Food, Booze, & Baggage

Food, Life, Travel

It’s Fruit and Cake

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Does anyone remember the old Fig Newton commercial, “its not a cookie, its fruit and cake”?. Well, this week I made my own “fruit and cake”. P and I have not bought any pre-packaged cookies for almost a year now. As I mentioned in my previous post on cleaner eating…we still consume sugar and flour…so we are not model clean eaters but then again I’m not pretending I am.

Fruit & Cake

This recipe is by Megan Scott and was featured on Food 52, she calls them “Fig Keplers”. I prefer Fruit and Cake…because it makes me laugh. I am not featuring the full recipe because I have no new additions or changes for you from the original. Baking is one of those things I’m not brave (or knowledgeable) enough to ad-lib. So why am I even featuring it? Well, so glad you asked.

Let’s look at the ingredients:

For the cookie dough
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
10 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) butter, softened
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Zest of one orange
For the fig filling
1 pound dried figs, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup water

This is all of the ingredients, 10 whole ingredients and only 2 ingredients make up the filling, and one is water. Let’s compare that to the ones you buy at the store..also they are now apparently only referred to as Newtons. Newtons (the fig variety) has 20 ingredients, 2 of those being natural and artificial flavor (so who knows what that entails). When you make them at home you know exactly what you are consuming and you can easily identify ingredients; the same can not be said for those in the package. So, while we may still be eating sugar or flour we are cutting out the unknowns and extra “filler” and “stabilizing” ingredients. These do not look (especially mine) like the traditional but they taste almost identical. The dough smells exactly how commercial fig newtons smell..I was so shocked when I made it. Would it be easier just to buy at the store?…well duh. But this is the point, would I make these every week…umm NO (it took me three days to make these)….it was work to get the cookies fruit and cake so we are not eating cookies every week because some weeks I’m not going to invest the time. Focusing on real food (whether you are the kale, Paleo, no sugar kind or like me the sugar, flour, meat kind) changes your perspective and your habits.

Here again is the link to the full recipe. It was not really that hard…it is a process though because you need to let the dough chill (I let mine chill for two days)…hence why it took me three days 🙂 My process was no where as nice or neat as the pictures. I was patching holes in my dough logs with pieces from the end, but all turned out well and they stayed together! I also had issues piping out the fig filling so next time I may just spoon it on.

The Rest of the Week:

  • Chicken Pot Pie with Rosemary Biscuits: so good..we are on a cozy meals kick lately. BTW, 3 oz of butter is equal to 6 tablespoons of butter (why it is written like this is beyond me). Also I added celery and used diced yellow onion in place of whole onions.
  • Cabbage Soup: used Coon Rock Farm ground beef (1lb), used a full head of cabbage b/c it was small, threw in the remaining parsnip we had left over, yes we cooked the rice in the soup (not pre-cooked) and used brown rice instead of white, it turned out great.
  • Reuben Grilled Cheese: this is a no meat reuben, and it was awesome. We used locally made sauerkraut.
  • Melina’s Spinach Ravioli w/ Lemon Ricotta (made local) with this sauce: I love ravioli but I found it hard to figure out what sauce to pair with them. If you make a ravioli recipe, please include a suggested sauce..thanks, me!

Clean Eating and What It Means to Me

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Clean Eating

In my very first post, I discussed some of my food philosophies, cutting out processed foods, and shared some resources for going organic, finding farmers markets, and sources of pasture-raised meats. I wanted to share some more about our journey to cleaner eating and some sites I found helpful.

Clean eating can and does mean different things to different people, this is one reason I like to say cleaner eating when I discuss our habits. The focus of our change has/is cutting out processed foods and chemicals. Our journey started out slowly by gradually cutting out processed foods like soda, frozen dinners, and most packaged snacks. Then we moved into buying organic and pasture-raised meats. We still use sugar, flour, buy chips and crackers (but ones with less ingredients), and only half our meat is pasture-raised.

My advice to anyone looking to change their eating habit is to start by cutting out the most obvious processed foods and start cooking. If you think organic is too expensive start cooking real food, and don’t worry as much about organic. See how buying real foods impacts your budget. Make small changes and don’t feel like you have to do it all at once.

If you are worried about your budget make sure you are not wasting food. This a huge focus for me and I’m so proud of our progress in this area. Planning is key to avoiding food waste. I try to find recipes where I can use the same ingredients like herbs or milk in multiple recipes because you generally don’t use up all of these in one meal. We eat leftovers for lunch at least a couple of days a week, this also helps to stretch your food budget and cuts back on waste. Another factor in keeping your food budget low is eating less meat. Pick at least a few vegetarians dishes or use meat as an ingredient as opposed to the main focus.

We shop primarily at Whole Foods, mostly for their selection of organic foods (especially vegetables). We go to the farmers market about every other week (sometimes less sometimes more…winter is less than summer and in summer we might go every weekend). We also utilize a CSA to get pastured-raised meats and sometimes vegetables.

Resources to start your journey:

100 Day of Real Food: this website has pretty much everything. If you have questions about clean eating and budgeting I recommend her 100 Days on a Budget.

The Gracious Pantry: this site has a lot of how-to. Clean Eating 101 is a good start.

 

The Rest of the Week:

This week I do not have very many pins for you. We made chili from leftovers (short ribs, bacon, hamburger-I forgot to freeze) and just made-up the recipe. We went out several times and had eggs and bacon another night. We did cook:

Vegetable Lentil Soup: I made this a month ago but it was worth repeating. It is easy and inexpensive.

Chicken and Dumplings: this is a weekend meal, as it is time-consuming but not that difficult. Make sure to read through the recipe before starting. I did not use sherry, and used 1/4 cup extra of chicken stock to scrape up the brown bits before pouring in the rest of the stock. This turned out excellent and I was pretty happy with it since I had never made dumplings before.

 

Well hello there

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So you either know me or you just happened to stumble across my little space here…either way lucky you, thank you, and welcome:) I have no idea how to start this blog so I’m just diving right in, right here. To learn a bit more about me or my vision for this blog please visit my About page.

LET’S START WITH FOOD: we all have to eat and we all do eat but a million things (tastes, philosophies, attitudes, accessibility, skill, knowledge, location…)  impact the what, why, and way of that simple, or not so simple, task.

Eating is a journey and there are lots of way to look at it.  The below is just my view.

MY FOOD PHILOSOPHIES: I’ve always loved to eat; I love trying new things, and I’m not a picky eater. I really enjoy dining out. I will never give up the eating out part of our lifestyle, however we try to eat at least 3-4 main meals at home a week, pack our lunch/breakfast, and make these meals cleaner.

I say cleaner not necessarily healthier because there is a lot of debate on what is healthy – dairy is deadly, pasta is making you fat, bread is poison, etc, etc. I’m not saying that these are necessarily true or false (though I did make them up), just that it makes my head spin trying to keep up with it all. One thing I can count on is that you are not being harmed by cutting out chemicals. I’m pretty sure you aren’t going to find out you need Yellow 5, propylene oxide, pesticides or any other chemicals in your diet to survive/be healthy. Do your own research and just start somewhere. It doesn’t have to be everything at once. We started with cutting soda out, which felt like a big step towards cleaner. My philosophy on moving towards cleaner is “Is there an alternative with less chemicals and/or less ingredients?” It’s really not going to hurt you to cut out chemicals, so why not just do it?

Our other shift in food philosophy is organic, local, and pasture-raised. I’ve always enjoyed going to the farmers market and buying local but it became more of a focus after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.  I highly recommend this book to really make you think about eating and food. It is not preachy or overly judgmental. It is information laid out to make you think and may make you want to look a little closer at your food choices. Do I still buy meat at the grocery store?  Yes, but not all…and this is a step. I am more aware of where my food is coming from and try to make sure my money is going towards sustainability and local not mass farming.

Helpful Links:

Environmental Working Group

Eat Wild (find farms near you)

Local Harvest (farmers market directory)

Thanks for stopping by 🙂 I  thought a good starting point was to understand a little about my thoughts and where I’m coming from on FOOD…particularly for my future home recipe posts. Eating out is a whole other story 🙂 …or maybe not always. A lot of the time the places we love most are those that source local and focus on more simple preparation…funny how it all lines up.

BTW….I  was having such a hard time thinking about how to start or what to start the blog with. P gave me my inspiration with his text today :”Just wanted to tell you how happy and proud it makes me to have such good homemade food for lunch at work.” Change is so much easier when you have great support 🙂