Heart of our Home

My kitchen, the heart of our home.... and if I'm completely real with you it's also a mess :)

Yup, it isn't always perfect around here. The sink is full of dirty dishes, I've covered most of the counters with stuff as I grind wheat and make bread, the little guy is raiding the utensil drawer for flippers and other tools to make playdough cookies with, there's playdough crumbles all over the carpet, and if you missed it there's a gingerbread cookie jar up in the top peaking out that just never made it away after christmas. And believe it or not this isn't even as messy as it got today! LOL.

I've been getting back into my breadmaking groove after taking a bit of a break and the wheat berries have been running through my nutrimill double time. Six cups of berries creates about seven cups of flour ready for baking bread, muffins, pita pockets, tortillas, cookies and more. Any extra flour left over is stored in a glass one gallon jar for later use.



Hard red spring wheat berries milled into soft fine flour with every part of the wheat's goodness still there.

My favorite bread recipe rising in the warmth of the preheating oven.

Lunch was a little late as we waited for my oldest son to come in from stacking wood in the woodshed but the aroma of fresh bread and the sight of giant sandwiches waiting for his arrival washed away any tiredness. Plus I made sure his was extra big :) This mama knows what makes her growing boy happy *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

Curing Fish

Every year I try to can as much fresh salmon as possible to keep us eating delicious fish all through the winter and spring and with the huge sockeye run that came through here this summer we were able to get some great prices on sockeye and humpies fresh off the boats!

With fifteen fish in the freezer I was planning on getting around 48 pints of canned salmon but Hubby has a slightly different plan this year. He has decided that he is going to smoke a bunch which is sooo good but is going to cut into my stash *grin*.

So today he cleaned and scaled eight of the fish and then filleted them so that we could coat them with a dry brine of brown sugar, salt and seasonings for smoking.

We were just down in the cold room checking on them and they smell fantastic! Tomorrow morning we'll fire up the smoker and toss some in and I'm going to experiment with canning some of the smoked fish to. I'm thinking that I better get some of the smoked stuff squirreled away or we may just eat it all as it comes out of the smoker *grin*.

Mmm, can't wait!
~ Rosina

Garden Fresh Pizza ~ Recipe

When lunch time rolls around at our house I like to keep it quick and simple but still provide something nutritious. So I came up with a great way to make a pizza using fresh tomatoes, peppers & basil from the garden with a toasted tortilla for a crispy flat crust :)

So quick, so easy and oh so tasty!

To start I toss my plain tortillas in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit and toast them until they start to go slightly golden and firm. This only takes a couple of minutes so keep an eye on them or they will burn, trust me I know *grin*.

This provides a firm base for you pizza plus the toasting keeps the tortilla from going soggy when you top it with all of your fresh tomatoes! With your toasted tortillas finished put down a layer of sliced tomatoes over each tortilla and then top with your favorite vegetables and tons of fresh basil.

I had a left over sausage from dinner so I sliced it thinly and put a few slices on each pizza along with red peppers, red onions, our basil and some shredded asiago cheese, popped it back into the hot oven for just a couple of minutes to melt the cheese and that's it.

Slice each tortilla up into wedges and enjoy a slice of garden fresh pizza! YUM :)

PS. Check out the Wholesome Whole Foods and Food Renegade weekly link up for more great recipes and articles :)

Bon appetit!

~ Rosina

Real Food Community

I love food... don't we all?

I especially love to learn about good food, most importantly whole foods and now I've come across a fantastic new group of blogs known as the Real Food Community. These bloggers are passionate about sharing about traditional foods.

Like the saying by Michael Pollan ~ "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Sadly there are way to many foods that our grandmothers would never recognize today and I think that we need to move back to those unprocessed, recognizable foods and ingredients of yesteryear and stop being tricked by misleading claims found on so much of the packaging found in supermarkets today.

Needless to say I am really looking forward to digging further into some of these new blogs and the best place to find them so I'm told is to start scoping out the Real Food linkups that happen each week. They're loaded with oodles of great articles.

Fight Back Fridays @ Food Renegade

Real Food Wednesdays @ The Kitchen Kop

Wholesome Whole Foods @ Health Food Lover

Others that were recommended as must read blogs are:

Nourishing Days
A Moderate Life
Kitchen Stewardship

This is going to be great! I am really looking forward to all of the new recipes to *grin*. Actually now that I mention recipes I found another blogger through the above link ups that loves Kohlrabi as much as I do and now I have 2 new recipes to try out :)

If you know of more Real Food bloggers that I should check out leave me a comment I'd love to know.

~ Rosina

Whole Wheat Pumpkin Muffins

I came across a really great site today called Cookus Interruptus and it's all about cooking & baking with organic whole foods! This is totally right up my alley since I love to use as much organic food as I can get my hands on and make everything from scratch. Plus they share tons of recipes so of course you just knew we were going to have to try something out :)

I rattled off some choices to the kids and we settled on one for a very wholesome Whole Wheat Pumpkin Muffin. They were delicious!! I say were because there's nothing but crumbs left *grin*.

They're made with a blend of whole wheat pastry flour & a touch of unbleached white flour, pumpkin, spices, molasses and more, making a deliciously dense muffin :) I did make a few changes to the recipe though. I used my own wheat berries instead of whole wheat pastry flour by substituting 2 cups of soft white wheat berries that I ground in my nutrimill so that we could get all of the great roughage created by using whole wheat berries, omitted the salt completely, and cut the sugar in half. I used the full amount of honey but instead of 1/2 a cup of cane or brown sugar I used 1/4 cup of organic Sucanat which is also an unrefined cane sugar. We didn't miss the extra sweetness at all :)

If you're wondering why my muffins don't look very muffin shaped above, it's because I ran out of muffin tins and put the left overs in a loaf pan *grin*. Gotta make do with what's on hand. LOL.

I'm looking forward to doing some more exploring on their website and trying out another recipe :)

~ Rosina