I sometimes feel like I live in the kitchen. I definitely spend the majority of my awake time in the kitchen with cooking/preparing breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks and then cleaning up after them. But I love food, I love saving money making my own healthy foods, and so I don't mind too much :).
This past week we made a few firsts. My good friend Kim came over with a box of apricots she'd picked from a family members tree. We made apricot juice and apricot jam. I didn't use sugar in my recipes but substituted with Stevia. The jam turned out well though I can't say the same for the juice. It's interesting. But I didn't make very much juice because I don't like us to drink much juice, so what I do have I'll mix in with some smoothies which tastes just fine. I am so happy about the jam because trying to buy jam without sugar and chemical sweeteners is a hard and expensive thing to do. I did have to use a box of pectin though which I didn't love doing. I'll post that recipe at the end of this post. Here's Kim getting ready to put the apricots through the juicer.
We had a church activity this past week and I was asked to bring a dessert to share that would feed a lot. I rarely get to make trifle dishes because they are so big and we can't get through one fast enough, and I really don't want my little family getting through a whole one anyway. I made this Strawberry Trifle dish once before for book club and it's a great summer dish because it's light, cold and has fresh fruit inside. I have the recipe posted
here from a previous post. I decided to make the pound cake this year to save money, instead of buying it from Costco like I had done before. It turned out well and made a lot: 2-9'' loaves and 2 mini loaves. And did you know the reason they call it pound cake is because it calls for a pound of butter? Wow. That's a lot. Yeah, this dish is definitely not very good for you, though my husband would probably try to argue that point reminding me it had strawberries inside :). Gotta love him! And I made the whipped cream with agave instead of sugar so that was a tad better :).
Since I'm in the kitchen so much the kids like to do projects in there. We've started having a 1 hour 'siesta time'(Annabelle's stopped napping for the most part) each day which is mostly quiet activities like writing, reading, beads on strings, puzzles, flannel boards etc; normally I wouldn't let them paint during this time because painting requires too much supervision on my part and siesta time is for me too, but I allowed it this day because I had a lot to do in the kitchen.
I moved the map from our table(it was under a plastic cover that would sometimes get liquid underneath which was no good...and Scott thought it looked too busy/messy to be on the table surface) to the wall in our kitchen. I love having the maps in the kitchen because like I said, we spend so much time in there that I'd like to create an environment that encourages learning. The kids know the USA map pretty well because it's been on our table for so long. They like us to ask them where certain places are and we'll sometimes give them hints telling them to go North, South, East or West of another place they're familiar with. Anyway, now that both maps are up they've got a lot more to learn. And it's fun to talk about what's going on in the world and where.
We made homemade pasta this week. I actually have done this once before in a class so when Scott's mom brought a pasta maker out to us this past year, I knew I wanted to try it again. But I also needed to read the manual first so the task got put on the back burner for a little while. Making pasta was really not hard at all and it turned out great! The kids loved cranking the handle on the pasta machine. We made 100% whole wheat fettucini noodles and had fettucini alfredo for dinner. Thanks Grandma Angela for the pasta maker! We promise to use it regularly now that we know what we're doing!
Another recipe I've been meaning to try for awhile is a whole-grain bread recipe that I got from my friend Heidi. I put it off because I didn't have any millet. But I finally got some and made this bread last week. It's really yummy and makes several loaves. I'll post that recipe below.
Whole Grain Bread-from Heidi
½ cup honey or molasses
½ cup canola oil (I used 1/4 c butter and 1/4 c coconut oil melted together)
5 cups warm water
2 Tbsp SAF Instant yeast
1 Tbsp salt
10-11 cups freshly ground whole wheat (you can also mix in spelt or kamut flour to your liking)
1 cup whole millet
1 cup whole quinoa
1¼ cups organic vital wheat Gluten
Proof your yeast in 1 cup of warm water (so you have 4 cups remaining) & 1 tsp of honey for 10 minutes.
Grind your flour and set aside in large bowl 11 cups.
In your large bowl that goes with your mixer add vital wheat gluten, millet, quinoa and 2 cups of the flour, set aside (while yeast proofs). Combine in a separate bowl the honey, oil, & remaining water; add proofed yeast.
Add this wet mixture to the 2 cups of flour, millet, gluten, quinoa mixture that is in your large mixing bowl. Mix together & sponge for 15 minutes.
Put your bread hook attachment onto your mixer. Mix the salt into the remaining 9 cups of flour that was set aside. Add this remaining flour to sponged ingredients in the Large Mixing Bowl 1 cup at a time. Make sure each cup is blended before adding another cup of flour. The dough will become stiff and cleans the sides of the mixing bowl. This kneading process should take approx. 6 minutes on speed #2 should be sufficient to develop the gluten if you are using fresh flour. Transfer Into very large greased bowl for rising process.
Cover Bowl And place in a warm area to complete first rise. Approx 30 minutes or when dough has doubled in size, punch down, placed on large greased bread board & cut into four equal sections. Place three of the pieces back into bowl & shape into loaves one at a time. Rolling into loaf shape & pinching off seam together.
Set into lightly greased stoneware loaf pans. Cover with towel and set in warm location for 2nd rise approx. 30-35 minutes. Should rise approx two inches above pan edge. Do not over rise.
*Bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes. Take out of oven and let stand for 5 minutes;remove from loaf pans onto wire cooling racks. Cool completely before using a electric bread knife (serrated edge) to cut; enjoy.
Apricot-Pineapple Jam (I tripled this recipe)
3/4 lb. apricots
1 (16 oz.) can pineapple, crushed, packed in its own juice
2 c. pineapple juice or apple juice
1/2 c. sugar, its equivalent or 1/4 c. honey (I used 1 tsp stevia total with my tripled recipe; though next time I'll do honey)
1 pkg. low-calorie pectin
Apricots: Wash and pit firm, ripe apricots. Do not peel. Grind finely in a food grinder. Measure 1 cup of fruit.
Pineapple: Drain pineapple, saving juice. Measure 1 cup of fruit.
Place apricots, pineapple and juice in a 3 or 4 quart saucepan or kettle. If short of fruit or juice, add water or other juice to make 4 cups total mixture. If using sugar, add it to the mixture. If using artificial sweetener, add it after cooked mixture has been skimmed.
Add pectin and stir vigorously to disperse.
Place saucepan or kettle on high heat. Bring to a boil and boil rapidly for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Skim foam and pour into glasses. If using artificial sweetener, add it to the mixture, stir and immediately pour jam into glasses. Seal according to package directions. Makes 4 cups.
One night Scott had the idea to make fancy nachos, like the ones Mexican restaurants serve, you know with not just cheese but jalapenos and beans etc. So we took a couple jalapenos and tomatoes off the plant, washed and chopped them and cooked the jalapenos on the nachos. Then we added the tomatoes, a little onion, black beans and sour cream. They were SO yummy! I think making these nachos will be one of my new weekly traditions for summer time when our garden is producing. 
We also served it with a Mexican Lasagna. Here's the recipe I came up with for that.
