Random MomBlog

The last time I made this, my father-in-law (I didn’t even know if he liked spinach!) said he loved it, but it needed more spinach. He’s from meat-and-potatoes Wisconsin, but he’s always had his meat and potatoes with a salad too. So this time I doubled again* the amount of spinach, and I hope this ratio works for us. This recipe as written serves my family: Daddy and Mommy eat all of our spinach, and there’s enough chicken to share with our two hungry sons who like chicken but are small enough that they don’t need their own serving from this recipe. Plus the boys just think food tastes better when it comes off our plates. No, neither of them eat spinach yet. I loved spinach, even as a small girl, and even more the other dark leafy greens, so I’m not worried yet.

*Almost all meat-and-veggie recipes taste better to me if I double the amount of veggies or halve the amount of meat. I’m pretty sure this recipe has already had at least one doubling, which is why it goes in a baking pan with high sides!

Baked garbanzo flour (mixed with olive oil or chicken stock) is a surprisingly good cheese sauce substitute! It even has protein, and a lot less fat than cheese.

I almost called this recipe “Vegan Chicken Florentine” because it is dairy-free and egg-free, but then I remembered the chicken … hehe … oops! But it is GFCF (not that the original had gluten either, but this version is gluten-free and casein-free) so it works around Cale’s allergies.

This is an easy make-ahead recipe: I do all of the steps except baking the chicken (sometimes I butterfly it and try to have the chicken breasts “hug” the spinach, but as I said, we like more spinach than you can even pretend to stuff inside the chicken, so the chicken is a topping on a bed of delicious spinach). I take it over to the in-laws, leave the boys to play (Karston said today that he doesn’t get to visit Opa and Grammy often enough), go to work, and return to a yummy meal that I know is allergy-safe for me and Cale to eat. Making three dinners tonight (chicken soup for Daddy who has the cold that the boys have, chicken stir-fry for me, and chicken florentine for tomorrow) was a challenge, but at least mine was just combining and heating leftovers.

Come to think of it, I guess that chicken soup was da bomb! Daddy went back for seconds, if not thirds, and this cold has removed his appetite (not that he ever had much). Chicken soup with tiny pastina stars made by a food lover is pretty tasty … homemade stock + chicken breast + grated carrot + sliced celery + a handful of frozen peas + a few diced onions from the florentine + a sprinkle of adobo seasoning + pastina added at the end so it doesn’t get over-cooked, boiled until done. Simple, and good enough for someone who’s sick and not hungry to go back for more.

Well, I just tried a Krups coffee grinder to turn flax seeds into flax seed meal, and it works! Fast too! One tablespoon of flax seeds turned into two tablespoons of meal, so that’s an easy conversion to remember. I wish I had thought to use when I mixed the spices (coarse sea salt, dried rosemary from my bush, and coarsely ground black pepper) for my chicken florentine by hand with mortar and pestle. If the Krups can pulverize rosemary too, that would be awesome! I bet it can. I like the flavor of rosemary (in moderation), but I don’t like finding little sticks of rosemary in my food.

At first I tried to use it like my food processor, where five two-second bursts yield better results than one ten-second burst, but since I want the flax seed finely pulverized, the continuous run (instead of short bursts) is more effective. It’s not hard at all to clean with a paper towel either.

I looked at The Post-Punk Kitchen for a butter or margarine to oil conversion (1/2 cup/1 stick of those to 1/3 cup oil). Also, when I use Ener-G Egg Replacer, I use the whisk attachment on my mixer to whip it into a meringue-like froth before using it, and I’ve never noticed the chalk-y taste. Another tip is that chocolate chips don’t “stick” to oil batters, so use fewer than in the chips-laden original. I also replace brown sugar with slightly less white sugar and a dollop of molasses. So here’s what I did:

I either left the cookies in too long (the kids were wild), or I need to drop the temperature to 300 °F for the oil substitution. Or perhaps I should use a combination of apple sauce (to hold moisture) and oil (to transport yummy flavor)? OK, this is still a work in progress, but completely edible as is too. The cookies also wanted to stick to the pan, so I either should have removed them sooner or I should have greased the cookie sheet. But still mighty tasty! These are my favorite cookies …

So I had some Bob’s Red Mill garbanzo flour that includes a recipe for hummus on the back. Starting with finely ground garbanzo flour seems a lot easier than grinding my own chickpeas to the properly smooth texture! I was also tempted by this hummus cracker recipe so something had to happen eventually.

The first time, I scaled down the hummus recipe to make only the 1/2 cup needed for the crackers, and I left out the tahini because I didn’t have (or want!) any. What I learned from this batch of hummus answers one of those little mysteries: why is some hummus so amazingly good, and why does the rest taste horrible like dirt? The answer is that cooked garbanzos are tasty, and raw garbanzos are ick ptooey. Cook the mixture again after adding the garbanzo flour, and it improves greatly!

On to the crackers, first time! I used olive oil instead of canola oil. Even adding extra flour, the crackers still were too wet to roll out, but after baking, the clumps tasted pretty good! Worth making again.

The second time I made 1/2 cup hummus from the Bob’s recipe much as before, except I put all the liquids (lemon juice and texas pete) in the 1/2 cup measuring cup, and topped it off to 1/2 cup total. I also skipped the olive oil in the hummus this time around (it still tasted mostly ok, suggesting I can skip the tahini and cut back on the olive oil, and still get enjoyable lower-fat hummus), and just added the olive oil for the crackers part of the recipe. This time I had crackers that I could roll out to a uniform thinness before baking on a silicon baking sheet.

The report is still yummy crackers, and more cracker-like with the much drier hummus. I’m inspired to try this with refried beans! I had never considered making my own crackers until Cale had allergies to most commercial crackers, but it’s not hard to make these crackers and they taste great! The one drawback (ahem) is that I get some remarkable gas from just two small crackers, so I probably need to cook the garbanzo beans even longer to tone down that effect. Or perhaps this is inherent in the garbanzo flour, although I suspect not since I don’t remember gas from the vegan calzones made with it.

We wanted pancakes this morning, and I’m still searching for the right vegan recipe to avoid Cale’s allergies. I started with the Simple but Perfect Pancake at Recipezaar. To eliminate the eggs, I followed the Post-Punk Kitchen’s advice and used 1/2 cup of banana that had been through the food processor (I was trying to make banana ice cream, but discovered that if the banana has been frozen so long that it has lots of ice crystals, the water prevents the desirable ice creamy texture: so I had leftover, defrosted, maple-extract-spiced banana purée to use up). Instead of milk, I used fruit juice (mango, passionfruit, peach, and pear; cleaning out the frig again). I followed the technique, even to beating the “eggs and milk” with a mixer. The banana and fruit juice, despite not having the protein (and allergen!) content of eggs in milk, did froth up a lot! I used the whisk attachment for my mixer, and that may have helped aerate it. Whatever the reason, frothy fruit or Bakewell Cream, the pancakes turned out great! They were thick, fluffy, light, and only very vaguely possibly fruity. No gooey center (and no crispy edges), either. Yum! I didn’t add fruit chunks this time since I figured I had already pushed my luck enough by replacing all of the protein and most of the liquid with Cale-safe alternatives.

I made a half-batch of Root Beer Pancakes this weekend, with 1/4 cup of mashed banana as the egg substitute. The report is that the griddle needs to be hotter for these pancakes, to get the yummy crispy edges and to avoid a gooey center. Since my root beer was going flat, I added 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder. Cale had to have one as soon as he saw pancakes, and he had to do a lot of blowing. He definitely understands that hot foods need blowing!

This makes a thin batter that needs to be on a hotter griddle than most pancakes. Then it makes somewhat thin pancakes with tasty crispy edges and soft middle. The root beer flavor came through (as did the baking powder, barely), so I need to adjust it for perfection … like maybe using regular beer that isn’t flat so I can skip the baking powder.

I decided to try stevia as a sugar substitue, just to see. I bought a small box of Stevia In The Raw to see how it tasted. The problem with most artificial sweeteners, all except Splenda so far as I know, taste like rotten lemons to me. Not just not sweet, but sour gone bad! Yuck! Well, Stevia in the Raw, and presumably all stevia, hits another one of my taste bud quirks: I strongly dislike the taste of anise, the flavoring of black licorise. We had anise plants when I was growing up (it looks like dill, and like dill, grows like a weed), and even the plant and seeds smelled fake to me. Anise just strikes my tongue as wrong, fake, weird, icky sweet. So if I had read the box that says they’ve removed the licorise aftertaste, I would have known that it’s not possible to remove enough of that aftertaste for me.

Luckily, since I dislike throwing away food, the taste is masked in my granola. I use two packets of Stevia in the Raw instead of six Tablespoons of brown sugar. With the other yummy flavors and three cups of oats, I don’t taste licorise. So I can use it up, and not do that again.

Flour with even higher protein levels than typical bread flour needs more water to make bread. I made chewy bread with this recipe:

1 cup warm water
1 tsp salt
3 cups Sir Lancelot high-gluten flour from King Arthur Flour
2 tsp yeast

I added ingredients in that order, and put it on the Dough cycle. I checked on it after 3 minutes of machine kneading to check the water-flour ratio. Add more water by teaspoons, more flour by tablespoons. (On a dry day, I needed to add 3 tsp water!) When it was done, I started the cycle over again for 10 minutes so that the bread machine did the second kneading also. The flour is that fractious! Form log, slash, bake as usual in french bread pan or on a pizza stone.

I’ve had a bread machine for many years, although I made bread by hand for many more years before that. And, having made bread manually, I have to say that my bread machine is one of my favorite kitchen tools! I know exactly how much time it saves me! I do get better results for knowing how the bread should feel, and I adjust by adding teaspoons of water or tablespoons of flour when I check on it after about 5 minutes of machine mixing. Great results all the time! (I usually pull out the paddle after the last kneading cycle so that it doesn’t tear up my loaf.)

After the initial excitement, I find that I pretty much make only two base recipes in my automatic bread machine (ABM). Although my bread machine makes both 1.5 and 2 pound loaves, my 1.5 loaves usually rise high enough that I’m not sure I should make the 2 pound size. So these are scaled to 1.5 pound recipes!

Plain Bread

1 Tbs olive oil
1 tsp salt
1 1/8 cup warm water
3 cups flour
1 tsp yeast

My usual variation on this recipe is 2 cups of bread flour and 1 cup whole grain whole wheat flour, but I’ll vary it up. If I use less than 1.5 cups of a high-protein flour like bread flour, I add wheat gluten to make sure it holds together like bread instead of cake! If I add raisins at the beep, it becomes raisin bread! When I do that, I often use sweetened water, like water that I’ve used to rinse out that last little bit of honey.

Fancy Bread

1 Tbs canola oil
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup warm liquid (like water)
1/2 cup warm sauce (like applesauce)
3 cups flour
1/3 cup rolled oats
1 tsp yeast

My usual variation on this recipe is, of course, applesauce bread as noted. When I make applesauce bread, I tend to add cinnamon and often something sweet (2 Tbs honey or molasses). This would also be a good base for raisin bread too. But I’ve been “free form” and used thinned barbeque sauce for the liquid and leftover guacamole for the sauce. As long as the combination of liquid and sauce adds up to 1 1/4 cups, I’ve had good results baking with whatever needs to be used up!

Yum yum!

One of those nagging questions is what to feed your baby. If Cale is not getting as much breastmilk as he wants, he bites! Infant formula would be the standard answer, but as you replace breastmilk with formula, the rate of SIDS goes up proportionally. Plus Cale doesn’t like the taste of formula, and even the hydroplyzed formula for multiple allergies causes him a lot of uncomfortable gas (exactly what the hydrolyzed stuff is supposed to avoid). Well, thanks to a recommendation from a co-worker whose kids just a few months older than Cale grew up on this as a supplement, I tried Living Harvest Hempmilk. Cale thinks the taste is fine, he slurps it down, and he doesn’t seem to have any problems with it. Given his suite of allergies and how often something causes him gas, that’s pretty impressive.

One thing that helps is that the Original is lightly sweetened. Most milk replacements, like soy and rice milk, are either sickeningly sweetened too much, or chalky and not sweetened at all. Lightly sweetened is a nice compromise: enough to moderate and improve the flavor (I tried Hemp Dreams and didn’t like it at all), but not so much that I think I’m going into sugar shock.

Standard infant formula has 20 calories per ounce, approximately the same as breast milk. Formula for premature babies contains 22 calories per ounce. For comparison, this hemp milk has just over 16 calories per ounce, so for the newest ones, give as much breast milk as possible. However, especially now that he’s over a year old, I think this stuff and water are the greatest drinks for Cale! He likes both of those too.