Homemade Elderberry Syrup

Fall brings a lot of wonderful things, but it also brings on cold season. Last night was a reminder for us, as my husband and I took turns rocking our coughing little boy. Nothing breaks my heart more than his sweet little face twisted in discomfort and sorrow. So, today, I made elderberry syrup. It's been on my to-do list for a while now, and thankfully, I had just purchased some elderberries at Kramer's Spice Market at Central Market.

So before I share the recipe, I want to share the healing properties of each ingredient in this amazing syrup:
~ Elderberries are often used for their wonderful antioxidant properties that help boost the immune system in order to fight coughs, the flu as well as bacterial and viral infections.
~ The healing properties of raw honey are too numerous to list. Simply put, honey is considered a cure-all remedy for nearly everything. From burns to bones to immune systems, it works magic all around. For this recipe, however, raw honey boosts the antioxidant properties of the syrup and it helps stimulate the immune system to fight infections such as colds and other bacterial or viral infections.{NOTE: local raw honey is the best and can be found at your local farmers' market or health food store. If you cannot get local raw honey, make sure you purchase raw honey, as the integrity of the product has not been refined, removing all of the good healing properties.}
~ Cinnamon contains antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties which help aid digestion as well as help raise the body temperature which combats breathing problems. As a result, it is an excellent addition to this syrup, as it helps fight coughs and colds.
~ Cloves contain both antioxidant and anti-inflammatory healing properties {among many others} that aid the effectiveness of this syrup.

Homemade Elderberry Syrup
~ 2 oz. dried elderberries {or 4 oz. fresh}
~ 4 cups water
~ 3/4 cup raw honey
~ 1 cinnamon stick
~ 1/2 Tbsp. ground cloves

Combine water and elderberries in a saucepan and bring to a boil {uncovered}. Reduce heat and simmer about 30 minutes. Add cinnamon stick and cloves and stir to combine. Continue simmering, uncovered, for an additional 30 minutes, or until reduced by about a third to half. Remove from heat and strain liquid into a bowl {I used cheesecloth}. Allow liquid to cool to about room temperature. Add honey and whisk to combine. Pour syrup into an airtight glass container and store in the fridge. It will keep for a few months in the refridgerator. Recommended dosage: 1/2-1 tsp every 2-3 hours for small children/toddlers at the onset of illness, continuing only for a few days {not more than 5}. For bigger children and adults, increase the dosage to 1/2-1 TBSP every 2-3 hours.

** Never give to infants under 1 year since it contains raw honey. And, as with anything, I encourage you to do your own research! This is an excellent source on the topic.

Pumpkin Granola Bars

It's back and it's everywhere. Pinterest. Starbucks. From candles to bread to drinks to the pumpkin patch. Is it just me or is pumpkin super popular these days? Like pop culture popular. I feel like pumpkin has it's own style, and it's definitely a household name. For me, it's delicious and fragrant and taking up space in my freezer!!! So, in an effort to use up last year's stock and make room for some new stuff {my parent's pumpkins are always prolific so we end up freezing a TON!} I've been putting pumpkin in everything.

When I first made these pumpkin granola bars, I wasn't sure whether my hubby would be on board or not. He likes pumpkin but not pumpkin pie or pumpkin spice lattes or any of the other pumpkin goodness that I love. But I made them with him in mind, since now he's back at school and needing snacks to get him through the day. I also made them with Burke in mind, since he's at the age where he eats like a grazer. All day long. Little bits at a time. So I like to keep healthy snacks on hand for him as well.

Needless to say, these were a hit with everyone! They had a nice granola bar texture--soft and chewy, but not sticky or messy--and they were easy to eat on the run.


Healthy Pumpkin Granola Bars 
adapted from Oh Sweet Basil Pumpkin Spice Granola Bars 
Ingredients:

4 cups quick oats

      1/2 cup coconut oil

     1/4 cup organic cane sugar or sucanat

     1/2 cup pumpkin puree

     1/2 cup honey

     1 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice*

     1/2 teaspoon sea salt

     1/2 cup pepitas {pumpkin seeds}

     1/4 cup sunflower seeds

      1/4 cup flax seeds

        1/4 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

      1 Tablespoon wheat germ 

      1 – 1 1/2 cups raisins

  

Directions:

Heat the oven to 325 degrees and place parchment paper in a 9x13” baking dish
 

     In a large bowl, mix together the oats and coconut oil. Add the pumpkin, honey and sugar and mix thoroughly. Add in the remaining ingredients and stir to combine.

  

      Press the mixture into the parchment-lined baking dish and bake for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven  and press down on the granola bars using a spatula or large spoon. Bake for an additional 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow them to cool completely before cutting.

* Don’t have pumpkin pie spice? Make your own! Simply combine 4 Tablespoons of ground cinnamon, 4 teaspoons of each ground nutmeg and ground ginger and 3 teaspoons of ground allspice. {This will give you plenty of pumpkin pie spice for all of your Fall recipes!}

Hope you enjoy these as much as we did!!

What are some of your favorite Fall foods, flavors and/or fragrances?

October #Unprocessed: Checking In

Halfway through Week #2 of the October #Unprocessed Challenge, I thought I'd check in and let you know how it's going in our home. Last week, we were not as committed as I had planned. But then again, some things you just can't plan. Last minute invites to a birthday dinner and a breakfast out with family {my favorite meal to eat out...} threw some wrenches in our plans. But overall, we were definitely much more intentional about making sure we avoided even the processed organic food that we often gobble down with no thought.

One of my favorite dishes that graced our table last week was my Fall version of Shepard's Pie. Shepard's Pie is a favorite in our house, but this time I used mashed sweet potatoes instead of regular mashed potatoes to top off this savory dish. It was a gamble for me, knowing that my hubby proclaims to hate sweet potatoes. But I was pretty sure he'd like them served this way, since they wouldn't be sweetened. Just savory. Sure enough, he was a fan. {He wolfed down the savory sweet potato fries I made the week before too! I think he's finally realized that it's not sweet potatoes he hates, but the sugary, sweet and completely false preparations he's been served over the years.}

For snacks last week, I mixed up a batch of trail mix. Tired of paying high prices for trail mix that wasn't even good for me, I started making my own mix over a year ago. I love shopping the bulk room at our local natural food store and have found that I can control my ingredients making the mix exactly how we like it while being able to skip the hassle of carefully scanning the ingredient list on the package for processed imposters. I've done the math and my mix ends up costing exactly the same as I can purchase a similar {though processed--because M&Ms are not a whole food} product at our wholesale club. Our mix usually entails a mix of equal parts peanuts and cashews to equal parts diced pineapple, diced papaya, raisins and dried cranberries with some pumpkin seeds thrown in for a little extra nutrition. Sweet. Salty. Delicious! I also made homemade nutrigrain bars for another between-meal snack.

Our chickens are in full production mode now, and we are swimming in eggs at this point. It's a wonderful problem to have. So {my hubby's} breakfast generally consists of runny eggs and toast made from homemade bread. I made this delicious oatmeal bread last week and froze one of the loaves so that we are now enjoying it this week too! I love yogurt, though, and made some granola to eat with that for breakfast. A little local raw honey drizzled on top adds just the perfect amount of sweetness to the otherwise sour creaminess of my plain yogurt. My little guy also loves yogurt or for some variety I make him some oatmeal using just apples and cinnamon to sweeten the pot.

So, although we haven't had a perfectly unprocessed October, we have been as intentional as possible about eating a largely unprocessed diet. Thankfully, the produce from our CSA keeps us focused on the challenge as well, as we're always looking for new ways to use seasonal veg. It's definitely a challenge, but it's also worth the work involved. And thankfully, sweets aren't completely eliminated from our diet {definitely craving more sweets during this pregnancy!!}. For dessert, we've been enjoying this naturally sweetened apple pie. Soo delicious!

 

 Did you take the challenge? Feel free to share some of your unprocessed recipes! {I'm always looking for some new ideas}

If We Are What We Eat...

Then we're mostly corn. Sounds friendly, healthy and natural. And it was...before our country had a name. But throughout my food journey, I've come to regard corn as an enemy. A filthy-rotten poisonous killer. So when I stumbled across this infographic on Pinterest today, I knew I had to share. I love corn, don't get me wrong. I just choose to eat it in its whole food form {as much as possible} and choose organically grown, non-GMO {genetically modified organism} corn when I do.

Did you know that the average corn yield in 1920 {roughly the same as averaged by Native Americans} was about 20 bushels per acre? And today, the genetically modified hybrids are capable of producing yields as great as 180 bushels of corn per acre! The reason for this tremendous increase in yield is that the genetically modified hybrids can be planted very close together--30,000 stalks per acre rather than the approximately 8,000 stalks per acre in 1920. {Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan} So you see, much of the corn we eat today owes its ancestry to science rather than it's original predecessor, Zea Mays {an edible grass}.



I'd love to hear your thoughts!

My Food Journey {and October #Unprocessed}

I love food. I love to eat. Fortunately, God gave me a good set of genes and a healthy appetite for exercise. I've always been the girl who scavenges friends' lunches for unwanted leftovers and who has helped herself to thirds at dinner. {Having a salty tooth, I often consoled myself with the fact that while I ate three helpings of dinner I usually skipped dessert. It evened out, right?}

But, over the past four or five years my views on food have slowly, but radically changed. Don't worry. I still love food. And I still love to eat. But a few years ago, I didn't know what I was eating. And I didn't care. I lived a life of moderation and balance, so I figured I was okay. And then I joined a healthy living small group at my church. It was made up of about 6 women and we talked about food, healthy lifestyles and our body image. I came in a bit skeptical, knowing that the organizer {a good friend} is a die-hard organic type of gal. I was in law school. I knew that even the term organic came with its own set of qualifiers. So I resisted. I debated. I was studying to be a lawyer, afterall. And I walked away from it thinking I hadn't really been affected. Maybe I won or maybe it just wasn't for me. Either way, I still didn't feel convinced.

But the problem was that I was now a whole new level of educated. And with education came an acute awareness in certain settings that was never there before. Now, I would walk down the aisles of the grocery store beleaguered by the devil/angel debate going on in my head.  

You should read that label. It probably isn't very healthy. High fructose corn syrup? Really? Do you know how many pesticides are just waiting to be devoured on that? You can't wash them all away. Don't do it!

Don't worry about the label. You never read labels before and look at you--you're in perfect shape. Good health. No worries. Don't you remember the recipe you are planning on making with this? A substitute just wouldn't do. You would be so disappointed. Do it!

And just like that, my perspective began shifting. And my choices reflected my new way of thinking. I began investing my time reading more about the ways in which our foods are grown and processed. And I began researching ways to make homemade whole-food substitutes for some of those terrible offenders in many of the foods I loved. As Michael Pollen suggested in The Omnivore's Dilemma, eating really had become a moral and ethical dilemma for me.

Fortunately, I wasn't alone in my dilemma. My husband joined me on this journey and we equally, separately and yet unitedly, believed that changing our way of eating was vital. Fortunately, eating a whole foods, natural, local, and/or organic diet didn't mean tasteless, boring and undesirable. {Remember my last post about those sinfully delicious chocolate chip cookies? Even they can technically be considered an unprocessed food, because I used whole-food ingredients!} And fortunately, I love to cook, invent and create in the kitchen. So instead of viewing this as the end of a delicious feast, we began to look forward to it as a challenge in which the reward would be great. Not only would we reap a personal reward of a healthier lifestyle, but by supporting our local farmers we would reap a better local economy and a better environment {because we weren't supporting all of the carbon that goes into transportation}. And by choosing sustainably raised and grown meat and produce {whether or not certified organic--because that really is just a fancy and expensive bureaucratic descriptor} we were reaping a better environment and humanely raised animals. The whole goal of sustainability, afterall, is to promote a model of growth that can support itself for years to come without destroying our precious remaining resources.

Fast forward to yesterday when I opened my email and clicked on Aimee's post about October Unprocessed over at Simple Bites. In a nutshell, it is a challenge to go one month {or whatever length of time you can realistically commit} without eating processed food. So what qualifies as unprocessed food? Well, Andrew of Eating Rules describes unprocessed food as anything meeting the "kitchen test".  

Unprocessed food is any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with whole-food ingredients. {Andrew Wilder}

Since we already try to commit to a largely unprocessed foods diet, my husband and I immediately decided to join the challenge. For me, the challenge lies in my snack choices. If you've ever been pregnant, you know that your tastes and cravings aren't always things that are good for you. So my goal is to be more intentional in planning for the challenge of meeting these cravings with healthy, unprocessed choices. We already have a few social engagements on the calendar over which we won't have control of our food choices. So, we already know that we will have to make a few exceptions to this challenge. But otherwise, we are on board to accept and tackle this exciting challenge! Here are a few things I'm doing to prepare:

~ I've started an October #Unprocessed pin board on Pinterest to help me with menu planning
~ I will be menu planning a week in advance {which means I'm working on my first menu plan this week! I'll post my menu plan soon!} and will be accounting for all three meals plus snacks
~ I will be making a trip to Sonnewald Natural Foods this week in order to stock up on essentials such as unbleached, unenriched flour, grains, etc.
 ~ I have already signed the pledge over at Eating Rules and have signed up to follow along

So what do you think? Will you be joining me in taking the October #Unprocessed challenge? Feel free to share some menu ideas!

Finally

My husband has a crush on chocolate chip cookies. Seriously, he has a very strong chemical attraction toward those soft, pillowy, melt-in-your-mouth kind of chocolate chip cookies. The kind of attraction that drives him to lustfully devour at least a half-dozen in one sitting while moaning Oh God! between bites. It's intense.

But he married me. The woman who can cook up tasty concoctions from scratch and make anything taste amazing {so he tells me, anyway}. Anything, that is, except cookies. Especially chocolate chip cookies. For years, I have tried every new recipe claiming to be the best chocolate chip cookie. And for years, I have met my bitter friend, Disappointment, at the buzz of the timer showing me flat, crunchy, or falling-apart cookies that usually end up in the trash. So naturally, for years I've been blaming my cookie sheets. It must be my cookie sheets because I always carefully follow each new recipe to the "T". {The things you do for love! I HATE following recipes...} I always tell myself that I will buy new cookie sheets, the kind the pros use {whatever kind that might be}, but then I always forget. Basically, I've just been boycotting cookies altogether.

 So when I recently pinned a recipe for nutella-stuffed brown butter + sea salt chocolate chip cookies I thought maybe this was the one. It sounded far too good to fail. And if it failed, well then I decided I was definitely hanging up my hat. My husband would just have to satisfy his lusts on a stranger's chocolate chip cookies. So I embarked on my potentially last cookie-making excursion and browned my butter {happily it did not burn!} and mixed up my dough. With a 15-month-old in tow, I only have so much time to devote to these endeavors, so I decided to refrigerate my dough overnight and actually make the cookies the following day. This was the only deviation I made from the recipe {her instructions were to refrigerate at least 2 hours} and I crossed my fingers and prayed that it wouldn't be fatal.

I am proud to say that my friend Disappointment got a taste of his own medicine yesterday when he was ousted by Sheer Joy at the sound of the timer. Never before have I made such amazingly chewy, delightfully tender and sinfully delicious chocolate chip cookies! And my husband has sworn to remain faithful to these cookies as he exclaimed Babe! These are your new specialty! which means that I'll be making these cookies for every occasion we ever have and any time he is overcome with a salivating lust that can only be satiated by devouring at least 6 of these cookies with a chilly glass of milk.

{Click here for the recipe}

Please tell me that you've had similar cookie-making experiences! Do you swear by a particular chocolate chip cookie recipe?

Homemade Peanut Butter

I promised myself that once we finished our jar of commercial {though natural} peanut butter, I would take a stab at making it myself. After all, the only ingredients listed were peanuts and salt. How hard could it be? And, I thought it would be one more easy step toward replacing commercial food staples with my own homemade varieties. So, I purchased a bag of salted peanuts from the bulk room at our natural foods store {if you've never shopped in a natural foods bulk room, DO IT!} and set out to finish off our last jar of store-bought peanut butter. A few days ago, I scraped the bottom of the container and excitedly broke out my food processor.

I dumped about 3 cups of peanuts in my food processor and let it work its magic. About five minutes later, I had peanut butter.

Smooth. Creamy. Peanuty. Delicious! The perfect blend of salty and sweet.

We are hooked! My husband has a scoop or two with his granola {his typical evening snack} and raves each time over how delicious it is. Next time you're running low on peanut butter, go buy some peanuts and make your own. I bet you won't go back!

Try it! And then come back and let me know how you like it!! Do you add anything extra to your homemade peanut butter?