Honey-Baked Chicken

Posted on by Erin

Last summer, during our cookbook tour of Nourishing Traditions, I made this recipe which was divine. This dish made me think of the country-cousin to that recipe–a little less refined, less fussy, and more humble. Still, it was delicious. It wasn’t divine, but it was delicious. And it was easy.

I made very few changes to the original recipe. I used grapeseed oil instead of margarine. It would also be delicious with coconut oil, butter, or plain ol’ olive oil.

My oven also tends to run a little hot, so I ended up cooking it for about an hour, a little shy of the recommended hour and 15 minutes. As you can see from the photo, it was beginning to burn.

We served ours up with some rice and steamed broccoli. All tummies at the table were well-pleased and you can bet we’ll be visiting this dish again in our house.

Plan to Eat users, click on the recipe title to import the recipe into your account.

Honey-Baked Chicken

Source: More with Less by Doris Janzen Longacre

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs organic chicken pieces
  • ⅓ cup grapeseed oil or other preferred fat
  • ⅓ cup honey
  • 2 Tbs prepared mustard
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp curry powder

Method

For instructions, see page 180 in More with Less by Doris Janzen Longacre **

** While it’s technically legal to repost recipes, we don’t feel it’s ethical to post copyrighted recipes from the same source for weeks at a time. I’m providing the ingredient list to use in creating a shopping list. We here at the Plan to Eat blog apologize for any inconvenience. If you don’t already own the cookbook, and don’t wish to buy it, most libraries have a copy on their shelves. Thanks for your understanding

Chickpea and Spinach Curry

Posted on by Erin

Whenever I’m looking for new allergen-friendly recipes, I like to search for vegan cookbooks. The recipes are guaranteed to be dairy and egg-free, and many of them will be gluten-free. It gets me a good bit of the way to a doable dish, and the rest I can usually adapt. It’s also an easy thing to add meat back in, if we’re feeling carnivorous.

This is from one of my favorite vegan authors, Isa Chandra Moskowitz. Her recipes are tasty and delicious and uncomplicated.

This dish is in constant rotation in our house. I can almost always pull it together (or a close-enough approximation) from what’s in my pantry. You can substitute other veggies (Green beans are good. So is cauliflower, or zucchini.) If we’re feeling like we need the extra protein, I top the bowls with half of a hard-boiled egg.

I typically use crushed or stewed tomatoes, instead of chopping up whole ones. It just shaves a bit off of the prep-time. Likewise, you could replace the fresh spinach with frozen, chopped spinach, but it really does taste better with fresh spinach.

I’ve made this in the crock pot a few times when my schedule needed me to. It was fine, but I do prefer the flavor from the stove top. The spices are more pronounced and it’s much more flavorful.

The asafoetida powder is optional here because you probably can’t find it at your corner grocer. You’ll find it at your local ethnic market though, and it’ll boost the flavor and authenticity of the dish. It also goes by the name Hing Powder.

Plan to Eat users, click on the recipe title to import it into your account.

Chickpea and Spinach Curry

Source: Vegan with a Vengeance, by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

Ingredients

  • 12 ozs can whole tomatoes in juice
  • 3 tbsps oil
  • 2 tsps black mustard seeds
  • 1 organic oniondiced
  • 4 cloves garlicminced
  • 2 tbsps fresh gingerminced
  • 3 tsps curry powder
  • 2 tsps ground cumin
  • 1 tsp ground coriander
  • ¼ tsp ground cloves
  • ½ tsp ground cinnamon
  • ¼ tsp asafoetida(optional)
  • 3 cardamom pods
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 10 cups fresh organic spinachrinsed and chopped
  • 4 cups chickpeascooked and drained

Method

  1. prepare the tomatoes by removing them from the can, squeezing out the juice, and tearing them into bite size pieces. Place the prepared tomatoes in a bowl and reserve the juice in the can.
  2. Preheat a medium saucepan over moderate heat; pour in the oil and then the mustard seeds. Let the seeds pop for about a minute, then add the onion; turn up the heat to medium-high and saute for 7-10 minutes, until the onion begins to brown. Add garlic and ginger and saute 2 more minutes. Add spices, salt and 1/4 cup of the reserved tomato juic; saute one minute more. Add tomatoes and heat through. Add handfuls of spinach, mixing each addition until wilted. When all the spinach has completely wilted and the mixture is liquid-y, add the chickpeas. Lower the heat, cover and simmer for 10 more minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste, and adjust the spices if necessary. Simmer uncovered for about 10 more minutes, or until a thick, stewlike consistency is achieved.

Getting Cultured

Posted on by Amy @ Progressive Pioneer

Have you tried your hand at culturing dairy yet?  It’s really not as scary as it sounds.  Making my own buttermilk was seriously the easiest thing.  And it was so satisfying to do it myself and feel all self-sufficient and handy.  First I got some starter (you can get it from New England Cheesemaking Supply Co.) and since then have just been using a quarter cup or so of one batch to start the next.  The milk only needs to be in the low seventies to culture.  It’s really simple to just let it sit to warm up to room temperature if you keep the house warm, or warm it over the stove on low, then  mix in some already-cultured buttermilk and let it sit overnight.  The next morning you have delicious fresh buttermilk!  The culture I have must be really strong because the buttermilk comes out quite thick; I love it.  I’ve been using it in pancakes, to soak grains, in macaroni and cheese, and in this delicious Russian soup.  The soup recipe was from Nourishing Traditions.  And it was AMAZING!  We all loved it (even the little ones!) and it was chock full of good healthy enzymes.  It was a base of buttermilk, creme fraiche (both made at home from raw milk), some sauerkraut juice (Bubbies brand, so also with live cultures), fresh cucumbers, cooked shrimp and fresh dill.  I served it cold and it was SO delicious!  It would be a perfect fresh summer treat.  I’ll definitely be coming back to this recipe in the summer when we have cucumbers coming out our ears and the dill is growing waist high in the garden!

If you’re new to culturing buttermilk or yogurt are great places to start!  If you already culture, what are your favorite things to make?  I’ve been wanting to try more fermented drinks and more adventurous veggie cultures!

Recipe Swap Friday–Grain Free Pumpkin Bread

Posted on by Erin

Hi, Friends! So glad you’ve joined us for our Recipe Swap Friday.

For the next few weeks, we’re sharing treats that are just-sweet-enough. Mine will be sweetened with alternative sweeteners (honey, agave nectar, coconut sugar…..) but yours can be any treat that’s not-too-sweet.

Join me? As usual, you can link up to your favorite recipe below, either on your blog or in your Plan to Eat account. If linking up to your Plan to Eat account, just cut and paste the url from the recipe in your recipe book.

This week I’m bringing:

This bread was a winner in lots of ways. Foremost, it is gluten-free, and easily adapted to be dairy free (I used grapeseed oil instead of butter). Second, it has absolutely no sweetener in it. Nada. I was disappointed in this at first, but then realized it was the perfect foil for a smear of pumpkin butter, which made it just delicious.

If I was going to be making this to be served by itself as a treat, I’d consider adding some honey or agave nectar to sweeten it up just a bit. But I loved it just like it was for breakfast.

For those of you who are familiar with such things, this recipe (as written, not with my suggested adaptations) is SCD (and I think GAPS?) compliant.

Plan to Eat users, click on the recipe title to import it into your account.

Pumpkin and Almond Bread

Source: Healing Foods by Sandra Ramacher

Ingredients

  • 4 cups almond flour
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 3 eggs
  • ¼ cup butter, softened
  • 1 cup fresh pumpkin, cooked and mashed
  • ½ cup walnuts, chopped
  • 1 Tbs organic orange rind, grated
  • ½ tsp ground ginger

Method

  1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
  2. Line a 4×8″ loaf tin with parchment paper.
  3. Combine the almond flour with the baking soda and salt. In another bowl whisk the eggs with the butter and add the remaining ingredients. Combine the almond flour with the egg mixture. Pour the dough into the prepared loaf tin and bake for 1 hour, until the top of the loaf feels firm. Remove from the oven and cool completely. Store in the refrigerator.

 

Share Your Just-Sweet-Enough Treat with the Rest of Us

Rules for Sharing:

This is a sharing post. So…please share.

The rules for sharing are simple: If you take a taste (link from this post to your blog) you should share a taste (link from your blog back to this post).

If you’re linking to a recipe in your Plan to Eat account, you don’t need to bother with “sharing a taste”. Just copy and paste the web address for your recipe from your Plan to Eat account.

How to Get Your Dish Onto the Goodie Table:

I really want this to be easy and accessible to everyone, so leave me a comment if you have trouble. I’ll do my best to help you out. It’s a little bit harder than just setting a bowl of veg on the table, but I promise it’s pretty easy. Just click on the link below that says “Click to view/add link” and follow the directions from there.

Pancake Mix (and Pancakes)

Posted on by Erin

Because of all my diet restrictions, breakfast is the one meal that our family simply can’t eat together. For this reason (and because he’s just an all-around great guy) breakfast here is the domain of my Sweetie Pie husband. During the week, he makes oatmeal. But on Saturday morning he cooks up something special (which keeps the kiddos from complaining about oatmeal the rest of the week).

Last weekend I woke up to him whipping up a batch of these guys. The kiddos pronounced them “Yum-o!” And the Sweetie Pie really likes having all the dry ingredients mixed up, which means fewer opportunities for mistakes when trying to follow a recipe at 7:00 on a Saturday morning.

He likes to use our fresh-ground, whole wheat flour and so he used that instead of white flour. I’m sure they would have been “fluffier” with white flour, but our family usually goes for “hearty” over “fluffy”. He also mixed in some apples and raisins and cinnamon into the batter. “You could mix in just about anything!” he says.

For the future, I recommended we leave out the powdered milk and simply use milk instead of water when mixing up the batter. I just don’t trust ingredients that no longer resemble what they once were. Although, if you’re taking this mix camping or to a mission field in darkest Peru then by all means use the powdered milk.

Plan to Eat users, click on the recipe title to import it into your account.

Pancake Mix (and Pancakes)

Source: More with Less by Doris Janzen Longacre

Ingredients

  • MIX
  • 6 cups flour
  • 1 Tbs salt
  • 6 Tbs baking powder
  • 6 Tbs sugar
  • 2 cups powdered milk
  • BATTER
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1 cup water
  • 2 Tbs oil
  • 1½ cups pancake mix

Method

For instructions, see page 73 in More with Less by Doris Janzen Longacre **

** While it’s technically legal to repost recipes, we don’t feel it’s ethical to post copyrighted recipes from the same source for weeks at a time. I’m providing the ingredient list to use in creating a shopping list. We here at the Plan to Eat blog apologize for any inconvenience. If you don’t already own the cookbook, and don’t wish to buy it, most libraries have a copy on their shelves. Thanks for your understanding