Happiness is a recipe which helps you cut back on toilet paper!

 For a butt-hole which is clean as a whistle, eat one of these oat flour and wheat bran muffins every morning instead of toast! You'll find yourself using far less toilet paper as a result!

Foil the kitty!

Oat Flour & Wheat Bran Muffins

1 cup oat flour (just grind up one cup whole oats in the coffee grinder)

2 cups wheat bran (I pay $1.29/lb at the health food store for a refrigerated bag of organic; super cheap!)

1.5 t baking powder

0.5 t baking soda

0.5 t ground cinnamon

 

1.25 cups milk

0.33 cup brown sugar

1 egg beaten

0.5 cup apple sauce

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1/ preheat oven to 400 F

2/ combine dry ingredients in one bowl, wet in another

3/ add the dry to the wet, whisking together

4/ line two 8-bay muffin tins with parchment baking cups

5/ spoon in the completed mixture, about 1/4 cup each

6/ bake 15-20 minutes

7/ let cool thoroughly before storing in the frig or freezer

8/ parchment peels right off once cooled

9/ rewarm in microwave and serve with butter and jam

10/ one a day will do ya

 

 

Oat muffins with dried Montmorency cherries

Oat Muffins with dried Montmorency cherries

This recipe is adapted from the POST 100% Bran Muffin recipe of old. The only substitution is the oats for the bran cereal. The only addition is the cherries. The yield is about 15 muffins. Calories per muffin are about 194. Total fat is 2g, total carbs 38g (dietary fiber 3.2g), and total protein is 6g. 

Ingredients:

1 cup unbleached flour

1.5 teaspoons baking powder

.5 teaspoon baking soda

.5 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 cups whole rolled oats

1.25 cups 2% milk

1 egg 

.5 cup unsweetened apple sauce

.33 cup brown sugar

.66 cup dried cherries

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Whisk dry ingredients together in one bowl.

3. In another bowl whisk together the wet ingredients, and the sugar and cherries.

4. Add the dry to the wet, mixing well with a wooden spoon.

5. Lightly grease 2 8-bay muffin pans with Crisco.

6. Add .25 cup of the mixture to each bay.

7. Add water to the last unfilled bay.

8. Bake 15-20 minutes on the center rack of the oven.

Some of the top mineral-rich foods

Nuts are in a class all by themselves

Seen here:

Almonds, cashews and Brazil nuts

Beans and lentils

Spinach and kale

Salmon and sardines

Sunflower seeds, flax seeds and pumpkin seeds

Oysters, scallops, mussels and clams

Mushrooms

Oatmeal, whole wheat and wheat germ

Milk and yogurt

Beef and lamb

Avocado

Dark chocolate

Parmesan, Swiss and Mozzarella

Apricots, prunes, raisins, figs and dates 

It turns out you could make it on just French Fries, milk, oatmeal and some kale, spinach or broccoli, and lose weight

This story got my attention:

Why French Fries Are More of a "Superfood" Than Kale.

From there I landed on:

Could you survive on just one food?

From which this:

Some years ago a reader wrote to The Chicago Reader advice column, The Straight Dope, asked whether it was true you could live on just potatoes and milk. After all, it's been said that before the Irish Potato Famine, people there were living almost solely on potatoes. Cecil Adams, the erstwhile columnist, claims to have run the numbers with his assistant and found that a whole lot of potatoes and milk would get you most of what you need – with the exception of the mineral molybdenum. But you can get all you need of that by also eating a bit of oatmeal.

Hearing this, [dietician Jennie] Jackson [of Glasgow Caledonian University] laughs. “Oh, that's our diet – that's the Scottish diet from a hundred years ago. That fits right in. Potatoes, milk, and oatmeal, with some kale in there, too.”

My Current Super Foods Menu

Monday--Burritos (homemade pinto beans, onions, and saved bacon fat from uncured bacon, ground turkey, homemade Mexican seasonings, in an Azteca brand flour tortilla with extra sharp cheddar cheese and fresh toppings including homemade guacamole, black olives, salsa, green onion and chopped spinach)

Tuesday--Basil Pesto Sockeye Pie (canned wild sockeye salmon, eggs, homegrown tomato sauce, homemade basil pesto sauce, rolled oats) with a green salad of romaine lettuce and spinach with a lemon-evoo dressing

Wednesday--Italian pasta with homemade hot Italian turkey sausage, homemade tomato sauce, grated Pecorino Romano cheese and steamed green beans or baby broccoli or a romaine-spinach salad

Thursday--One of two flexible nights in the week like Sunday, but often curry night, usually leftover poultry, butter, garlic, Penzeys curry powder, canned coconut milk, flaked coconut, dried cranberries, diced Fuji apples and chopped almonds served over Jasmine rice with a salad on the side, or Italian meatloaf made with ground turkey, rapini and seasonings, or baked chicken with rice and broccoli

Friday--Filet of something from the sea, these days baked skin-on steelhead trout with lemon pepper, Jasmine rice and a steamed vegetable like baby broccoli or green beans, or a curried salmon-rice cake with a fruit sauce, or sockeye pie leftovers

Saturday--Napoli style pizza baked in cast iron with homemade basil pesto sauce, homemade tomato sauce, mozzarella, and fresh roma tomato slices, with a fresh salad

Sunday--Charcoal Grill Day: usually hamburgers ground at home from a single piece of Angus chuck served with all the toppings desired on a potato bun and steamed green petite peas with butter, otherwise grilled marinated Otto's chicken (locally grown) with red potatoes baked in the oven, or a stir fry in the wok, or pasta carbonara

Luncheon is usually a homemade barley-lentil soup using homemade chicken broth with some homemade buttered toast, or leftovers like a burrito, and an apple on the side with a square of 70% cocoa chocolate to finish, or a can of Norwegian bristling sardines on rye crackers with a fresh pear

Breakfast is usually stove-top espresso with 2% milk steamed, a hardboiled egg or a fried egg with toast and jam, and a fresh orange, or a blueberry-banana smoothie with homemade yogurt, coconut milk, cinnamon and ground flaxseed meal, or whole oatmeal with berries and walnuts

Wine, especially on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Purists will revolt as purists do, but life is for the enjoying.

Curried Basmati Salmon Cakes With Apricot Sauce

Of all the salmon cakes I've made, I like these the best.

The reason is simple. They are lighter and crispier than the cakes I make with whole oats, oat bran, bread crumbs and the like.

It's always laudable to combine as many healthy ingredients into one recipe as you can, but when the result is better with slightly fewer of those good things and which actually makes you prepare and eat the recipe more often, I say go for it.

Wild salmon is something you should eat as often as possible instead of red meats in order to improve your overall health, and I think this recipe will help you do that and add an important ingredient at the same time which we should all eat more often for health reasons, namely, curry powder, a powerful anti-inflammatory.

Curried Basmati Salmon Cakes With Apricot Sauce

1 egg beaten in a large bowl

1 T curry powder of your choosing

1 14.75 oz can wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, drained

1 cup already prepared white Royal Basmati rice from the foothills of the Himalayas, cooled

.5 cup sweetened coconut flakes

1. After you beat the egg in a large bowl, whisk in the curry powder.

2. Add the drained salmon and mash together with a potato masher.

3. Stir in the basmati rice and the flaked coconut, combining gently with the masher until thoroughly mixed.

4. Heat a generous amount of sesame or canola oil in a porcelainized dutch oven, such as a Le Creuset oval 3 quart.

5. Form the cakes using a smallish half inch deep lid from some container or other, pressing the mixture into the lid until firm. I use a rubber lid from a broken Leifheit food chopper I saved. It releases the cakes perfectly. Using it, I make seven patties from the ingredients.

6. Fry the cakes over medium high heat two minutes on a side. Use a slotted silicone spatula to lift and drain the cakes as you remove them, and keep on a serving plate in a warm oven.

Apricot Sauce

4 T salted butter

6 T best apricot jam

2 T fresh lemon juice

1. Melt the butter in a sauce pan over low heat.

2. Stir in the apricot jam and lemon juice at medium heat.

3. Cook and stir until thoroughly combined and slightly thickened and remove from heat.

4. Top each cake with some sauce and serve immediately with some petite steamed sweet peas, or a crisp green lettuce salad on the side.

Wunderbar! 

Flaxen Oat Bread

Two of three I baked today, one in a clay baker.

When I was a boy I'd wake up on Saturday mornings to the smell of fresh white bread baking in the oven, just one of my mother's many talents on routine display. When I'd finally come downstairs I'd find her in the kitchen with the loaves on the breakfast table, smearing melted butter across their already golden brown tops. There they'd glisten in our cozy Wisconsin home on a cold January morning, just begging to be sliced, and made into French Toast. Perhaps the memory of it is more vivid because of the sun streaming in the windows from a cobalt blue sky today, but I'm guessing it was the whole package made special because mom was at the center of it, the choreographer of our lives. No one will ever love you like your mother.

Shortly after she died in September 2008, a book arrived in the mail, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois (St. Martin's Press, 2007). I've been baking bread ever since. The following recipe is my adaptation of their recipe for oatmeal bread. Unlike them, I let the dough rise only the one time and in the greased pans I bake them in. I also bake all the loaves at once, and freeze them after they have been cooled and sliced. You can modify some of the ingredients from their original recipe as I have below, by using 2% milk, buckwheat honey, and flax, among other things, in favor of the super foods. Her highness loves it.

Flaxen Oat Bread

1.75 cups lukewarm water

1 cup 2% milk
2 T canola oil

.5 cup sugar, light or dark brown sugar, or buckwheat or clover honey, or maple syrup

2 T yeast

1 T salt

6 T ground flaxseed meal

1 cup oat bran

1.5 cups whole rolled oats

5 cups unbleached all purpose flour

1. Combine the water, milk and oil in the bowl of your KitchenAid Mixer.

2. Add the sugar, yeast and salt to the bowl and mix using the triangular head. Add the flaxseed meal, oat bran and whole oats and mix for a couple of minutes to allow the oats to soak up the moisture.

3. Scoop into the flour with your measuring cup, tapping with a butter knife and scraping cleanly across the top, and add one cup at a time allowing the mixer to incorporate the flour for at least a minute for each cup. I find that as you approach the fifth cup it takes longer to incorporate, and I move the bowl up and down as needed to keep the added flour from poofing out the top.

4. Scrape the dough off the hook into the bowl with a silicone spatula, and scrape the sides of the bowl, too.

5. Grease your baking pans (I use glass bread bakers) and then grease both hands with the Crisco. Grab a grapefruit size wad of dough and manipulate it with your hands and shape it to fit your pan, and drop it in.

6. When all the pans are full, I put mine in the microwave above the stove to rise, where the preheating oven to 350 degrees F below helps the bread rise. It takes about 45 minutes to rise.

7. Then bake in the oven at 350 F for about 40-45 minutes and when done turn out onto a wire rack to cool. I like a longish bake as opposed to a shorter one.

This bread is moist, and likes to be thoroughly cooked and thoroughly cooled before slicing.

Fiber-Packed Morning Oats

Come, says Puss, without any more ado,

'tis time to go to breakfast; cats

don't live upon dialogues.

-L'Estrange

Readers of this blog know that oats aren't just for breakfast anymore. We eat them twice a week at dinner in Basil Pesto Sockeye Pie, which is a super food grand slam all by itself. But let's face it, oatmeal for breakfast is probably the best opportunity we have on a daily basis to get this important super food.

Oats are classified among the foods primarily responsible for providing soluble fiber to the body. Other common foods doing so include peas, beans (like pintos), barley, prune juice, plums, berries, bananas, apples, pears, broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, and onions. The importance of soluble fiber, which is fiber which dissolves in water, is that unlike insoluble fiber, it ferments in the gut and produces short chain fatty acids which do a veritable host of important things for you.

Short chain fatty acids help control blood glucose levels, working on both the pancreas and the liver. They nourish the cells lining the colon walls. They suppress the synthesis of cholesterol and reduce levels of LDL and triglycerides. They increase the colon's acidity which in turn protects the lining from polyp formation while improving mineral absorption. Increased acidity also stimulates production of crucial elements of the immune protection system and improves the health of the colon's mucosal layer which helps inhibit inflammation and irritation.

As you can see, the health of your gut doesn't just make you happy in the toilet. It affects your over all health, touching on issues as diverse as diabetes, cardiovascular problems, cancer, and compromised immunity generally. You can improve your odds against these by making soluble fiber a daily habit. And oatmeal for breakfast is a fast and easy way to start doing that. The basic recipe includes quick oats and oat bran, which can be supplemented from day to day to keep it interesting and boost the levels of optimum nutrition. To accomplish that I always add some kind of berry and an ounce of nuts, and often some cinnamon and a tablespoon of raw wheat germ and/or ground flaxseed meal. As listed, the ingredients in the recipe below provide about 15 grams of dietary fiber. Everyone needs 25 grams per day, men even more. Eating this sort of breakfast gets you well on your way each and every day.

If you have more time, use whole oats and simmer them on the stove for about six or seven minutes. For a really delicious form of oats, try the steel cut variety toasted in a cast iron pan in a little butter and then cooked in milk on the stove for about thirty minutes, stirring constantly. I buy my oats in all their forms in bulk at Apple Valley stores, and I buy organic if they've got them.

Fiber-Packed Morning Oats

.25 cup quick oats--2 grams dietary fiber

.25 cup oat bran--6 grams dietary fiber

1 cup water

dash of salt

stir into a bowl and microwave for about two minutes

then add:

.5 cup fresh blueberries (or 1/3 cup dried cranberries)--2 grams dietary fiber

1 oz. (=.25 cup=30 grams) walnuts (or 1 oz. almonds)--2 grams dietary fiber

1 T raw wheat germ--1 gram dietary fiber

1 T ground flaxseed meal--2 grams dietary fiber

dash of cinnamon

sweetener if desired (I use Splenda)

stir and add a little water if necessary, and microwave if needed another minute or so

Ground Flaxseed Meal

Flaxseeds are the second person of the whole grains super food trinity which includes oats and wheat germ. Just a tablespoon or two each day goes a long way. Steven Pratt calls them "the best plant source of omega-3 fatty acids," in the form of ALA, the plant analogue to the wild salmon we so zealously value for its rich stores of the same acids in the form of EPA/DHA. Omega-3 fatty acids are important for cardiovascular health, and for cellular health generally throughout the body, especially in the brain.

As an insoluble fiber (fiber which does not dissolve in water), ground flaxseed meal contributes to a shorter transit time of food through the body, and just two tablespoons a day provide four grams of the suggested daily intake of twenty-five grams, or 15%. On top of the ALA, you also get protein, iron, magnesium, potassium, and, listen up ladies, lignans, the latter thought to help prevent and/or treat breast cancer.

Incorporating it into the diet is easy. You can add it straight to your morning oatmeal or other cereal, include it in a smoothie, or in cakes on the griddle. In fact, if you bake anything requiring oil or butter in the recipe, you can use flaxseed meal as a substitute, using the ratio 3 to 1. In other words, if using ground flaxseed meal instead, triple it (A recipe requiring 1/4 cup canola oil will require 3/4 cup ground flaxseed meal instead). Recipes "tend to brown more rapidly," as the Bob's Red Mill package says. I frequently substitute part of the oil or butter needed in a recipe with the ground flaxseed meal and never notice the difference, not even in my homemade bread.

I buy my ground flaxseed meal at an Apple Valley health food store near our home in Michigan, where I always find it refrigerated. And that's how I store it at home. Otherwise it can go rancid. Choose Bob's Red Mill. You won't be disappointed!

Basil Pesto Sockeye Pie

Wild Alaskan Red Sockeye Salmon in the 14.75 oz. can is acknowledged to be one of the cleanest and most potent sources of omega 3 fatty acids, calcium and protein. But did you ever open up one of those things? Eek! Its price is often compelling compared to the putatively dirtier, farm-raised fresh salmons, but how do you serve this stuff, skin and bones and all?

I came up with a solution, and you know it's got to be good if my young son looks forward to eating it. We have it twice a week! The best part is the recipe combines no less than 6 super foods in one neat package, 7 if you make the pesto with spinach. My mother's meatloaf was the inspiration, may God rest her soul.

Basil Pesto Sockeye Pie

2 eggs, beaten in a large bowl

1 can (14.75 oz.) Wild Alaskan Red Sockeye Salmon, drained

.5 cup Basil Pesto Sauce recipe

.5 cup Tomato Sauce, Semi Home Made

2 cups organic quick oats

To the bowl of beaten eggs, add the salmon and mash with ye old trusty cheapo hand-held potato masher until it no longer looks 100% disgusting. Stir in the basil pesto sauce and the tomato sauce. Then add in the oatmeal, mashing away, until thoroughly mixed.

Let it stand and soak while you do the following:

Preheat the oven on bake to 375 degrees F. Grab a 10" Pyrex pie plate and thoroughly grease it with vegetable shortening, like Crisco. Plop the salmon mixture into the pie plate and flatten it out using the potato masher. You can smooth the surface more finely to finish using a silicone spatula. Place the pie in the oven on the middle rack and bake for 35 minutes, checking that a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool for five minutes or so and slice it like pie. Serve with ketchup generously drizzled on top, two slices per adult.

Additional notes:

1) Canned salmon is often very high in sodium, containing nearly 1900 mg. per can, according to the label on the brand I buy. How much of this gets tossed out when you drain the salmon is not stated. Doctors often say a healthy adult should consume no more than 2000 mg. per day. You can reduce the sodium in this recipe if you need to by leaving the salt out of the basil pesto recipe (the teaspoon of salt in that recipe amounts to 2360 mg. distributed over approximately 1.25 cups, or approximately 944 mg. in .5 cup prepared pesto). Otherwise your minimum sodium intake per slice could be as high as almost 400 mg., plus whatever's in the ketchup and the Pecorino Romano cheese.

2) Your choice of oats is also important. I often use 100% rolled oats instead of quick oats to give the recipe a "toothier" quality. Since these take a little longer to "cook" when you make oatmeal, in this recipe you can help them along with a little more soaking time in the mixture (covered in the refrigerator) and an extra half cup of the tomato sauce. The added benefit is all the goodness of the whole grain.