Archive for the ‘Cooking’ Category

• My Low GL Cornmeal Pancakes

  Date: 2010.06.04 | Category: Baking & Cooking, Cooking, Food, Health, Homemaking, Recipes, Spunky, Vegan/Lenten, mama | Response: 2

  

  Michelle’s Low GL Cornmeal Pancakes

  • 2 cups ground cornmeal
  • 2 cups boiling water
  • 1 tsp unrefined real salt (or 2 tsp regular salt)
  • 2 eggs (or egg substitute)
  • 1 Tbsp agave nectar (or about 2 Tbsp regular sugar)
  • 4 Tbsp margarine, melted
  • 1 cup soy/almond/rice/hemp milk (or regular milk)
  • 1 cup stoneground whole wheat flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • Fresh or frozen berries or fruit
  • agave nectar (or sugar)
  1. In a bowl, mix together cornmeal and salt.
  2. Add boiling water, stir together, and let stand for 10 minutes.
  3. In a separate bowl, beat together beat, sugar, margarine, and milk.
  4. Add to cornmeal mixture.
  5. Sift together flour and baking powder and add to batter, mixing lightly.
  6. Cook pancakes on a 300 degree heated griddle, spreading out the batter each time you put in on the griddle. Brown lightly on both sides.
  7. Fruit Topping: Combine frozen or fresh fruit with a little bit of agave nectar (or sugar) and heat until warm through.  Spread over pancakes.

  

  I divided the batter into separate bowls, and added some food coloring to a little bit for the kiddos.  Spunky loved these so much that she ate EIGHT pancakes!

  

• Great Website: StillTasty.com

  Date: 2010.05.02 | Category: Cooking, Websites | Response: 2

  

• Recipe: Vegan Gingerbread Cut-Out Cookies

  Date: 2010.04.09 | Category: Cooking, Cooking With Kids, Food, Health, Punky, Recipes, Spunky, Vegan/Lenten, mama | Response: 1

  

  Delicious Vegan Gingerbread Cookies!

  Ingredients

  • ½ cup oil
  • ¾ cup sugar
  • ¼ cup molasses
  • ¼ cup plain soymilk
  • 2 cups whole wheat flour
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • ½ teaspoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ½ teaspoon each ground nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon
  • 1 ½ teaspoons ground ginger

  Directions
  1. In a large bowl beat together oil and sugar for about 3 minutes.  Add molasses and soymilk.

  2. In a separate bowl, sift together all the dry ingredients.

  3. Add the dry ingredients to the wet in batches. Mix together with a firm spoon or spatula until well combined.
  

  4. Flatten the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap and chill for an hour or up to 3 days in advance.

  5. Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly grease your cookie sheets.

  6. On a floured surface roll you dough out to a little less than 1/4 inch thick (it is a bit crumbly).
  
  7. Cut out your shapes with your cookie cutters and gently place on cookie sheets.

  8. Bake for 8 minutes.

  9. Remove from oven and let them cool for 2 minutes on the baking sheet then move to a cooling rack.

  10. Wait until they are completely cool before icing.  (Icing: powdered sugar and water)

  

  These cookies are very soft and delicious.

  I was skeptical at first when I saw how crumbly the dough was, but they turned out great!

• Spend Great and Holy Friday with Us

  Date: 2010.04.02 | Category: Bunky, Cooking, Faith, Family, Food, Health, Holy Week, Hubby, Orthodoxy, Punky, Spunky, mama | Response: 12

  Our day started with our early riser (Spunky) waking up long before the sun began to peak over the horizon. I brought her into our bedroom and attempted to sleep a little bit longer. Shortly after her arrival, Punky came into our room and Bunky began to cry in his crib. So, we made our way downstairs and let Daddy sleep in.

  I made a batch of Kulich (Russian Pascha/Easter Bread), but, with my terrible luck, my bread did not rise… at all.  So I baked a small loaf to see how it would turn out.  Since it turned out fine, I decided to make braided loaves with that dough and I will try again tomorrow with the Kulich.
  (Any tips on how to make my bread rise?)

  While I was mixing up the dough, I sat the kiddos down at the table with a few coloring pages of Great and Holy Friday.  Punky even drew blood on Christ’s hands (look closely at the photo).  He is all about the small details.

  

  Later that day, we headed to church for the Entombment Vespers, where Christ is literally taken down from the cross and placed into the tomb.  It is a wonderful service for children to see what happened when Christ died.  It also made them both very excited for Sunday morning!  Spunky kept asking, “Is Jesus in the soup?” She didn’t understand the word tomb, so I had to explain that to her.

  Speaking of which, Punky and I had a really wonderful talk last night about dying:  He asked me if God was in the sun, and I told him that God made the sun, but he was in Heaven.  Then I explained how after Jesus rose from the dead, He ascended into Heaven, etc.  They he asked me how we could go and see God in Heaven. I told him that when we die, we’ll see Him.  Then he started asking questions about why people die.  It was a very insightful conversation that I had with my four year old. I am very proud of him.

  

  Later this evening, as I was carrying Bunky in his carseat, I tripped in our garage.  Rather than throwing the carseat with my baby boy in it, I tried to land without hurting him.  But, of course, I hurt myself.  I somehow managed to lose both of my shoes, scrape up my toes and some of my nail polish and…
  I broke my toe!

  

  Just my luck! My mom always jokes that I have a “little black cloud that follows me”, but it really seems true. I just can’t catch a break recently.

  Thank you for all your prayers for the sickness in our family.
  We are all feeling much better.

  Unfortunately, my husband also hurt himself this week: he was carrying a large amount of carpet down the steps at our former home, and he fell down the concrete stairs.  Thankfully, he wasn’t hurt too badly, but his knees are very sore.

  I hope everyone had a blessed Good Friday.
  We are looking forward to celebrating our Savior’s resurrection!

• Very Easy Vegan Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

  Date: 2010.03.06 | Category: Cooking, Recipes, Vegan/Lenten | Response: 1

  

  

  Ingredients
  • 1 box cake mix (I used devils food)
  • 1 cup oatmeal
  • 1/2 cup oil
  • 1/3 cup applesauce
  • 1 cup chocolate chips (I used baking chocolate chopped up)
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract

  Directions

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
  In a large bowl, combine all ingredients, blending well.
  If mixture is too stiff, add a little water, if too wet add more oatmeal.
  Drop by Tbspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet.
  Bake for 13-15 minutes.  They spread out a lot when they bake.

• Accomplishing Much and Enjoying More

  Date: 2010.03.05 | Category: Bunky, Cooking, Family, Food, Friends, Homemaking, Punky, Spunky, mama | Response: 6

  Look at all I did yesterday:

  baked one batch of banana nut muffins
  baked on batch of blueberry muffins
  cleaned all of the kids’ rooms
  vacuumed
  did two loads of laundry
  put away 1/2 of one load (I hate this task!)
  baked two loaves of bread
  make two chocolate cakes
  prepared one pasta salad
  made a big batch of chili
  cleaned the kithcen
  cleaned up the guest room
  made up guest bed
  gathered clothes for the next batch of laundy
  made dinner for the kiddos
  straightened up the house
  gave my children a bath

  And the best parts:

  read books to Spunky
  bragged about my cute kids to my sister
  spoke to my mom on the phone
  taught Punky how to write his numbers
  cuddled with Bunky before his afternoon nap
  chatted with my hubby mid-day
  showed Punky how to play a new computer game
  snuggled with Spunky before her nap
  called Trish and made plans for my trip to see her
  saw the delight in Punky’s face when I put a cherry in his juice
  enjoyed listening to the children dance together
  witnessed Spunky mothering Bunky
  tucked my sweet babies into bed
  nursed and rocked Bunky to sleep

  and I get to do this all over again…
  well, not today, but another day in the near future.

  Today, Bunky and I are off to see Trish!
  

• Best Vegan Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

  Date: 2010.02.26 | Category: Cooking, Recipes, Vegan/Lenten | Response: 5

  Now that I’ve been doing some vegan baking, I am learning that one of the most important parts of baking this way is what you use to bind the cookies.  I’ve previously posted my Super-Substituted Banana Bread and A List of Cooking & Baking Substitutes, and here is a fantastic recipe for oatmeal cookies made with several substitutes.  (I am going to try to make peanut butter ones soon, too…)

  Ingredients

  

  • 1 cup of regular organic sugar
  • 1/2 of a cup of turbinado sugar
  • slightly less than 1/3 of a cup of oil
  • 3 Tbsp of water
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons of good vanilla extract
  • 1  mashed banana
  • 1/4 cup organic applesauce
  • 1 1/2 tsp of cinnamon
  • 1 tsp nutmeg
  • 1 1/2 cups of flour
  • 1 teaspoon of baking soda
  • 1/2 of a teaspoon of salt
  • 2 cups of oats
  • 2.5 ounces of baking chocolate, crushed/chopped (I use Green and Black’s Organic Baking Chocolate)

  Directions:

  • Mix the sugars, oil, and water.  Add the vanilla, banana, and applesauce.
  • Then mix together the cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, baking soda, and salt.
  • Combine the wet and dry ingredients.
  • Stir in the oats.  If it is too thin, let stand a bit so the oats can absorb the excess liquid.  Or if it is too dry, at a little bit more water.
  • Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls on to greased cookie shhets
  • Bake at 350 degrees F for 13 minutes.  Let them sit a bit before you take them off the cookie sheet.

• Using Christmas Presents to Make Muffins

  Date: 2010.01.21 | Category: Cooking, Cooking With Kids, Punky | Response: 1

  
  We bought Punky, our “Cooker”, a little baking set for Christmas.
  We used it a couple of weeks ago to make mini blueberry muffins.

  

  He was very proud!

• Baking Pink Piggy Cookies with Punky

  Date: 2010.01.11 | Category: Cooking, Cooking With Kids, Punky, mama | Response: 7

  On Sunday, Punky and I made Pink Piggy Cookies.  I bought a cookbook around Thanksgiving that I plan on cooking/baking from and then blogging about over the course of this year.  It is a cookbook full of recipes for foods that kids would like.  It cost $10, which is more than I usually spend on any type of book, so I promised myself that I would try to make the majority of the recipes over the course of a year.  We’ll see how that goes…

  But here is the first!

  

  

  

• Baking with Subsitutes & A Recipe

  Date: 2010.01.07 | Category: Cooking, Cooking With Kids, Homemaking, Recipes, Vegan/Lenten | Response: 4

  We had some VERY ripe bananas just before we left for our trip to Gatlinburg, so I put the in the freezer (my mom’s idea) to save to make banana bread with.  The bananas smelled so sweet, so I changed up my usual recipe a bit and even tried out some new substitutes as well.

  Michelle’s Super Substituted Banana Bread

  

  Mix together in large bowl:

  • 2 cups of organic whole wheat flour
  • 1 1/2 tsp baking power
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp nutmeg
  • pinch of salt

  Combine in small bowl:

  • 2 Tbsp organic milled flax seed
  • 6 Tbsp water

  Then add to the small bowl:

  • 5 very ripe brown bananas
  • nearly 1 cup of natural organic sugar
  • 1/2 cup organic unsweetened applesauce
  • if you like nuts, add 1/4 cup chopped walnuts

  Pour the contents of the small bowl into the larger one and mix thoroughly.

  Pour into a greased 9×13 pan and sprinkle about 2 Tbsp of the flax seed over the top of the loaf.

  Bake at 350 F for 60-65 minutes.

  While cooling, sprinkle a little bit of cinnamon/sugar over the top of the loaf.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Other Substitutes To Try in This Recipe
  

  Egg Substitute (each equals 1 egg)

  • Ener-G Egg Replacer (you can buy this in most grocery stores)- works well for most things, but NOT packaged brownies mixes.
  • 1 Tbsp Milled Flax Seed plus 3 Tbsp water- works great especially with whole wheat flour
  • 2 Tbsp cornstarch
  • half of a banana, mashed
  • 2 Tbsp water plus 2 tsp baking powder (1 tsp oil, optional)
  • 1/4 cup blended tofu
  • 1/4 cup applesauce plus 1 tsp baking powder
    

  Oil Substitutes

  • Applesauce
  • Butter or margarine
    
  • Shortening (use 1/4 more)
  • Stiffly beaten egg whites
  • Just about any fruit puree will work (cook the fruit and then puree in a food processor or blender)
  • Soy Lecithin (can be found in health food stores)- I’ve never tried this one