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My goodness, the long stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year's Eve is a slippery slope of sinfully scrumptious food, isn't it? (That's one of my favorite desserts EVER, pictured above: my mother-in-law's pumpkin flan.) With the holidays potentially piling on the pounds, I thought this might be just the right time for another round-up of healthy food recipes. Well, not all of them are technically "100% healthy", but they're all healthier versions of holiday treats. Ready for some good food for good times? Dig in!
Here's one of my favorite ways to spend a lazy weekend morning: Making a creative, slightly crazy breakfast with the kids. (They're in full-on "Chef Mode" lately, thanks to "Master Chef Junior.") What's the dish they concocted, above? It's challah french toast, sprinkled with powdered sugar, chocolate chips, pomegranate seeds, and maple syrup, of course! It won't win any awards for good health (although the pomegranate helped me feel slightly less guilty), but it was good fun to spend Saturday morning whipping up something wild and wacky with my two little chefs-in-training. After making sure they stay safe in the kitchen, my most important kitchen rule for them is "be creative!"
And my most important rule for the weekend is this: Let the kids relax, rest, imagine, play, create, and generally do their own thing (within reason!), without hustling them off to activity after activity. I'm a huge believer in underscheduling children. How 'bout you?
Is there anything more visually delish than food photography? (I guess you could rattle off the names of a few movie stars, but that's not what I meant!) When I was scoping out the blogosphere for posts about healthy food for the weekend (to piggyback on my Wednesday post about saying no to palm oil), I discovered some of the most delectable foodie blogs for healthy recipes, with outstanding photography to match!
I think I'd like to make this a regular feature here at Joyfully Green--maybe the first Friday of every month, the "Joyful Reads for the Weekend" will be about healthy food choices--the fringe benefit being that healthier food = a healthier planet. Does that sound like a yummy idea to you? For now, here's a first taste, with all of the following posts focusing on making your own food from simple ingredients instead of buying highly processed, store-bought food with who-knows-what ingredients:
Kneading bread dough is one of those activities that you either love to do or hate to do. People in the former camp croon about how cathartic it is to get out their frustrations by punching and pounding away at the dough; people in the latter camp just want to "get on with it" and eat some fresh-baked bread. I'm in the latter camp. So, I'm beyond thrilled that I finally found the easiest, best bread recipe, and it requires absolutely no kneading, from Mother Earth News (the recipe is on page 2 of the link). I tried it yesterday, to astounding success.
Honestly, I'm still a bit shocked at how easy it was to turn out a loaf of bread that looks like the ones sold in the windows of Paris boulangeries. A loaf I could knock on for that hard, hollow crack, and slice for airy moistness and crusty chewiness. In a word: Perfection. Because the recipe recommends that the final loaf rests an hour before slicing, I took out my camera and snapped 126 (!) photos of my two loaves. That's right--I took a crazy amount of photos of two loaves of bread, dressing them up in different dishcloths, placing them on different plates. I even thwacked my head on the wrought-iron chandelier above this table while I was taking an overhead shot (how's that for a full disclosure policy?). But those golden loaves reminded me of a Caravaggio painting, or a Vermeer painting...oh, now I'm just going off the deep end, aren't I? Suffice it to say that they were almost too pretty to eat. Almost.
As I said in my post about making your own organic cookies, if you find a super-easy, super-tasty recipe for a food that's fun to make, what's the point of buying it instead? When you make it yourself, you control the ingredients (which hopefully means you'll make it healthier than a manufacturer would); you save money and gas; and you cancel out the manufacturing, packaging, and shipping processes (except for the ingredients themselves--I haven't figured out how to make my own organic flour yet and it's not high on my to-do list). With this recipe, you basically just need a lot of time--to ignore the dough while you go off and do other things. It takes a good 18 hours between that initial five minutes of mixing time and the getting-it-out-of-the-oven stage. I said previously that "life's too short for flat soda and stale donuts", and now I've got an addendum: "Life is too short for bad bread."
I think making your own bread is one of those things that seems really daunting and you just need to dive in and do it. Have you ever tried to bake your own bread? How did it turn out? Have you ever surprised yourself by making something that seemed difficult before you gave it a go?
Some green changes are harder to make than others--for example, installing solar panels on your house or driving an electric car. Others are easy as pie--or in this case, a dozen cookies. Among the activities that I genuinely enjoy sharing with my children is baking. Unlike (just for example) playing "princess hair salon" or "crash-and-smash cars", we get mutual enjoyment out of baking together. My daughter puts on her chef hat and apron, her big brother proclaims he's my sous-chef, and they're off and baking.
From the green standpoint (of course), there is no plastic packaging with homemade cookies. Most store-bought cookies have at least two layers of packaging, and it's rarely recyclable, so it sits in the landfill forever. Also, homemade cookies contain only ingredients that I can identify easily. (I have a vague idea of what "high fructose corn syrup" is, but what is "resistant corn maltodextrin" anyway? Never mind--I don't want to know.) I can even use organic flour, organic sugar, organic eggs--you get the picture. So, recently, after handily churning out six dozen homemade sugar cookies with my kids and watching their enjoyment at the results, I wondered, "Why am I buying cookies?"
I don't want to lie to you and promise that I'll never buy another package of cookies from here to eternity, but since they're easy to make, a fun and creative activity with the kids, and a better choice for the planet (no packaging) and our health (no strange chemical additives), I plan on making them much more often and buying them far less frequently.
Here's a link to one of our favorite recipes for homemade chocolate chip cookies (from King Arthur brand flour) using organic white whole wheat flour. (Important step: You will need to scoop the dough into a tablespoon and mold it firmly onto it with your hand before putting each one on the cookie sheet., otherwise they are a bit difficult to manage--there are a LOT of chips.) Substitute as many organic ingredients as you can find--butter, eggs, sugar, even vanilla extract--most stores (near metropolitan areas, anyway) have gotten on-board the organic love train.
Food for thought (literally this time!): What are your favorite recipes using organic or otherwise healthful ingredients? As with a good batch of cookies, it's better to share!
