Penelope's Apple-Butternut Squash Soup

I am in an apple recipe mood as I get ready for Penelope's apple themed 2nd birthday.  This recipe is one of the recipes I was thinking about making for her party and wanted to experiment with it.


I had such fun making this soup, a perfect way to spend a Fall afternoon.  I looked at several different recipes, but in the end, I just started adding ingredients and amounts in the moment.  I totally understand why people say cooking is an art.  When you can let go of a following a recipe verbatim, and truly let yourself create something, it is art.  

Here is my recipe.  Feel free to create your own version and have fun with it!


1.5 butternut squash, halved and roasted in the oven, at 350 for over an hour.
2.5 green apples, cut up into cubes.
1 onion, chopped.
3 celery sticks, chopped
1 cup of carrots
3/4 cup of heavy whipping cream
1 cup of homemade chicken stock
pumpkin pie spice
salt and pepper


First, I sautéed the onions in butter ( A LOT, butter is good for you!), then added the celery, carrots and apples.  I sautéed them all, until they were mush.


When the squash was done roasting, I scooped out the insides and added to my veggie mush.  Then I transferred everything to my blender and adding the heavy cream, chicken broth, spices, salt and pepper and blended until smooth.


Then I served it up!  Penelope is a big fan of soups. Which is great, because she is kind of a picky eater and it is a way I can get a ton of veggies in one sitting.  And with the homemade chicken stock in this soup, it is a very nourishing meal.

And P.S. this freezes well! I either freeze it one big container or individual servings like I do with my chicken stock.

By Best Kids Health Blog

Gluten Free, Grain-Free Chicken Nuggets

As long as you are using good quality ingredients (organic grass fed butter, humanely treated chickens, etc), I think chicken nuggets are damn good and healthy meal.

You can use bread crumbs if you want, but if you are finding out that you have a hard time digesting grains, even ones that are sprouted and soaked, this modified recipe is for you!

As you know, my week of no-sugar and no gluten was a big eye opener for me. Once I introduced gluten and sugar back in, I realized how horrible they both make me feel.

Now, I am on a mission to eat gluten-free as much as I can, eventually, I would like to be grain free for at least a period of healing as well.

So here's my recipe:

2.5 pounds of chicken breast meat (I bought chicken strips to save time on cutting the meat up)
1 cup of finely grated Parmesan cheese
1 cup of almond flour
Salt, Pepper, Thyme, Basil, to taste
1/2 cup butter

Mix the dry ingredients together in one bowl.  It gets really gunked up, so I like to put half in one bowl and half in another, so the crumbs stay crumbly longer.

Then melt the butter.

Dip the raw chicken meat in the butter, then the dry mixture, and place on cookie sheet.

Then put in the oven, at 375, for at least 20 minutes. Every oven is different, so keep your eye on them. Take them out when they are golden brown.  These freeze great, so when you take them out frozen, just heat them at 375, till they are warm.

Don't pay attention to how ghetto my cookie sheets are.  New ones have been on my wish list for awhile.  I realize in hindsight, why people have big weddings!!

Also, a side note about cookie sheets and non-stick pans, they have chemicals in them that leach into your food.  I use a cast iron or stainless steel to cook with when I use pots and pans, but my sheets are crap.  You can line them with parchment paper if you don't have stainless steal sheets.  But I always forget.  Got get better about that.

Enjoy! Both Peter and Penelope devoured these!  This is what your family plates will look like if you make these nuggets! And if you have kids, you know how much they love chicken nuggets.

Now, you have a recipe that you can 100% feel great about feeding them instead!

And check out Miss P.  She is a big girl now, no more high chair.  We were given this hand me down booster seat last week.  She LOVES being able to eat off the table like us.  She will actually sit in her seat now and eat (before she would stand up and do yoga, while eating).  Amazing.

How I Quit Sugar

For five days anyway.

Well, five days may not seem like a lot, but to me it was.  I have never gone more than a few hours without sugar (in any form) since I was 12 months old.  Maybe sooner, who knows when my parents starting giving me processed apple juice (aka SUGAR.)

Let me just start by saying, that sugar is bad.  Really bad.  I could write a whole book on the topic, in fact, many people already have.  Suffice it to say, sugar is at the root of all sorts of issues from high blood pressure, diabetes and even cancer (cancer tumors feed off sugar).

It messes with your digestion system, and if your digestion is bad, your health is bad. Period.

Seriously, I can't even begin to go into how horrible sugar is for you.  So just do me a favor and go read these books:  Nourishing Traditions and The Diet Cure.

The Diet Cure is an amazing book.  It's wonderfully written and makes it easy to comprehend the complexities of the human body, how it works and how what you eat (nutrition) affects every thing in your body.

I first read the book when I was focusing on quitting my caffeine addiction.  With the help of some amino acids, as recommended in the book, I have been caffeine free for almost 6 months.

Sugar was next on my list!

I knew I may have had a slight yeast overgrowth in my body, and that part of my powerful addiction to sugar, was from the yeast yelling at me to feed it more sugar, but what I didn't realize, until after reading The Diet Cure, is that I very may well be ALLERGIC to sugar as well!!

By end of day 2, I felt like I was going to die.  Like I had the worst kind of flu.  I am not sure if was drug (sugar is a legal drug people) withdrawal effects or if I was feeling the yeast die-off effects.  I was feeling much better by day 3.  By day 4 I felt great!

Typically, they say that you shouldn't do a detox while you are breastfeeding.  But from what research I did, I felt like a yeast detox is not the same as a heavy metal detox and would be ok.  And plus, I figured if I have yeast overgrowth, she does too from drinking my sugary, yeasty milk (sigh).

Here are the supplements I took to help fight off the yeast in my body:

• garlic
• oregano oil
• grapeseed extract
• licorice root (there is some controversy about this herb and whether or not it is ok to take while breastfeeding.  I went ahead with it and listened to my gut, because I felt my body could handle the hormonal fluctuations and I felt like it was really important to kill the yeast in my body now, before I get pregnant again and I can't take this herb then.) 
• Solarary (my preferred brand for all supplements and vitamins) actual makes a pill that combines all of the above, so I just took one pill three times a day to get all those herbs in me.
• additional doses of reuteri probiotics (normally I just take one a day, but I upped it to two a day for the two weeks I was abstaining from all carbs to kill off the yeast).

These are the supplements I took to reduce my sugar cravings and normalize my blood sugar:

• L-Gluatmine ( I took this 4 times a day, one with each meal and one before bed time)
• Chromium 3 times a day with meals
• Biotin, 3 times a day with meals
• Vitamin B1, 2 times a day with meals
• I also upped my prenatal vitamin to three times a day, previously I had only taken one a day.  But after reading The Diet Cure, I realized that you are supposed to take 3 to 6 pills in one day to get the full amount!  Check your bottle at home, it will probably say one serving is 4 pills!
• I also upped my calcium and magnesium.  This is not directly related to sugar cravings, but something I realized I was a little deficient in after reading about the amounts I should be getting per day in a supplement.

I continued to take my protandim, cod liver oil and extra vitamin D like normal.  I also still take GABA and Tryptophan to help restore my adrenals from a lifetime of sugar and caffeine addiction.  I will probably stop taking them in another month.

It's a lot of pills. I know.

And its expensive, I get it.

But once you have killed the yeast and freed yourself from your addiction to sugar you do not need to take anything other than your normal daily vitamins (which for me is a prenatal, vitamin d, now calcium and magnesium, cod liver oil and protandim).

So, I made it 5 days. No gluten and no sugar, no wine, nothing.  Day 5 I had a piece of chocolate cake. Day 6 some chicken tenders and beer.  Day 7 it just went down hill fast.  I pretty much binged on sugar for the next week.

I thought that I didn't loose any of my belly flab, but when I reintroduced sugar (read:stuffed my face) my belly almost instantaneously got bigger, flabbier, and more bloated.  If I could have stuck with it for a few more weeks, I know I would be prancing around in a two piece right now.

Those 5 days taught me a lot.

I now notice much more how shitty gluten and sugar make me feel ( my lymph nodes get swollen, I feel waves of extreme fatigue and irritability, and nasal drip and congestion).

I think my yeast is much stronger than I realized.  I also think that I am a much more of disordered eater than I realized.  For me, that means I rely heavily on food for emotional nourishment and to de-stress.

So I need do some more emotional work to get my head in a more stable place before I try this again (maybe its the yeast making excuses!)  I have been doing a new treatment for the past two weeks and I really think it is making a big difference. It's something called Trauma Release Exercises, and it is awesome. I will tell ya'll about it soon.

Back to the drawing board I go. Just putting one foot in front of the other.  At least going in the right direction and praying that one day I will quit my sugar addiction for good.

If anyone wants to do some more research, here are some good links that talk about how awful sugar is for you:


Insuline Resistance


Stop Sugar Cravings

Guide To Natural Sweeteners


Intestinal Belly Fat and Yeast

Broccoli Quiche

Broccoli Quiche was one of the first things I really learned how to master.  One of the first recipes I could make without having to study a recipe for 20 minutes while I siked  myself up and mentally prepared to get in the kitchen.

Before I became pregnant with Penelope, I was a hot mess in the kitchen, for some reason I couldn't even follow a simple recipe.

Anything I figured out how to cook, was from someone showing me how.  This is also the first recipe where I started playing and getting creative with the ingredients and experimenting with different things.  I have made this with spinach, arugula, mushrooms, leeks, etc and lots of different cheeses.  I often put a pound of bacon in it too. It's a great way to use up whatever veggies and cheese you have on hand.  Or in my case, what's ready in the garden!

It is such a simple, cheap and nutritious meal. We eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  You just dump everything into a bowl, mix it up, then dump it into the pie crusts and bake.

My recipe calls for more eggs than the average quiche, but when I think about eating a serving of quiche I want to make sure that there are at least two eggs in my serving to meet nutritional needs.

I always make two, one to eat right away and one to freeze for later.

Here is my recipe, it is adapted from a recipe in Willam's and Sonoma breakfast cookbook that Peter's mom got me years ago.

1.5 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
6 whole eggs
5 egg yolks
veggies, sauteed in butter first before adding to the mix.
1 cup of shredded cheese
Salt, pepper, mustard, and tarragon spices.

Cook at 375 for an hour.

Sometimes I make the pie crusts from scratch and use Peter's great, grandmother's recipe or I buy organic whole wheat ready made. You can buy sprouted whole wheat flour from this site if you want to make your own from scratch.

How to Make Homemade Cream Cheese

Making your own cream cheese is so freaking easy to do. And it's one of the first things you need to learn how to do, in order to have your own supply of liquid whey, which is needed to make your own fermented drinks and food.

First off, watch this video to get a good idea of what to do. This video is where I learned how to do this, she gives you everything you need to know.  She's my guru.

You MUST only do this with RAW MILK. It will not work with regular, pasteurized milk. Raw milk sours and is still very good for you to consume, pasteurized milk goes bad.  Check out this page for more info about the benefits of drinking raw milk.  If you are local, you can get raw milk from New Leaf Market.  You must ask for it and they go and get it for you from the back. It has a sticker on it that says For Pet Consumption Only.  Do not be alarmed, its the farmers way of not being held liable to the FDA.

First you pour your sour milk into a container, or just leave it the milk container it came in, and set it on the counter to clabber (it's your vocab word for the day!) for 24 to 48 hours.  If your milk is not sour to start out with, it will take much longer.  Keep your eye on it.  When it's thick and chunky, it's ready.

 

Then you pour the chunky, clabbered sour milk into a clean (with non-toxic detergent), rag and tie it up with a string or rubber band. Then you hang the rag up somehow, I just hooked the rubber band over a cabinet door knob, and let the liquid drip out into a bowl.  In Nourishing Traditions, they have a crazy picture of the rag tied to a wooden spoon held over a glass pitcher...but this is MUCH easier.

What drips out is whey. Once the dish rag is done dripping, you open it up and you what's left over is cream cheese! Every time I do it, the cheese tastes a little different and the consistency is different, so don't be alarmed if yours doesn't look like mine or Sarah's. 

You can eat it plain, but its a little too different than store bought for me to eat it straight, but I like it with strawberries or nuts and a little maple syrup with a slice of bread. I also use it plain in baking and cooking when a recipe calls for cream cheese or ricotta cheese. Delish!

Then you bottle up the whey, I use a mason jar, label it and put it the fridge.  It will last about 6 months in the fridge.

This post is apart of The Healthy Home Economist's Monday Mania.

 

Fermented Lemonade

After Penelope's first birthday, I had a dozen organic lemons left over, that I had used as decoration.
I planned to make regular lemonade from scratch and then happened to find this post about how to make fermented lemonade and I was so happy to give it a try!

Fermenting adds enzymes and probiotics to the lemonade that make it a healthy alternative to regular lemonade or juice, not to mention this recipe doesn't call for regular white sugar.

I followed the directions from the above post and it came out great! I only used lemons, but you can add limes to the mix if you want.  It was very tasty. Not like sugar-laded,  store-bought, pasteurized lemonade, but very tasty.

I got this juicer for Christmas, so I am excited to try more fermented juice recipes. I know I can't protect Penelope forever from store bought juice, but I hope to always make any juice I give her and keep her from being addicted to sugar, like 99% of kids in our country.

Anyway, just wanted to share that this is a good recipe and it came out tasty. This is a perfect way to start doing fermentation at home.

For more fermented beverage and food recipes, check out this cookbook.

P.S. I got those bottles at World Market, but you can also find them online or at a local brewery supply store.

Cornais Spinach Pie

The picture does not do this pie justice. It is SO YUMMY! Its so yummy it makes the ridiculous amount of work involved to make the pie worth it.

Part of the reason it is so time consuming is because I used fresh spinach. 5 pounds of fresh spinach. 5 pounds of washing, steaming, draining and choping takes FOREVER.

Next time, I am going to cheat and use organic frozen spinach and see how the taste compares.  I am all about making things from scratch these days, but good God this really did take forever.

Eating this pie brought back so many memories. This is Peter's mother's recipe and she made some for us while she was visiting when Penelope was just born. I ate Spinach Pie for several days after I gave birth. Actually, the first several days all I wanted was steak then after that I ate Spinach Pie.

Spinach is so good for you! Its high in Vitamin K (which is a great to eat more of in late pregnancy and brand new post partum if you are going to skip the Vitamin K baby shot like we did), Vitamin C, Iron (which helps increase your milk supply), and whole bunch of other vitamins and minerals.

This dish is so tasty, my husband, who HATES vegetables, especially green ones, will gobble this up. Penelope gobbles it up too.  It's got bacon and boiled eggs in it for added protein, so it really is a complete meal.

Ok, enough rambling. Here's the recipe.  FYI, I doubled it and made two pies. I cooked one right away and froze the other (just the pie filling in a freezer bag, and it was perfect when I cooked it later).

-5 bags of pre-washed spinach.
-3 boiled eggs.
-1 onion, chopped.
-half a package of bacon.
-2 whole eggs.

Boil the spinach for 10 to 15 minutes and place in a colander after that to cool and drain. When the spinach is cool, use your hands and press all the water out. Then chop and set aside.

In a pan, cook the bacon, when done, saute the onions in the bacon grease. When the onions are done take the pan off the stove and add the spinach, boiled eggs, add about two beaten whole large eggs (save a little bit of that for later) pepper, nutmeg and pour into a frozen pie shell (cover the bottom of the pie shell with some plain bread crumbs, to absorb excess moisture).

Take the second pie shell and cover the first pie, make some little holes with a fork, and if you want use a little bit of the egg you left aside and brush the top of the pie crust with some.

Bake for 30 minutes at 350 or until it's a nice light brown color.

Enjoy! Let me know if you have any questions.