Category Archives: health

desserts, health, scratch cooking, Uncategorized

Brown sugar

Leave a comment

All commercial brown sugar is is molasses and sugar. If you ever need brown sugar and you normally purchase it, that’s good to know. If you have molasses.

Me, I would rather have sugar and molasses on hand and just use that. But those days you want brown sugar straight, it’s nice to have it on hand.

But I can’t bring myself to purchase it. We buy molasses by the gallon and sugar in 25# boxes. So, I have started to simply make some in advance.

Since I recently learned that not everyone knows this, here’s a how to.

I am going to start with 6 cups of sugar. No reason. I have my two cup measure out, so that’s where I am. Now, I know I am lucky to have have a kitchen aid, and not everyone does. It is 30 years old, though. if you can find one, please consider it. This is still possible, just not as easy.

I love playing with molasses. It’s a cool non Newtonian fluid!

I can’t say it’s my favorite, because whipped cream, ketchup, and nail polish are all up there.

Anyway, that’s 2 tablespoons of molasses to six cups of sugar, or 1 teaspoon per cup. Let the mixer work for 6 minutes and viola! Brown sugar! Want it darker, add more. Lighter? Add less. Baking cookies? Remember 1cup + 1tsp to simply add while creaming. And you never need to rely on commercial brown sugar again.

Eggs, Food, health, pulses, weight loss, weight loss

Make Your Own Beans or Ful Medames

Leave a comment

This morning I stepped on the scale and the number had gone up instead of down or staying in place. I had had nothing planned for dinner tonight (late on menu planning) so I have decided to make what our son lovingly called ‘make your own beans’ when he was a toddler. It’s basically an ancient recipe and possibly one if the oldest street foods, so I have been told. All it is is beans, cooked, served with seasonings- traditionally salt, olive oil, garlic and pepper.

Variations include cooking eggs in their shells with the beans and adding onion skins or coffee to the cooking liquor. We’ve decided that coffee makes the best ful for us, so that’s what I now use. 🙂 I also prefer darker beans for this recipe, as it’s dependent on the beans for flavor.

So I am going to start with three cups of these dark red beans (about a pound) in the pressure cooker. This would feed four people, if they like beans.

Then I nestle six eggs in the beans.

And then I add about a cup of brewed coffee and a quart of water. If I were using anything other than my Instant Pot, I would add more water and watch it more. I have made this in the slow cooker, on the range and in the oven. I have not yet tried it in the ashes of a campfire, but I really want to. 🙂

And that is it. Cool until the beans are done. I have all day and the pot will take under an hour. Other cooking versions take different times. The next step will come at serving, so by the magic of the internet…

Here are the beans, done and able to be crushed by the back of a spoon.

They will sit like that until serving time. Which is now. 🙂 We have sourdough bread, salt, oil, pepper and fresh garlic.

You can mash it together and serve like hummus. Make it into a wrap. Serve as a side dish. Skip the egg. Add tomato, chili, parsley, any seasoning you want. It’s a simple, healthy, filling meal that should be on rotation in any home that loves pulses.

Food, health, pulses

WHO is saying to eat pulses?

Leave a comment

I’m so sorry. I will try to avoid that in the future. But yes, the WHO, the US and Canada are all pushing to eat more pulses. The UN actually made 2016 the ‘Year of the Pulse’ to try and get more people to eat them.

Yes, another post about how important it is to get more pulses into your diet. Because it simply can’t be emphasized enough that pulses are cheap, so affordable to everyone around the world, not just to trim a food budget; highly nutritious, so they can reduce malnutrition in poverty stricken countries, and add nutrition to the food rich but nutrition poor diets of many western countries; healthy, for digestive systems, hearts, blood sugar levels, cholesterol levels, and many other lifestyle issues; good for the environment, because pulses add to the biodiversity of the soil they are grown in, contributing to healthier soil a healthier environment, and reducing the need for fertilizer; and good for the environment because they mitigate climate change and put less waste into our environment.

There are simply no reasons to not add pulses to your diet, or replace some proteins in your diet with them and many many reasons to do it. Of course, this is assuming you do not have one of the rare problems where you simply cannot digest pulses.

So you are sold, and you want to add more pulses to your diet? You are in luck, because one thing I have is a wide range of pulse meals to share.