Garbage Pail Vegetable Broth

Oh my gosh you guys.  I am SO behind.  I've got 14 recipes ready to be posted (and those are for big people.  I've got three baby recipes ready to go, as well), but I just can't find the time.  First I had strep; then the baby had croup; then I had bronchitis, and then it was the holidays.  There are days when I considered myself lucky to have time to get dressed and even luckier if I managed to take a shower.  At this rate you're going to be getting Fall recipes this Summer!

Here's one that's quick and easy though, and it's REALLY economical.  I've always called the Vegetable Butt Broth, but I figured maybe I should revamp the name if I was going to put it out there on the internet.  I'm not sure that this is any better, actually, but it's far more appetizing than it sounds.

When I clean my vegetables, I never throw away the parts that most people consider garbage.  I keep the celery leaves, the tops of red, yellow, and orange peppers (but never green; I loathe green peppers), carrot peels, potato and sweet potato peels (but sure to clean them very well first), zucchini ends, outter cabbage leaves that are a little wilty, pieces of squash not quite big enough to roast, the ends of tomatoes, the thin outter rings of the onion, and anything else I happen to be using at the time.  I also save vegetables that are about to go bad and won't be used before they turn.  I keep a big bag in the freezer, and just throw all of this stuff in it as I have it.  When the bag is full, I make veggie broth.  This is far more economical than buying pre-made broth; it has far less sodium, and it also costs less than going out to buy veggies to make your own.

Honey Roasted Cinnamon Peanut Butter

My nut butters are usually very simple, one ingredient kinda things.  Generally I use just nuts, either dry roasted or raw, no added salt or sugar or oil of any kind.  It's absolutely amazing this way.  You get the taste of the actual nut without all of the added sodium and fat and calories that really do nothing to enhance the flavor anyway.

Every now and then, though, I like a treat just as much as the next person.  While surfing the web one dreary morning, I came across an ad for Naturally Nutty Honey Roasted Cinnamon Peanut Butter.  It set off an almost immediate craving.  I've never seen Naturally Nutty brand around here in the stores, and ordering it from their website wouldn't have fulfilled my sudden need for instant gratification.  Then there was the whole issue of the fact that I'm ummmm frugal, and I wasn't about to pay five bucks (plus shipping!) for a mere eight ounces of peanut butter.  Hmmmm, a little light bulb went off in my head.  "I'll bet I can make this." I checked my cabinets and was thrilled to discover that I had all the ingredients needed to make this new yummy concoction that I now absolutely had to have!  It was easy as pie, too.  Though I don't know who made up that expression, because I think pie is all kinds of hard.  I've never made a pie crust in my life that was worth eating.  But as usual, I digress, so back to the goodness that is this peanut butter.

How to Make Your Own Nut Butters

Making your own nut butter is far more healthy than than buying the typical jar of Jif at the grocery store, and it's far more economical than buying natural nut butters at health stores, or even at the grocery store if you're lucky enough to have a grocery store that sells natural nut butters.

The Jif website tells me that their peanut butter contains roasted peanuts, sugar, molasses, fully hydrogenated vegetable oils (rapeseed and soybean), mono and diglycerides, and a metric crap-ton of salt.  Nut butters don't need any of that added stuff.  I don't even know what rapeseed oil is, and I have no idea why I'd want to consume anything that provides 150mg of sodium per serving.  The beauty of making it yourself is that you don't have to have any of that extra stuff, and if you want to sweeten it you can pick something way healthier than refined white sugar with which to do it--agave nectar, honey, maple syrup, etc.

Nut butter is fabulously healthy.  It contains fiber and essential fatty acids. It contains good quality, usable protein, without any cholesterol.  Nuts lower the risk of type II diabetes.  There are all kinds of benefits.  If you want to read further on the subject, here is a good place to start.

You can fancy up your nut butters, as well and make gourmet flavors.  Add a couple of tablespoons of cocoa powder to hazelnut butter for home made Nutella.  Add a sprinkle of cinnamon and a splash of vanilla to your almond butter.  Add a drizzle of honey to your sunflower seed butter.  Add a very ripe banana to your peanut butter.  Go where your imagination takes you.  I'm getting ahead of myself here though.  First the how to. 

All you need is a food processor and your nut of choice.  Many sites on the web will tell you that you've got to add oil to make your nut butter creamy, but this simply isn't so.  All it takes is a little bit of patience.  I made peanut butter for this how to.  I generally buy my nuts in bulk and raw.  This saves tons of money.  However, these particular peanuts came dry roasted, unsalted, and in a jar.  They were on sale for far to cheap for me to resist.  You can roast your nuts first, buy them roasted, or make raw nut butters, which are also amazing.  In fact, I prefer my almond butter to be raw.

1.  Put about two cups of your nut of choice in the food processor.  I've used peanuts, sunflower seeds, pecans, almonds, and cashews, and they've all resulted in fabulous nut butters.  My absolute favorite is the sunflower seed.

2.  Turn the food processor on high, and cover your ears, because the beginning of this process is really loud.  The nuts will break down into a flour like consistency.

2.  Turn off the food processor and scrape down the sides.  Depending on the motor strength of your processor, you may want to rest it.  This is where the patience thing comes in.  You don't need to add any oil at all.  You just need to processes and rest, process and rest until the nuts begin to release their own natural oils.  This could take anywhere from a few minutes to 20 of them, depending on the strength of your food processor.

3.  The level of creaminess is personal preference.  The picture below is still a bit too grainy for my tastes.  I like my nut butters to be very smooth.  I also like to process them until they are pretty thin.  In this case, that's because I'm going to use this in Sesame Peanut Noodles.  I also like to process it somewhat thin, because you've got to store it in the refrigerator.  I don't know about you guys, but I don't have the patience to bring something to room temperature before I spread it, so I want it to come out of the fridge already spreadable.

This is still too thick and grainy for me, so I'm going to give it a few more minutes in the food processor.

4.  Once you've reached your desired smoothness and consistency, store in an airtight container in the refrigerator.  It lasts for a couple of weeks, at least.

Now it's getting there.

Perfect!

Enjoy!

Pinch Your Pennies - Home Dehydration

We use a lot of dried fruit around here (apples, bananas, pineapple, mango, guava, pears).  I use it in my oatmeal, in my granola, in my granola bars, just as a snack, etc.  I use a fair amount of dehydrated vegetables, as well (sweet potatoes, zucchini, eggplant, red pepper).  They crisp up into nice "chips" for dipping into hummus or salsa.  It's convenient; it's healthy; it's easy, and it's really quite good for you.

I'll spare you a repeat of my rant on why you shouldn't buy dehydrated fruits in the grocery stores, and just link to it instead.  That way, if you've seen it once, you don't have to see it again.  Along with all of the health reasons you shouldn't buy pre-packaged dehydrated fruits, there's the cost reason as well.  One pound of  banana chips costs $2.70 at my local grocery store.  I can buy 22 pounds of baby bananas at the local Hispanic market for $5.00!  At the same grocery store, a ten ounce bag of dehydrated apple slices costs almost $3.00.  I just paid 59¢ a pound for red delicious apples.  I don't suppose I need to point out that the savings here is HUGE!

You don't need special equipment to dehydrate; you can do it in your oven at a very low temperature.  I even know one guy who dehydrates his fruit in a cardboard box on the dash of his car during the summer months.  I, however, use a simple, no frills, food dehydrator.  It was $40.00 at Target, and it's paid for itself many many times over since I bought it.

The prep can be a tiny bit time consuming, but the end result is more than worth it, and it's not like it's hard or anything.  You just wash up the produce you want to dehydrate, and you cut it into uniform slices.  The thinner they are, the quicker they dehydrate.  If they're thicker, they take longer, but they're also crispier.

My mother-in-law gave me this handy dandy apple slicer and corer gizmo, and it's turned out to be invaluable!  I slice my apples much thinner after the initial cut, but having it already cored is great!

Then you just load up the dehydrator trays and turn it on.  Piece of cake!

In about two days, I'll have a nice big bowlful of dehydrated apple chips.  Then I'll start on the bananas.  I've discovered that there's just no such thing as too many dehydrated banana chips!  Yum.

Store them in an airtight container, and they'll keep pretty much indefinitely.

Pinch Your Pennies - Breakfast Convenience Foods

Greetings!  I'm back after a long and sunny weekend in New York.  There are no recipes today, because I'm in the midst of unpacking, laundry, checkbook balancing, and getting myself organized again.  You know, the normal post travel agenda. 

I do have a penny pinching post, though!  If there's one thing I go out of my way to do, it's save money wherever I can.  Too much goes to waste in this world.  Anyway, I'll be the first to admit that breakfast convenience foods are ... well, convenient.  However, they are generally neither healthy nor are they inexpensive.  For example, at my local grocery, a box of French Toast Sticks costs $6.99, making them $1.09 per serving.  One serving of five pieces, has 330 calories.  I make my own French Toast for a fraction of the cost and about a bazillion times the health.  Mine ends up having 76.5 calories for the same serving size, and the total cost per serving averages out to be 15¢.  That's a savings of 253.5 calories and 94¢ per serving!  That's a big deal, you guys.

You can do this with pancakes and waffles, as well.  Not only are you saving a lot of money, you get to decide what goes into your food.  You can make it completely vegan, low fat, sugar free, organic, etc. etc.  It's all up to you.  You get to decide what kind of bread to use in your French toast, or even make your own bread.  You get to decide what types of flours go into your waffles or pancakes.  Find a hour or so of free time, make up a big batch, freeze it, and then pop the (French toast, waffles, pancakes) into the toaster (just like the expensive, caloric, chemical filled grocery store kind!) for a fast and convenient breakfast.

I recently made two loaves of French Toast.  The total cost for both loaves was $5.68.  That's 40 servings of French Toast sticks for $1.31 less than six and a half servings of the store bought variety.  Mine was sugar free, salt free, and of course chemical and preservative free.  It was not vegan, but the point is that it could have been.  This is what you make it.

I mixed up a big bowl of Egg Beaters, soy milk, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, and I used whole wheat bread.  I staged everything so I'd be ready to go.  I made mine on a griddle, but you can just as easily use a nice skillet.

Next I dipped the bread into the egg mixture and cooked it in batches on the griddle.

No matter what it is that you're making, be sure to cool it COMPLETELY before freezing.  I do this by laying the pieces out on a clean, dry dish cloth.

When it is completely cool, then you can freeze it.  I just put my French toast pieces back into the original bag that the bread came in.  You can store it in Ziploc bags.  You can put it in freezer safe containers.  You can wrap it in waxed paper and tinfoil.

When it's time for breakfast, just pop a couple of pieces into the toaster, and you're all set to enjoy a quick, convenient, low cost, and healthy breakfast!

The Sprout Project

There are about a bazillion reasons to eat sprouts, other than the fact that they taste good.  By sprouting your legumes, seeds, and grains, you make them much easier to digest, and because they are easier to digest, you absorb more nutrients.  Sprouting also ups the nutrient count of your seed (legume, grain) exponentially; sprouts are the most reliable, year round source of vitamin C.  Sprouts continue to gain vitamins AFTER you have "harvested" them.  Sprouts are a living food, and even after you have refrigerated them, they continue to grow, thus their vitamin content continues to increase.

I love sprouts, so I sprout my own.  This is a real money saver, actually.  While sprouts are not exceptionally expensive in the stores, dried seeds/beans/etc., bought in bulk, are even more economical.  They can be used exactly when you need them, and you can make exactly how much you want.  You can also mix and match to end up with a mixture of all your favorites.

I've only been doing this for a couple of months, because I always thought I needed to have fancy sprouting equipment.  I believe I've mentioned before that we operate on a budget, and I couldn't see my way clear to buying specialty equipment just to produce something only I was going to eat anyway.  Then someone told me that I don't need anything special at all.  If I could find a glass jar, some cheese cloth, and a rubber band, I'd be set.  So I made the boys peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch for an entire week so that I could have the jelly jar, and then I started my very first sprouts.  I've been doing it ever since.

How to Sprout at Home:

1.  Fill clean glass jar about 1/3 full of your seeds/beans/legumes of choice.  Don't fill the jar too full.  They'll grow a lot.

2.  Cover seeds with clean cool water.

3.  Cover mouth of jar with cheese cloth and secure with rubber band.

4.  Soak seeds over night.

5.  The next morning, drain water from jar.  The cheese cloth will catch the seeds. 

6.  Fill and drain again.  Make sure to use cold water. Warm or hot water will stop the growing process and kill the sprouts.  Give the jar a few good shakes to remove as much water as possible.  You want your seeds to be damp but not swimming.  Too  much water will make the seeds spoil and rot.

7.  Prop your jar at an angle so that the excess water will continue to drain.  You can prop it against the wall on a saucer, in a bowl, whatever works for you.

8.  Cover jar with a dish towel.

9.  Rinse and drain three times a day.

10.  On the last day, remove the towel and put the jar in a windowsill to green up a bit.

11.  Dump out onto dish towel and gently pat dry before storing in the refrigerator in an airtight container.

Here I have sprouted brown lentils, red lentils, chick peas, mung beans, and quinoa.

The time it takes depends on what you're sprouting, but four or five days is the general rule.  You'll start to see small "tails" form.  When those tails are about an inch or so long, then your sprouts are probably done.  The best way to figure out when they're ready for harvest is to taste them.

You can use them in many different way:  in wraps or on sandwiches instead of lettuce, in tacos, as a salad topping, or as the salad itself.  My husband and I call the mixture above Sprout Salad, and I grow it specifically as a salad.  Sometimes I put it on top of other left over things:  red cabbage, zucchini and tomatoes, spinach, green beans, etc.  If there's nothing left over, I just dump it in a bowl and put some dressing on it.  For dressing I mist it with olive oil and either squeeze the juice of half a lemon over it or add a couple of shakes of balsamic vinegar.  My husband eats his with Italian salad dressing. 

Enjoy!