zucchini bread

This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.

Today I picked up a CSA share for someone on vacation.  I was not prepared for the bounty of berries I was to receive!  2 pints of raspberries and 2 quarts of strawberries, plus other assorted vegetables and herbs.  I had been prepared to make a currant quick bread, and had prepped some wheat the night before (soaked it in yogurt and left it out 24 hours), but when I realized I could now make a raspberry currant pie, I had to switch gears and figure out something else to do with my soaked wheat.  I froze the raspberries and currants  so I could make a pie with them later this week.  The raspberries would not have lasted more than a day in the fridge, which is always the pity with raspberries.  So delicate that they must be used or frozen right away.

Since I’m getting a delivery of meat in 2 days, I figured I should use something from my freezer to help free up space.  Well, I did happen to have a little less than a cup of grated zucchini so I thought I’d make zucchini bread.  Besides, here in the northeast, the zucchini have arrived at the farmer’s markets, and soon we will be up to our ears in it!

Now, this isn’t a recipe that uses heaps of zucchinis.  It only uses about a cup of grated raw zucchini, or about 1/2 - 2/3 cups grated, blanched zucchini.   So this is a good recipe for when you have an odd zucchini.  Not enough for a meal, but you don’t want it to go to waste.  Of course, you could make multiple loaves and freeze them for later…

Soaking the flour overnight in yogurt is an essential step.  This neutralized the phytic acid present in the wheat.  Phytic acid is an anti nutrient found in nuts, seeds, legumes, and grains that can cheleate minerals from your body.  It can be neutralized by properly preparing these foods, such as soaking flour in yogurt.  The other reason the yogurt step is important for this zucchini bread is that it really helped to leaven the bread.  I would have used all soaked wheat in the recipe, but it would have thrown off the liquid to dry ingredient ratio.  Since I couldn’t soak all of the flour without making the batter too runny, I used sprouted wheat.  Sprouting will also destroy phytic acid.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, fresh out of the oven.  Recipe below.

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Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp

I love making crisps; if I were to have a “signature dessert” it would be crisps.  I make them so much because they taste great with the fruit and brown sugar combination, crispy topping, and fruity bottom and they are so easy.  I’ve never really exactly followed a crisp recipe, but if I did, it would be the one in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison.  By the way, I highly recommend that cookbook.  It is filled with lots of great information, tons of inspiration, and everything uses real foods.  I’m not a vegetarian, but her cookbook can be used for side dishes, meatless main dishes (for those of you, who like me frequently have “Meatless Meals” or days), and everything tastes great.

Crisps are great all year round.  Any kind of fruit can be put inside to make them suitable for spring (rhubarb and strawberries, tada!) to fall and winter (apple crisp, anyone?).  This recipe will work for all seasons and all fruits with a little bit of know how - really juicy fruits will benefit from the addition of some sort of a starch such as flour or tapioca in the filling to help hold it together a little bit, and the sweeter the fruit, the less sugar you need.

Strawberry season is in full force here in the northeast.  Almost every stand at the farmer’s market has pints lined up, and more to replace the ones that are purchased.  Rhubarbs are still hanging on, as they will until the weather gets too hot for them in another month or so.  I never grew up eating strawberry and rhubarb in combination, but it seems it is a classic, so I made it into a crisp.

This post is submitted to Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, Tasty Tuesday and Real Food Wednesday.

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Strawberry Shortcake

Today at the farmer’s market, I saw strawberries for the first time.  Not really having  plan, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them if I were to get them.  I just knew I had to have them.  When I got home, I browsed my cookbooks for inspiration.  When I saw strawberry shortcake, I knew that is what I had to have.  But none of the recipes seemed to be what I wanted.  They had too much sugar, used refined white flour, or even used vegetable shortening!  No thank you!  So I went about creating my own recipe.

I also whipped the cream by hand - no kitchen aid here, sadly.  Though I must say, I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment when I beat that whipped cream to stiff peaks.

This is a great dessert - one you can serve to your kids or guests and they will feel as though they are getting a decadent dessert, but you can feel good that you are giving them something that has some good nutrients for them with its coconut oil and sprouted whole wheat flour.

Coconut oil is preferable to vegetable shortening by the simple fact that coconut oil is a food, while vegetable shortening is a highly processed industrial product that was originally designed for candles.  Coconut oil has lots of amazing properties that make it a healthy choice, such as boosting metabolism and providing anti viral and antibacterial properties.  Sprouted wheat flour is preferable to white flour because sprouting changes the wheat in important ways - it gets rid of the phytates, allowing our bodies to absorb the minerals, and makes the flour easier to digest.  It also has a higher percentage of the B-complex vitamins.

Recipe, instructions and resources to purchase sprouted flour, coconut oil, and sucanat, rapadura, and evaporated cane juice below.

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A piece of rhubarb buckle

At the farmer’s market I bought a few pounds of rhubarb.  Normally, I would make a crisp, but since I had so much rhubarb, I thought I’d try something else first.  Enter the buckle.

A buckle is a dessert from the colonial times.  It is related to the crisps, cobblers, and brown bettys.    A cake-like batter is made with fresh fruit folded into it, and then a lovely crumble topping it added to the top of the batter just before baking.  It is essentially the marriage of a cake and a crisp.

The buckle turned out very well: a delicious large crumbed cake filled with bits of tart rhubarb and topped with a buttery crumble.  For my recipe I used sucanat for the crumble topping and as half of the sugar in the cake.  Sucanat retains more of the nutrition found in sugar cane, so it isn’t all empty calories like refined white sugar.  It also has a richer flavor, similar to molasses.  It works really well for this type of recipe.  Don’t be fooled though, sugar is still sugar and this is just a treat!

Here is my recipe, inspired by The Washington Post.

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Ginger Pear Spice Muffins - perfect to bring to a friend.

This post is submitted to Tempt My Tummy Tuesday and Tasty Tuesday.

Cooking for people brings me enjoyment. I like seeing them enjoy something I’ve made, and I feel good about making something nourishing for the people I care about. So when a friend had a small get together at her house, I thought about what I would bring. The food needed to taste good, but be healthy. In fact, I wanted my friends to be surprised at just how healthy it was. I wanted to bring something sweet, since I knew someone else was bringing something savory. I also wanted it to be vaguely breakfast or brunch appropriate. I turned to the food blogs, but did not see the inspiration I needed. So I turned to Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and saw just what I wanted (with a few modifications, of course!).

I ended up going with a variation of the Basic Muffins recipe found on page 482. Everyone loved them. They thought that the spices were just right, they were delighted with the level of sweetness, and they couldn’t believe the real pieces of pear inside. They taste delicious, and you would be hard pressed to find a healthier muffin. The recipe uses whole wheat flour, demonstrates soaking of the flour overnight to reduce the phytates, uses maple syrup (and a small amount at that) instead of a refined sugar, and includes fresh whole fruit. You must give these a try. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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!