Category Archives: nutrition

I’m back – for right now!

food preservation, Homemaking

We got the new keyboard right after our phone lines went out due to some faulty wiring.  Hopefully dh will be able to fix it tonight or tomorrow but I decided to go to the library to use their computers so I wouldn’t be uptight about when the repair happens and can be a smiling and patient wife when he walked in the door.  I don’t have very positive thoughts about the internet usage at the library (since the library has a handful of people looking for books but the computers are always taken), but I’m grateful now for the ability to connect with all of you even though my home computer is down.  This isn’t very easy, though, since the person right next to me is using his time to look at very revealing pictures of plus sized large chested women and I’m really having to try hard not to use any peripheral vision.  It’s kind of distracting and very unpleasant.  I can’t believe people aren’t embarrassed to have others see what they’re watching.

On one hand it’s been challenging not having easy computer access for a week – the hardest thing has been not being able to post here since that’s something I love to do!  But on the other, it’s been liberating.  I’ve been more present emotionally for my family, gotten more done around the house, and most importantly, gone to sleep lots earlier!!  I’m going to hopefully use this as a reminder to be more careful to limit my online time and focus on doing what I really need to do.  It’s easy to get drawn into all the info out there, especially when there are so many things to learn about….

I have lots of things to post about but very limited time (31 minutes left), so I’ll catch you up on what’s going on in our house this week.

My oldest ds came home from camp yesterday afternoon.  Like dd14 a few weeks ago, he’s spent most of today sleeping.  She took at least a week of sleeping for hours later than usual to get back into her regular routing. This reminds me of the sleep needs of infants – I don’t think adults and infants are very different in this – we all need a certain amount of sleep and when we don’t get it, we need to either make it up or we get crankier and crankier. 

Ds16’s birthday was July 4 but we didn’t make much of a big deal about it, and then when dd13 had a birthday on Aug 4, we also didn’t do much.  Tonight we’re having a surprise birthday dinner for them both.  Dd is particularly difficult to surprise – she notices every single tiny thing that’s a little different.  She had a sleepover at my inlaws a couple of days ago so dd14 baked the brownies for her then and prepared the french fries – and of course dd13 came home and commented on a pan being in the freezer that wasn’t there before!  I bought a cheesecake for ds (he loves cheesecake) and we’ll have pizza, onion rings, french fries, and salad for dinner.  We’ve done what we can to keep dd from catching on, but we’ll see if tonight we actually manage it or not. 

Tonight would be the first dinner in almost 2 months that we would all be here for, except for the fact that ds10 is away.  He was invited on Sunday evening by a friend to go to Indiana with them first thing the next morning, and I shocked ds by immediately agreeing that he could go.  He’s having a great time. 

This week I’ve canned peaches (bought three cases of 24 lb each for 9.50 each on my shopping day last week) and peach fruit spread. I wasn’t happy with the fruit spread – I used frozen strawberries that I didn’t realize came from China and they were terrible.  I’ll have to check where the frozen fruits and vegetables come from, from now on.  The strawberries were tiny and a lot hardly had any color – I should have just composted them but I didn’t and I won’t make that mistake again.

Today I’m dehydrating pears that we picked last week.  They’re now very soft and ripe so they should be very sweet when dried.  I also have a basket of apples that the kids picked on Thursday when we out for our shopping day.  I have to decide what to do with those since they are rather tart.  They are HUGE – I was amused when I was told they are called Rambos.  They are very appropriately named – each apple is at least 1 – 2 pounds!

Avivah

Drying squash and pears

dehydrating, food preservation

I love having the ability to preserve food!  It’s very fun to be able to find a way to use any amount of food that comes our way. 🙂  Yesterday I dried a load of yellow summer squash – we were given a box of them when the person who got them realized they were so perishable that they’d go bad before they could use them and didn’t want to wait for that point so they passed them to us; I still have enough to do another half load in the dehydrator.  We dried four trays as slices, since the kids like to snack on them, and six trays with chopped pieces, since that’s the way I use it most frequently for cooking.  I’ll do the rest of them chopped.  It will nice when the winter comes, to add a taste of summer to my dinners.  Right before the squash I dried the last of the peas and carrots I had in the freezer, to get them out of the way.

Today we went pear picking and got loads of delicious pears.  (Thanks, Alisa!  Your kids were a great help and a pleasure to spend time with!)  Fruit picking is a wonderful family activity, and I love being able to do it locally and for free rather than driving forty minutes away to pay for the experience.  I put a large wooden basket of them in the basement (where it’s cooler) for eating fresh, and will load the dehydrator with some before I go to sleep.   Last year when we got a lot of free pears we found that the kids really enjoyed them dried – it’s hard to dry them fast enough to keep up with their ability to eat them!  This time I’m not bothering with peeling them or deseeding them – we’ve sliced them thinly and put them on the trays at 135 degrees; they’ll be ready when I wake up in the morning.  As they ripen more I’ll probably want to can some, too.   Dh liked having them canned, so there’s something for everyone.  🙂

Tomorrow I’m taking the kids to a Hands On History Day at a historical museum.  I scheduled my monthly shopping trip to coincide, since the museum is somewhat in the area of where I’ll be going.  This museum day is the main reason I haven’t been in eight weeks (I didn’t want to go during the Three Weeks and it didn’t make sense to go right after Tisha B’Av and then to go again now for this trip).  After a few hours at the museum, we’ll do some shopping.  It will be nice to stock up again, and if I find some good produce bargains I’ll then have more dehydrating in my immediate future!

Avivah

Watermelon Candy

dehydrating, food preservation

Until recently, it never occured to me to dehydrate any of the juicy fruits, like melons.  But I someone online mentioned doing it, and figured I could try it, too!  This was very easy and the kids really like the results – we call it watermelon candy.

Basically, all you do is this: cut the watermelon away from the rind, then slice it about 1/4 inch thick.  Make sure you use seedless watermelon since the seeds don’t enhance anything in the final product!  Put it in the dehydrator at 145 degrees (that’s the fruit setting on the Excalibur).  It will take longer than most fruits because it has such a high percentage of water, somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours. 

When it’s done, it will be very thin and chewy, like a piece of fruit leather.  Because all the juice has been dehydrated, the flavor is strong and very sweet.

After slicing up the watermelon for dehydrating, I decided to use the rinds to make pickles with.  I wanted to make it today but dh took the van to the mechanic to check out why the starter fuse keeps blowing out before I could go to the store for more vinegar, so I’ll have to wait another day. Then I chopped up the final bit of rind and instructed ds10 to bury it deep in the part of the garden beds that are unplanted, where it can break down.  Not a bit of garbage left from the entire thing!  And I even maximized the electricity being used to run the full dehydrator – dd8 made paper yesterday, so I had her put her paper pulp on top of the dehydrator, where it dried very quickly with no extra expenditure of time or energy!

We still like fresh watermelon, and economically it’s a better buy to eat it fresh than dehydrated.  But it’s fun to experiment, especially when the experiments are successful!

Avivah

Recycling jars for canning

canning, food preservation, Intentional Spending

Today I was soaking some empty food jars I had saved (peanut butter, mayonnaise) to get the labels off so I can reuse them for canning.  That’s the best kind of recycling, don’t you think? 🙂    Then I soaked several more that I was given last week – I got six dozen jars for free, and about six of them had labels on them.   When I glanced in the box and noticed that, there was a feeling of, ‘oh, not real canning jars, but they’ll come in handy anyway’.  But it was really interesting to see that after I soaked the labels off, they were literally identical to Atlas mason jars in every regard, including the name of the canning company on it!  Then I remembered reading something posted by a long term canner about this, who always buys the spaghetti sauce in a jar made by a particular company (wasn’t kosher) because she gets the sauce along with a free canning jar. So while these particular jars were about ten years old, it’s still possible to get canning jars after eating up the supermarket foods that they contain.

As long as the glass jars fit the standard canning jar lids, you can use them for canning, in addition to storing anything that you find helpful.  In addition to using them for canning, I also like using glass jars for storing my dehydrated foods, grains, and other pantry items, so they come in handy.  

Some will say that you can only use jars that were specifically manufactured for canning, and that it’s unsafe to use other jars.   When I read this a few days ago in a local newspaper, I also noted a recommendation from the same writer to never reuse canning jar bands – because it’s not safe.  I don’t like when people feel they have to err on the side of caution to the point that everything becomes off limits and has warnings on it, even when it makes no sense.  The recommendation to throw away bands after one use unnecessarily brings up the cost of canning and is wasteful – I commented to my kids that anyone following that advice would at least be doing their part to stimulate the economy, since the ones to benefit from the suggestion are the companies that manufacture canning lids/bands.  And the writer also commented that canned goods have to be stored with the bands on them, which is exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. sigh.gif

Is it actually unsafe to reuse jars that mayonnaise or peanut butter come in?  Though this is frequently cited as a safety issue, I don’t believe it is.  I’ve seen a number of people who have been canning for years post online about their experience with used canning jars.  All of them have said they haven’t noticed a difference between the breakage rate of used glass jars and specially made canning jars. Some have noted that the canning jars are in some instances thinner than the recycled jars.  Some have said that they’ve taken the precaution of only using those jars for water bath canning versus pressure canning, which makes sense to me, if you feel the mayonnaise jars are made of thinner glass and wouldn’t be able to stand up to the higher pressure. 

I’ve had jars break in the canner during processing, but all of those that broke were standard canning jars.  That happened in my early days of canning, and it was my inexperience in canning that lead to that, not a defect in the jars.  So far I haven’t made any attempt to treat the recycled jars differently than the canning jars, and haven’t had any breakage issues with them. 

I also like the ‘twofer’ aspect of buying food in glass jars and then being able to use the packaging the food came in.  Unfortunately, so many foods now come in plastic jars that it’s not as easy to find glass jars to recycle! (And the kosher companies don’t use standard sized jars for the most part – all those gefilte fish jars weren’t helpful when it came to canning.  But I did use them to give Chanuka gifts in, so they were still useful. :))   These particular jars came from a health version of mayo and the others from organic and sugar free peanut butter; I think that the healthier items tend to be packed in glass rather than plastic.

After soaking off the labels, I spent a very long time in the kitchen kashering used canning jars that I either purchased or was given.  The jars I bought several months ago were mostly still unkashered, so when I got this latest batch of six dozen, it was an incentive for me to get myself busy to clear the backlog.  I was getting tired after seven or eight dozen, and then noticed that my ds16 had kashered 4 dozen instead of the two dozen I thought he did (he marked the boxes a few months ago when he did them), and washed another couple of dozen in preparation for kashering (washing them is a chore since they have to be spotless and that’s not always easy).  Tonight when I write him a letter (since he’s in camp) you can be sure I’ll be thanking him for that! 

I still have another four dozen to go, but decided to have mercy on myself and call it quits for tonight.  Tomorrow I hope to toivel them, along with a bunch of new lids.  (Rav Heinemann told us we have to toivel the lids, even if using them one time – and since I’m going with his psak on kashering used jars, I have to go along with that, too! :))  Since I have at least twelve dozen to toivel, that will be an activity.  Good thing it’s not a busy time of year for this kind of thing; can you imagine the line I’d cause if I was doing this around Pesach time?!

If you’re wondering how many jars I have by now (Julie, you’re keeping track better than me!), I really have no idea.  It doesn’t seem like so many.  But I decided today that though a person can say that they never can have too many canning jars, I have an excess of the half pint size (some of you may remember last summer when I bought more than 30 dozen in that size, all brand new)- it’s not practical for my family at all since it’s so small; it’s like a one person serving!  I think I’ll sell them or take quart or pint sized jars in exchange. 

Avivah

Flavor of coconut oil

nutrition

>>I have a question about dfifferent brands of coconut oil and their taste.  I went to my local health food store and they had a couple of brands of coconut oil (either expeller pressed, virgin or extra-virgin).  I asked one of the sales people about the flavor and she said they are all pretty coconut flavored.  I want to make both sweet and savory foods and I cannot imagine coconut flavor going over well in a Italian or Mediterranean dish :).  Can you help with a brand that will fit that need?  I can buy a jar of the other kind for sweet foods and for skin care, etc. <<

This just goes to show that just because someone works in a health food store, they won’t necessarily have accurate knowledge of all products!  Extra virgin is the best quality and will definitely have a coconut flavor.  If it’s expeller pressed, it’s odorless and flavorless.  I use expeller pressed for most of my baking and cooking, when I don’t want a coconut flavor. 

There are apparently differences between the flavors of extra virgin coconut oils, but I’m not very sensitive to the differences.  I’m currently using Golden Barrel expeller pressed and Mountain Herbs extra virgin coconut oil, and am satisfied with them both. I’ve also used Spectrum and Omega extra virgin, and they were also both good.  If anyone would like to share their experience or preferences for certain coconut oils, please do in the comment section below – others considering using and learning about coconut oil will find it helpful!

Avivah

Sprouting and dehydrating wheat

dehydrating, food preservation, nutrition

I did something new this week!  Okay, so that’s not so unusual, but it’s still the first time I did it! 

About two or three years ago, I soaked, sprouted, and then dehydrated the wheat in the oven.  Oh my gosh, that was so laborious and I wasn’t happy with the end product after all of that time and effort at all.  So much so that I still have some of that wheat that has yet to be used, and not because I haven’t used much wheat.  Actually, at the rate I use wheat, I’ve gone through a number of fifty pound bags since then.  Because I felt it was a lot of energy to spend on something that didn’t give me much satisfaction or seem worthwhile, I resolved to spend my scads of excess time doing something more useful.  Until this week.

Thanks to a comment made here regarding soaking nuts back when I said it hadn’t been successful for me, I tried it again at that time and then used the dehydrator to dehydrate them.  Well, that made all the difference –  the results were great and I’ve soaked and dehydrated nuts successfully a number of times since then.

Remembering that, I thought that maybe using the dehydrator to dry the sprouted wheat would work, since it was the dehydrating aspect that didn’t work well for me.  I soaked a large amount of wheat and within a day, thanks to the warm weather and my non air conditioned indoor climate, the sprouts were visible.  I was surprised at how much wheat I was able to fit on the nine trays of the dehydrator – everything I had soaked fit easily.  The wheat dried in much less time than I expected, too.  When I got the dehydrator, I never expected it to come in handy in all the ways that it has – and if I was willing to use it for meat or dairy foods, I’d really be able to expand on the possibilities!

My reason for soaking the wheat is this: there are two ways to use flour that neutralizes the phytic acid. One is by soaking the flour, the other is by sprouting the wheat.  Until now, I’ve been soaking the flour.  But sometimes I don’t remember to soak the flour for something the night before, and it would be very time efficient to be able to prepare a lot of sprouted wheat in advance, so that I’d have it ready when I needed it.  Then all I’d have to do is grind it up right when I wanted to use some.

In the past, the sprouted wheat had a different consistency than regular wheat, so I don’t think this is something that will give me the same results in baking that I’m used to.  However, for quick breads, muffins, pancakes – that’s mostly what I soak the flour for – I think it should work pretty well.  I’ll be trying it the next couple of weeks and seeing how it works out.

Avivah

How much water to drink

nutrition

>>Do you think that if I’m drinking 3/4 to 1 gal. of water a day, I’m drinking enough to provide for my newborn?<<

This is just my personal opinion but it sounds fine to me.  For years I’ve heard the recommendation to drink 8 cups of water a day, but I think a better recommendation is to drink half of your body weight in ounces.  Meaning, if you’re 120 pounds, drink at least 60 oz.  There are sixteen cups/ 128 oz in a gallon, so you sound like you’re doing great! 

If a person lives where it’s hot, is very active, or is nursing, they’ll need to increase the amount they drink. And for the immediate days before a fast, it’s also a good idea to increase your daily water intake. 

Avivah

Canning jam and cherries

canning, food preservation, Intentional Spending

Yesterday I did some canning.  We were getting low on the homemade jam we made back in January, and since I recently found frozen strawberries on sale for $1 lb, it was a good time to make a batch to replenish our jam supplies!

We used ten pounds of strawberries and 2 cans of juice concentrate, which came out to 14 half pints and 4 pints of jam.  It looks a little runny, but last time I made it, it also looked like that and it then solidified over time.  Hopefully this will do the same – I’ve read that it takes about a week for jam to set.  If it doesn’t, we’ll use it as a thick syrup instead of a jam, and that will be fine, too.

Then I canned cherries.  I bought 20 pounds on Friday when I saw the organic cherries were cheaper than non organic sale priced cherries, but we ate some and took some to our hosts for Shabbos, so we didn’t end up canning more than 12 pounds.  We were recently enjoying the cherries I canned last summer and now’s a perfect time to replenish the pantry so we can continue to enjoy cherries when fresh prices aren’t at the seasonal low we’re enjoying right now.  Dh has been having them fairly regularly for breakfast, and I figured we must be just about finished with the cherries I canned last summer.

Today I was planning my next bulk order and in order to buy what I needed most, did an inventory of what I have on hand.  Usually I send the kids to the basement to bring up whatever I need, which is why I don’t have a good idea from seeing it regularly myself.   Imagine my surprise that we still have 14 quarts of canned cherries (plus one 1/2 pint)!  I don’t mind, it’s just that I would have expected that we finished them off!

I also noticed we still have eight + quarts of the pears we picked for free last year.  That’s especially nice since we’ve been keeping an eye on the same neighbor’s pear trees and there’s no sign of any fruit this year.  It just illustrates that you can’t assume what you have one year is what you will have another, and there’s a value in setting aside or preserving during the abundant times so it will tide you over during the lean times!

Avivah

Ways to include coconut oil in your diet

nutrition

Since I recently wrote a little about some benefits of coconut oil is to your health, maybe you’ve been thinking about including it in your diet but wondering how much to take and how to take it.  The recommendation I’ve generally seen is to take 3.5 – 4 T. daily, spread out throughout the day.  The reason to take it regularly instead of all at one time is it helps to keep your metabolism running strong all day.  However, start with a smaller amount, like a teaspoon at each meal, and slowly build up.  That way your body can get used to it – otherwise you might experience a strong cleansing reaction which is positive for your health but not pleasant.

– Shakes/smoothies (since it chunks up, coconut milk may be more useful)

Mix into hot tea, coffee, milk

Bake with it, using it to replace shortening, margarine, or butter.

Saute or fry foods with it.

Spread it on bread or crackers like butter.

Use it as a salad dressing base, mixed with 50% olive oil so that it will pour more easily and not chunk up when poured on cold salad

Pop popcorn with it.

Make healthy desserts with it – my favorite way is to make healthy chocolate.

Spread it on your skin – it will be absorbed and help nourish you from the outside in!

If you already use coconut oil and have some great ways to enjoy it, please share them with us in the comments section!

Avivah

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration – the book

nutrition

Several books on nutrition have been mentioned in the comments recently, but not everyone has access to a library that carries the books they’re interested in, or even any library at all!  Dr. Weston Price wrote extensively on his travels in the 1930s to many places where he was able to observe the native culture as well as the effects of modernization on the health of younger generations.  The title of his book is Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects.  This book is the starting place for anyone interested in the traditional foods approach to eating, and if this is all you can read, it will be enough.  I thought that some of you would appreciate being able to read it for free online here .   

There’s also a huge amount of information online about this approach to healthful eating, which is what I initially started with and stayed busy with for a long time.  When I was finally able to get the books, I appreciated being able to systematically get the information, since it was cobbled together in my head from here and there.  But there honestly hasn’t been much that I’ve read that came as something totally new after all of my online reading.

I hope this is helpful!

Avivah