Healthy Eating…

 

You know, to make up for all the ice cream we’ve been eating! 🙂 Growing up, I was often a little bit annoyed by my mom’s attempts to make our food healthier. It wasn’t until I had kids of my own that I understood. We don’t eat perfectly by any means…pretty badly by some standards. We go through a fair amount of white sugar, eat white flour in quite a few things, and eat quite a bit of red meat. But I do try and serve  a wide variety of fruits and veggies and I attempt to incorporate whole grains as much as possible. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading about soaking  whole  grains. I had heard of this before but had kind of dismissed it as not necessary. But the more I read about it, the more I was convinced that if I was going to go to the trouble of whole grains, I should do all I can to get as much nutrition as possible out of them!

So far I’ve tried oatmeal (a little tart from the yogurt, but great texture and the kids didn’t mind), granola (Not so good….very hard to chew and I’m afraid we like a bit more sweetener in ours), pancakes (good, but I want to use real buttermilk next time), and whole wheat bread (yummy….every bit as good as un-soaked!). I’m really wanting to figure out the granola bit, because I really don’t love oatmeal that much, especially in the summer. But I am so thrilled to have perfect whole wheat bread. The first recipe I tried was okay, but not nearly as good as our normal bread. And some of the loaves I’ve seen pictured on the internet…well….I’m glad they like them, but they looked more like quick bread to me! But these loaves were easy to shape, rose beautifully and are so yummy!

Soaked Whole Wheat Pankcakes (Can’t remember where I got this)
2 Cups Whole Wheat Flour
2 Cups Buttermilk
Stir together and let sit covered overnight.
In the morning add:
2 Tsp Baking Powder
1 Tsp Salt
2 Eggs
6 Tbsp Melted Butter
Cook on griddle or in greased pan.

Here is a link to another granola recipe. I haven’t tried this one yet, but her bread recipe was so good, I have high hopes for it.