Category Archives: nutrition

Manual grain grinder

Minutes before Shabbos, we got a knock on the door and found our mailman waiting with a package.  Because time was so tight, we didn’t open it until tonight, when we saw our new grain mill!  After having my electric one out of service for several weeks last time, it made me think how dependent I am on it to use my bulk purchased grains as planned.  I also thought about The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and how they spend all day grinding enough wheat for a small loaf of bread for lunch and dinner, because all they had was a small coffee grinder.  And so I decided that having a manual grain mill would be a useful addition to our pantry supplies.

The one we chose was the Family Grain Mill.  It’s not the cheapest, but it’s not extremely expensive, either – it was $120.  I wanted something that worked reasonably well but didn’t have a huge price tag attached, and this was the one that seemed to best fit my needs.  Tonight the kids all tried it out – for hours.  🙂  It was one child after another taking turns grinding, even the 2.5 year old. 

It’s certainly not as efficient as the electric grinder, but it produces a wider range of grinds (ie, coarseness/fineness).  They had lots of fun, and the flour is freshly ground and ready to be made into pancakes for breakfast tomorrow morning.  🙂  I think the pancakes will taste even better to them than usual, knowing all the labor that went into the grinding. 

Avivah

Making orange zest

When I got my dehydrator, I didn’t expect it to be so fun or so frugal!  For years I thought of it as a luxury item and couldn’t see a practical value in it, but I’m now enjoying proving myself wrong and finding new uses for it.

I bought these gorgeous navel oranges, with thick clean peels, and it occurred to me that maybe I could dry them to make orange zest that would be used for baking.  At first I sliced them into small pieces, since I didn’t want to make them so small that they’d fall through the spaces in the drying tray.  But even though things shrink substantially when dehydrated, they’re still a little too big to use as zest (funnily enough, my baby thinks these are a super treat!).  Then my dd14 put the next peels into the food processor with the ‘S’ blade, and put them on top of the paraflex sheet (that’s intended for making fruit leathers) that covers the regular dehydrator tray.  That worked perfectly, and the final result is a perfect orange zest, just like you’d buy in the store.  It’s a nice feeling, turning something you would have thrown away into something of value.

I don’t like to run the dehydrator just for a small quantity of something, because it seems to me an inefficient use of energy – I made these because there was one unused tray that afternoon that wasn’t needed when drying all the shredded broccoli stems that I experimented on the same day. 🙂  Those turned out great, too.

Avivah

How to can ground meat

>>How do you can ground meat? Do you cook it in a sauce or soup before caning? <<

I used to hear how complicated and dangerous canning meat was, and I’m really glad that one of the very first things I canned was turkey.  That way I did the ‘hardest’ thing first and I wasn’t intimidated by it because I had nothing to compare it to.    Some people will tell you to start out with fruits and jams and then work your way up, but it worked out well for me the other way!

Despite what people  may say, it’s really not hard or complicated to can meat.  It does require precisely following instructions, like any other low acid food (ie, not fruits and jams).  You MUST have a pressure canner and follow all proper safety guidelines.  Fill with water up to the water line (marked inside the canner), and fill up the jars you’re going to use half way with water.  While you prepare the meat, your jars will be sterilizing, and then the  jars will be ready to be used at the same time the meat is ready to be packed. 

Before preparing the  meat, you have to decide what you’re going to later use it for.  I decided I wanted to cook it up as crumbles that could be added to stews, pot pies, etc because that has the most possibilities.  (I considered making patties and then decided against it, but it is possible to make little meat balls or burgers and can them.)  I sauteed the meat in its own juice and broke the chunks up into crumbles.  It’s suggested to drain off the fat since it could interfere with the seal. 

I removed each jar, poured out the boiling water, and filled it with hot meat.  Then cover it with boiling broth or water, leaving 1″ headspace.  Make sure there’s no air space in the jars.  Wipe down the top of the jar, so that there’s no residual grease that might keep it from sealing later on.  Put the heated jar lids on, screw on bands, and put back in pressure canner.  It needs to process at 11 pounds pressure for 75 minutes for pints, 90 minutes for quarts.  Exhaust the canner for ten minutes with the steam steadily rising from the vent hole, then put the weight on top and wait for it to get up to the proper pressure.  Start timing the process from the point that it’s at the proper pressure. 

You have to keep it at the right pressure the entire time.  If it gets a little high, that’s okay, but if it drops below 11 pounds pressure, you have to restart timing the canning all over again (to prevent possibility of botulism).  So don’t let it drop!

So far in the meat department, I’ve canned beef cubes, beef stew, turkey pieces, ground chicken, ground beef, broth, and meat spaghetti sauce.  The only problem I had was with jars that failed to seal because I didn’t drain the fat enough, so when it reached the high temperature inside the canner, it boiled over the jar lid, and then the lid couldn’t adhere.  I put those in the fridge and used them right away, but they could have been reheated it, and then reprocessed. 

If you start canning and do some meat, please share your experience!

Avivah

Homemade Strawberry Jam

We made a delicious experiment last week that was so simple that I had to share it with you, a sugar free strawberry jam! It’s slightly softer than a jam, so maybe to call it a fruit spread would be more accurate.

Here’s the proportions we used:

  • 3 lb. frozen strawberries (you can use fresh, too)
  • 1 can frozen apple juice concentrate
  • 1 box powdered pectin (use the pectin intended for low sugar recipes)

Put the strawberries and concentrate in the pot.  Cook on low, covered, until the strawberries are soft.  Mash the strawberries using a fork while keeping them in the pot.  Add the pectin, thoroughly mixing in so that there are no lumps.  Cook on medium-high for another few minutes, and then pour into jars.  It won’t look as if it’s at all jelled by this point, but don’t worry about it – it will continue to set after it cools.  If you cook it until it looks thick, it will be overdone and hard to spread once it cools.  (That’s what happened to our first batch.)  This recipe yields 7 half pint jars of jam.

If you’re not going to be canning it, you can store it in glass jars or empty peanut butter jars.  We canned ours in 1/2 pint jelly jars, processing for five minutes in a boiling water bath.  Once it’s canned, you won’t need to keep it in the fridge or freezer.

For one batch, we added blueberries; for another we used a different flavor juice concentrate.  All of the batches turned out well.  I think if you keep the basic proportions the same (7 c. fruit to one can concentrate), you’ll find you can successfully experiment with different fruits.

Avivah

Dehydrating frozen carrots

When I last went shopping, I got a huge amount of frozen vegetables.  One of the things I ordered for the first time was frozen diced carrots, and when I got there to pick up my order, the woman in charge of the frozen section told me that I was in luck, since the manager told her to mark the frozen carrots down fifty percent that morning.  And even though I placed my order the week before, that applied to my carrots, too.

That made the diced frozen carrots 25 cents a pound, which is very, very cheap, especially considering that the peeling and chopping has been done for you.  When I saw them marked down, my first instinct was to buy a bunch more than the case of 24 pounds that I already had ordered. But my rational brain took over after taking a second look at the industrial sized cart she had wheeled my order out on, and I wondered what I could possibly do with more, since as it was I didn’t have room in the freezer for everything.  I briefly considered canning them, but I prefer not to can vegetables and knew that I would be creating a lot of time pressure for myself if I had to can everything before it defrosted.  So I reluctantly stuck with just 24 pounds.

Then later that night, eight hours later to be precise, it occurred to me that I could have bought them and then dehydrated them.  I felt like smacking my forehead when this occurred to me, but there was no way I was driving two hours in each direction just to go buy some more!  I had never tried it before, which is why it didn’t occur to me in the store. 

I was very lucky in that the weather has been so cold that nature has been keeping several cases of veggies frozen for me, so I didn’t have to rush to deal with them. But I can’t rely on it staying this cold forever, so I decided yesterday would be a good day to dehydrate some.  My dd8 and I did this together – it was pretty easy since there wasn’t much prep work, just separating the pieces that froze together after she took the bags out to defrost and spreading them evenly on the trays.  We took out three bags of 4 lb. each, and that was one load in the dehydrator.  It took most of the day (I’m estimating about twelve hours, though I wasn’t watching the clock), since there was so much moisture from the ice that had to melt first – I turned it off before I went to sleep and the last of them were finished by then.  It always amazes me how compact everything becomes once it’s dehydrated.

Today, I plan to do another load, since there’s no advantage to keeping them frozen over having them dehydrated.  In fact, the opposite is true – they will take up lots less space when dried and free up freezer space for something else.  Since I plan to use them in stews, chili, pot pies, etc., they’ll be rehydrated as a natural part of cooking and dehydrated works just as effectively as frozen for my purposes.

Avivah

Soaking and drying nuts

Last night I decided to try soaking some nuts again, thanks to the encouragement of blog reader Chava.  (Here’s why I soak nuts.)  I had some unroasted walnuts that I thought would work well, so I soaked them overnight in water with sea salt.  Early in the afternoon, I strained them out, rinsed them, and put them in the dehydrator at 145 degrees (my oven doesn’t go low enough and over-toasted the nuts I tried in the past).  And since four cups of walnuts only took up one tray, I chopped up a bunch of purple onions I bought at .29 lb and prepared four trays of those, so the dehydrator wouldn’t be running for just one tray.

After dinner, I took the tray out, and they were done perfectly.  The kids and I tasted them, and we all agreed that they are good – they hardly tasted any different than they usually do.

I’m so glad I tried to do this again.  Now that I see how easy it is, and the results are good, I’ll try to integrate this on a regular basis.  The easiest way to do it would probably be to buy and then prepare a large batch of nuts at a time, so that they are all dehydrated at one time.

Avivah

Coconut oil sources

Here are the companies I’ve ordered coconut oil from.  The first is Omega Nutrition.  I order in five gallon buckets, and you have to call to get the pricing on that.  They may not know what to do with you because you aren’t a restaurant, but just tell them your friend ordered a big bucket and you know it’s possible, and they’ll figure it out.  🙂    They have the extra virgin and regular organic.  I’ve ordered both in the past.

I more recently discovered Mountain Rose Herbs – they also have two kinds of coconut oil, but only one is suitable for eating (the other is for cosmetic use).  It’s a raw high quality oil.  Their prices for five gallon buckets as well as smaller containers are on the page I linked to, and their prices are lower than Omega.  But you’ll have to clarify about the status of their hechsher (kosher supervision) on your own; they say it is kosher and it is a raw and unrefined product.  But as I said, you’ll probably want to clarify with your lor.  I use it but prefer recommending Omega for this reason.

Even in large amounts, coconut oil isn’t cheap.  And I’ll warn you ahead of time that shipping is also expensive because the bucket is so heavy – probably about forty pounds or so; figure in about $40 per 5 gallon bucket for shipping.  But – it lasts a long, long time, and stays without needing any refrigeration.  As I’ve said before, I economize in a lot of areas of our food budget, and that creates room to buy the more expensive things like this.  I do kind of dread when I have to place my coconut oil orders, though, because it’s so expensive, even though it’s in the budget!

Avivah

Soaking grains, flours, beans, and seeds

 >>Can you explain a little bit about soaking flour (and other grains as well)? Do you use an acid medium? Do you soak all your grains?<<

Soaking grains and flours is something that traditional cultures have done for many centuries, tapping into an intuitive wisdom that I think we’ve lost.  They didn’t need the scientific explanations of why it was helpful; they must have sensed a difference when they ate things prepared one way or another.  But I found it helpful to learn more about it when I first encountered the idea, which seemed foreign to me.

Basically, whole grain products and the flours made with them are a source of many nutrients.  The challenge is that they also contain large amounts of phytic acid, which binds with the nutrients when ingested, and escorts them right out of your body.  So in order to benefit from the nutrients, you need to do something to neutralize the phytic acid.  That something is soaking the grains in an acidic medium, and there are a number of options to use: apple cider vinegar or lemon juice, whey, buttermilk, kefir, and plain yogurt are the ones that come to mind, but there are probably others that I’m not aware of.   

 I’ve tried using apple cider vinegar/lemon juice as an acidic medium.  It’s added by the tablespoon (1 T. acv and one cup water: one cup grain) and even though the amounts are small, my kids didn’t like the sour taste so I don’t use that anymore.  I’ve used whey, but that’s not something I often have around. When I made cheese, I had a good amount left over from each batch, and if I get around to making cheese on a regular basis, that would be a good option.  And I have a small amount when I let the kefir I make sit too long and it separates.  To use whey, you use a tablespoon and one cup of water in place of the liquid called for (just like the lemon juice or apple cider vinegar).  But what I’ve preferred using has been either kefir or plain yogurt.  It does change the flavor, but not so much that the kids grimace.  🙂  Seriously, it tastes fine with the yogurt as a soaking medium.  For baking quick breads like pancakes and muffins, it adds a very nice, light texture. 

I don’t soak all of my grains, though I’d certainly be better off nutritionally.  Some grains are more important to soak than others, since they’re so much higher in phytic acid.  That’s what I focus on.  The highest of them is oats, and that’s the grain that I most regularly soak.  This is very easy – I put half the water the recipe for oatmeal calls for in the pot the night before, and add some plain yogurt.  The next morning, I add the rest of the water and it cooks up very quickly.  When I prepared the baked oatmeal for today’s breakfast, I mixed it up the night before, and let it sit overnight before baking it.  (I’ve been wondering about the value of butter as an acidic medium, since it’s composed of lactic acid, so it seems to me it should work fine, too.  But I didn’t look into that, it’s just my own mental conjecturing.)  The hardest part is planning ahead so that you have the flour soaked and ready to be used when you want it, and a menu plan comes in very handy here.

The grains we use the most are brown rice, kasha (buckwheat), and millet and all of them are low in phytic acid.  So I don’t soak them, particularly since I usually prepare them for meat meals, and the options for soaking that I like are dairy.  I do usually cook them with a broth that has often been made with an acidic medium, though (adding a small amount of apple cider vinegar when making stock accomplishes this very easily).   

As far as flours go, I fall very short in this area.  Initially I soaked, sprouted, and then dehydrated wheat before grinding it to bake with.  I was very displeased with the quality of the flour.  It probably would be fine for cakes or cookies, but not for yeast breads.  And it was a long process to prepare it in that way, and didn’t seem worth it for mediocre results. 

But I do try to soak flour when I can, though definitely not always.  This is only when I’m baking for dairy meals, usually breakfast muffins, quick breads, or pancakes.  I’ve found that soaking the flour overnight gives a very nice light quality to those things, and adds a pleasant flavor, too.  In those cases, I generally soak the flour at a ratio of 1 cup flour to 1 cup  of thinned yogurt or kefir.  Other than this, I don’t use very much flour in our meals.  The main exception that comes to mind is baking challah, for which I unapologetically use freshly ground, unsoaked, unsprouted flour. 

I also soak beans overnight at the very least, though I don’t always sprout them.  I tend to sprout them more in the summer just because they sprout so much faster in the heat. I never soak or sprout seeds or nuts.  I wasn’t happy with the results I got when soaking nuts, and decided not to pursue that further.

I don’t use wheat germ, or wheat/oat bran, because I think it’s best to eat foods in the complete package, not one part or another.  If I did, I’d try to soak them as much as I could, treating them like flour.  I also stay away from puffed wheat products, and very rarely have rice cakes, because the processing for these foods has been shown to be harmful.  I sometimes have shredded wheat for breakfast or baked wheat crackers (like shredded wheat in cracker form), but I don’t fool myself that they’re healthy.  I consider them treat foods that are best used in small amounts. 

I’ve learned to adapt most recipes so that they nutritionally conform to guidelines I feel are helpful, though I don’t always post my adaptations when I share recipes.  If something says flour, I may or may not soak the flour as described above, but generally it can be done without drastically changing the recipe. 

Avivah

What are healthy fats?

I think that almost everyone knows that margarine is bad for you, though most people probably don’t know just how bad.  In the kosher kitchen, women often feel that whether it’s healthy or not, they don’t know what else they can use for baking.  Others argue that the cheapness of margarine justifies its use, but I don’t agree. It is cheap – and I’m always up for a good deal – but it’s a false economy. By shopping carefully for the bulk of your groceries, you’ll be able to create room in your budget for the expensive high quality ingredients you can’t get cheaply.  We got rid of margarine and all so called healthy substitutes (eg. Earth Balance spread) a long time ago. The fun part is that it’s really easy and the healthy alternatives work just as well but taste better. thumb.gif

We use butter for dairy meals (I stock up when it’s $2 lb), and coconut oil for baking for meat meals. We buy two kinds of coconut oil – a) extra virgin raw, which still has coconut flavor – because of the flavor it is harder to use in cooking/baking; b) organic but with the coconut flavor removed – I use this for all baking, except challah, when I fall back on regular vegetable oil. I buy it by the five gallon bucket, and it’s not cheap (though it’s lots cheaper than by the little containers in the store), but I think it’s worth the price for our health – it’s a major factor of why I can now consider the baked goods we eat to be in the ‘good for us’ category.  It seems we keep going through this faster and faster all the time. 

We use extra virgin olive oil for salads, not much else. When I roast a chicken, I save the gravy in a container in the fridge, and the fat at the top that congeals is shmaltz – great for frying veggies for a meat dish, and the gravy that congeals below the fat is a delicious addition to grains or stews. I do the same thing with lamb and beef, but I use those less often.

Several months ago, an email friend who follows similar nutritional guidelines that I do recommended another high quality oil to me – palm oil.   I started to look into it, discovered that there are actually two kinds of palm oil – palm kernel oil, and palm fruit oil.  The palm fruit oil has a stronger flavor and color, and I was looking for something that would be a good substitute for the regular coconut oil – specifically, with a bland flavor for baking.  Palm kernel oil was the solution.  I began researching buying it in bulk quantity (it seemed pretty expensive to me to buy in the 24 oz tubs in the health food store) but didn’t see it through – the company that had it certified kosher didn’t answer their phones, and the emails I received in response to my pricing queries weren’t clear.  So I put it on the back burner.

But then I finished my bucket of regular coconut oil, and was dismayed to find a huge price increase when I went to place my order.  So when I went to the health food store (somewhere I rarely go into), I bought several containers of palm oil.  If I hadn’t been tipped off about this by my friend, I would have walked right by it, because of the way it’s labeled.  It’s made by Spectrum, and marked as Organic All Vegetable Shortening – and to me, shortening is a word with only negative nutritional connotations.  But in spite of that, it really is just pure palm oil.   It’s pure white and flavorless, so it’s perfect for non dairy baking.  I went to the health food store on their 10% discount day, so it was a little under $7 for a 24 oz container.

Some of you may be reading and cringing at the thought of all that saturated fat.  Doesn’t everyone know that saturated fat bad for you?  Actually, it’s not.  If you want to start learning more about fats, what’s good, what’s not, and why, start with this link: http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/index.html.  It’s very helpful in dispelling a lot of the nutritional miseducation out there surrounding fats.

Avivah

Dehydrating pickled fruit

This past autumn, I shared with you about the wonderful free fruit that we picked and preserved.  When I started canning fruit, I stuck to the basics: fruit of one kind in it’s juice, and applesauce.  But there were so many appealing looking recipes to try that I finally succumbed, wanting pantry shelves filled with all of those beautiful looking jars, and made a number of interesting looking things.

Well, it’s several months later, and I can say that was a mistake.  We really like just plain fruit – not chutneys or pickled fruit.  Plain boring applesauce, compote, or stewed fruit.  We have hardly touched any of the other stuff.  I hate all the work that went into it being wasted, but I don’t want to compound the situation by wasting the food and not eating it, too.  And the jars are taking up space that could be taken up with something useful.  So yesterday it occurred to me that we could try to dehydrate the many quarts of pickled apples and pickled pears, and see how that turned out. 

My son did this today, and so far, the jury is still out on how they like the dehydrated pickled fruit slices.  Only three kids so far have tasted it, and two think it’s great, one thinks it’s terrible.  I tasted it and thought they were fine – different from the plain dried apples and pears we preserved, but still tasty.  The consistency is more chewy (the others were crispy), but fine.  They would probably also be good in some kind of pie or cooked, if I wanted to do that, but I probably wouldn’t.  It’s the keeping things simple thing, again.  🙂  

One immediate advantage is that dehydrated fruit takes a lot less space than all of those full jars – I didn’t count how many jars there were that are now empty (17 or so??), but however much it was, it will all fit into two quart sized jars by the time it’s all dried. 

Edited to add: my son discovered that when blended up, the pickled fruit makes fantastic fruit leathers!  Now I don’t feel all that time and effort was wasted, since everyone is enjoying these so much!

Avivah