I will use for them. The meal plan uses 1 rabbit every two weeks, so we'll see if that is a good rate compared to how many we have available to eat.
If you don't have rabbit you could substitute a chicken meal for the rabbit meals in the menu.

Week A

tacos or fajitas

BLTs or egg salad sandwiches

spaghetti

salad & bread

Pizza

Breakfast

Oven or crock pot rabbit

Week B

Yakima Valley Pie

Stir fry or sweet and sour and rice (meat: leftover rabbit?)

zucchini quiche (Simply in Season page 139)

tavern & veggies with dip

Pizza

Misc. garden-produce-inspired meal

burgers or brats

What the Vander World Eats in a Week

Have you seen the photos from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats? It was interesting to look at the pictures and see the variety in amounts of food, what kinds of food, and how it is packaged and served. I declared myself too lazy to make a photo of one week's worth of food for our family. And then to prove myself wrong I did it. Kind of.

I probably didn't do the most accurate job, since we also eat items from the pantry and the freezer. I normally "stock up" on items like pasta or dried beans all at one time, so I didn't need those things this week. 

Pictured is one grocery trip to Winco (which I do weekly), plus 1 carton of eggs from the fridge and the  metal bowl of produce showing the types of things we eat from the garden lately: beans, kale, onions, tomatoes, and cabbage. We harvest more than that in a week but I didn't have room for it in the bowl. The eggs are almost always from our chickens but they are molting and not laying as much, so we bought a dozen store eggs last week.

Don't see the bread? There are wheat berries in the back left plastic bag that get ground and used in pizza crust and bread.

We also occasionally buy food at the NW Regional Food Hub or order foods from the Azure Standard food co-op through them.

I spent $42.50 at Winco today, which is pretty typical. Mint.com says that I spend $232 on groceries per month on average (based on the last 12 months). That number doesn't include chicken feed, garden supplies, aquaponics supplies and fish food, or food storage supplies like canning equipment. And it probably leaves out an occasional small purchase made with cash that doesn't get recorded by Mint.

We're blessed with access to a lot of fresh fruit and lots of sunshine to grow food in our region!

I'd love to see your picture of food for a week!

Fall 2013 Rotating Meal Plan

Ta-da! Fall meal plan. I put jackets on the kids outside yesterday, so it is officially fall at our house.

I hope to have a good supply of kale and cabbage from the garden, and I can use fresh, frozen, or canned tomatoes from the garden or greenhouse in soup or pizza. Fresh basil tastes great on pizza, and gives us a break (a free and healthy one, too!) from other toppings like pepperoni and Canadian bacon.

It is not on the meal plan, but on Sunday night after church we usually have homemade chocolate pudding or chips and salsa. Friday nights is always pizza, and popcorn during our movie. Do you have any meals or snacks that are a weekly family tradition?

Week A

Chicken pesto pasta

Runza Casserole

Enchiladas

Kale/Potatoes and sausage or other meat

Sourdough Pizza

Breakfast

Teriyaki Chicken

Week B

Soup and bread/biscuits

Quinoa/spinach bake

Baked egg rolls

Egg casserole

Sourdough Pizza

Mac 'n cheese

Pork Chops

Click here for a downloadable pdf one-page version of this meal plan for your fridge.

Coconut Yogurt Popsicles

These popsicles were inspired by creamy sweet Mexican coconut popsicles and coconut cream pie or pudding. I also give inspiration credit to the large amounts of plain yogurt I had in my fridge and my two voracious popsicle testers.

1 c. plain yogurt

1 T. honey (warm to soften if needed)

4 drops vanilla stevia sweetener

1/2 c. shredded coconut

Stir, freeze, serve.

This was a small batch and only filled 3 of the 4 popsicle slots in my mold. Other than that, it was a hit. It had a hint of yogurt tartness so if you want it sweeter and more ice-cream-like you could start with vanilla yogurt or something already sweetened. There are also non-dairy coconut milk yogurts that might taste great as popsicles. I'd love to hear what variations you come up with!

Summer 2013 Meal Plan

It's that time of the year when we use up the strange things in our freezer and savor the first bits from the garden. We've been eating a lot of apple butter pie (I make it with just the bottom crust, like pumpkin pie) and putting kale in lots of things.

We're partway through our first rotation through this plan. The sweet potato and kale casserole was pretty good, and I hope all the other new things turn out well too, else I might have to edit them out! I tried to design this plan so that it can use whatever produce is coming from the garden: for example we had egg salad sandwiches on Tuesday because we aren't getting tomatoes from the garden yet, the quiche can use a variety of vegetables, and burgers can be served with or without tomatoes and lettuce. Seasonal fruits and veggies can be served as side dishes or snacks as well.

I've made a one-page printable version of this meal plan for your fridge (it includes a few snack and breakfast ideas too) if you'd like to try it out. I rotate between weeks A and B, sometimes switching meals around to fit our schedule. Our backup meal is spaghetti.

Week A

quinoa salad (we made this without the zucchini and served it with quesadillas)

BLT sandwiches OR egg salad sandwiches

sweet potato kale casserole

potato-crust quiche (from Simply in Season)

Sourdough Pizza

quesadillas

Chicken (ideas: grilled kabobs or maple chicken)

Week B

runzas or pocket sandwiches

pasta/veggie salad

Sweet and sour meatballs (or chicken) with rice

lettuce or cabbage wraps

Sourdough Pizza

Breakfast (sourdough waffles, omelets)

(grilled) burgers/brats/sausages

Guest Post: Cultured Foods

I think that cultured foods have a lot of health benefits with very little financial investment, as well as being fun and interesting.
If you're interested in learning more, hop over to the Medi-Share blog where my guest post on cultured foods is posted today.

My Kitchen Slaves

No, I'm not referring to my sons. Although knowledgeable and enthusiastic in many kitchen-ey things, especially pizza, they aren't coordinated enough to be super helpful in the kitchen yet.

I'm speaking of these: chunky colonies of microorganisms known as water kefir "grains".

After our family's first bout of pneumonia and antibiotics, I thought now was a good time to put my new year's resolution of kefir into action. And to be honest, I've always liked a good science experiment. Kefir is a probiotic culture (like yogurt), and probiotics are good for everyone, whether or not you've been on antibiotics. I picked up some grains, which are actually little colonies of specialized bacteria and yeast, from a friend (you can also purchase them in a dehydrated form) and put them to work.

The finished kefir is a little like pop: a bubbly sweet beverage. The starter ingredients are sugar/molasses, water, and the culture/grains. You can add flavoring as well. A lot of the sugar gets consumed by the bacteria but it is still sweet. The grains are removed before you drink the kefir and used for the next batch.

For now I'm keeping track of each batch (ingredients, how long it ferments, etc.) so I can tell what makes a good batch. The first two batches (berry tea and sweet cherry juice) have been good flavors with a mild fizz.

Considering that a bottle of kids probiotic pills ranges from $8-$23 for about a month's supply, I'm happy to have these little kitchen slaves on my countertop manufacturing virtually free lactobacilli for me.

Citrus Cake in the Bread Machine

Perhaps your oven is in use with another project, your house is too hot to use the oven, or you simply feel the need to justify your $12 thrift store purchase of a bread machine. All these would be perfect opportunities to use your bread machine to whip up a tasty citrus cake (a copycat of the Starbucks Lemon Loaf). My recipe is based on this one, which might be a better option to try if you're just going to do it in the regular oven.

If your machine has a dough setting and a bake setting, you can basically override the the machine's preprogrammed routines and use it somewhat like an easy-bake oven. I have used a similar method to make cornbread in the bread machine. Some bread machines also have a specific cake setting. I have a Breadman TR875.

Cake:

1 c flour

1/2 c. oatmeal flour

1/2 t baking powder

1/2 t. baking soda

1/2 t. salt

3 eggs

1 c. sugar

2 T. butter, melted

1 t. vanilla

1/3 c. lemon juice

1/2 c. coconut oil, melted

zest of one orange or lemon

Glaze:

1 c. powdered sugar

2 T lemon juice

Put all ingredients in bread machine and put on "dough" cycle. Use a small rubber spatula to help scrape the flour out of the corners and bottoms while it mixes. When thoroughly mixed, cancel the dough cycle, reach in and pull out the mixing paddle, and turn on the "bake" option for approximately 1 hour or until the middle is done. Remove, cool, and pour the glaze over the top.

Rotating Meal Plan

Every New Year's Resolution is about food, right? I didn't make any hard and fast actual resolutions, but I do have a few food inspirations that I would like to try...things that sound healthy, fun, or just interesting. Sprouts, mozzarella, bottling a batch of pop, kefir!

But it doesn't help to burn yourself out on an über-healthy meal or project, and then the next day have no meal ideas, does it. I have that problem sometimes. I bet you do too.

I have tried, with varying success: making a meal list (ideas that I have the ingredients for on hand) and crossing things off it as I go, using saymmm.com to plan out a week at a time, freezer cooking for a month, and the old "just wing it" method. For January, February, and March I am going to try a 2-week rotating base meal plan. I can always substitute something "more interesting", but at least I have a default idea to fall back on.

When the seasons change I can either make a new 2-week rotation, or ditch this method and do something else. My goals were to aim for not too much dairy, use a moderate (for us) amount of meat, and try to use things like frozen applesauce that tend to get forgotten about in the freezer. There are a variety of recipes and variations that can be used for some of the things like soup, pizza, and stir fry. It may need some tweaking or juggling around yet, but hopefully it is a good start!

Winter Meal Plan Week A
Monday: make a snack, stir fry and rice for supper
Tuesday: make yogurt, burritos or quesadillas for supper
Wednesday: BBQ chicken or pork sandwiches + applesauce
Thursday: Goulash
Friday: Pizza
Saturday: Breakfast for supper (French Toast, Pancakes, Waffles, etc.)
Sunday: Baked Chicken (raspberry, BBQ, basil, or other flavoring) and apple crisp for Sunday dinner


Winter Meal Plan Week B
Monday: make a snack, Soup and bread/biscuits for supper
Tuesday: make yogurt, noodles with chicken or tuna for supper
Wednesday: egg casserole or breakfast burritos
Thursday: Fish + squash or sweet potato
Friday: Pizza
Saturday: lentil taverns or shepherd's pie
Sunday: lasagna

Pretzel Rods

There is nothing new under the sun, or on Pinterest: others have already done a good job of listing and photographing all the picturesque and tasty things one can do with pretzel rods. My 3 tips to emphasize are:

1. Make sure you don't have too much chocolate on the pretzel or the toppings will drip off.
2. It helps to work as a team: one person rotates the pretzel over a dish while the other sprinkles.
3. For the white drizzled over chocolate (or vice versa) it was easiest to spoon up some melted chocolate, and pour it out in the thin stream from the spoon while passing the pretzel underneath. Move the pretzel, not the spoon.

We used toffee bits, crushed peppermints, various sprinkles, coconut flakes, and the ones with a lumpy "spiral" around them have a stretched-out caramel (think play-dough snake) wrapped around them before dipping. The styrofoam tray was our cooling rack. We barely snooped at all, so I'm going to have to make a few for myself at home with the leftover ingredients.

B-B-Butterflies

If you search Pinterest for "pretzel butterfly", you'll find lots of cute colorful ways to make winged creatures out of crispy twisties. Ours turned out looking a lot more like moths: brown and fat. Oh well, they'll for sure all be gone before they turn fuzzy!

To Portland, to Portland, to Buy a Fat Pig

Actually we were not there to buy a big pig. We did see some hairy pigs with big tusks at the zoo.
We were there to have fun with family, explore Portland, and see Nate's friend Ben. We succeeded at all those goals. We visited the Oregon Zoo and OMSI. Both were definitely fun for all ages; Malachi did seem more interested in the plants (eating them) at the zoo than the animals though.
We went to Ben and Liz's favorite Thai restaurant and it was very good! I had never had Thai food before. One of the waitresses served Malachi his very own plate with brown rice and helped him get started up with a spoon. He happily created a sticky mess about 4 feet in diameter, and I tried not to feel too bad about it because...she started it.

Once a Month Cooking (Month 2)

Last month 4 women and 9 of their sons convened on Rachel's house to cook the February 2012 menu from Onceamonthmom.com. It was a fun but intense 3+ days of cooking (the first day was a long day and then the other days were partial days of cooking). We learned a lot and got to try lots of new foods (some good and some....interesting?), and decided to give it a second go.

So this week we did the March menu. We substituted one recipe and changed a few details (for example, making regular lasagna instead of lasagna rolls to keep things simple). Instead of everyone buying so many different ingredients, we each took a section of the list. For example, I bought all the dairy products to make the meals for 4 families. Some of the things we had access to for free, such as chickpeas and applesauce. The night before, we each had a few tasks to do such as soaking and cooking beans, making dough, etc. That way we saved money by not buying the canned beans and biscuits.

We haven't crunched the numbers yet (I'll update when we do) but we think we spent about $120-130 per family to produce the 15 recipes. Perhaps a little more if you include things like freezer bags and containers. Each recipe was supposed to produce 2 meals worth per family, but some of the recipes seemed to produce a lot more than that. I think I have 4 containers of quesadilla filling, and 3 of the zucchini pesto. Everyone took home 2 big broccoli stromboli rolls and 1 little one. The lasagna recipe and the cinnamon rolls had some rabbit-like qualities to them (in quantity, not flavor)....I think I put together the equivalent of eight 9x13 pans of lasagna (some of the pans were smaller so it was actually more than 8 pans). Jamie spent most of Thursday rolling out cinnamon rolls.

(photos by Sheila)

15 recipes x 2 meals worth of each recipe x 4 families = 120 meals

120 meals x 5 people per family = at least 600 servings of food, more if you count leftovers


Some of the recipes are basically a meal in themselves, and some would need buns or a vegetable or various condiments to go with them. We had some extra bags of some of the veggies though that we split up among us, so some of those are already paid for too. I think this was an economical way to try new recipes!

Next month (or at least sometime) our goal is to plan our own menu. We can make some adjustments to have it run more smoothly with so much quantity and limited freezer space, as well as using some of our personal favorite recipes or hits from this month or last month's menu.

Besides the convenience of having all this healthy food in the freezer, it was a fun time getting to talk with others while we were cooking! The kids played (and built things, and bothered the chickens, etc.) in the fenced backyard and didn't get into too much trouble.

If you're thinking of trying this with friends, look at onceamonthmom.com. They now have some 5 and 10 day mini menus, so you could start small and then expand, instead of starting big and then trying to simplify like we did!

Valentine's Day Peanut Butter Heart Cookies

I saw some cute cookies on Pinterest, but I was either too cheap or didn't plan ahead enough to buy heart-shaped chocolates.

So I used Aunt Janet's peanut butter cookie recipe and added 3 chocolate chips to the top of each. After they baked, I used a toothpick to push the melted chocolate into a heart shape.

Lest you think it was a complete Martha Stewart experience, I did drop some.

I also let Tobias help. He wanted to make owl cookies (2 chocolate chips for eyes) instead of hearts. Then some of the owls ended up with more than 2 eyes, somehow. Then the eyes got poked with a toothpick. I am assuming they will all taste good though.

Half a Dozen Eggs

Four and a half months after buying our chickens on Craigslist, we have started getting eggs. I was shopping in Spokane when I got a text message from Nate. We rarely text, and I was only vaguely aware that my Tracfone was capable of receiving a picture in a text message, but I was very excited when I saw the picture of the egg, and the caption "one of two". So far we have found 6 eggs in about 8 days. We suspect that Ginger is the one laying the eggs. I'm looking forward to having the other 3 chickens start laying too! The eggs are small, have very dark yolks (that means they're good for you!) and seem to be very tasty. Tobias talks about the chickens and the chicken coop a lot (even in his sleep), so the educational part of the chicken raising process seems to be working as well as the nutritional.

Our eggs aren't technically "pastured" eggs, but we do try to feed the chickens plenty of fruits, veggies, and green things. I found this chart that shows what "store eggs" are missing compared to eggs from chickens that eat a variety of healthy food. Not shown in the chart is the statistic that "pastured" eggs contain 4 to 6 times as much Vitamin D as regular store eggs. Recently, I heard the phrase "you are what your food eats", meaning that eggs, dairy, and meat from animals on a healthy diet have better nutrition in them. So, adopt a chicken, find a friend with chickens, invite yourself over to our house for an omelet, buy eggs from healthy chickens, or at least make sure you're getting lots of extra Vitamin D, E, and A, Omega 3's, etc. from other foods or your vitamins!

(click on the picture to make it bigger if you can't read the words here)

Sit-ups and Squash

Tobias is 6 months old so we're letting him try a few bites of food that hasn't been pre-processed by mom. And I know, rice cereal is the traditional first food, and probably not a bad one, but for a variety of reasons, I picked squash. (One of the reasons being that Walmart was all out of my first choice of pears.) It has been fun and quite messy. You will notice that in the first food clip, he is wearing clothes, and by today he is eating in diaper and bib only. We're all learning. What do you think he should he taste next?

(photos by Nate)

Last Friday we went out in the drizzle to rescue some beautiful grapes. We picked 6 bins worth and over that day and the next turned them into over 50 quarts of grape juice using Terry and Jan's steamer. One of my favorite parts, besides the tasty juice, was seeing the colors of the grapes. On the vine they were a handsome navy with a dusty gray coating, in the steamer they gradually turned neon purple, and the juice was a deep, staining, almost black color.

P.S. The stains did come off the countertop with bleach, the fate of the khaki pants that came into contact with grape-stained potholder has yet to be determined

Freezer Cooking

One of my goals in preparing for the baby is to have some "easy" food in the freezer. However, I got sick of looking for recipes and only finding things that were: a. made from pre-packaged or canned foods anyway (that's not saving me time or money), b. had lots of cheese, milk, or creamy soup, or c. would fill up my freezer with pasta and rice (I'd rather save the freezer space and add the bulky things later). My solution was to just make up my own recipe: so now my freezer has one container of "Creamy Crouton Chicken Bake", and my fridge has a smaller container to test out this week. The not-so-secret and wholly untasted recipe is:

1. boil some chicken (take off bones if not boneless), chop, and place in freezer-safe baking dish
2. make a sauce with some of the broth, flour, margarine, and crouton-like spices (thyme, rosemary, salt, pepper, garlic, onion, chicken bullion, basil etc.)
3. pour the sauce over the chicken
4. freeze
5. thaw and bake when ready to eat
6. serve with pasta or rice or biscuits, and cheese to sprinkle on top for the lactose-tolerant

Well, it smells good. I'll let you know if it actually works. 

Any other freezer meal suggestions that don't violate principles a., b., and c. ?

Sourdough Bread: Scored top

I've been having problems with the tops and sides of my bread exploding open during the baking process, and since this bread is destined for church council snacks tomorrow night, I wanted it to be a little better aesthetically. I tried scoring the top before baking with a finely serrated knife. I think they turned out gorgeously if I do say so myself. Good thing the smell is not included in the photo or I bet you would be drooling on your computer. OK, I will stop bragging about it now. Come and visit me if you want to sample some of the next batch!