Tomorrow is my Blogger-versary!!

It fills me with much pride to say that Wednesday is my blogger-versary!! That is right. I have been clacking away at the computer for almost a year now. And since the whole point of this blog was to get off processed foods in a year, let’s ask the most important question of them all, are we off of processed foods?

The answer is yes, and no.

What a cop out, huh?

Let me try to explain. First I will give you a small recap. At this time last year I was a passionate CSA member whose heart thumped loudly when I came too close to a carrot. But behind my veggie fervor, many of our calories came from frozen pizza, chicken nuggets, potato chips, paninis, crackers and cookies, packaged cereals, ice cream….well you get the idea. For as much devotion to vegetables as I spouted, I fell into every food trap there was. I wasn’t paying attention to what I was eating and I was buying separate food for the kids thinking that was all they would eat, I didn’t want to deprive them…insert your best excuse here.

My desire to eliminate processed foods came from the rationale that if I made it myself, that I would make food 10 times more healthy and of better quality than the ‘chefs’ in the food industry were doing for me. Plus I could see to it that no icky chemical preservatives, dyes or other non-food ingredients were allowed to come to the party. Through cooking at home I could better nourish myself and my family. My mission was both nutritional and emotional. I was looking not only for a few good recipes, but really how do I regain control of my kitchen from the money-grabbing executives who had convinced me to fill my shelves with overly pasteurized sugar laden adulterated food!

I made a To-Do list of everything in the house that I wanted to examine. I said I would eliminate foods altogether, or attempt to regularly make them myself in my own kitchen or…learn to make peace with them as is. The worst offenders in the kitchen, the ones that had to be completely eliminated: American cheese, Nutella and ice cream, fishy crackers. These are not simple foods to make. They are complicated and require a lot of work to make them. And they contain a lot of yucky ingredients. Out they went. Though I have found a local ice cream that we like, but with it being so high in sugar, it only makes an appearance every 3-4 months instead of every week like the good ole’ days.

Next was another small group: hot dogs and crackers. Both these items I had originally thought I would just eliminate. But I have since found an excellent grass fed hot dog from Hawthorne Valley Farm, whom I have blogged about before. I have started buying them. But instead of having them twice a week, we have them once every other week or so. I feel good about these hot dogs and the people I am buying them from. Same goes with crackers. I didn’t buy crackers for months until I found Ak-Mak crackers. They taste good, they are organic and they are completely whole wheat. So, they are back in the game.

And then there is pasta. I have made pasta several times. It is easy. Well…relatively. I have the best of intentions but I don’t always get to it. I like my homemade version because it is far higher in protein than store bought. But I do keep a box of store bought around for those nights when my train runs late. Sometimes the best laid plans fail and you have to cook a 5 minute dinner.

There is one item that has stuck around in spite of itself, pretzels. The pretzels I buy are the Utz Organic variety. I believe they are 50% whole wheat and 50% regular white flour (oh for shame). But the kids really love them. And I buy one bag a month. I have no intention of making homemade pretzels (yet). And I am happy with them. I can put it into perspective. I am not trying to win any awards in food perfection, so the pretzels stay. We do not eat enough of them for me to consider them a problem food.

However when I wrote that post I never imagined all the things in my cabinet that were highly processed and potentially problematic that I ended up adding to that list: conventional mayonnaise, soybean and other vegetable oils, bouillon. This year has been about discovery for me. And finding alternatives to some of these foods, especially making my own broths at home, has been a deeply enriching experience.

The To Do List: Pasta

Remember the To-Do List? I bet you don't! I wrote a post about the To-Do List back when I had fewer than 20 RSS subscribers. I might have even written that post before I set up my RSS feed!

I am not sure why it took me so long to try making pasta. I grew up eating only homemade pasta. Every few weeks my father would bust out the pasta machine, roll out long strips of dough and turn flour into a meal. But I have never made pasta at home. I think my hesitance to make pasta at home is because I thought I had to have a pasta maker. I felt that some heavy, silvery set of gears that can be vice gripped to the counter top was integral to the process of making pasta. And indeed it is, for some people. But I have no room for bulky machinery. I barely even use my stand mixer because I don't have enough counter space to keep it out, it must stay locked away in the pantry. Then I read this interesting blog post. And I suddenly realized that one could make pasta at home without another piece of one use wonder equipment! Life has opened up to me!

I quickly emailed my father for his recipe. He said he started with 2 cups of flour and four eggs and about a tablespoon of olive oil. So I started there, with a trusted family recipe. Only I made some slight alterations--because you wouldn't expect anything less from me! No really, it is not that bad this time. I just made it different by using whole wheat flour, something my dad never does. I used 100% white whole wheat flour. I remember watching Mario Batali making pasta, and he always made the flour into a pile, and carved out a well. I cracked my eggs in, one, two and three--whoops! My third egg spilled over the wall of my well an all over my counter. Eggs look so solid when they are cracked into a bowl. But they run like water when they have nothing to contain them. Rats! I scooped the egg back into the messy flour. The recipe called for 4 eggs. But I figured that 3 eggs would just make a slightly smaller batch. Plus I was using extra large eggs. I hate that everything seems bigger than natural in the US (even though I love my country--have I mentioned that?). I never trust foods in bigger forms. But recently I discovered that my recipes were just coming out better when I used extra large eggs. I don't know why, but it works on everything from muffins to custards.

Once I got the egg scooped back into the flour, I added some oil and went to town. You want pasta to have some tooth. So I kneaded the dough to develop the gluten. But pasta dough is not like pizza dough. It is thicker and tougher. I continued to add flour until the dough was no longer sticky. I took my ball of dough and broke it into 4 smaller pieces. And then I rolled each piece out in turn. It took significant upper body strength to get each piece of dough to roll out thin enough. But that works out well for me because I haven't hit a real gym in like 7 or 8 years. And I am looking for some compelling upper body workouts that center around my interests. No pain no gain right??

After I got each sheet rolled out I rolled it into a flat packet. And I used a serrated bread knife to cut the roll-up into thin strips. I first tried just a serrated steak knife--But don't do it. The force is better distributed in a longer serrated knife. My strips were smaller and straighter and overall better looking after I switched.

Then, because I have no pasta rack, I dried the strips on a cutting board. I just let them hang out on the board for a couple hours. But then I got freaked out about the raw eggs even though that seemed counter intuitive, and my father has let every batch of pasta air dry for years and years. And I did get the recipe from him! Oh well. I put all the semi dry noodles into a plastic bag and parked them into the fridge.

Make no mistake. These are not your restaurant angel hair noodles. These noodles are thick and not altogether straight. They are brown from the wheat germ, and they felt heavy and toothy.

We didn't eat them right away. We had other wheat dinners and I have this thing about not eating pasta too often. I try to space it out over the course of a week. And I don't think we have ever had pasta more than twice in one week. Not because I am bragging about that. I am a little nuts about the wheat and grains. But I have to explain why I didn't have this post up sooner! Last week it was imperative that I make my friend D a lasagna because she had a baby. Yay! Congrats! And if you are going to the trouble to make one lasagna, you really ought to make two. So we had already made pasta for dinner on Monday, plus leftovers. It was Friday before I was read to have pasta again. And even that I felt like was too many nights eating pasta for dinner. But I took one for the team.

I usually have some frozen spaghetti sauce put up for a weeknight meal. So I brought out my last batch and took out my homemade pasta. It was ugly stuff. A week of drying out in the fridge took it's toll on my precious strippy strips. Then it hit me. I had no idea how much pasta I had made. I usually buy 12 oz boxes of pasta and I know my family will eat about 8-9 ounces, so not quite one package, two-thirds if I don't want any leftovers. But here I had this ziploc bag of homemade pasta, how much should I make??

I brought out the old Weight Watchers scale and laid a plate on top. I measured out 9 ounces of pasta. Judging by what was left I think I made about 11 or 12 ounces of pasta. 9 ounces didn't look like enough. But scales don't lie.

My pasta looked so ragged and handmade (not in the good way). I was scared that it would crumble and fall apart in the water. Some strips had already broken into shorter pieces as I was drying and bagging them. I threw it in the pot and held my breath. I usually boil pasta for 10-12 minutes. I did the same with these bad boys. They did not break, they lolled gently in the water. I tried one to test it, gave them another 2 minutes and drained. Only because they were so thick, the noodles were rather al dente. Too bad I didn't realize this until after I was eating them at the dinner table covered in sauce. Oh well, better luck next time.

The kids adore pasta. And the transition to whole wheat pasta has been far easier than expected. A year ago I swore that I just couldn't do whole wheat pasta. I had tried it, I hated the flavor AND the texture, and that I could do healthy whole grains everywhere else but pasta. Then when we started the blog I started buying only whole grain pasta. Strangely, no one minded. DH didn't bitch at me about the grainy texture. And while the kids definitely looked at me liked I was keeping a secret from them, they ate it. And now they don't know any different. I was also pleased how well they took the next leap from store bought to homemade. Given the difference in my wild free form pasta from the eggless, perfectly extruded stuff they are used to, I was shocked that everyone cleaned their plate. The pasta was really really good. very tasty. But it was anything but soft.

For next time: I will use a little more olive oil to give the dough some conditioning. I will also try and roll the sheets a little thinner before cutting the strips. That's easier said than done because rolling out the sheets was, like I mentioned, like doing upper body work at the gym, but one must strive for perfection. I will also cut the strips thinner. Because if I can only make the sheets so thin with a rolling pin, I can reduce necessary cooking time by making say, linguine rather than fettuccine or tagliatelle. I don't even know what I did. Some of my strips were tagliatelle, some were like lasagna noodles (just kidding).

I will also try and make this pasta in larger batches. No joke, it was quick. It took me about 45 minutes from when the first pile of flour hit the counter to when I was cleaned up and the noodles were drying. But I don't really want to have to do that every week. Once a month would be more doable on my schedule. Maybe this will be a good opportunity to commit to eating pasta less? I like that my pasta has many eggs in it. So it is higher in protein than the store bought stuff. But it is still a grain based meal, very filling and lower in protein. While we ate alot of pasta last week, we usually have it only once a week. Perhaps now I could try and get down to once every other week? It is a thought. I am not opposed to grains in a general sense. But while I know that they have their place in my diet (I really do feel better and more energetic when I eat some every day), grains like to take over. They can be addictive. I have to keep them in their place, so to speak.

And finally, let me say that I am proud of this experience. While we are getting really comfortable finding what 'real food' options work for us on a busy working parent schedule, I love challenging one more convenience food. I can now take flour and eggs and turn it into pasta. Take THAT food industry. That's one more thing I don't need you for!

This Post is a part of Real Food Wednesdays at Kelly the Kitchen Kop!

The To Do List: Big Brand Name Oat Circles

There is a sunny yellow box inside the homes of countless families' kitchens. There is a single product that is ubiquitous among children of all ages. There is a cereal so friendly it ranks high on the list of 'first foods' for babies without teeth all over the United States.

My brother ate so many of these oat circles growing up that I could hardly stand the smell of them by age 9. When I was a child, sugar cereal was a treat not to be eaten at breakfast. If it was really bad or had marshmallows in it, we could choose to buy it instead of another treat, but it could not be eaten for breakfast. It had to be for an afternoon snack. But we could get non-sugar cereals, and it seemed a popular choice was often the oat circles in the yellow box. But I really didn't like them. So I ate toast or something else.

Then after my kids were born this cereal was everywhere. Now all of a sudden it seemed like it was a household staple. The kids loved them, they made little mess when they feed themselves (Except when you step on them after they have fallen to the floor. I swear half of the dust in my vacuum is cereal dust sucked out of the area rug.), and they were healthy enough to feed to a 7 month old right? What was in it? OATS!! Right? Isn't it oats? I know it doesn't look like oatmeal, but that shouldn't matter.

Then after two years of feeding these brand name oat circles to my kids, I finally picked up the box. This is what it said:

Ingredients: Whole Grain Oats (includes the oat bran), Modified Corn Starch, Sugar, Salt, Tripotassium Phopsphate, Oat Fiber, Wheat Starch. Vitamin E (mixed tocopherols) Added to Preserve Freshness.

There is also a long list of added vitamins and minerals. Aaaaahhhh, enrichment. This enrichment is no different than the flour enrichment I discussed last week.

Now to be fair, this large manufactuerer of brand name cereals puts out alot more dubious products laden with sugar and marketed directly at children. Like I said, my own mother was exasperated by our constant pleas for sugar cereal when my brother and I were children. She put limits on what and how much she would buy and how much we were allowed to eat. This one particular brand of oat circle cereal is not the biggest threat to health out there. It probably does more harm than good when compared to all the highly processed foods heavy with salt and sugar that are so commonplace these days. But still, the long ingredient list surprised me, and one can hardly put it in the whole foods category. So what is all that stuff?

Modified Corn Starch: This additive is a starch derivitive. It is just like a starchy corn flour that the processor adds acids and other chemicals to break down the starches until it becomes almost like a powdered geletin (except it is not animal based geletin at all, it is plant starch based). It's purpose is to act as a thickener or stablizer. I am not a cereal maker, but I would guess it is what helps to keep all that ground up whole wheat oat flour together.

Tripotassium Phosphate: This is a water soluable ionic salt (huh?). It is also used in the food industry as a stabilizer and emulsifier. Oh, and it can be used as a fertilizer (a fertilizer with no nitrogen, but hey when you are eating fertilizer who is counting).

Oat Fiber: Just the germ and bran of the Oat Groat.

Wheat Starch: Exactly like Modified Corn Starch only made from the wheat plant.

Tocopherols: I learned something new recently. I always knew that when you see the word tocopherol you knew they were refering to Vitamin E. Well apparently there are 8 different kinds (read 8 different molecular structures) of vitamin E. Four of these kinds are classified as tocopherols. Beyond that, I guess I just wasn't paying close enough attention in my 11th grade chemistry class. The info is all there, but alot of the true chemistry stuff I just don't get.

By the way--I have been slacking on the bibliography feature of late. All information for today's post came from Wikidepia.org

So what does all this mean? Upon diving deeper, these oat circles probably do more good than harm as I said. They are mostly oats and they are WHOLE oats, which is way better than eating sausage breakfast sandwiches and pop tarts. But, they do contain salt and sugar and the highly processed starches and stabilizers leaving me wanting something better for my family. I love oatmeal the way it is. I was never looking for a shelf stable version of the thing I love. I gave my kids these oat circles because I am like everyone else out there, I never questioned them.

So I have switched to New Morning Oatios. This brand is organic, lists their ingredients online (try looking for the big guys, their nutritional page is empty) and the nutritional profile is largely the same as the big guys. There is slightly more sugar (2g vs 1g--which is almost nothing anyway) but in New Morning's product sugar is not listed as an ingredient which makes me feel better. And they taste more real to me, more grainy like a whole grain product should.

The To Do List: Crackers, Part 2

So the Great Cracker Experiment didn't go as well as planned. Below is the recipe as I found it in allrecipes.com :

Ingredients
1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup water
salt for sprinkling

Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
In a medium bowl, stir together the whole wheat flour, all-purpose flour, and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Pour in the vegetable oil and water; mix until just blended.
On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough as thin as possible - no thicker than 1/8 inch. Place dough on an ungreased baking sheet, and mark squares out with a knife, but don't cut through. Prick each cracker with a fork a few times, and sprinkle with salt.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until crisp and light brown. Baking time may be different depending on how thin your crackers are. When cool, remove from baking sheet, and separate into individual crackers.

The way I made it:

Ingredients
3 1/4 cups of brown flour (or wheat flour that has had about half the germ removed, be sure to let toddler taste the flour)

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup olive oil

1 cup water

salt for sprinkling

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). In a medium bowl, get your not quite three year old to stir together the flour, 3/4 teaspoon salt and the olive oil oil and water; mix until just blended. Close the door to the spice cabinet, take honey away from the toddler (yes, it is a bear!) On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough as thin as possible (Yes honey, mommy's rolling pin is exactly like your play-doh rolling pin!)- no thicker than 1/8 inch. Place dough on an ungreased baking sheet, and mark squares out with a knife (no we don't need the pizza cutter. No baby....please put that down...the pizza cutter is just like a special knife....Hey! That's sharp give it to me, that's ONE.), but don't cut through. Prick each cracker with a fork a few times, and sprinkle with salt. Bake for 20, no 25 minutes in the preheated oven, check and bake another 5 minutes. Take crackers out and let them cool. Then decide that they need more time and return them to the 350 degree oven for another 10 minutes. When cool, remove from baking sheet, and separate into individual crackers.

The crackers were actually quite delicious. Their taste was great, but their texture was horrible, like seriously stale pita bread. But I am undeterred. I will find a good recipe and I will master it. The flavor was good, kind of sweet almost, and I ate some avocado with some of them last night and it was really good. Best of all, Thing 1 was THRILLED to be cooking with mommy and though he spent more time trying to lick the jar of cinnamon or picking up anything that resembled a knife, we both had a good time. And he has asked for these crackers over and over, he eats them and he likes them. I guess you never can tell.

Notes:

Wheat Crackers. http://www.allrecipes.com/ 22 May, 2010.

The To Do List: Crackers, Part 1

Amazingly crackers are one of the more complex processed foods that reside at my home. When I made the To Do List a couple of weeks ago I took a quick inventory of my refrigerator and pantry items to come up with the list of processed foods and crackers were high at the top of the list. We eat them every week. They kind of overlap pretzels, but this post is dedicated solely to crackers. I was surprised by how many ingredients these seemingly simple items contained. My beloved Kashi crackers have an ingredient list a mile long! Mostly because they use seven different grains and they ALL have to be listed separately in every application that they use them. But the crackers that were curtiously baked for me by the little elves that live in that cute tree had all kinds of strange stuff in them.

For starters, the first ingredient, Enriched Flour, had it's own ingredient list! All these vitamins had been added to the flour, which I suppose is not bad, but unnecessary in my mind. They do list the main ingredient as wheat flour, which is not untrue. But with whole wheat flour being such a sought after ingredient these days (at least among my crowd) I can only believe that there is some hope that you, the consumer, won't notice the omission of the word whole.

They also list something that I have started to see alot of places called TBHQ. And I suppose that is an understandable progression. With so many people saying these days, 'don't eat what you can't pronounce', and if you were a food company have an important ingredient called tert-butylhydroquinone you would want to shorten it to TBHQ too. Hey! Anyone can pronounce TBHQ, right? That means you can eat it!

TBHQ is a preservative. Particularly it is a preservative of unsaturated vegetable oils. It is colorless and odorless, which is good because you can't have a preservative screwing up the original product. The whole point is to preserve shelf life. You might think that is a good thing, because when you buy a box you can keep it open and pick at it for as long as you want and the crackers will taste fresh. But I have a feeling that the TBHQ is added so that the mid level distributors can buy it wholesale and leave it on their shelves for a long time until you mosey in to find that special cracker for your dinner party. A product that goes bad is a product that you can't sell and that is a huge problem.

In trying to research what this additive is, I stumbled across a website called www.scienceblogs.com that happened to use a quote from Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. The quote reads as follows:

According to A Consumer's Directory of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (ie-lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food.

I actually found a blog quoting Michael Pollan quoting a different book. How the heck do I notate that?? MLA take me away! The blog continues to say that TBHQ is NOT lighter fluid. However eating it in high doses can make you sick. I am sure that there are no high doses in my elfin baked crackers, and I have full faith that I am not going to get sick from these. However, that is one more mark in the "Throw It Out" column.

Additional suspect ingredients are monocalcium phosphate, high fructose corn syrup (just sugar--people do not be swayed, it is just a highly processed form of sugar!! Don't just look for items that replace the HFCS, look for items that OMIT them) and soy lecithin. Ironically, I took supplements of soy lecithin when I had a clogged milk duct shortly after Thing 2 was born. It cleared me right up. I'll have to do a separate post about that once I figure out what it is!

I have thrown these crackers out. I threw out the Kashi ones too. I actually made my own crackers this weekend. But you are just going to have to check the blog tomorrow morning to find out how they turned out!

Notes:
tert-butylhydroquinone. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. wikipedia.org 25 May, 2010.

Molecule of the Day: TBHQ. Science Blogs. www.scienceblogs.com 27 March, 2007.

The To Do List

It has been a couple weeks now and I have gone through many of my initial personal experiences regarding my family and it's food. But now I think it is time to make a to do list. Kind of like what I'd like to accomplish in the short term and the long term.

I am a consummate list-maker and goal-setter. I am a Gemini which makes me analytical by nature, and planning is completely involved with my list-making neuroses.

My first list (shortly to be available to click on on the side bar of this blog) is of common processed or ready made foods that my family and I normally eat in a given week. This would include:

Breakfast cereals (cheerios, shredded wheat, etc)
Pretzels(we like the Utz whole wheat pretzels--really I like them, I don't think the kids know the delicious white variety that they are missing)
Potato chips (never really met one that I didn't like)
Sometimes salad dressings
American Cheese
Those individually packaged cheese sticks (yuk, Thing 1 likes those)
Hot Dogs
Nutella
Crackers-both the cheesy fish variety and otherwise
Cookies (sometimes!)
Granola bars or other snack bars
Ice Cream
Pasta
Breads

And of course there are the condiments that sit around our house week after week avoiding consumption, things like mustard and ketchup and jams and the like.

If we are seriously considering getting off processed foods. I am going to hit everything on this list and add items to it when I realize that there are others I have forgotten. I would like to end up splitting these items into 1)Finding a non-processed or less processed version 2)Never eating them again because even organic varieties are still processed beyond belief or 3)Making peace and moving on.

If we can make changes to these core foods that we are eating every week, I think we can make some real progress. We might even be able to cut this list in half.