As I mentioned in the beginning of the week, I’m trying to cut down on grains in our meals, and since our breakfast meals tend to be heavily grain based, that’s a challenge. Since the baby started solids a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been baking a lot of yams for him, and once I was throwing some into the oven for him, figured I’d put in a bunch more for everyone else! I made this for the first time last week for a different kind of breakfast meal, but it would be great as a side dish for lunch or dinner. The kids asked me to keep it on the list of things to put on the regular rotation because they liked it so much.
The first part of the recipe is to prepare the yams – use as many as you think you need for your size family. You can bake them if you want to keep it really simple. We sliced them in circles about a 1/4 inch thick, then roasted them with coconut oil.
Amazing Almond Sauce
- 1 c. milk (we used raw)
- 1 c. nut butter (we used organic almond butter, which is just almonds and sea salt, but you can use peanut butter)
- 4 T. honey
- 1 t. cinnamon
- optional – 1 1/2 t. cocoa or carob powder (I used carob since I was out of cocoa)
Put all the ingredients in a food processor and blend – it doesn’t get much quicker or simpler than this! This was almost pudding-like when we made it, but you can adjust the milk to get the consistency you want. Very easy and yummy. You can use it as a topping for pancakes, waffles, or anything else that would be enhanced by a sweet topping. If your kids are anything like mine, they might think this is good enough for dessert!
(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)
Avivah
One question–where are the almonds in this almond sauce? =D Are you supposed to use almond butter instead of peanut?
Oops – sorry, I was so tired when I posted this that I didn’t write almond butter or peanut butter! I just corrected my post. Yes, you can use either one. I’m planning to try it with sliced almonds that have been soaked and dehydrated – then whiz them in the food processor until a ball forms. I also want to try it with almond meal and see how that works out.
(Nice to hear from you, Meg. :))
So does the sauce taste kinda like halva then? I need to find a new sauce/syrup for our pancake mornings. The kids are comatose after eating (my last holdout in HFCS) “syrup”. I have to figure out (budget wise) how to again buy real syrup and see if there is a difference.
I made a chocolate topped protein bar from passionatehousekeeping’s blog and it is so yum! The kids call it birdseed bars due to the way it looks. To me, it tastes like a chocolate covered halvah/peanut bar (my husband even tried to stop me from feeding it to DD until he made sure there were no peanuts in it!). I have to leave it in the freezer so I won’t eat it…
You might find it somewhat similar, though I wasn’t really thinking about comparing flavors when I tasted it. Almond and peanut butter have different flavors from sesame butter, and this is much more liquid than halva.
What I recently made when serving french toast was honey butter. Basically it just means melting butter with some honey. You can serve it hot so it’s a liquidy syrup, or put it in the fridge to solidify so it’s spreadable. The fat in the butter balanced out the effect of honey on their systems. I also have made some jams using only fruit and fruit juice concentrates as the sweetener.
I checked out the recipe you referred to – it looks very similar to our power bars, that are a staple around here, with the addition of some dried fruit in the bar part and a chocolate topping. (http://oceansofjoy.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/almond-power-bars/) I’m going to try it this week for a little bit of a change (probably without the chocolate, though)!
If you live in the right climate (and i think you do) and you have neighbors with maple trees, you can make your own maple syrup. Comment on my blog- mamamoomoo.livejournal.com- if you want more info on how to do that. We made our own maple syrup for years. Its healthier, insanely cheap (just pay for taps to put in the tree and for the gas to burn the flame on the stove)…
Very interesting idea! We’ve seen it done a couple of times at the nature center in the winter, but I never considered it as a home project.
Yael, you can boil some berries with some water and make a natural fruit-based syrup…(I’m highly sensitive to maple type syrups and get severe migraines from the smell!)
Yum! This looks great. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for visiting – enjoy the recipe!