Peanut Butter, Brownies, and Pizza...Wholeness. Oh yeah!

I learned two things today. First when I'm not lazy, there are more hours in the day. And second, my food processor is my best friend.

After school, I attacked my planned whole living experiences for the day: homemade peanut butter (I actually made the PB yesterday, but it's easier just to lump it in to today), Rich Peanut Butter Bars (aka, brownies), and whole wheat pizza with "special" sauce.

Homemade Peanut Butter
We have been pretty good about buying "natural" peanut butter over the last couple years; however, those jars of "natural" peanut butter still include a lot of sugar and are still somewhat processed to increase shelf life. So I figured...what do I have to lose giving it a try?

It was SO easy.

I dumped a pound of peanuts into the food processor and turned it on. After the peanuts started to break up, I dribbled a bit of oil over the mixture through the little hole thingy at the top. I let the food processor keep going until the peanuts turned to paste. The kids thought that was pretty cool. Then I dribbled a couple teaspoons of the delicious honey I got at the farm yesterday on to the paste.



That was it. And it's good! Michael even said it tastes better than the "normal" peanut butter. The only one who doesn't like it, surprisingly, is my best eater, Audrey. She's not so fond of the straight peanut taste. But 3 out of 4 ain't bad.

Rich Peanut Butter Bars (aka, Brownies)
I decided I needed to put the homemade peanut butter into some sort of snack for the kids today. I still don't have my honey granules from Bread Beckers, so I went to the Bread Beckers cookbook for help. I have a bucket of Sucanat which came with us from Georgia, so I found a recipe that called for it. Sucanat is evaporated cane juice. Regular Sucanat has a rather strong flavor, so it cannot always be substituted for refined sugar. It can almost always be substituted for brown sugar, however. If you don't have Sucanat, use regular sugar or even light brown sugar.

Anyway, this recipe from the Bread Beckers cookbook already calls for Sucanat, and the end product turns out very brownie-esque...which the kids really liked (with the exception of the Princess who still had an issue with that peanutty peanut butter). They were very quick and easy too!

Rich Peanut Butter Bars
1/2 c. peanut butter
1/2 c. butter
1 1/2 c. Sucanat
2 eggs
1 c. whole wheat flour (I used hard white)
1 1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
1/2 c. cocoa
1 t. vanilla

Melt butter and peanut butter together. Add the remaining ingredients and stir until well blended. Press into a greased 9x13 pan. Bake in preheated 350 oven for 25-30 minutes. Cool and cut into squares.

Pizza
So I got stuck with dinner duty tonight. Ugh! Even though I am only at this time focusing on healthifying snacks, I thought I'd take the challenge and make dinner worth it too. And all I had to work with was some ground beef. So I decided on pizza.

The kids always opt for cheese pizza, sometimes with some kind of meat. They don't opt for pizza with green peppers, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, or onions. So I waited until they went outside to play, and I dumped big hunks of green pepper, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes, and onion into my food processor and pureed it a la Deceptively Delicious style.



I then added tomato sauce (someday I am going to try my hand at making my own tomato sauce) and threw it in a saucepan. I added seasoning, a couple of bay leaves, and some molasses. Molasses takes away some of the acidity of the tomato sauce and enhances the flavors.

OK, so I don't really know if that's what it does, but my mom used to always add it to her sauces. Plus I wanted to sound all Food Network-y. But here is something I do know about molasses (I read it anyway): Blackstrap molasses is the only kind that has any nutritionl value.

Anyway. Then the crust. This recipe comes from Marilyn Moll who owns Urban Homemakers, which is where I purchased my grain mill, Bosch mixer, and other start-up bread making stuff. This is quite possibly the easiest pizza crust I've ever made.

I had a sudden panic attack at 4:00 this afternoon because I hadn't yet looked over the pizza dough recipe, and I worried that I wouldn't have enough time to make it, let it rise, shape it, let it rise again...BUT this dough does not need to rise! Here is the recipe:

Basic Pizza Crust
4 c. whole wheat flour (I used hard white)
1 T. yeast
1 T. olive oil
1 T. honey
1 1/2 t. salt
1 1/2 c. warm water

If you have a pizza stone, preheat it now. If you don't have a pizza stone, get one; pizzas are so much better from a stone! I only have one and need to get another one because 1 pizza doesn't feed all these growing children anymore.

OK, so put the warm water in your mixer bowl and then add the rest of the ingredients (maybe go easy on the flour at first - not all at once). With your dough hook, mix ingredients and add enough flour to make a stiff dough that pulls cleanly from the side of the bowl. Continue to knead with the dough hook for 3-5 minutes until dough is elastic.

Roll out pizza dough on cornmeal and then place on heated stone. Brush with olive oil and prick with a fork. Pre-bake in 400 oven for 5-8 minutes.

Remove and add sauce, toppings, and cheese. Bake about 10-15 minutes.

So why no photos of my masterpiece pizzas? Well, if you know me, you know cooking is really not my thing. My pizzas did not look all that pretty. But they sure tasted good!

back to the Real World

It's over. My Our Christmas vacation is over. Five weeks of baking and sleeping and shopping and playing and partying flew by at a much greater speed than any five school weeks could ever pass by.

Tomorrow begins the last half of the 2009-2010 school year in our home. Which means I can't stay in bed until 9:30 anymore. And our homeland security will reclaim tighter restrictions on video game, computer, and TV use. And a stricter bed time will be enforced. And which also means the children will probably appreciate the resurrection of the Hot Breakfast. Did I mention there will be no more sleeping in 'til 9:30 for me?

Speaking of breakfast and the kitchen and all...I've been perusing Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious again. I pureed some carrots the other day. Mark hid some of them in the burgers he made for dinner yesterday. The others went into the mac and cheese this evening. Boxed macaroni and cheese because that is the children's preference. Which makes hiding those carrots in there all the more important. I feel empowered.

They need the energy from the carrots because I have a very full, busy day planned for tomorrow. It's been great having 5 weeks to plan the last half of the year. One thing I've been working on is organizing our own little Keepers of the Faith Club. If you're not familiar with it, it's sort of like Boy/Girl Scouts for lazy people. And, no, you would never find that description on their website. It's just that I am lazy and do not want to have to take the children out anywhere for Scouts. So we're going to just do our own little club whenever we want, wherever we want. The kids still learn stuff (hopefully) and earn badges.

My plans are ambitious for the last half of this year. Here's hoping the kids rise to the challenge. Don't bother me at 6:30 tomorrow morning; I'll be pressing my snooze button.

A Successful Failure

I suspect every teenager does it; in fact, I'm sure I started as a pre-teen. I'm referring, of course, to that mental file we make called "What I Will Never Do As a Parent." I'm sure my kids have already started theirs.

I was a picky eater growing up, but my parents were of the thought that if they forced me to gag raw, slimy tomatoes and mushy avocado down enough times, I would grow fond of them. Consequently, number one on my mental list was I will not force my children to eat food they do not like.

The people who ran my boarding school were of the same thought as my parents. I remember sitting at lunch faced with a "dessert plate" which contained slices of papaya and wedges of lemon to squeeze on to the papaya. I opted for a wedge of lemon because, surely if I had let a piece of papaya touch my lips, I know I would have lost my lunch. The oatmeal was the worst. It sat in the bottom of the bowl, a sad, lumpy, cold pile of gray mush. No one liked it. Stevie Pittman didn't like it either, but at least he didn't gag when he tried to eat it, so I paid him my allowance every week to eat mine on the three days it was served to us. I still to this day cannot eat oatmeal; even the smell of American oatmeal triggers a gag reflex.

I think it goes without saying that I have a few issues. And I think it goes without saying that I had good intentions adding I will not force my children to eat food they do not like to my mental list.

However. Now I'm actually a parent. And while I still share great empathy with my picky children's food aversions, I have this strange desire to see them grow up healthy. I know it's partially my fault. My oldest would eat ANYTHING until one day at the ripe age of 18 months, she decided she DIDN'T want to eat anything. And, rather than still placing her old faves in front of her, I pulled from my mental file and did what came naturally: "Oh, you don't like that anymore? Well, you don't have to eat it."

So now here we are eight years later. She is by far the pickiest of the bunch. Her willingness to try new things has improved, but there still isn't a vegetable or fruit she'll touch with a 10-foot pole. Until tonight. Only she doesn't know it.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, I purchased this book called Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld (yes, Jerry's wife). I have been poring over this book since I purchased it, plotting my best deception. The strategy behind each recipe is to hide veggie and fruit purees in kid-friendly recipes (think avocado puree in brownies, cauliflower puree in scrambled eggs). Of course, the book has its critics. Some say you shouldn't hide fruits and veggies because then when the kids become adults they will turn their noses up at strawberries, carrots, and broccoli. You know what? My children already do that. I decided I'm going to deal with today and deal with my grown up kids when they're grown up. The goal right now is to get them to grown-up. And in as healthy a fashion as possible.

So tonight I finally stopped my plotting and decided to dive in. In the interest of being honest, I suppose I should divulge a little secret to all of you people who have this false impression that I'm some sort of Super Mom: I don't cook. I don't like to cook. I like to bake, but unfortunately, man does not live by cake and cookies alone. When TravelDaddy is home, he does all the cooking; he loves it, by the way, and is right up there with Emeril and Bobby Flay. He often even overcooks so we'll have leftovers while he's gone. And, really, I do some cooking while he's gone, but I always stick to what I know: spaghetti, tacos, and waffles for dinner, that kind of stuff.

Anyway, the recipe I chose for tonight was for chicken nuggets. And, just to make it seem like McDonald's around here, I made french fries: regular for the kids, sweet potato fries for me (and for them to try). (All we needed for the full McDonald's experience was a cheap toy and bad service.) Unfortunately and in my opinion, the nuggets were disastrous. According to the recipe, I was to dip the chicken in a mixture of raw egg and spinach puree. I was then to dip them in the bread/flax mixture, thus HIDING the spinach. The bread mixture (which was homemade bread and fresh ground flax: score 1 for healthy!) did not hide a thing. So I muttered a few unsavory words in my head but continued the cooking, all the while mentally (my brain is busy, I tell ya!) reviewing the contents of the pantry and fridge to decide what I'd feed the kids once they got a look of the green nuggets.

Everything was finally cooked an hour later than we usually eat dinner. Because my non-cooking cooking takes a lot of time. Thankfully, the later hour meant there was little light in the kitchen, and I decided not to turn the lights on at all. I fake cheerfully set their plates in front of them and was, of course, met by "What is that green stuff?" And here is where I told a little white lie. Just a tiny one, which I know, according to what I've been preaching to my VBS kids all week is just as bad as a big one. But, really, it couldn't be helped; the health of my precious children is at stake. "Oh, that green stuff," I said dismissively, "that's just spice. It makes the chicken taste better. Like salt. Salt's a spice. You guys love salt."

And the verdict? Well...I was finally able to convince Jacob to eat one piece. But the others? They wolfed it down, especially Alex who claimed it was "delicious" and kept getting up to get more. I wonder what she'd say if I told her? I don't plan to, of course, because that would raise high suspicions about all future dishes...and tonight I plan to make peanut butter and banana muffins with cauliflower puree. Shhhhh!!