New Friends....and a New Recipe!

A few days ago I was out and about because I had several errands to run. I had passed by this way several times before and have always wanted to capture the horses on photo, but never had the time. This day I had decided to make the time. As I drove up, these guys (or are they gals?) seemed quite curious to meet me.

 

They let me pet their noses and scratch behind their ears. They were quite sweet!

 This was a neighboring farm,

 I liked the silhouetted appearance of this shot

so I just wanted to throw this one on as well...

 

A parting photo.....until we see each other again!!! 

Our visit ended much too soon...

...and now for this recipe....a confession: This was my first attempt at banana bread

I looked online to find a recipe, and found two that seemed good. I combined things from both and came up with this one:

My Banana Bread Recipe 

In a medium sized bowl combine these dry ingredients:

2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

In a large bowl combine the wet ingredients:

1/4 cup butter, softened

3/4 cup brown sugar

2 tablespoons olive oil

The original recipes called for 1/2 cup butter, but I decided to cut back and use a bit of olive oil instead...trying to be "heart healthy"...

So at this point cream the butter/oil with the sugar. Once it is nicely mixed together, add:

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

Cream these into the butter mixture.

In a separate bowl, mush together 

3 bananas and add 

applesauce to make 2 cups

then add to this banana mix(if desired)

1/4 cup walnuts

1/4 cup cooked quinoa 

Add this banana mixture to the butter mixture and mix until well blended. 

Now all the wet ingredients are all mixed together. Add your dry ingredients that you reserved at the beginning into this larger bowl of wet ingredients, and fold it together until the dry ingredients are combined but don't stir it too much. It is ok if it remains a bit lumpy, do not over stir!!! Just stir until the ingredients are barely combined, maybe about 7 or 8 turns.

Have your loaf pan buttered and floured and pour the banana batter into the loaf pan. Sprinkle 2-3 tablespoons of brown sugar over the top of the batter. I like the dark brown sugar best.

Place the loaf pan into the center of the oven that has been preheated to 350 degrees. Bake for 65 minutes.

Enjoy!!!

  

Green Bean Casserole

My first attempt at trying to make green bean casserole....well, actually my second. The first time I tried it with the Campbell's soup and used canned green beans, and Durky Onions... and it turned out pretty yucky....but this time I'm going to use frozen green beans (instead of the fresh that the recipe link suggests, trying to simplify it a little) and used the powdered rather than fresh ground nutmeg...one of the commentors suggested cutting the amount of nutmeg in half...I watched the video and read a few of the comments...so I think I'll play it safe and use partly freshly made crispy onions, and partly store bought ones. I promised I'd make the casserole for the potluck at work tomorrow....I'll post in comments how it turns out for me, keep me in prayer on this one, I don't want to make others ill.

Link to recipe and the video too:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/best-ever-green-bean-casserole-recipe/index.html

More about Coconuts part 2

 image link

Found another article and more recipes!!! :D He mentions Whole Foods Market...I'll have to look, I have heard there's one near me somewhere...also there Dr. Mercola's website



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http://www.marksdailyapple.com/coconut-flour/


A barrage of comments to our post on low-carb thickeners confirmed that while coconut flour is terrible for thickening sauces, it does serve other purposes. Our last post on a Primal flour – almond meal – went over well, so I figured the time was ripe for a look at coconut flour.
Coconut flour is simply dried, ground up coconut meat. Most likely you’ll be buying it online or from a specialty grocer, like Whole Foods or a food co-op, but you’ll occasionally come across highly processed, ultra-white coconut flour. Stay away from this. The good stuff will be like actual coconut – slightly cream colored, rather than bone white. You can make your own at home with a food processor, but without a grain mill you’ll probably have issues getting a “floury” consistency. If that’s okay with you, have at it.
Whether you’re making your own or buying it pre-made, always make sure your coconut flour is unsweetened. Pretty much all that you’ll come across is unsweetened, but it’s always worth it to make sure.
Apparently, defatting is one of the major steps in making it, so coconut flour doesn’t have much of the delicious, hearty coconut fat left over. It’s too bad, but understandable when you realize you’re dealing with a dry flour designed for baking. That’s pretty much my only qualm with coconut flour, as everything else looks good. According to my just-bought bag of Aloha Nu organic coconut flour, 2 tablespoons of the stuff contain:
1.5 g fat (1 g saturated fat)
10 g carbs (with 9 g fiber, bringing the net carb count to a measly 1)
2 g protein
Those are pretty great stats, especially when compared to the glucose-boosting powers of “normal” flours like wheat or white. Less hearty than almond meal, but also less heavy and closer in texture to the other, forbidden flours (if that’s what you’re going for). Coconut flour can be used to bake, but be forewarned that it’s very dry and doesn’t stick together well (hence its uselessness as a sauce thickener); avoid this problem by adding eggs to the mix, which allows it to bond and form batter. I’ve also had success using it in a light egg batter for fried coconut chicken. I’d assume it would work equally well for shrimp or fish.
Okay, onto a few recipes.

Coconut Bread

I’m not a big baker, but I can appreciate those who are. For those budding Primal bakers who still miss bread, why not try to make some with coconut flour? Slightly sweet and fairly light (as opposed to the denser breads made with almond meal), this coconut bread should do the trick.
Ingredients:
6 eggs
1/2 cups ghee (or butter)
1-2 tablespoon honey, depending on taste
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup coconut flour
Method:
Preheat your oven to 350. Whisk it all together, or blend in a food processor until all lumps are gone. Grease a bread pan with butter or coconut oil and pour your batter in. Bake for 40 minutes.
If we split it up into six servings each slice will, according to FitDay, have:
30.9 g fat
13.2 g carbs (9 g fiber)
8.35 g protein

Coconut Pancakes

Drizzle these with honey and berries, wrap up some bacon and eggs for a Primal breakfast burrito, or just eat them plain. These things are incredibly easy to make.
Ingredients:
4 eggs
1/4 cup coconut flour
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1 pinch nutmeg
1 pinch cinnamon
1 tablespoon honey
1/4 cup coconut milk (full fat)
Method:
Mix these ingredients and let them sit for five minutes. Oil or grease up your pan and heat over medium heat. Pour about a 1/4 cup of batter for each crepe, allowing each side to brown before flipping it.
Without accounting for toppings or cooking fat, FitDay says the whole batch amounts to:
37.2 g fat (20.9 g saturated)
42.2 g carbs (19.4 g fiber)
30.6 g protein

Coconut Crusted Chicken

This doesn’t even require an ingredient list. Simply take your chicken pieces (or shrimp, or fish), season them with salt and pepper, dunk them in an egg bath (just scrambled up raw egg), then dredge them in coconut flour, then back in the egg bath, and then coat with dried coconut flakes. After that, it’s just a matter of frying them in oil (use coconut) or sautéing them in some butter. Crunchy, delicious, and low-carb.

More about Coconuts

image link

This is a "part two" to a posting from a couple of days ago. I was looking around a bit more, following links as I went along and found this recipe. It looks like it could be delicious! It'll be a few days before I can test it out...if anyone sees this and tries it before I do, please let me know how it turns out for you :)

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http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2011/11/16/missingyourmuffins/

Many of the hundreds of emails that flooded my inbox after the Wheat Belly book review was published were from people seeking wheat substitutes for their daily delights.

The reason I eliminated wheat from my diet before I had even heard of Dr. William Davis’ toxic wheat theory was to reduce carbohydrates, as I suspected I had a carbohydrate intolerance. Most gluten-free flours are still high in carbohydrates (and may be perfectly fine for your weight loss and health but were not for me), so I turned to coconut flour.

Coconut flour is made from ground coconut meat and is super high in fibre (61 per cent as opposed to wheat bran’s 27 per cent fibre content). It has three times as much fibre as it does digestible carbohydrate, which works well for my diet goals.

It is also high in fat. Coconut fat, I have discovered, is a very intriguing substance. Among alternative nutritionists it has the reputation of being a low calorie fat (not that I could care less about counting the calories I am consuming any more; I’ll talk about that in another blog). For those who do count, it actually has slightly fewer calories than other fats: 8.6 calories per gram, not 9 calories per gram.

Coconut fat is also unique in that it is comprised of medium-chain fatty acids, where most of the fats in the Western daily diet are made up of long-chain ones, and the medium ones are more easily digested and have a reputation of both increasing metabolism and reducing appetite. I have been consuming coconut oil in large quantities, and have found all this to be true. Actually I have tripled my fat intake in the past few months, and my weight loss is at 26 pounds, as of today. (More about that in another blog, too)

The muffin recipe below is adapted from one by Dr. Bruce Fife, ND, who is a prolific author on the nutritional benefits of coconut. If you don’t like the taste of coconut, then I’m sorry, but it is riddled with it. Even a beginner cook can make muffins, and you don’t need much in the way of fancy kitchen equipment, even a toaster oven will do.

The best part? One of these muffins fills me up for 3-4 hours.

Basic coconut muffins

3 large eggs

1/4 cup sugar (or the equivalent if you are watching sugar intake)

1/4 cup melted coconut oil (or melted butter)

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup coconut flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

2-6 tablespoons liquid, sometimes more (canned full cream coconut milk, milk, cream, water, or I am using a product called So Delicious unsweetened dairy-free coconut milk beverage)

Heat your oven to 375 deg F. Grease your muffin pans (or make your life easy and get some silicon baking cups – best invention ever). Whisk the eggs with salt, vanilla, oil, and if you are using a liquid sugar substitute add it now). Stir together the flour and baking powder, and sugar or dry sugar equivalent ingredient, then stir it into the egg mix.

Now don’t freak out. Coconut flour is hugely absorbent and your muffin mix will look like an ugly lump. Stir in the liquid (the amount of which changes on any given day depending on the humidity in my experience) until it reaches a texture where you can scoop it up in a spoon and drop it as a semi-solid mass into the baking cups. Don’t scoop it yet, though.

Now is the adding fun flavours part: I stir in 1/2 a cup of frozen raspberries (two reasons: my freezer has a supply of homegrown ones, and they are a good low-carb fruit) but 1/2 cup of any fruit will work. Now scoop the mix into the cups. It won’t rise an awful lot , so fill them up.

At this stage I have added cubes of cream cheese poked into each (my husband’s favourite), and toppings like shredded unsweetened coconut (yes, I have gone a little coconutty) or slivered almonds.

Bake 15-18 mins – they are done when they are browned. This recipe makes 6 muffins, but you can double the mix and they freeze well.

Nutritional content will vary with your ingredients.