17th July, 2011 - Posted by shawn - No Comments
They're here!
Yes, it is true. All those celiac patients out there can now have rice krispie treats! General Mills has developed a brown rice based Rice Krispie that is gluten-free. This is one cereal we thought at the beginning that Scott would be able to have in its regular form, but not so, it had malt in it. In fact most breakfast cereals have malt in them.
I haven’t found these at our stores yet but we will be trying them. Brown rice is better for you for sure, but I’m not convinced it will pass my taste test in the marshmallow squares. We’ll see.
Here is the website for Gluten Free Rice Krispies - with recipes of course!
14th April, 2011 - Posted by shawn - 2 Comments
Making Idea Books
For years I’ve subscribed off and on to several magazines and I’ve piled them up thinking I’d use them when I needed ideas for recipes or crafts. Well that never happened because they invented in the internet. If I need a recipe or craft idea it is much easier to search the web for what I want than to search through all those magazines.
I hated to think of all the money I’d wasted on ideas I’d never use, so I decided to do something about it. I started making idea books out of all that old stuff.
I went through each magazine and pulled out the information I thought I might use some day. If I didn’t see anything I donated the magazine to our local reading room. For the ones that were torn up I kept some of them for craft projects with the kids, but the rest got thrown away (we can’t recycle magazines here.)
I three hole punched the pages and used reinforcements before putting them into 3 ring binders I had from other projects. I pasted smaller cutouts to ugly scrapbooking cardstock (you know the kind – you bought it in a combo pack or something and you have no idea what you’ll do with it) and hole punched those pages too. Some larger articles went into page protectors to keep them together. I used heavy cardstock and homemade tabs to divide the sections (I have books for crafts, kids, recipes etc.) so I could find things easily.
Now when I need an idea it is easy for me to grab a binder from my kitchen bookshelf – even easier than using the internet – and I finally feel like I’ve put those magazines to good use. No need to print off internet ideas either, it is all right there for me.
Yes this project took time but it was also kind of fun and very gratifying since I was reducing my clutter and making something useful.
If you decide it is too much work to handle all those back issues then just donate them to someone who can use them. No sense hanging on to things you will never use when someone else can use them.
One of the other benefits of this little project was that I saw how little some of the magazines actually had in them and I dropped those subscriptions. I can read the few articles of interest at the library if I want to but in most cases I’m not missing anything but advertising.
4th February, 2010 - Posted by Scott - No Comments
In a bid to get her to subscribe my wife was recently sent a free copy of the Feb-Mar 2010 issue of MaryJanesFarm magazine. Much to our surprise has a number of organic gluten-free cake and cookie recipes just in time for Valentine’s day. The article starts on page 68 and includes:
GF Chocolate Cupcakes
GF Cream Cheese Frosting
GF Peanut Butter Mini-Cheesecakes with Ganache Topping
GF Lemon Mini Cheesecakes
GF Lemon Frosting
GF Chocolate Snap Cookies
I haven’t had a chance to try any of the recipes but I’m really looking forward to trying the Chocolate Snaps. Grab a copy from your favorite bookstore before they take it off the shelf.
25th January, 2010 - Posted by Scott - No Comments
After watching Food, Inc. our oldest daughter decided that she would like to know more about where her food is coming from, especially when it involves the death of an animal. As my wife and I are dedicated omnivores with wide ranging palates we committed to helping her explore this path. In doing so, we will also show her how life must change in order to seek this goal. Simply put, locally organically grown meat is expensive compared to industrial agri-business products. We are fortunate that we can afford to buy these items, but not without some changes.
We must eat less meat to do this.
To do so, our meat-centric diet needs to be curtailed. Initially, my thoughts were simply to reduce the amount of meat served at any given meal and up the starches and veggies, we are after all a stereo-typical meat and potatoes family. My wife recalls growing up in a family that served up a large portion of meat, some form of potato, and a vegetable. Though she left out one small detail about the vegetable portion that I have gotten to experience first hand with her mother’s cooking: there will be butter. After searching through our recipes and putting some thought into what to serve and how to par back while increasing other portions so that it is still balanced about the same, our conversation changed; the problem with these thoughts is that meat is still the main portion of the entree. Steak with potato gratin is still steak first regardless of the portion size.
I am looking at our meals in this new light and see that there will need to be more changes to our eating than just choosing to put less meat in. New recipes will need to be found and developed for our liking that have less meat to begin with. They will need to incorporate it so that it is not the focus. Eventually, we can change our family’s decades of eating habits to a new lifestyle that includes vegetarian meals and only a few servings of meat a week.
Has your family made this kind of change? How did you do so? What recipes are now staples that you wouldn’t have eaten before?
