Soured Milk Chocolate Cake

Most of the milk I consume is raw milk. This means that it has not been pasteurized. I buy it from small farms who keep their cows on grass. I like raw milk for a number of reasons – I like that the vitamins have not been destroyed from the heat of pasteurization (vitamins are added back into pasteurized milk, but why not get the real vitamins inherent in the milk?). Raw milk also contains beneficial enzymes and probiotic bacteria. Plus, I just like the taste better. So there are lots of reasons to drink raw milk.

Fresh raw milk is wonderfully sweet and delicious. At some point, it starts to sour. It differs from batch to batch (since it is a real food, not a food that has been packed full of stabilizers and preservatives, or cooked before refrigeration). But when raw milk starts to sour, it isn’t bad. Sour cream is, well, soured cream. I’ve made cream cheese from soured milk before. When pasteurized milk goes sour, don’t drink it!

Since I don’t want to drink a glass of soured milk or pour it over cereal, the question becomes, what do I do with it? I recently had a full half gallon sour on me since I didn’t drink any for about a week. I couldn’t bear to throw it down the drain, so I had to figure something to do with it. A half gallon is a lot, so I needed several ideas. This was one use for it – a chocolate cake made with soured milk! If you don’t have sour milk, or if you don’t have any raw milk, you can sour regular milk by adding a tablespoon of plain white vinegar or lemon juice to one cup of milk. I imagine that kefir, yogurt, or buttermilk would also work in place of sour milk.

The resulting cake is incredibly moist, light, and fluffy. It is chocolatey and sweet, but not overly so. Make, and enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

Simple Spring Salad with Sourdough Bread and Butter for Dinner

Summer is a perfect time for salads. You just need something light, quick and fresh. It may not be summer yet, but recently its been so warm, and I’ve spent a good deal of time outside. When I come inside, I need food that is quick and light. Salad fit the bill. This salad has very simple ingredients:  Read the rest of this entry »

My first line of defense: Acerola powder and cod liver oil

It seems a funny thing to talk about. Winter is over and summer is on the way. Today is sunny and gorgeous and expected to hit 90 degrees! Well, I want to talk about immune system support anyhow. You may have heard about the Swine Flu that is going around. Now, it seems to be mild in the US, but it is a good idea to take proper precautions.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to take supplements. We would get all the nutrition our body needs to remain healthy just by eating a healthy diet. Well, we don’t live in a perfect world. Many of us haven’t been eating healthy our whole life, so we are already at a disadvantage. Many if us still don’t eat perfectly, even if we would like to. There are pollutants in the air around us that make our body work harder. There are lots of reasons why diet just doesn’t cut it.

That being said, I still prefer to get my vitamins and minerals from food sources. Here is what I take/eat to support my immune system:   Read the rest of this entry »

Raspberries and Cream

Here in the Northeast, we had an absolutely gorgeous day. It was unseasonably warm, and while some people weren’t ready for weather in the mid 80s, I welcomed it with open arms! I woke up early and took off for the Union Square Greenmarket.

NYC has greenmarkets and farmer’s markets all over the city, but the largest one is probably the one at Union Square. They have everything. Maple syrup, honey, jam, baked goods, vegetables, dairy, meat, even yarn. Visiting is wonderful for food lovers like myself. Except for the crowds. It is so crowded! But still worth going.

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The types of sweeteners you will find in my house - none artificial

I don’t eat Sweet and Low, Equal, or Splenda. I don’t believe they are food. They are chemicals that are masqueraded as food. Geared towards those who want to have their cake and eat it too, these artificial sweeteners supposedly provide all the sweetness of sugar without the side effects of calories. Eat yummy food and keep your waist trim!

Well, my first thought is that they taste awful. Even Splenda, which has marketing materials talking about how much it tastes like sugar, tastes awful to me. I can taste them in anything. Gross.

Secondly, maybe we shouldn’t be eating empty calories (like that which is found in refined sugar and to a lesser degree all the other natural, minimally processed sugars – honey, maple syrup, etc) to such excess that it causes weight gain. Maybe it should remind us that sugar is a treat, something to be used in small amounts and/or infrequently. I bake with sugar and eat it, but I try to use unrefined sugars when I can, and I also try not to bake sweets every week or eat them every day. In fact, I find the less sweets I eat, the less sweets I want to eat!

With all of this already in mind, today I checked out The People’s Chemist and learned some truly awful things about Splenda.

From the article:

Splenda contains the drug sucralose. This chemical is 600 times sweeter than sugar. To make sucralose, chlorine is used. Chlorine has a split personality. It can be harmless or it can be life threatening.

Guess what one Splenda is? It was discovered when its creators were trying to design a new pesticide, so that should tell you something. Go read the rest of the article to get the full scoop.

A Nourished Start Sharing Carnival

This post is part of the Nourished Start Carnival at the Nourished Gourmet.  Breakfast can be a rough meal.  For me, my biggest hurdles are not wanting to eat something too heavy too early and being able to prepare something quickly that can be consumed in front of the computer while I check email or in front of the TV while I check the weather.  My time is limited, so I want to multitask in the morning instead of spending time at the stove or in the kitchen.

I used to be big on skim milk and breakfast cereal.  Every single morning.  But despite always going for the “natural” and organic cereals, most are still highly processed.  Many are extruded, which means heated at an extremely high temperature and then forced through something to make it into a fun shape (such as a flake, or twig).  This is not a natural process, nor is it something that was ever done traditionally.  Well, then there are the granolas.  I love a good granola.  But most are made with canola oil or other vegetable oils I prefer not to eat.  Vegetable oils have only been in our diet for 100 years (or less!), and I do not believe they are good for us.  I eat mainly animal fats, coconut oil, and olive oil.  And then there is the milk – I don’t drink skim milk anymore.  Only whole, pure, unadulterated milk, fresh from a cow.

So, what is for breakfast?  Here are a few standbys I enjoy these days:

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A neighborhood market

I’m a busy person. I work 40-60 hours a week with a 1 hour commute each way. I frequently babysit on evenings and weekends. I have 3 cats that I have to care for, not to mention an apartment to clean, errands to run, and oh yeah, I do have friends I like to see and hobbies that do not involve cooking! And yet here I am, talking about preparing food from scratch. How do I make it work? It really isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a pound of raw honey on top of the freezer, a bag of desicated coconut in the cupboard and a very ripe banana burning a hole in my freezer.  I was in a mood to bake, and then this Mango Honey and Banana Bread from Gel’s Kitchen Blog appeared in my reader.  Perfect!

I made it on Sunday, and it was a sucess.  The bread has a warm, coconutty flavor, further deepened by the honey.  The banana gives it just a touch of flavor and adds moistness.  This is not an overpowering banana bread.  The banana takes a back seat to the honey and coconut and helps round out the flavor.

I followed the recipe exactly except for the mango honey.  I did not have any (though now I simply must find some to try!), so instead I used a local apiary’s raw honey.  It is dark, thick, and rich.  It carries a strong flavor, and worked well in this bread.

It tastes great warm out of the oven, cooled in the next day’s lunch, or warmed with some butter melted over the top.  This is a recipe I’ll come back to over and over again!