Recipe: Healthier Pumpkin Granola

 

Since it is fall I thought I'd share my recipe for pumpkin granola. I make a batch every week and then have it with greek yogurt each morning for breakfast. I typically make "healthy" granola so it is not very sweet. If you like sweeter or richer granola, just up the sweetener and add  more goodies (nuts, dried fruit, etc). It is really customizable so if you don't have all the ingredients, don't sweat it and if you want to add other things in it, go for it. Enjoy!

 Supplies:
2 mixing bowls, one large & 1 medium
2 baking sheets
1 rubber scraper
1 mixing spoon
Measuring cups


Ingredients:
Dry:
6 cups Rolled Oats aka "Old Fashioned Oats"
1/4- 1/2 cup Flax seed (ground)
1/4 cup Wheat Germ
Few shakes of Cinnamon
Dash of Nutmeg
Dash of Ginger
(and other spices to taste)
3/4 - 1 cup Coconut Flakes (or brown sugar, sugar in the raw or other sweetener--adjust amount to taste)

Wet:
1 Can of Libby pumpkin puree or equivalent amount of pureed fresh pumpkin
3/4 cup Applesauce
Squeeze of Honey

Recipe: 
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2. In the large mixing bowl combine the dry ingredients.

3. In the smaller mixing bowl combine the wet ingredients.

 
4. Pour wet ingredients into dry and combine. Mix until the wet ingredients are thoroughly dispersed and most of the flakes are no longer dry looking.

 5. Pour onto the baking sheets and smooth out. This will allow it to cook more evenly.

6. Cook for 30-45 minutes or until the granola reaches the texture you prefer. The shorter time will yield granola that is a little more chewy and the longer will yield crunchy, hard granola.

7. Let cool and then store in an airtight container.

Eating Suggestions:

This tastes great in yogurt, mixed with applesauce, put on top of ice cream or even eaten with milk like cereal.

Shared on Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways #47

Recipe: Easy Roasted Beets

Just took the last of the beets out of the garden yesterday. This got me thinking that we should post about how we usually use them up. Typically we roast them in the oven. There are many ways to roast beets, which seem to be the super food du jour, but as with all things we favor the simple method. This recipe roasts the beets with the skin on and doesn't require par boiling or making foil packets, etc.

Supplies:
Knife and cutting board
Bowl
Spoon
Baking sheet

Ingredients:
Beets (lots or only a few)
Olive oil (or oil of your choice)
*Sea salt

*Optional but gives it a nice flavor

Instructions:
1. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.

2. Take your fresh from the garden (or wherever) beets and cut off the beet greens (but don't throw them out--we'll do a beet green recipe as a future post).

3. Scrub up the beets to get all the dirt off. (If you clean them before you cut off the beet greens be sure not to get the greens too wet; they will last longer in the fridge if they stay dry).

4. After they are all cleaned up cut them into small pieces. The Cylindras (red ones in pic above) we cut into medallions since their shape makes them so easy to cut, but the Goldens we tend to cut into little quarter sections. The smaller the pieces the faster they will cook. 

5. Put your cut up beets into a large bowl and drizzle olive oil over them. Mix with a spoon so each piece is more or less covered and then spread them out onto your baking sheet.  If you are plan to use salt, then take your sea salt grinder and sweep it quickly across your beets now (or just lightly sprinkle by hand).

6. Put sheet in the oven and bake for 30-45 minutes or until you can easily pierce with a fork. If you are only doing a few beets reduce the cooking time and check them often. When you take them out they will look a bit shriveled and reduced in size.

7. Try and get them to the table before you eat them all right off the baking sheet.

Enjoy!

Featured on Gastronomical Sovereignty

 

Featured on Nature's Nurture's Tiny Tip Tuesday.

Also featured on Gnowfglins Simple Lives Thursday. 

How to Make Your Own Chamomile Tea

 As we have chronicled in previous posts, our chamomile did really well this year (until its demise in early June--likely from excessive heat). Now all that is left is to make tea.

Process: Plant some chamomile seeds in the spring. When your plant starts to flower, wait til the leaves are fully extended outward and then go through and hand harvest as many as you need. This step of removing the flower heads is sometimes called "deadheading." (I admit that by the end this year we were harvesting flowers that weren't completely ready but it didn't seem to make a big difference.) You will have to separate the flowers from the stems which can be rather tedious but is no hard to do.

Drying: Spread the flowers out on a foil lined baking sheet and leave it out somewhere with good airflow. Make sure the place you choose isn't too damp or cool.  I just left them on my kitchen table. After about a week they should be dry enough for tea.

Storage and Usage: You can then either store the flowers whole  (recommended) in a glass jar or you can crush them. Storing and brewing them whole or crushing as needed will allow the tea to maintain more of its oils, keeping it fresher longer since the oils in the flowers are released a bit when crushed. (For a greater discussion of size of tea in relation to taste and brewing I found the Harney & Sons site very helpful).

We opted for crushing dried flowers with our finger tips to make a better comparison with commercial bag tea and ended up with enough tea to fill a Ball pint size canning jar all the way to the top. Store in a glass jar with a tight fitting lid and out of direct sunlight, like a pantry. In hindsight (and after reading the Harney & Sons page months later) I regret crushing it and will probably not do so in the future.

When you are ready to use, put the tea in a tea strainer and pour almost boiling water over. Let steep for 2-3 minutes. You can also can put it directly in a cup and brew and then pour it into a strainer over another cup. In retrospect, the latter method would have worked better for us .

Comparison: Here is what our crushed tea looks like:

Here is commercial chamomile--Stash Organic Chamomile brand--(left) compared to our tea (right). You can see that the commercial tea is ground really finely :

and here is my first cup of our chamomile:

Verdict: Our tea smells AMAZING whereas the commercial organic chamomile has barely any scent at all. Likely because it is already crushed AND has been sitting in that little pouch for goodness knows how long. Ours is not as finely ground but even so it was too fine for our IKEA tea diffuser to completely contain it all and little bits of chamomile escaped. It tasted lovely though. Only job now is to find a finer mesh diffuser or remember to do the two cup method.

Hope this is helpful. Please leave any comments you may have as they are always appreciated! :)

Also featured on Simple Lives Thursday.

Making Rhubarb-Apple Jam

Since our rhubarb plant is now 3 years old we are trying to make a concerted effort to actually use it. The first year we didn't take any since we read that you should let it focus on putting out strong roots by not picking any. We could have harvested a ton last year because it was plenty big, and we did take some, but not as much as we could have.

And so, we made jam. I have always wanted to make jam and now we have a reason. We used this recipe from allrecipes ( I say "we" but hubby actually did all the work). The process was very easy and only took the following:

3 cups of diced rhubarb
3 cups of peeled, diced apples (preferably organic)
2 cup of sugar (we used turbinado but you could use white)
1/2 cup of water (although we had extra rhubarb so we added a few more tbsps of water)
1 tbsp of cinnamon
1-2oz pkg of pectin

Cook the rhubarb, apples, sugar, cinnamon and water down for 20 or so minutes. Mash it with a potato masher if it still a bit lumpy. Then throw in the pectin, boil for 5 mins and you're done! We are going to put it in fridge and freezer, so we didn't process it in a water bath but you easily could.

I thought the expense of the pectin would make cooking your own jam somewhat cost prohibitive since it is about $4 a box but look how much this made! The jam itself turned out brown because our rhubarb is the Green Victoria type not the red. Luckily someone else posted about this on allrecipes, so we were prepared for it to be this less-than-appetizing color. Still tastes great...almost like a tangy apple butter. We will definitely make this again; although, this will hold us for a good long while.