Make crackers, PopTarts & cinnamon toast crunch

So I'm reading "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver and loving it! The basic premise of the book is eating local is good for your health, bank account, community and the planet. I believe in that and want to do what I can to eat more locally farmed and made foods. To that end I've been shopping at stores that carry local produce and meat and give back to the farming community (like PCC). I've been avoiding fast food altogether as that industry fuels the worst farming practices. And I've been trying to reduce our consumption of pre-packaged foods.

That last one has been a bit of a problem where the kids are concerned. They LOVE their goldfish crackers, pop tarts, granola bars, cereal, etc. and although they love fruit, they don't feel like that's an acceptable substitute for their packaged treats. So today, I thought I'd try my hand at making some of these on my own. I ended up making crackers, Parmesan crackers, cinnamon toast crunch crackers/cereal, pop tarts and chocolate pockets. This is the basic cracker recipe:

Crackers
Ingredients
2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/4 C Flax Seed meal

1/2 C wheat germ
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup water

Directions
1.Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2.In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, wheat germ, flax seed meal and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Pour in the vegetable oil and water; mix until just blended.
3.On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough as thin as possible - no thicker than 1/8 inch. Place dough on an ungreased baking sheet, and mark squares out with a knife, but don't cut through. Prick each cracker with a fork a few times, and sprinkle with salt.
4.Bake for 15 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until crisp and light brown. Baking time may be different depending on how thin your crackers are. When cool, remove from baking sheet, and separate into individual crackers.

That makes the basic cracker. Parmesan cheese on top for the Parmesan crackers, cinnamon sugar on top for cinnamon toast crunch. For pop tarts I cut 2 3x3 squares of dough, put some jam in the middle, put second piece on top of first piece and sealed the edges. Then for chocolate pockets I put chocolate chips in the middle of a 2x2 square of dough then bunched up the edges into a little chocolate kiss shape.

I think they are a success! I've tasted them all and they are pretty darn good. Just make sure to make the crackers really really thin. The thinner the better for a crisp cracker. Maybe with this recipe I'm one step closer to being a locavore!

Deceptively Delicious

As my son continues his picky eater phase I've been looking into new recipes that will both be healthy and appealing to a 4 year old. He loves most breakfast foods so I thought making them more healthy would allow me to serve them more often and for other meals. I found a few recipes online for pancakes and french toast, and I've recently gotten out my Deceptively Delicious book by Jessica Seinfeld and have found a few recipes that will be new favorites. I think the ones I like best are the pancakes I found on allrecipes.com that include cottage cheese, whole wheat flour and fruit or veggie puree. So far the kids have eaten them up and asked for seconds. In Deceptively Delicious I found a french toast recipe that included butternut squash and sweet potato puree. Also in that book I found chocolate chip cookies with chick peas and chocolate pudding with avocado. The kids loved those as well. I'm not sure how I feel about sneaking healthy foods into something that doesn't seem healthy, but I guess as long as I continue to present the healthy foods at meal times in their original form there's no harm in adding some other healthy goodies into other foods that I know they'll eat.

Too many roosters

So, every year around September we order a new batch of chicks to add to our flock. Ideally we'd be culling our old hens to make room for the new ones, but we have so far been "chicken" and have just let the old ones die of old age or other chickenly ailments. In each of these batches of chicks the company sneaks in a couple of roosters. So now we have 4, count them 4, roosters! Who in blazes needs 4 roosters?!? Who really needs one? But, lucky us, we have 4 roosters running around our yard crowing at 3am and throughout the day. (the picture of the 4th rooster is on the side bar on this page.) If anyone wants a rooster, or 2, or 3, please let me know and I'll drop them on your doorstep...I may drop them on your doorstep even if you don't ask. Just Kidding...or maybe not.

The starts in the greenhouse are looking pretty nice. I remembered after my last post that I still need to plant some broccoli and cukes as well as red cabbage and golden beets. I'm not really sure how this Miner's lettuce is going to turn out. So far it looks pretty strange for lettuce, but we'll see.

Benefits of Free Range Eggs

I've sent this out to folks before but wanted to "archive" it in my blog so I wouln't have to go look it up every time I wanted the info.

I know from eating eggs from our own "happy backyard chickens" that free range eggs don't taste anything like the bland eggs you get cheap in the grocery store. Our eggs have yolks that are almost orange and have a lot more flavor than factory eggs. I assume that color comes from all of the grass, weeds, bugs, worms and whatever else the chickens find to eat around the yard. According to Mother Earth News, eggs from pastured hens versus factory hens contain:

•1/3 less cholesterol
•1/4 less saturated fat
•2/3 more vitamin A
•Two times more omega-3 fatty acids
•Three times more vitamin E
•Seven times more beta carotene
•3 to 6 times more Vitamin D

So whether you buy your eggs from a farmer's market, a friend or from the grocery store, always try to buy free range eggs rather than eggs from factory raised chickens.

First Lettuce of the season

For Easter dinner this year along with the Ham and carrots I made in the crock pot, we ate the first lettuce of the season. I started some seed a couple of months ago in the greenhouse and the lettuce is now big enough to nibble. I thinned my lettuce pot and we ate the thinnings. Hopefully the plants left in the pot will continue to grow and become full heads to eat in a couple more months. Everything is growing pretty slowly due to the cold temps outside, but it is all still growing.

I now have starts of Lettuce, spinach, green cabbage (need to start some red cabbage), leeks, scallions, peas, red beets (need to start some golden ones), butternut squash, zucchini, sunflowers and another flower I can't remember. I'll seed the corn, pole beans, soy beans and pumpkins directly in the garden when I get it weeded. What am I forgetting? I've gotten 2 out of 14 rows weeded so far, and will hopefully get a lot more done in the nice weather predicted for this weekend.

This past weekend we went to the Tulip Festival and worked outside cleaning up the rest of the old deck. The new deck is about 95% finished, and now the old deck is 100% removed. We cleared about 150 sq feet of woods behind the chicken coop to stack the spare good lumber and stacked the "bad" lumber behind the compost pile. It'd probably be better just to get a dumpster and throw out the old lumber, but in the back of my mind I keep thinking that there must be something we can make out of it. One section of the old deck is now in our "Secret Trees" where the kids play. They're using as a stage. :)

Now I just need to figure out what to do with about 400 sq ft of empty space off the end of the new deck...Hot Tub?

Is it Spring yet?

The gorgeous weather yesterday made me want to go do something spring-like. So I did some garden clean up and took a look at the green house. Last fall we raised a brood of chicks in it and they left it looking horrendous. Every surface was covered with chick dust including the window-walls. So I got out the hose and washed everything down and scrubbed it with a deck brush. Then I lined up all of my starter trays and put my starter pots in them. I think I've got about 4 trays of 48 pots and one tray that has 72 pots along with a ton of little 4x4 round and square pots. I didn't add all of those up but it makes more starts than I can put in my 1800 sq ft garden.

Today's not as nice as yesterday but having all of those empty pots made me itchy to plant something. So today I went digging in our compost pile for "dirt" to put in my pots then planted some Miner's Lettuce, Pompom lettuce and Snap peas. They are all pretty cold hardy so they should be OK. The greenhouse should keep everything from freezing but it doesn't really keep things warm in there. I wanted to plant spinach but realized that I used all of my seeds last season. Oh darn, I guess I HAVE to make a trip to Flower World. :)

Wii Fit Plus or Big Brother?

For Christmas this year we finally broke down and got a Wii for the family. Along with it we got the Fit Plus with balance board. I was really excited about this since I do yoga 2 times per week at the gym and wanted to have some supplemental yoga to do on other days. So we all made our Mii's, took our body tests and started "training" with all of the neat games. The first thing that made me a bit wary was that the Fit plus requires everyone to have a weight goal. Now with hubby and me, that wasn't such a hard thing to do, but with the kids, I wasn't really sure I wanted them to have a goal of any kind. They don't necessarily need to gain weight and they certainly don't need to lose it. So we set a goal for them to stay the same weight for 2 weeks. The next thing i know they are getting upset every time they did a body test; "Mommy, I lost weight!" or "Mommy, I gained weight!". I just wanted them to play some games.

My next annoyance with this machine is its negativity. When you take a body test it gives you 2 balance tests to go with the weigh-in. No matter how well you do on these tests it picks the one that was slightly imperfect and tells you that you're not good at it. Now why is that necessary? Can't it be positive and praise you on the one you did well, or say you did pretty well on both? And if you happen to gain just one pound at a weigh-in compared to your last weigh-in it makes you choose a reason for your weight gain. Did you overeat or snack too much or not exercise or something else. Now I don't know about the rest of you, but my weight can vary a pound or 2 from morning to night each day. So depending on when I take my test that could be the sole reason for my one pound weight change, not some external thing that i did wrong.

The last issue I have with our Wii Fit plus is the Big Brother feeling i get when it asks me these strange questions about people in my family (i.e. the other Miis on the system). I went to do a body test one day and the machine asks me what I thought of my son's posture. Well, his posture is always good, so I said i hadn't noticed any change. The machine then proceeded to ask me "Are you paying enough attention to him?". I almost fell off the balance board! Who in the development department of Nintendo thought to put that little statement in the system? I suppose if you have teenage children who hide themselves in their rooms most of the time, you might want to ask yourself that every once in a while, but would anyone ever want their video game to ask them? That was just over the top!

I have to say that the negativity alone has made me somewhat reluctant to use the system. I dread stepping on that board and having it grill me about that pound that I may or may not have gained since last weigh-in and tell me I don't have good balance because I got 98% on its test. Can't they add a little encouragement to motivate people to be more active? As a parent I know that encouragement and cheer leading get way more out of my kids than telling them they aren't good enough. Doesn't Nintendo employ any parents?