Recipes « (y)our food choices™

Crispy, crunchy Green Things.

If you need a quick, healthy, and delicious snack that will satisfy the pickiest eaters in your household, it’s time to try green things. You’re probably thinking: what are green things? We’re referring to leafy green vegetables, like kale and collard greens, slowly dehydrated in the oven with a little olive oil and salt. These crunchy veggies offer a fun way to eat your greens. If you haven’t had leafy green chips before, this is a must try. The leaves dry out in the oven and become brittle and crunchy instead of chewy and tough. With the addition of a little salt and smoky paprika, the flavors deepen, tasting like the delicate leaves have been slow roasted.

In addition to our oven toasted “chips,” we’ve recently rediscovered an all-time favorite American snack-food: popcorn. In spite of all the kernels that have been popped over the years, it’s one of those snacks that we haven’t embraced, until now. The air popcorn maker we own is a super cheap one that we bought for the purpose of popping corn that we then used as packing material (just another one of our dirty hippie tricks). Cheap works for popcorn poppers, and if you prefer to pop in oil, a pan and a little oil on the stovetop works well and costs pennies.

In the last couple of months, we have pulled out the air popper and started trying out a variety of flavors and spices on our popcorn. A little olive oil, salt and pepper is delicious. Add a bit of freshly grated Parmigiano cheese, even better. We’ve even had the occasional sweet tooth that requires something a bit more decadent than salt. Jason recently made a nice maple crunch popcorn that we couldn’t stop eating. Our favorite flavor, so far, comes as a result of an experiment with the green things described above, crumbled and added to a bowl of fresh popcorn. The result is a wonderful, complexly flavored crunchy snack that is packed with nutrients.

Green Thing Chips

Bunch of Kale, Collard, Chard (or any other leafy vegetable)
Drizzle of olive oil
Sprinkle of smoked paprika
Salt

Preheat oven to 250 – 275 degrees. Wash the greens and remove the stem. Spin the greens dry in a lettuce spinner. Lay the greens out on a baking sheet, or two, trying not to overlap the greens. Drizzle a little olive oil over the greens and toss with your hands. Sprinkle salt and paprika and bake for about 12-15 minutes, checking and rotating the pans every 5 minutes. Pull out of the oven and eat as chips or toss the chips in a bowl with air popped popcorn.

More fun than a science experiment.

Whenever we travel back to visit our parents (Jason’s parents live in Utah and Steve’s are in Idaho) we end up at the grocery store in the dairy section looking for yogurt. With all the chips, dips, meats, sweets, and other bad-for-you foods that our parents serve us, our bodies get out of whack and in desperate need of repair. Yogurt, with its restorative probiotic cultures, seems to be just what the doctor ordered. But the problem we face is that the yogurt we find at the grocery stores outside our fair city is always crap. Sugary sweet concoctions with high fructose corn syrup as a main ingredient and low-fat or non-fat milk seem to be the only options available. It’s a tremor to the head, as Steve’s grandmother would say, that with all the obese people walking through the aisles with bags of processed “food” that they continue to think of yogurt as a diet food and something that needs to be free of fat to be good for you. And since there’s little or no fat to nourish and to satisfy hunger, manufacturers add lots of sugar to make the mess palatable. Why not just eat a little whole milk yogurt with fresh fruit or a nice drizzle of honey?

Plain, not boring. Homemade yogurt is rich and tangy.

Back in San Francisco we don’t have problems finding real yogurt. In fact, we have aisles of choices that may include the fat free and low fat options, but there are also real, organic whole milk yogurts, including increasingly popular creamy Greek yogurts, that are much tastier and keep the belly fuller longer. The problem with the “diet” versions is their lack of hunger busting fat. Those low cal tubs of sugar or artificial sweetener and non-fat milk just don’t keep people full. And with all the processes the sugary ones go through, there’s really no nutritional value left in the most important ingredient – whole milk.

Yogurt is natural. Its probiotic cultures help to repair the digestive system after we put it through the stresses of over eating crap and drinking too much booze, coffee and sugary soda. It helps to keep us “regular” and it’s easy to make. There is no substitute for organic whole milk in yogurt. We’ll revisit the whole v. low fat or skim milk argument in other posts, but believe us when we tell you that we do ourselves no health favors by cutting fat out of our yogurt, kefir or milk.

With fruit and nuts.

We started making our own yogurt about five years ago. It started with the purchase of a yogurt maker that had small glass jars and a warming bottom and cover. We made it a few times but found the machine to be just another cumbersome appliance that we just had to have. Like other specialty gadgets, the yogurt maker would be used a few times and then put into storage – out of sight and out of mind. We went back to purchasing yogurt in little plastic containers, but with our desire to go plastic-free a few years ago, we wanted to find an alternative. With a few web searches Jason found the perfect technique. Did you know you could make your own yogurt in your oven when it isn’t in use? It tastes better than anything you can purchase in the store and it takes no time to put together. Not all ovens will work, but if you have a thermometer in the oven and it’s registering something around 110 degrees when the oven is off, you’re set. The recipe is simple and easy. Give it a try, and if it doesn’t work do a web search for other methods. There are some interesting slow cooker recipes that look like they’re worth a try.

With multigrain pancakes and berries.

Yogurt

3 ½ cups whole milk
½ cup of whole milk yogurt

Using a candy thermometer and a medium pan, slowly heat the milk to 180 degrees. Prepare an ice bath by putting ice cubes and water in a large bowl, place the pan of heated milk on top of the ice and let sit until the temperature of the milk drops to around 110 degrees. Add the ½ cup of yogurt to the milk and whisk together. Place in a sterilized quart sized mason jar and place in the oven, turned off, for 12-18 hours. Remove from the oven and refrigerate for at least 2 hours before consuming.

When eating, top with your favorite fresh fruit, granola, or even a drizzle of honey.
Don’t forget to keep at least a ½ cup for the next batch of yogurt.