Happy New Year!

Well, it is so late in the new year to be finally posting that!

Why have I been away all this time?  Well, I was busy busy busy sewing up some cool Christmas presents.  :-) Which I will share with you another day, because I don't have the pictures right now!

Remember the last post I made (long ago...) about my new favorite blog?  Well the very next day I found my really new favorite blog.  It's called Cooking Traditional Food.  And I'm in love with it.  Kerry has put together some amazing recipes using ingredients that I use, and has even inspired me to start sprouting wheat again and even start trying to sprout beans!  (no success on that front yet...)

Okay, well the best part of it all is that Kerry offers a menu mailer-- a weekly or monthly mailer with a menu, the recipes, a shopping list for all the ingredients you need that week, and a daily guide for notes to write about what you need to do each day. I was really excited about this, because I was struggling so much for the last few months with figuring out what to eat each day, scrambling to make it, just buying whatever at the store and then making meals out of it later,...

I joined her email list just so I could get two free ones (a 'budget" one that's only three dinners per week and centers on less meat, and a "classic" one that provides five dinners per week and meat as the main course more often).  I used those two mailers to generate a meal plan for the last week and a half before Christmas. That week and a half was so nice!  I knew each day what I was going to cook and I could start it early enough to have dinner at a somewhat reasonable time.  :-) Hooray.

Guess what?!!??

Chris gave me a year subscription to the budget menu mailer for Christmas.  I was/am SO happy!  I have only been using it for a week now, but this week has been so stress free (on the food front-- NOT so much on the children puking front).  I printed out the mailer (the budget one comes once a month) and I put it in a binder to keep in the kitchen/dining room so that I can reference what's for dinner and the recipes easily.  I have been reviewing it each night before I go to bed so I am prepared for what's ahead the next day!  It's been great.  THANKS CHRIS YOU ARE THE BEST!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

I will be posting more soon.  I have to tell you how my couch recovering project went, tell you about my Christmas sewing project, some coconut flour pancakes I came up with for John, the pickles fermenting on my counter, and a whole bunch of other stuff I took pics of long ago and never told you about.

Love, Janet.

Dehydrator Additions

We recently started sprouting our wheat.  Well, we were dehydrating our wheat in the oven, when finally we wised up a bit. 

We have had a dehydrator that we borrowed from my FIL awhile ago.  Chris researched and got some screen off the internet that is food grade and small enough that the wheat won't fall through.  He cut the screen to the size of our dehydrator trays.  Then we also purchased two more trays for the dehydrator.  Now, we can dry 50% more wheat at once in the dehydrator than we could in the oven (because of the two new trays).  We plan to get two more trays (at least) sometime in the future.

Also, my oven doesn't have to be on for 12 hours at a time dehydrating wheat.  Drying wheat in the oven is truly inconvenient if it happens to be during the day because I cannot use my oven all day long, or if I want to, I have to take four full trays of wheat out of it, bake what I need to, put them back in, and often end up staying up late or getting up in the middle of the night to take the wheat out of the oven and turn off the oven.  Or, just leave it on all night unnecessarily. 

Now that our dehydrator is taller, it doesn't fit in its original box.  This weekend, I made it a cute cover.  It's not completely done, as I would like to make it into a bag with handles and a top flap cover and maybe even a zipper (Chris thinks I'm crazy to do this all for a dehydrator) or at least a little velcro.  But, since we aren't done buying trays, and I don't know how many we will have at the end of this (you can use it with up to 12 trays!, and we only have six), for now it just has a cover that slips over the top while I'm not using it.  At least it's sparkle-ey and full of stars!  :-)

I was excited about this sewing project because it was round.  (The first round project I have attempted!)  I measured the circumference and the diameter separately, and didn't do the math to see if they were close to each other, so the top is a little off... but I didn't care enough to take the whole thing out and actually do all that math!  So it will just have to look a little funny on top.  :-)

See the funky fold in the top?

Phytic Acid Article

I discovered this article from Bread Beckers tonight and wanted to share it. 

It really made me think, and while I will continue predominantly sprouting grains as our source of flour, I will not be so harsh on myself if we run out once in awhile, or if I just feel like making oatmeal for breakfast (as you may know, we have an oatmeal obsession in our house!), even though I didn't soak it last night... etc. 

Anyway, I know most of you are not on the soaking/sprouting route right now, but I wanted to share this article.  Until now, my biggest influence in my soaking / sprouting conviction has been Sally Fallon and Nourishing Traditions.  Which I still love and will continue to read and from which continue to glean amazing amounts of wisdom. 

Goodnight for now!  :-)

Sprouted Wheat

Hello again, everyone!  I really do think about you all the time.  Even if it doesn't make it to the interwebs.  :-)

Well, one of my New Year's resolutions is to sprout or soak my grains as much as possible.  Or ferment them, as in sourdough bread.  I wrote a post on this about a year ago, but now I am serious, people.

The above picture is proof.  Look at those cute little wheat berries with little white tails-- those are the sprouts!

While it takes about 36 hours to sprout and 12 hours to dehydrate the grains, I actually spend very little time on this!  I just have to remember to keep up with it.  Here is how it has been going for me so far:

1. Fill a 1/2 gallon jar about 1/3 full of wheat berries.
2. Cover the wheat berries with water (plus about 2-3" above the water)
3. Let the berries soak either overnight or all day.
4. Pour the water off the wheat berries and drain well.  (Get a sprouting lid for your jar so that wheat berries don't go all over your kitchen!)
5. Rinse two or three times a day, and in about 24 hours, the berries will be ready to dehydrate.
6. Pour the berries onto a cookie sheet.
7. Place cookie sheets in the oven and turn it on to the lowest setting.  (Or, put it in your dehydrator and set for no more than 145*-- if you use a dehydrator, you need to get mesh screen to put on the trays, or the wheat berries will fall right through.)
8. Come back to your wheat berries in 12 hours or so and they will be all dried out.
9. Store in an airtight container until you are ready to use it.  :-) 

So there you have it.  I have been constantly sprouting wheat for a couple of weeks now, and not running out of sprouted flour.  Sprouted flour is such a healthy option for my family because the sprouting process wakes up, or unlocks the vitamins and minerals that are stored in the seeds to support a new plant.  Also, sprouting breaks down the phytic acid in the the grain that acts as an inhibitor in your digestive tract, which stops the minerals that are available from being absorbed. 

This is definitely a big step in our healthy eating journey!  And, it doesn't cost me any extra money!  Only a few minutes a day and my family is eating much healthier breads!  Yay!