Kitchen Stewardship

Wordless Wednesday: You Know it’s Time to Bake Sourdough Bread When…

Katie — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:20:37 +0000

Don’t worry, you can bake great bread before your starter turns into the glob that ate Grand Rapids, too, but this is a pretty clear sign of a healthy, mature starter!

I sent Kelly the Kitchen Kop that top photo just to make her jealous once. It worked! I also shared my starter with her, in case you thought I was just totally sourdough heartless.

See all the sourdough recipes for this week; bread coming Friday!

Be sure to enter to win my favorite bread pans at the giveaway this week!

Did you see Nina Planck here yesterday?

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I’d love to see more of you! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

More Wordless Wednesday at 5 Minutes for Mom.

Wordless Wednesday: You Know it’s Time to Bake Sourdough Bread When… is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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Sourdough Recipes Galore: Pizza Dough

Katie — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:08:26 +0000

We’re sticking with sourdough recipes that don’t need as much rise for now, in case you’re still nurturing your baby sourdough starter and waiting for the bubbles you really want to see, like this:Look at the beautiful air pockets right through the side of the jar! This starter is ready to leaven some bread!

I am totally planning sourdough pizza for next week after checking out some options for this post. Lots of drool all over my keyboard here. I haven’t tried sourdough pizza dough yet, but Sarah Wood has, and she shares her recipe:

Soaked sourdough pizza crust

Adapted from Mike Avery’s recipe

Ingredients

1.5 C “discarded” sourdough starter
1 T olive oil
1 t salt
1 – 1.5 C whole wheat flour

Equipment

Stand mixer or mixing bowl
Baking sheet and a Silpat type non-stick baking mat OR baking stone
Rolling Pin
Plastic Wrap

Method:

Mix the ingredients together, working in flour until you have a soft dough. If it gets too dry add more starter or water.

Once kneaded, cover and let rest for half an hour.

After resting, roll out the dough on your Silpat or baking stone. I then transfer the Silpat with the dough onto the baking sheet. Cover with plastic wrap to prevent it from drying out and leave at room temperature for at least seven hours. The crust will rise some as it soaks.

(I make this recipe into one oblong pizza crust that fits on my Silpat in a jelly roll baking pan. Divide the dough as you desire to suit the baking equipment you have on hand.)

Seven or more hours later, heat the oven to 450 degrees F. Bake the crust for 5 minutes. Then add sauce and desired toppings to pizza. Put pizza back in oven for about 10 minutes or until the cheese is bubbly and starting to brown.

Note: Save your plastic wrap and reuse it every time you make pizza dough. I’ve been using the same piece of plastic wrap for months!

You can also freeze the pizza crusts after they have been par-baked and save them for future use.

(Katie back; thanks, Sarah!) Remember that you can always put your sourdough starter in the refrigerator if you’re not baking often; just feed it once a week. That way you won’t end up with a ton of starter taking over your house. On the other hand, if you are encouraged to make this awesome pizza because you have too much starter, maybe it’s better to let it take over a bit!

I found a few other tempting pizza dough recipes in my forays through the blogosphere lately. I have no idea which one to try first!

King Arthur Flour never seems to fail me with great products and recipes. Here is their sourdough pizza recipe.
Pam at Adventures in Homemaking wrote recently of trying my friend Sarah’s sourdough pizza: “This was by far one of the best pizzas I’ve ever put in my mouth. Remember the scene from "What About Bob?" when he was eating dinner with his therapist’s family? That’s kind of what we felt like eating this pizza.” It’s fun to hear others acknowledge Sarah’s mastery of sourdough!
No one seems to remember to take a photo of their pizzas, though – they must be so tasty they just get eaten!

Sarah Wood has one more “discarded starter” guest post recipe for you tomorrow – muffins – and then (drum roll, please!) it’s bread time on Friday! Be sure to enter to win my favorite bread pans at the giveaway this week!

Did you see Nina Planck here yesterday?

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I’d love to see more of you! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

Sourdough Recipes Galore: Pizza Dough is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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Real Food Face-Off: Nina Planck vs. Kitchen Stewardship

Katie — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:21:54 +0000

I wasn’t even sure I was going to answer the questions when this whole thing got started, and here I am facing off against Nina Planck, author of Real Food and one of the inspirations for many of us self-titled “Real Food Bloggers.” I feel very unworthy, both to be facing Nina Planck and to have featured so many wonderful foodies already here at Kitchen Stewardship.

This series has introduced me to some new people and given me a chance to go more in depth with some of my favorites, as well as interview Sally Fallon Morell. It’s truly been an honor to host, and I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.

Visit the Real Food Face-Off Introduction page for a full list of all the participants and links to their face-offs.

The Final Face-Off: Nina vs. Katie

Nina Planck grew up on a farm eating nothing but local, real food, then left all that behind to become a vegetarian world traveler writing speeches for government officials and reporting for TIME Magazine. She finally came back to butter, cream and eggs and opened the first farmers’ markets in London, launching her next career as a Real Food icon. She married Rob Kaufelt and happily drinks raw milk and nibbles artisan cheeses in Greenwich Village together with their son, Julian, and still rather new twins, Jacob and Rose, born August 2009. Her second book, Real Food for Mother and Baby, tries to debunk some of the longstanding nutritional myths surrounding fertility, pregnancy, and feeding babies.

I really should have had someone else write this for me. Who wants to talk about themselves? (Bloggers, some might say. Touché.) Here’s how I ended up here, in brief: I wanted to write a book called Kitchen Stewardship. Easier said than done. I started blogging to have some accountability to keep writing and see if my idea would hold water, and I discovered books like Real Food, Nourishing Traditions, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I began applying my own philosophy to my ever-widening cache of food information and took baby steps, one at a time, until I started hosting the Real Food Face-Off, which has made me feel guilty for not doing more.

How do you describe the way you eat when someone asks you to define your food?

We eat real food. If humans have been eating it for a long time (hundreds, thousands, or millions of years), we call it real. If it’s been produced and processed pretty much the same way since then, we call it real. Wild salmon, grass-fed beef, raw milk, proper cheese. With a few fun things, like dark chocolate, and raw honey and real maple syrup.

I eat traditional foods, which means in a nutshell that if we as humans haven’t been eating a food for hundreds, or better yet, thousands, of years, it shouldn’t be passing my lips. Margarine and Crisco are great examples of “foods” of this century that don’t count! Mostly, I try to include basic foods that pack a nutritional punch, rather than to focus too much on avoiding.

What was/is your major incentive for living a real food lifestyle? (How did you come to eat the way you do?)

I was raised on real food. Then I went astray with vegan, vegetarian, and low-fat diets. My health faltered. I came back to real food bit by bit. Started with eggs for breakfast. A huge improvement. Dropped non-foods like non-fat frozen yogurt – the lowest form of milk.

I believe God gave me the gift of my human body and the earth we live on. I am called to be a good steward of those gifts and care for both well. As a mother, He has blessed me with the immense responsibility of feeding and growing two children, and that impacts my food choices even more than concern for my own health. I’m also a bit of a rebel inside, so I have to admit I’m drawn to traditional foods because they’re countercultural, and that makes me happy in its own right.

If you only had energy for ONE make-from-scratch food, what would it be? Is your preference for taste or health?

I love to make meatloaf (half beef, half pork) and I love chilli (no beans). But is roast chicken my all-time favorite food? Perhaps. We eat for taste and health. I don’t eat anything solely because it’s healthy – hmmm, except, perhaps, cod liver oil.

It’s a tie between chicken stock and homemade yogurt. Yogurt is just so easy and saves so much money; our health benefits because we eat it more when it’s always available. However, you simply cannot buy bone broth in a store with the same calcium, collagen, gelatin, and other health benefits of homemade chicken stock, so because it’s so elusive, I would have to make it myself. If I got too tired I could coach my husband how to do these tasks, too!

What food was your favorite that you no longer eat (or shouldn’t eat)?

Non-fat soft-serve frozen yogurt. And I used to consider the imitation crab meat at salad bars – the flaky white stuff with the orange edges – a delicious treat. But it’s truly the lowest form of reconstituted fish. I was also a juice addict. If you’re on a low-fat diet and drink a lot of juice, you’re wreaking havoc with your blood sugar and moods. Dumb.

Honestly, besides the fact that I need to cut down on refined sugar, I really miss easy chicken. So many of my good chicken recipes start with boneless, skinless breasts, which are just too pricey when you buy meat at the farm. I get tired of only having shredded chicken, but when I harvest some breast meat from our whole birds, it’s like a delicacy!

What’s your favorite real/traditional food?

I’m crazy about real chicken stock and beef stock but mine is never as good as it could be. I’d have to go with a fresh glass of raw milk, not too cold.

Plain homemade yogurt with raw honey and frozen fruit.

What was the hardest transition to make to real food?

Without a doubt, my toughest challenge in the change from low-fat, vegan, and vegetarian diets was adding real fats. My first steps toward conscientious omnivory were eggs, roast chicken, and yogurt. Good moves, all. But losing my fear of fat took some time. But oh boy, when I did - happiness. And better health. And no more struggles with my weight – the most amazing part.

Second guessing everything. Eating is no longer a question of “Does it taste good and won’t break the bank?” But now it’s “Is it sustainable? How to prepare? What are the origins? How did people used to eat this and why? Etc.” It’s also a realistic struggle to find the funds for pricier food. And the time to prepare it. There’s a reason KS seeks balance!

What’s something you remain afraid to try?

I’m not scared of anything, but I have learned there are foods I just don’t like very much, and I should stop trying them again and again. I dislike green and black tea, beer, and lamb. But who cares? If there are a few real foods you don’t like, just don’t eat them!

Kombucha. The darn mushroom is staring at me in my fridge, taunting me that I’ve already killed it! I even bought the tea; I just can’t seem to prioritize it enough to put it on my to-do list. (There’s plenty more for this list, by the way!)

What’s next on your list of changes to make?

I could drop a few bad habits: I eat standing up, when alone. I eat too fast, when alone.

Grind my own grain.

List your top 3 baby steps to move from a Standard American Diet to Real Food.

1. Stop eating industrial corn in all its forms: corn oil (and all the other yellow oils); corn syrup (it’s everywhere); and corn-fed/industrial feed-lot beef. Of those, the beef is definitely the best for you.
2. Stop eating anything that’s been engineered to be in high in something or low in another.
3. Cut refined sugar and white flour to the bare minimum.

This is tricky, because it really matters where you start. If I’m drinking 3 diet sodas per day, that needs to change before I worry about where my fish comes from. Here is an attempt at 3:

What is the worst food (or “food”) a person could possibly put into their systems?

Trans fats are bad. So is sugar in all its forms. Even honey and maple syrup should be treats.

A toss-up between trans fats and artificial sweeteners, along with all the junk and excess consumption that usually comes along with those.

If you had only $20 to spend in a week on real food, what would you buy and what would you make?

Some meat and some dairy and some affordable vegetables. Chocolate and wine would be sacrificed.

For starters, I would NOT buy lettuce for salad. It’s too easy to spend $5 on lettuce for the week even without going organic.

Split a pastured chicken with someone – $7 for my half.
$1 for some carrots, celery and onion to make stock.
79 cents for 1 lb brown rice
79 cents for 1 lb lentils
$1 worth of dry black beans
$3 a dozen pastured eggs
$2 for store whole milk to make into yogurt
$1.50 butter on sale
some flour and extra veggies with the remaining $3
I would make veggie bean burritoes, chicken rice soup with homemade biscuits, lentil brown rice casserole, chicken rice-a-roni and modified California chicken wraps (no avocado), black bean soup with sourdough bread, eggs en cocotte for a lunch and scrambled eggs for breakfast. Lots of yogurt snacks, and maybe I could sneak in a few bowls of oatmeal for breakfast.

What does “eating healthy” mean to you?

Eat all kinds of real food in moderation and ignore all the diets out there.

Focusing on the foods we need to eat to have healthy bodies, rather than demonizing foods we’re afraid of. I think there are two paradigms of healthy eating in America. Ask not what you can take out of your food, but what your food can put into you.

Name the top food scoring highest on both the nutritional and budget scale? (i.e., best health benefits for the lowest cost)

For children I’m a big fan of whole dairy, beef, chicken, and eggs. Canned wild salmon is affordable and very good for you. So are canned small oily fish.

Chicken stock for sure. You take bones that would be garbage and a buck’s worth of vegetables (or garbage scraps, too) and come up with something totally nourishing. It’s like beyond free.

Biggest drawback of real food lifestyle?

I can’t think of any but one: if I had a real food luxury, it would be a Raw Milk Butler. He’d bring me fresh raw milk round the clock. No orders, no collections: just a steady delivery.

Trying to explain why you do what you do to other people, especially in-law type people. The fight to keep candy at something less than a mountain for the kids.

What’s the most creative thing you do to make life easier in the kitchen?

Creative I’m not, particularly. I love to mix spices with butter and olive oil thoroughly, and then schmeer it on and inside a chicken to roast. Favorites are cumin, cayenne, and chili powder. I love fresh herbs under chicken skin, and I love throwing herbs, garlic, oil, and nuts – whatever I’ve got – into the food processor. I love a sharp fresh green sauce, and the sky’s the limit, for combinations. The other day we had salsa verde (the Italian classic) but without the basil or mint: just parsley, anchovy, garlic, capers, and oil. It was very nice on beef and I was grateful for the green flavor in deepest February.

Cheat on dishes! If I measure salt or something dry, the spoon goes right back in the drawer without apologies. I let a lot of things get rinsed and air-dried so the dirty dishes pile looks more tolerable.

How important is organic food?

Ecological is important. But most important: real. The real thing. Real chicken, not ‘tofurkey.’ No imitation foods. I grew up poor on real food. It wasn’t organic (though our home-grown vegetables were ecological).

For the earth, I think it’s super important, as long as it’s sustainable organic and not just “certified” on-paper organic. For our family, it’s hit or miss. We’ve increased our organic intake a ton in the past year; I used to get zero organic animal products. Cost is a major factor, as is quality.

What do you refuse to buy at a grocery store that you do eat from its source?

I would never buy farmed salmon but I do end up eating it, despite myself, at weddings and in other desperate situations.

Nothing. I’m getting there on meat, especially beef. But I’ll still compromise in a pinch.

When eating out, how do make your menu decision (fav “out” food, anything you avoid)?

In good restaurants I treat myself to the good white bread they serve. We are blessed with super bakers in NYC. And restaurant butter – while probably French and pasteurized – is usually terrific. We eat a lot of French and Irish butter at home, too. There are too few good American butters. But I digress. Otherwise it’s meat and veg for me at restaurants, and things I don’t do well, like marrow gellee or something similarly traditional and peasantry but labor-intensive.

If there’s wild caught salmon, I go for it because I don’t get that at home. I might lean toward beef over chicken after reading Sally Fallon Morell say that no one should ever buy conventional chickens, period. I try really hard to avoid trans fats at all cost, but I like to let my hair down sometimes too and just enjoy a meal without fretting.

Best book recommendations?

My favorite books on what to eat are my own. My favorite cookbook is Nigel Slater’s Appetite.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma to open your eyes, Real Food for accessibility, and Crunchy Cons for the philosophical.

Number one tip you tell your blog readers about eating healthy foods:

Everyone wants to know how much to eat of one thing or another. You’ve gotta figure that out for your own body and mind. No one can tell you. Not your mother, not the USDA, and not me.

Eat more healthy today than you did yesterday, and accept that you can’t do it all at once.

Follow Nina on Twitter @ninaplanck. Follow Katie @kitchenstew .

This has been the last Real Food Face-Off! Don’t despair; there’s always more to do at KS. We’re talking sourdough recipes all this week and learning to sprout things, and Thursday I have an announcement of the next li’l ol’ series around here.

You can win THREE TINWARE BREAD PANS, my sourdough success gadget, here at KS through Sunday.

Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed to make sure you don’t miss a thing. You can also follow me on Twitter.

Special thanks to Jo-Lynne from DCR Design for the fabulous Face-Off logos. Please visit her if you are a blogger looking for design improvements!

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Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

Any links to Amazon are affiliate links, which means I get a small kickback if you purchase by starting here. I appreciate you doing so if you’re buying online anyway, but I’d also recommend trying your local library first! Of course, if you’re going to shop at Amazon, you may as well try Swagbucks. I’m liking the gift cards to Amazon that are rolling in!

The image is from Nina Planck’s website.

See Real Food Wednesday for more real food inspiration!

Real Food Face-Off: Nina Planck vs. Kitchen Stewardship is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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GIVEAWAY: Urban Homemaker’s Magical Tinware Bread Pans

Katie — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:08:23 +0000

As we poke along through the less intensive sourdough recipes this week, we’re moving toward the grand finale on Friday: the whole wheat bread. Whole wheat bread is notorious for being dense, flat, and difficult to work with. Sourdough adds the complication of a very slow rise.

I will tell you everything I’ve learned about sourdough bread baking soon, but I just have to share with you my absolute favorite new bread gadget. I got some bread pans from Urban Homemaker for Christmas that have revolutionized my whole wheat sourdough.

I suppose I can’t claim that these pans are magical, but I’m telling you: the first time I used them was my first success with a good sourdough rise, and I’m not going to try anything else from now on!

The pans are 1/2-inch deeper than a regular pan, and I have the shortest length at 8”, so there’s just more room for your bread dough to rise UP and less room for flatness. It works! Tinware is a safe material, which was a step up from the Teflon surface I was using before my awesome mother got them for me for Christmas. My mom did the safety research on this one, and I’m just trusting her judgment. You can trust her, too! The pans are interesting – you don’t use water to clean them at all, just wipe them out with a clean towel and you’re done.

Look at the beautiful rise on these loaves!

Sometimes the bread even OVERrises before I can catch it!

The material is folded to make the shape, and water would certainly get inside the folds and cause problems. You know me – I just like skipping dishes! You just need to be aware that you wouldn’t use these pans for a quick bread, because the batter would also get in between the layers of tin on the walls of the pan.

See how narrow the loaves are at the bottom? This wasn't a perfect rise, but I could have waited longer if I wanted to.

The pans leave funny indentations all over, adding character to your bread in my opinion!

When you do get a perfect rise, you get this great shape at the top, just like store bread!

Urban Homemaker helps homemakers master the “timeless arts of cooking, baking, canning and homekeeping in the spirit of Titus Two.” You simply must browse through the left sidebar; everything they sell just rocks on and fits with the KS mission as well.

I am thrilled that they are willing to give one lucky reader THREE tinware bread pans! (value $24)

How to Enter

Mandatory: Click over to Urban Homemaker with this link and enter using the form there. Come on back here and tell me you did it so I can keep track. (While you’re over there, check out the free bread-baking eBook in the right sidebar!)

(If you receive KS via email, you will need to click over to the site to leave a comment.) If you’d like more chances, obtain extra entries by doing the following. Please leave all your entries in separate comments so it’s easier for me to count.

Mandatory entry: Click over to Urban Homemaker and tell me here that you did it.
Subscribe in a reader or via email to Kitchen Stewardship (or tell me if you already do).
If you have a blog or website, post about this giveaway linking back to this post.
Follow me on Twitter AND Tweet about the giveaway (just click the button at the top of this post).
Stumble or Digg this post (you can use the Share This icon at the bottom of the post). (What is Stumble?)
Email 5 friends (who don’t already read Kitchen Stewardship) about the giveaway.
Stumble or Digg your favorite post or recipe at Kitchen Stewardship.
What has been your favorite series or carnival here at KS? Just tell me in the comment for an extra entry.

Be sure to tell me everything you did in your comments, a separate comment for each. There are a possible 8 entries!

I will use random.org’s integer generator to choose the winner. The giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents (I think – pending email from Urban Homemaker contact). Entries will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, March 14th, and I’ll post the winners by the following Monday.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

Disclosure: I did not receive anything to run this giveaway. I just asked for something for you guys because I love these pans and wanted to share! See my full advertising disclosure here.

GIVEAWAY: Urban Homemaker’s Magical Tinware Bread Pans is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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Sourdough Recipes Galore: Sourdough Pancakes

Katie — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:03:48 +0000

My very first attempt at baking anything with my new sourdough starter last fall was Sarah’s sourdough focaccia with her Best Ever Minestrone. It really doesn’t need to rise at all, which is good, because I don’t think mine did. I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven in an Italian restaurant, though, when we ate dinner. I couldn’t have been more pleased with the result!

The first time we made sourdough pancakes, however, we decided they just weren’t for us. I tried Sarah’s Apple Cinnamon Sourdough Pancakes, and they were so sour mixed with the sweet. Don’t give up on these, though, because I’ve since learned my lesson: it’s all about the sourness of the starter. I’m so glad I tried again!

I’ve taken to making pancakes the day after I take a bunch of starter out to make bread, because then I can mix lots of new flour and water, make the starter the perfect consistency for pancake batter, and it’s all ready to go the next morning and not too sour.

Donielle also has a good sourdough pancake recipe, which is basically the same as Sarah’s without the fancy add-ins. Both recipes include adding baking soda to the mixture right at the end. Do this with kiddos nearby to watch that batter swell twice its size in about a minute! Cool science!

More Sourdough Pancakes

Here is another recipe from Sarah, who doesn’t like to throw away her sourdough starter when it gets too much! (She shared crackers yesterday.)

Ingredients:

Approx 1 C sourdough starter
1 C whole wheat flour
½ – ¾ C milk, depending on how thick you like your pancakes.
¼ t salt
1 T baking powder
2 beaten eggs
2 T melted butter
1 t vanilla (optional)
½ t cinnamon (optional) or other spices

Equipment:

Large mixing bowl with lid
Additional bowl for beating eggs
Wire whisk
Griddle
¼ c measuring cup for scooping batter (optional)

Method:

The night before you want to make pancakes, combine the starter, flour and milk in a bowl. Cover and let it soak at room temperature for at least seven hours.

In the morning, preheat your griddle. Then stir the flour/starter/milk mixture. Beat two eggs in a separate bowl then add them to the batter. Then add the salt, baking powder and optional vanilla and/or spices. Gently mix in the melted butter and let the batter rest for five minutes.

Grease your griddle with coconut oil or butter. Scoop pancake batter onto preheated griddle and allow the first side to cook until you see bubbles forming and the edges getting dry or until the first side is golden brown. Flip pancakes and cook until the second side is golden brown.

Makes over a dozen ¼ C pancakes. (about 14-17)

Katie’s note: because sourdough pancake batter is always a bit bubbly, watch for the dry edges over the bubbles on top:

Our Family’s Favorite:

Like I said above, this may all be dependent on your starter and how sour it is, but just remember you may not have the same pancakes twice – ever – with sourdough. Here’s one more quick recipe from the comments at Heavenly Homemakers:

Mix 1 cup flour, 1 cup starter and 1 cup milk. Let rest overnight.

Add 2 beaten eggs, 1 Tbs honey or maple syrup, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp baking soda, and 3 Tbs melted coconut oil or butter. Mix and cook!

The bottom line: No matter what your starter is doing, you cannot mess these up. Okay, you could get them too sour. But you don’t have to worry about the rising time…yet! Come on back tomorrow for some pizza dough options from Sarah!

Get ready to bake bread on Friday by checking out Urban Homemaker’s bread pans. You can win three of them HERE.

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I’d love to see more of you! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

Find more recipes at Tempt my Tummy Tuesday and Tasty Tuesday.

Sourdough Recipes Galore: Sourdough Pancakes is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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Kitchen Tip: On the Buying and Storing of Flour

Katie — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:02:22 +0000

We know that freshly milled grain is the most nutritious of all, but hey – I don’t have a grain mill yet, do you?

Since many of us have to buy our grains already in the form of flour, here are a few tips to get the best nutrition out of the situation:

Buy flour at a store with a fast turn-around to try to ensure the most freshly ground you can get.

Look for unbromated whole wheat flour – King Arthur states that on their package, and Gold Medal claimed to be unbromated when I called the company. It’s one fewer chemical that we don’t need in our bodies.
Store your whole grain flours in the freezer whenever possible. You can keep some of it in the refrigerator if that helps keep it close at hand. I only bought flour in bulk in the winter when I could store it in a tub outside and in my garage. Just this time of year, I’ve got to start moving it into my already-packed fridge. So sad!
Why the freezer? Keep the oils in the germ from going rancid and try to preserve the enzyme phytase in the bran.

Wish you could grind your own? Maybe I can sneak a little preview in here: I am just a step away from securing a Nutrimill grain mill as a giveaway prize for a Whole Wheat Bread series in the fall!!!! Yeee hah! I’ll let you know more as I nail down details.

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I’d love to see more of you! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

This post is entered in Kitchen Tip Tuesday at Tammy’s Recipes.

Kitchen Tip: On the Buying and Storing of Flour is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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Monday Mission: Bake Homemade Bread (or Grind Your Own Wheat)

Monday Mission: Sprout Something!

Katie — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:36:36 +0000

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to sprout a seed. I know many folks are getting into their gardening groove already, but that’s not exactly what a mean. I mean sprouting a seed, like a wheat berry, pinto bean, or lentil, then cooking and eating it.

Impact Ratings:

Level of Commitment: Baby Steps

There is a good body of research that shows that sprouting a seed before consuming it increases the nutrients and makes the whole experience a healthier one, and there’s generally less controversy (but not a lack of it) there than with the soaking grains research.

Be sure to read all the way to the bottom for the giveaway winners from last week and a big announcement!

How to Sprout a Seed or Legume

You can purchase sprouting kits, but I’m all about the free options.

Supplies needed:

Glass canning jar
Canning ring lid or rubber band
Tulle or similar netting, washed (mine was from a candy wedding reception favor)
Net bag from onions or citrus (washed well in hot water)
- OR colander for legumes or large grains
Bowl
Seeds or legumes

I’ve sprouted sunflower seeds:

Pinto beans: Lentils: Rice:

Spelt: and little seeds like broccoli and radish, but I forgot to take a picture.

Method:

For smaller seeds or grains:

Soak seeds or beans in water overnight or for about 12 hours. I do this right in the glass jar – just don’t fill it more than half full of legumes, because they’ll expand. It takes about 20 minutes to get packed-in pintos out of a half-gallon jar. Just an estimate. :p Only use 1 Tbs or less of seeds if you want sandwich sprouts, like from radish or broccoli seeds.
Put tulle or net bag from onions or citrus over the open mouth of the jar, and attach it with the canning lid (or rubber band, but the lid is optimal). Choose whatever has smaller holes than what you’re sprouting. When I do little seeds, I start with the tulle, then move to the onion bag after they start getting long sprouts.
Drain the water out.
Rinse with clear water.
Set the jar partly upside down in a bowl. This will allow the water to continue to drain out through the mesh, but the seeds/legumes will stay in.
Every 12 hours or so, rinse the seeds right through the mesh with clear water and pour the water off. Set up again in the bowl to drain.
If you’re going for sandwich sprouts, allow them to grow until they’re about an inch long. Sunlight will increase the nutrients further by adding chlorophyll to the mix.
For grains or legumes, a tiny sprout will do just fine.

For legumes or larger grains:

Soak in a bowl of water for at least 12 hours. Be sure to cover the legumes with twice the amount of water as they will expand.
Pour out into a colander.
Now you can just leaven your legumes in the colander, preferably with a plate underneath to catch the water.
Approximately every 12 hours (breakfast and dinner works great), rinse with clear water and set up to keep sprouting.
You’ll want some air circulation, and don’t try to do too many at once to the point where the beans are so cramped that they get moldy.
In 24-72 hours, you should see sprouts! You can choose to cook them as soon as they sprout or when the sprout is 1/4” long or so.
For these lentils, I chose to partially clear out the seed coat or outer hull by swishing them in water until the hull rose to the top. What does this do to the nutrition? I wasn’t sure, but the coating should be the hardest to digest, and Ma Ingalls took all the coating off her corn in Little House in the Big Woods, so I thought I’d try it! I froze the extras of this huge batch after cooking them. I like to do as much as my colander can hold without molding at a time to save energy – both mine and the stove’s. One pound of lentils yielded about 16 cups after sprouting and cooking.

How do Sprouted Seeds Taste?

Weird. Or no different at all, depending who you ask.

Because you’re using up some of the starch in the sprouting process, things like lentils and rice taste a little sweeter. They’re more like plants than seeds now, so that makes sense.

I really don’t notice it (much) in something like pintos once they’re all made into refried beans. I’m guessing the longer the sprout, the more the taste will change, and I haven’t seen any research that shows that the nutrition will be increased more the longer the sprout. For legumes, I would stop after the sprout appears. I’m guessing that you don’t actually want the tiny plant to use up too much of its stored energy; save that for yourself!

Don’t try to sprout brown rice for five days. Take my word on that one. I kept waiting for longer sprouts, but clearly something was happening, because it tasted so sweet it was almost unpalatable. Not a fun stir fry night! You only need to soak brown rice in warm water for 22 hours to make it germinate, says ABC Science. See how the tip of the rice is accented after a basic overnight soak? That’s all you need to see to know you’re dealing with living food!

How do you Cook Sprouted Grains/Legumes?

Just cook as you normally would. You’ll probably find that the legumes cook much faster than soaked dry beans, but don’t count on it! I used a normal amount of water for the rice and had to cook it longer to absorb it all, because the soaked rice already had absorbed some water overnight that I hadn’t accounted for. If you drain the soak water off, you can get away with using less water to cook, or just have fluffier/more moist rice.

You can use the cooked, sprouted beans or grains in any recipe. You can also dehydrate the grains and grind them into flour, which can be used in recipes that don’t adapt well to soaking (like cookies!).

Small sprouted seeds go well on salads or in sandwiches, or as a run-through-the-kitchen snack. Be sure to refrigerate sprouted seeds if you’re not cooking them, and store things like sprouted sunflower seeds in the freezer for longer term (dehydrate in a low temp oven or dehydrator first). Remember that you just got rid of their enzyme inhibitors and turned them from seeds (stored energy) into plants (growing energy) – they’ll now decay faster!

Added Bonus: Sprouting increases the mass of your seeds and legumes. It’s like getting 25% more free! How often can real food cooks make use of that advertising gimmick?

You may have noticed this is a baby steps challenge. It is soooo easy! To sprout dry beans, just plan ahead a few extra days, and you don’t even need any fancy equipment. You can do this immediately. After the sourdough starter, you’re welcome for an easy one!

Look for a Food for Thought later this week on exactly how sprouting changes the nutrition of your seeds and legumes.

Be sure to come back tomorrow for the very last Real Food Face-Off! I guess I’ll have to answer the questions, because someone has to line up against my favorite real food author…drum roll, please! Nina Planck!

Last Week’s Giveaway Winners

The two winners of the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day books are:

Jen at A Heavenly Perspective and Laurel at Happy at Home

Congrats, girls! Jen was first and gets her choice. Please email me your contact information.

If you didn’t win, check out the book(s) at your local library or order them through Amazon; buy both for free shipping.

The winner of the one-hour consultation with Luanne Gerrity, holistic health counselor, is:

Chanelle of Simply Real

Send me an email with your contact info (phone, email) and I’ll pass it along to Luanne! By the way, I did make sure Luanne’s answers weren’t counted in the comments for this giveaway.

If you’re interested in re-balancing your life: body, mind, spirituality, diet, and emotions, you may want to look into working with Luanne yourself. Visit her at I’m Hungry for Something to learn more about how she can help you. (Phone consultations work from anywhere in the U.S.)

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I’d love to see more of you! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

I am an affiliate of Amazon.com and Luanne Gerrity. See my full disclosure statement here.

This post is entered in Works for me Wednesday at Rocks in my Dryer.

Monday Mission: Sprout Something! is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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Sourdough Recipes Galore: Whole Wheat Crackers

Katie — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:35:01 +0000

If you started your sourdough starter last week, you may be ready to try your hand at something with it. I’ll be posting recipes all week long. These first few will give you a chance to use up some of your ever-growing starter without begging for rise action…success without chance of brick-bread! That’s the kind of baby steps we need around here!

This is a guest post from Sarah Wood, a KS reader.

I am relatively new to sourdough baking. But I have learned a few things. And one of those things is that a sourdough starter needs to be fed regularly. And in order to keep it from growing obese and overtaking your whole kitchen, you’ve got to take some starter out of the “active bowl” and “discard” it.

Being a faithful kitchen steward, I would never actually discard perfectly good flour and water (and yeast)!

“Discarded starter” refers to sourdough starter that is not being fed and is therefore losing its oomph. It doesn’t have enough power to rise bread, but those yeasty beasties can still have one more chance to serve a purpose in life. (Katie’s note: a lot of sourdough instructions say to toss out starter and feed a whole cup of flour. Yikes! I just feed it a few Tbs at a time to keep the lactic acid happy. As long as you have bubbles, you’re not starving the thing.)

The whole reason I even got into sourdough baking is because I became acquainted with Nourishing Traditions which revolutionized my whole food paradigm. So I couldn’t be satisfied to simply “use up” my extra starter in pancakes or pizza crusts with white flour. I wanted to find recipes in which I could use whole grain flours and soak the flour.

This week I’ll share some recipes I’ve adapted that use discarded or inactive starter and allow you to properly prepare whole grain flours. Sourdough fermentation will help you make some wholesome, nutrient-dense food. (Note from Katie: fermenting sourdough is even better than regular “soaking,” and even “inactive” starter will break down a great deal of the phytates and neutralize the phytic acid. See this post on the health benefits of sourdough for more.)

I only maintain one starter which is fed unbleached white flour. That is what I have used in all of the recipes for this week, but I think starters fed on other sorts of flour will work just fine too. I also soaked most of these recipes up to 24 hours before I learned that seven hours is sufficient for whole wheat, so don’t worry if you leave it for longer!

Soaked sourdough thin wheat crackers

(for discarded starter)

Adapted from Sarah’s adapted recipe.

Ingredients:

1 cup “discarded” sourdough starter
1/4 cup room temperature lard from pastured pork (or coconut oil or softened butter)
1 cup whole wheat or spelt flour, or as much as you need to make a stiff dough
1/2 tsp sea salt
Olive oil for brushing
Coarse salt (such as kosher salt) for sprinkling on top

Equipment:

Large mixing bowl
Plastic Wrap
Baking sheet and a Silpat type non-stick baking mat OR a baking stone such as Katie used for her cracker recipe OR parchment paper
Rolling Pin
Pastry Brush (optional)
Pizza Cutter

Method:

In a large bowl, combine the sourdough and the lard and mix thoroughly. Mix the salt in with 1/4 cup flour and add to the sourdough mixture. Knead it all together in the bowl, adding as much flour as necessary to make a stiff dough. Cover the dough with plastic wrap or put a lid on the bowl to prevent it from drying out. Leave the dough at room temperature for at least seven hours.

Seven or more hours later, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit .

Take a small portion of the dough (about 1/4 cup) and roll it out on a Silpat or other nonstick baking mat using a rolling pin, until it is very thin.

Pour a little bit of olive oil on the rolled out dough and spread it to the edges of the dough with a pastry brush or your hand. Sprinkle liberally with coarse salt. (I tried these with fine sea salt and it really wasn’t as good as the kosher salt!) Cut the dough vertically and horizontally into quadrangles with a pizza cutter. Transfer the Silpat onto your baking sheet and bake for 15-20 minutes or until just golden brown. Repeat in batches. The crackers shrink a little bit in the oven, so when you pull out your baking sheet, they will already be separated and you don’t have to try and transfer the delicate dough from one surface to another.

These crackers are absolutely delightful! I suspect it is the lard that makes them so nice. Crisp yet tender. I must confess I haven’t tried the recipe with coconut oil or butter, but if you don’t have access to lard from pastured pork, those are good alternatives.

Additional notes: This dough also freezes well and you can easily defrost one or two batches at a time so that you can have fresh crackers every day! I made a double batch of dough and let it “soak.” Then I divided it into eight equal portions which I shaped into balls and then froze. It takes 1-2 hours for the dough to defrost. Then place it on your Silpat or baking stone and continue with the recipe.

Katie here: I make the same crackers from Sarah’s recipe, and they are excellent! I have used both coconut oil and butter with great success. I used to think they might be too sour, but then my babysitter and her friend ate half the batch once. If they appeal to pre-teens, anyone might love them! I keep them in a pretty glass jar so they’re easy to grab for a snack:Also excellent with a little garlic powder and Italian seasoning on top:

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Don’t miss the other sourdough recipes all week long! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

The top two photos are Sarahs’s; the two at the bottom are mine.

Sourdough Recipes Galore: Whole Wheat Crackers is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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Mary and Martha Moment: Deepen Your Prayer Life this Lent

Katie — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:33:50 +0000

Time for a mid-Lenten check! As we’re approximately halfway through Lent this week, it’s a good time to remind, reevaluate, and recommit.

Remind: What are your Lenten promises, anyway? Did you forget about any of them?
Reevaluate: How are you doing sticking with it? Are you letting anything fall by the wayside? Are your goals working for you? If something is more of a hindrance than a help, or if you’re finding creative ways to bend the rules around your own commitments, a change may be in order. Last year hubs and I switched from “no eating between meals” to “no seconds and desserts” mid-Lent and had a much more holy latter half.
Recommit: Whether you’re changing things up or just need to rededicate yourself to your original intentions, now is the time to make sure you’re going to have fuel for the long run. Spend some time in prayer this week asking the Lord to continue to give you strength to stick with your goals, and remember for Whom you’re sacrificing. It might be a good time to choose a few special intentions to offer up the rest of Lent for, as well.

As important or more than fasting during Lent, increasing and improving your prayer time is a vital part of the devotion of the season. If you need to reevaluate and further improve your prayer life (ahem, perhaps like someone sitting in my computer chair. Just hypothetically, you know.), here are a few thoughts:

As a family this year, we’re praying a decade of the Rosary every night during night prayers, and that will continue in a modified way after Lent when we get back into our habit of a Sunday Rosary decade. For me, I need to work harder at entering into the prayer. Sometimes when we pray with my son, I end up making the prayers out loud for him to hear and completely forget to engage my brain and actually pray to the Lord. I’m just saying the words for his benefit as if I’m reading a bedtime story. That’s recommitment number one for me: make better use of family prayer.

It’s important to me to be personally grounded in prayer as well. I count on Lent every year to jump start my prayer life and get me back in the habit of solid, regular time with God. I’m a bit wishy-washy on that this year. I’m changing my adoration time Friday so I can actually make it there once a week.

Here are some ideas for incorporating more or deeper prayer in your life for the rest of our 40 days, with the hope of continuing the habit beyond:

pray during your commute (a Rosary CD is one option many appreciate)
pray before all 3 meals in the day
fast from complaining
do an examination of conscience each night as you’re falling asleep,
pray for your family when baby wakes you up at night/for your unborn baby when s/he moves/for your husband every time he gets home from work/for your kids when you check on them before bed/ETC. Pick a trigger to remind you to pray, and do it.
pray a novena to a favorite saint…then another one to last until Easter
attend a weekday Mass once per week
hit your knees right when you get out of bed, even if it’s just for 10 seconds.
choose some Scripture to memorize and post them above your kitchen and bathroom sinks to practice.
pray while you work in the kitchen.
find an adoration chapel and sign up for an hour (or just go once a week without committing to a certain time).

Oh, and my Twitter fast is going alright. It’s tough, but I know I’m wasting less time. It’s good for me! I did break it to announce Sally Fallon’s face-off, and I’ll tweet again tomorrow about Nina Planck coming by!

Mary and Martha Moment: Deepen Your Prayer Life this Lent is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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Mary and Martha Moment: Just Food

Katie — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 06:07:45 +0000

During this season of fasting, it is appropriate for us to reconsider our spiritual relationship with food. Beyond counting calories or even finding nutrient-dense or frugal foods, let us consider the social and environmental cost of our food.

Catholics believe in the mystical Body of Christ, meaning that everyone who is a child of God, living or dead, is connected in Christ’s Body like the Vine and the branches. What one person does, for good or for ill, cannot help but affect others in the same body. Feeding the mystical body is much like feeding the human body. It needs to be done properly.

When we eat a meal in America, we are doing both. We feed our own body and want to choose the most nutritious foods possible for our health. At the same time, we vote with our dollar three times a day when we purchase our meals – how the food was raised, how it was transported, the conditions of the workers along the way. We feed our families daily and rarely stop to think of our food’s impact on the rest of the mystical Body.

I finally got to see Food, Inc. recently, and if you’ve ever seen it or read about the conditions under which human workers raise our food, your conscience is instantly pricked. Each of the seven themes of Catholic Social teaching are easily applied to the issue of food and how it is grown and processed in America today.

Life and Dignity of the Human Person: The United States Council of Catholic Bishops explain: “The measure of every institution if whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the human person.” CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) are known for desensitizing the human worker, and major corporations often lock farmers in to their contracts, simply because they can. Does it enhance the dignity of the human person for a chicken farmer to go hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt just so they can have a job feeding cheap food to the rest of us?
Call to Family, Community, and Participation: “We believe people have a right and a duty to participate in society, seeking together the common good and well-being of all, especially the poor and vulnerable.” Many of those who work in the food processing, especially meat processing industries, are the poor and vulnerable, and they’re being taken advantage of.
Rights and Responsibilities: We all have a right to life and decency, and with those rights come the responsibility to the larger society. If I further the days of my life by purchasing food that denatures our American heartland, I’m out of balance.
Option for the Poor and Vulnerable: “A basic moral test is how our most vulnerable members are faring.” Farmers and factory workers, often migrant or illegals, aren’t faring very well when it comes to the big food processors.
The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers: “The economy must serve people, not the other way around. Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in God’s creation.” One can’t help but fall in love with the natural symbiosis of Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. He epitomizes working to continue in God’s creation. In my opinion, the industrial corn fields saturated with chemical fertilizers and the hundreds of thousands of farm animals in this country eating foods their bodies weren’t created to eat are precisely the opposite. So many of the food factory and food processing jobs are without dignity or productivity.
Solidarity: Not only are we called to subdue the earth and be good stewards of creation, but we must realize that each of our actions affects so many in ever-widening circles in our shrinking global society.
Care for God’s Creation: “Care for the earth is not just an Earth Day slogan, it is a requirement of our faith…This environmental challenge has fundamental moral and ethical dimensions that cannot be ignored.” Sustainable agriculture is not just a term to be thrown around in discussion or a pie in the sky afterthought. We’ve only got one earth, and we’ve got to stop messing around with it. Will the soil under the “amber waves of grain” in the American midwest ever be able to recover its fertility after decades of a monoculture crop leaching the same nutrients out year after year? I don’t want to live in a dead land, but a natural world teeming with life, from the soil to the treetops. We must stop playing God and circumventing all the incredible natural strategies God has given us to allow us to grow healthy crops without taking more from the earth than we give back.

Pope Benedict XVI’s thoughts on the subject, from his message for the World Day of Peace, 2008:

The family needs a home, a fit environment in which to develop its proper relationships. For the human family, this home is the earth, the environment that God the Creator has given us to inhabit with creativity and responsibility. We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. Human beings, obviously, are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole. Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves. Nor must we overlook the poor, who are excluded in many cases from the goods of creation destined for all. Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow. It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

I encourage you to take some time this Lent to pray about your food choices. Begin to allow God to show you how connected your palate is to peace and justice, and ask Him what He wants you to do about it.

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I’d love to see more of you! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

Images from UGArdener, cindy47452, celesteh

Mary and Martha Moment: Just Food is a post from: Kitchen Stewardship

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