Awesome Healthy Granola

I guess Sunday has become my experimental cooking day. I still cook dinner every night but I tend to go a little overboard on Sunday’s. This past Sunday I made homemade vegetable stock, homemade marinara, homemade crackers and homemade granola. They all turned out well but the granola was the best. On top of it being amazing it was also super easy and it will last forever. This recipe (like many others) is from Mark Bittman’s Food Matters.

I made a half batch of this recipe, leaving out the cinnamon and coconut b/c I just don’t like cinnamon and coconut. I also left out the salt.

You will need:

6 cups rolled oats (not the instant kind)
2 cups mixed nuts and seeds: sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, chopped walnuts, pecans, almonds or cashews ( I used chopped walnuts, sliced almonds and sesame seeds)
1 cup dried unsweetened shredded coconut, optional
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, or to taste
Dash salt
1/2 to 1 cup honey or maple syrup, or to taste ( I used ½ cups of maple syrup)
1 cup raisins or chopped dried fruit, optional

How to prepare:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a bowl, combine oats, nuts and seeds, coconut, cinnamon, salt and sweetener. Place on a sheet pan and put in oven. Bake for 30 minutes or a little longer, stirring occasionally. Mixture should brown evenly; the browner it gets without burning, the crunchier the granola will be.

Personally I had to be careful on this step. Our oven does not heat evenly and it tends to cook things very fast. I took the mixture out of the oven after about 15 minutes to stir and to make sure it wasn’t burning. After an additional 10 minutes I decided it was done. Just keep an eye on it because the last thing you want is burnt nuts! =)

2. After you have decided its done remove it from the oven and add raisins or dried fruit. Cool on a rack, stirring once in a while until granola reaches room temperature. Transfer to a sealed container and store in refrigerator.

And that’s it. Super simple and extremely good.

Quick Blueberry Smoothie

This is something I got from Ellie Krieger during a commercial break. Its super fast and very good.

You will need:

1/2 cup Low Fat Milk
1/2 cup Plain Low fat yogurt
1 cup Frozen Blueberries ( I use Wild blueberries)
1 teaspoon of raw, unfiltered honey ( regular will work but I hear this is better. Reference rant coming soon)
1 teaspoon Blackstrap Molasses (optional, you can just add more honey or a tiny bit of sugar)

And then just throw it all in a blender and bam! Your done.

Lentil Soup

Thought I would make a quick post about a soup that I eat pretty much every week. Its super healthy and very good. As the title suggests it is a lentil soup. You will need:

1 cup dry lentils
14 oz crushed tomatoes
Swiss chard ( usually it is sold in prepacked bundles. Just grab one of those and decide how much you want. Only use the leaves. I usually use about 110 grams.)
Half of a medium onion chopped
Extra Virgin Olive Oil or just some sort of oil or spray to coat the pan
1 cup water












Put the lentils in boiling water and cook about 13 to 15 minutes depending on the consistency you like. I like mine more solid than mushy. While those are cooking put half the onion in a food processor and pulse until very finely chopped. Then do the same with the chard. This can be done by hand if you do not mind larger pieces.












Finally heat a skillet over medium high heat and add the oil. Put the onions in and cook a few minutes until tender. Add the crushed tomatoes, the cooked and drained lentils, the water and finally the chard. Bring up to a boil and let it heat for just a few minutes. And that's it. I can generally get about four 9.3oz servings out of eat batch. I put it in an airtight container the fridge and it lasts about two weeks. Feel free to double the recipe and freeze the extra so that it will last as long as you want it to.

This dish is another that looks pretty gross when its done but I promise it is good stuff!

Beets and Blood

This week's vegetable was going to be the beet.











I have never really heard anything good beets except from Dwight Schrute and I figured I needed to form my own opinion. I ran across a recipe for beet potato chips in Food Matters and figured that potato chips had to be the best way to try this odd looking thing. I read up on how to trim and peel it without turning purple and I actually succeeded in that area.








But this is when it all went wrong. I used a knife for the first few slices and decided that I wasn't cutting them evenly so I grabbed the cheese grater which has a blade on one end.









I took the beet in my hand and slid it right down the side as hard as I could. I sliced the beet perfectly but I also sliced off part of my thumb. Aggg! Ryan was not home so I ran to get a washcloth and the first aid kit all the while getting blood on everything. I bandaged it as best I could but it still ended up looking a little crazy.


















After all of this I decided to finish making the beets that were already cut. All that was left was coating them in olive oil and putting them in the oven. I figured I could do that much and I didn't want it all to have been for nothing. But it was. They were terrible! Gross, gross, gross. I admitted defeat and went to wallow on the couch.

When Ryan got home he helped me change the bandage and that's when it started throbbing. I tried repeating Dalton's little philosophy that "Pain don't hurt" but it didn't help. I am a baby when it comes to these things. I finally decided that I should go to the doctor to get a real opinion.

Ryan took me the next afternoon and after three hours I found out that I had taken a good bit of meat off and that it would take 2 months to heal. The doctor gave me some ointment and instructions to change the bandage twice a day. He also grabbed himself a few times and that was a little unsettling. He was a weirdo. The last part of the day was a tetanus shot. Then we headed out to have dinner with Ryan's parents.

I feel pretty silly about the whole thing but I have learned my lesson. I have also learned that a tetanus shot hurts more the next day than a sliced off thumb. Who knew?

Cabbage

I decided this week the vegetable should be cabbage. Oddly enough I have never really had cabbage. I have tried coleslaw and have always hated it so that was not an option. And I guess I have had it lo mein noodles but that didn’t seem to count. Then I was flipping thru the magazine, Vegetarian Times, and came across a recipe for a Cabbage Calzone. That just seemed like a perfect solution. But I am not going to lie, this recipe shouldn’t really count either. Once it was all said and done I didn’t even know there was cabbage in the calzone. But I refuse to just cook it and eat it. Maybe I will try again. I did find another recipe for a cabbage and chard soup. That could work.


But I will also say that this recipe took me almost two hours to complete. I honestly have no idea why it took so long. It really wasn’t hard. The basic procedure is to chop the ingredients up, throw them in a pot and cook them for a little while. Then put them in the dough and throw it in the oven. And that’s it. I guess most of my time was spent reading the recipe a million times, rolling out the dough by hand and cutting it and then the time it took to cook in the oven. But the end result was very good and I didn’t even miss the meat. Which is weird. All the calzones I have ever had have been full of cheese and pepperoni with the marinara on the side. This calzone has no cheese, no meat at all and the tomatoey part on the inside. I debated most of the day about going to the store to buy some pepperoni but in the end I decided against it. The potatoes and mushrooms more than made up for that texture and filling that I needed.

I have listed the original ingredients below. I made a few changes to this for my version. I did not use red wine vinegar because I did not have any red wine vinegar. I also did not use the parsley or eggs. I added baby portabella mushrooms and a little sprinkling of Cabot 75% reduced cheese and a little parmesan. I honestly didn’t know it was in the calzone after it had been cooked so there really wasn’t a point in that. And finally I made my own dough rather than buying the prepackaged kind because I wanted it to be whole wheat. I have included the recipe for that below as well.


Cabbage Calzone

4 oz small red potatoes, cut into ½ inch pieces (3/4 cup)
¼ head green cabbage, cored and sliced into ½ inch thick ribbons (2 cups)
1 Tbs. olive oil, plus a little more for brushing dough
1 small onion finely diced (1 cup)
4 cloves of garlic, minced (4tsp.)
1 ½ tsp dried oregano
1 15oz can chopped tomatoes
8 pitted Kalamta olives, coarsely chopped
2 tsp. red wine vinegar
3 hard boiled eggs, each cut into 8 slices
3 Tbs. chopped fresh parsley
1 16 oz pkg. prepared pizza dough

1. Bring large pot of salted water to a boil. Add potatoes, and cook 8 to 10 minutes, or until just tender. Remove the plate with the slotted spoon. Add cabbage to pot, and cook 3 to 4 minutes, or until just softened. Drain, and set aside.
2. Heat oil in larger skillet over medium heat. Add onion, and cook 5 minutes, or until soft and translucent. Add garlic and oregano, and cook 1 minute. Add tomatoes, and simmer 5 minutes, or until most of the liquid has reduced. Add olives and vinegar, and cook 3 minutes more. Remove from heat, and gently stir in eggs, parsley, potatoes, and cabbage: season with salt and pepper if desired. Remove from heat and cool.
3. Preheat oven to 425F. Coat baking sheet with cooking spray. Divide dough into 8 pieces, and roll each into 8-inch diameter circle. Place ½ cup filling on bottom half of each circle, leaving ¾ inch border around edge. Fold dough over filling and pinch ends together to seal. Repeat with remaining dough pieces. Cut 3 small slits in top of calzone. Transfer to prepared baking sheet, and crush with oil. Bake 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown.

Makes 8 servings. (I halved everything and made enough filling for just 4 servings)

Whole Wheat Dough Ingredients
· 7 grams Agave Nector
· 3/4 cups warm water
· 1 teaspoon active dry yeast
· 1 ¾ teaspoon olive oil
· 1/2 teaspoon salt
· 2 cups whole wheat flour

This list is for a one pound bread machine. I simply put it all in the order that my bread machine calls for and put it on the dough setting. Once it was complete I put the dough into a bowl lined with olive oil while I finished chopping all the other stuff for the calzone. Then I rolled it out and used a small plate(which I made sure was 8 inches) to cut out the circles. I probably could have gotten 3 or 4 circles but I just went with two. One of them was perfect and the other was just a little too thin but it sill worked.

So once that was rolled out I put the filling on them and folded it over and threw it in the oven. They came out better than I hoped and were really good. I ate the messy one and saved the better one for Ryan. However, he really doesn’t like tomato in any form other than hidden in a pizza or ketchup so he did not like the fact that the inside had the chopped tomatoes. I am going to end up eating that one too.

Amazing Popcorn Trick

A few weeks ago I decided to stop buying prepackaged popcorn. I was never sure if what I was buying was really healthy or not. I thought that if I bought the plain kernels and popped them myself that I couldn’t go wrong. So that’s what I did. Then Ryan and I stared at the bag of kernels for weeks. Neither one of us really wanted to attempt to cook them on the stove and we also did not want to buy a fancy popper. I am sure there are other options out there but we didn’t look for those either. Then I was reading the ever trusty Food Matters and lo and behold there was the answer. It’s so easy that I didn’t believe it. Here’s what you need:

¼ cup popcorn kernels
2 teaspoons oil (optional)
1 teaspoon salt

Throw all of this into a paper lunch bag. Fold down the top a few times and heat in the microwave for 2 to 3 minutes or until the pops are about a second or two apart. To keep it healthy I would suggest seasoning it with fresh herbs or a little more salt. This process really does work believe it or not!