Hot & Smoky Barbecue Sauce

I like a blob of sauce on the side of my plate as much as the next girl.  What I don’t like is all the rubbish that goes into commercial sauces.  For example, this is the ingredient list for a supermarket own brand barbecue sauce:

Tomato Puree,Glucose-Fructose Syrup ,Spirit Vinegar ,Black Treacle ,Dijon Mustard ,Soy Sauce ,Modified Maize Starch ,Roasted Barley Malt Extract ,Spices ,Flavouring ,Salt ,Onion Powder ,Garlic Powder , Sweetener (Sucralose) ,Celery Extract. ,Dijon Mustard contains ,Water ,Mustard Seed ,Spirit Vinegar ,Salt. ,Soy Sauce contains ,Water ,Soya Bean ,Wheat ,Salt.

Hmmm, so the second ingredient is glucose-fructose syrup (otherwise known as high fructose corn syrup – worse for you than sugar).  Yuck.   Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough there’s another delicious toxin, masquerading as a sweetener – sucralose (otherwise known as Splenda).   Not exactly the sort of thing I want to eat, and especially not something I want to feed my children.

So, what’s a girl to do?  Why – make my own barbecue sauce, of course!  Life may be too short to stuff a mushroom, but it’s not too short to rustle up some barbecue sauce to go with your home made burgers.  It’s easy peasy.   Here’s how:

Take these ingredients:

150ml tomato puree

150ml organic cider vinegar

125ml honey

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped or crushed

1/2 tsp hot smoked paprika (if you only have regular paprika, use this but add some chilli powder too, for a bit more kick)

salt (I like my pink Himalayan salt)

pepper

Plop your ingredients in the saucepan.  Stir.  Bring to the boil then simmer for 5 minutes.  Serve.  Yep, that’s it!  Told you it was easy peasy.

Use some straight away and chill some down for the rest of the week.  As you can see from the pic, I served mine with burgers and roasted veg, then we had it again later in the week as a dip, and also as a topping for pizza.  Yum yum.

I am sharing this post as part of Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s Real Food Wednesday.

Creamy Coconut Soaked Porridge

Today I am going to share a recipe for my new favourite breakfast.  Since reading Nourishing Traditions, I am trying to ensure that the grains we eat are properly prepared – by soaking, sprouting or fermenting (for a good article on the whys and wherefores go here).  The easiest thing to start with was breakfast, and this is our favourite take on porridge:

CREAMY COCONUT SOAKED PORRIDGE (Serves 3-4)

The night before:

Soak 1 cup of rolled oats (we use Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Rolled Oats) in 1 cup of warm filtered water with 2tbsp yogurt or whey added (for dairy free folk, you could use lemon juice, but I haven’t tried this so don’t know if it tastes good!)

In the morning:

Bring 1 cup of full fat coconut milk to the boil, then add your soaked oats with their liquid.

Simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until thick and creamy.

Because I am such a coconut fiend, I like to serve mine with a big dollop of chilled coconut cream, and maybe a drizzle of honey too.  Yum yum!

Apologies for the rubbish picture – the natural daylight at 8am in England in March is not the best

Linking up with Fat Tuesday

Book Review – The Obesity Epidemic

This may seem a strange book for me to be reading and reviewing…I am not obese (or overweight), never have been and in all likelihood, never will be. Until recently, I was one of the many people who thought overweight people were either eating too much and/or exercising too little. But then I discovered the real food movement, via books like Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, and started to get a lot more interested in nutrition and health. I discovered Zoe Harcombe’s website by accident but decided that this book deserved a read. I am so glad I read it, because it is absolutely brilliant.

If like many people (including, sadly, governments and nutritionists involved in giving out advice on healthy eating) you think that a healthy diet is one low in calories, low in fat and with plenty of starchy carbohydrates then you need to read this book at once! Harcombe systematically dismantles the myths surrounding these “facts” about diet. For example, did you know that there has never been a study that conclusively showed an association (nevermind causation!) between high saturated fat intake and heart disease? According to our own Food Standards Agency in 2009 “The ideal controlled dietary trial for prevention of heart disease has not yet been done and it is unlikely ever to be done“.

Did you think that there were studies showing the benefits of eating plenty of carbohydrate? Erm, no, it’s just that if you tell people they need to eat less fat, then they need to eat something. Protein containing foods usually contain fat, so it has to be carbohydrates then.

In this book Harcombe systematically dismantles these and many other myths that have built up around diet. Myths that are perpetuated by our governments with their food pyramids and eat well plates. She does an excellent job of making this an entertaining and often amusing read, possessing as she does what could well be described as an acerbic wit, but after reading this book I have come away feeling somewhat angry and annoyed at the years of lies and mistruths I, and lots of other people interested in food and health, have been told.

So, what is the solution to the Obesity Epidemic? Harcombe suggests replacing current dietary advice with the simple advice to “Eat Naturally; Move Naturally“. She also gives advice on how this campaign might be put into practice. I would like to be hopeful about this but when you look, for example, at the website of the British Nutrition Foundation and see that their members include companies such as British Sugar, McDonalds and Birds Eye I don’t  think that’s gonna happen, do you?

In the meantime, I shall be harping on to whoever will listen about this book and about the Weston A Price Foundation, and maybe start removing dietary advice literature from the doctors surgery and replacing them with WAPF leaflets…waddya reckon?!

I’ll end this post with Zoe Harcombe’s TV trailer about the book and suggest that you hop on over to her website, download her “20 Diet Myths” ebook, then treat yourself to some eggs, butter and real meat

Linking up this post to Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday. 

I *am* still sewing (a bit)

Readers who have followed me over from my old sewing blog are probably wondering where all the sewing has gone!

So, just to prove that I haven’t abandoned the needle altogether, here’s some evidence:

These are regular nine patches waiting to be sliced up and spun around and turned into disappearing nine patch blocks like these:

I know, it’s not a lot, but still!!

I think I only have so much creative energy, and just lately that energy has been directed towards food – like making homemade beefstock:

Yummy.

And learning about nutrition with the boys, who have done a couple more months on their produce calendars. Waif’s:

Gman’s:

I am sure my sewing flame will be re-ignited soon and I will have some exciting projects to share

Raising Renegade Kids

One of the advantages of homeschooling is that you can make sure your kids get an education in the things that really matter. And what could matter more than food? We very rarely use purchased curricula in our homeschooling, preferring a more fluid approach, but have made an exception for Food Renegade’s Real Food Nutrition for Kids. We are working our way through the chapters, doing the activities and making lapbooks presenting the information. Here’s the boys puzzling over what is real food and what is fake food:

We are now up to the chapter on produce and the boys have been really inspired by learning about what fruits and vegetables are in season. With a bit of help from this website, they have put together a chart of what’s in season when (in the UK). Then we discovered some unused blank 2012 calendars, and so they decided to use this information to make pictures to go with each month. Even though it is already February, they were keen to include January! They have completed the first three months and will continue with the others over the next few days. Here are illustrations from Waif (just turned 7):

And Gman (just turned 12):

And we all enjoyed watching the Way of the Vegetable Assassin:

This post has been submitted to Food Renegades Fight Back Friday

A Cultured Home?

In her introduction to Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation, Sally Fallon says:

“The science and art of fermentation is, in fact, the basis of human culture: without culturing there is no culture.”

As a home-educating parent, I think it’s important to ensure the boys are exposed to culture in the form of theatre, literature, music…so why not cultured foods?

Having been dairy free for a few years, we have recently started eating small amounts of cultured dairy products in the form of goats’ milk butter and yogurt made from goats’ or sheep’s milk. So far, there don’t seem to have been any untoward effects! As we were getting through so much yogurt and we all like it, I decided to invest in a yogurt maker. I chose this one from Lakeland:

My first batch has been a success, with Waif declaring it “the best yogurt ever” . I used a commercial sheeps milk yogurt as the starter, together with some fresh whole goats milk. It is certainly runnier than bought yogurt but has a lovely mild flavour. Here’s what it looks like:

Yum!

In addition to the yogurt making, I decided to have a go at making water kefir. I ordered my grains from Kefir Heaven and they arrived yesterday. They are currently in their jar with sugar, raisins and lemon – but I need to wait until at least tomorrow (Sunday) to taste it:

One of the reasons I wanted to try the water kefir was that gluten free sourdough expert Sharon Kane uses it for the recipes in her book, and this is something I am keen to have a go at. Watch this space for a kefir update!

I am linking this post to Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday

Nourishing Books and Foods

Check out my new books!! I had some money given to me for my birthday this month, and this is what I chose to buy. All three books are excellent, but I particularly love Nourishing Traditions. Yes, it does live up to the hype! It is a wonderful mixture of information, recipes, history, and general instruction. Definitely a book to be treasured.

The Gut and Psychology Syndrome book certainly sheds a lot of light on some of the digestive difficulties that many children with autistic spectrum disorders (amongst other things) suffer from. Although I don’t think Gman’s symptoms warrant the strictness of this diet, it has certainly given us a lot to think about with regards to reducing our intake of grains and other starchy carbohydrates together with increasing the amounts of healthy fats and probiotic foods we eat.

Full Moon Feast I haven’t looked at in depth yet, but looks to be fascinating reading with some super recipes. I will report back when I’ve read more of it!

This weekend, we paid our first visit to a farmer’s market not too far from home – on the Sandringham Estate. It was well worth the trip! We came back with venison mince and burgers, pheasant breast and fresh prawns.

In case you think it’s all about the meat , I did get armfuls of veggies as well, including some magnificent red curly kale:

Kale has been quite a revelation to me since getting my Excalibur dehydrator. It makes the most wonderful snack food – tossed in a mixture of olive oil, honey and chilli then dehydrated until it’s crispy. Nomnomnom.

In other food news, I had my first go at making stock this weekend, something emphasised as important in both the GAPS and Nourishing Traditions book. For some reason, I’d always thought making stock was way beyond my skill set, but it was EASY and so worth it. Yesterday I used the stock in a scrumptious home made venison chilli, and today used it to make gravy. And there’s more left to use tomorrow and more in the freezer! And basically all I had to do was cover a chicken with water, throw in a few chopped veg and a little cider vinegar and simmer it for hours – which of course filled the house with delicious aromas – wonderful

I am linking this post up to Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s Real Food Wednesday and Food Renegades Fight Back Friday.

Thinking About Family Nourishment

Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the best way of feeding my family. As some of you many know, Gman (my eldest son) has a dx of Asperger’s Syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder. Since his diagnosis over three years’ ago, he has been following a gluten free casein free diet (and as we all eat all our meals together, the whole family has too, more or less). Without a doubt, Gman’s symptoms have improved on this diet. However, I am concerned that gfcf may not tell the whole story, and that we still have a lot to learn about what constitutes a healthy diet. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of a food item “it’s gluten and dairy free so it must be ok” no matter what it is. At the end of the day, highly processed crap is highly processed crap whether or not it’s gluten and dairy free. How much processing does an essentially indigestable bean have to go through to make it look like something resembling cheese spread? How many items on this ingredient list do you stock in your pantry?

Water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, isolated soy protein, corn sweeteners, tofu, non dairy lactic acid, sugar, stabiliser (carob bean, guar and carrageenan gums), spices, garlic, parsley, salt, vegetable mono and diglycerides, preservative (potassium sorbate).

Not too many,huh?

This is not real food and to me, that’s a problem. As Michael Pollan puts it “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”.

A combination of reading “Wild Fermentation” and stumbling upon fabulous sites such as Food Renegades, Real Food Forager and Our Nourishing Roots, I have discovered a whole host of reasons to make eating real food a top priority.

As a family, we already eat a wide range of foods including fruit, veg, meat and eggs, but I realise that we have a long way to go in eliminating processed rubbish. So, here’s where I am going to start:

1. Cut down on, and eventually eliminate altogether, soya products (read this article for compelling reasons why)
2. Start eating lacto-fermented vegetables (starting with sour beets – blogged about here)
3. Reduce the number of processed gfcf foods we buy and eat

I think this whole philosophy can be nicely summed up by Michael Pollan (again), with this rule from his book “Food Rules”:

“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

I am linking this post up with Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday – check it out!