Don't Like Vegetables Learn to Love Juice

If you are one of those people that eat Spinach Cheese Dip and count it as a daily vegetable serving or lettuce never ends up on your lunch plate unless it is being delivered by you to someone else you should consider looking at juicing your vegetables.

Even a small amount, like half a glass, of freshly juiced vegetables will give you necessary minerals and enzymes that you body needs to stay healthy and strong.

If you have accepted to live with extra weight, diabetes, allergies or other illnesses it could become a thing of the past if you include juice in your diet. In some cases juice fast can be what you need to turn your life around. I recommend to watch Fat Sick and Nearly Dead | a Joe Cross Film, if you have not seen it. It can be watched on internet and there is no fee. Film follows several people as they get themselves back to health and life by drinking fresh juice. While juice fast is not for everyone and person must prepare for it, including juice in your daily diet is.

An important thing to know about juicers is that all of them do not give the same results. Some not only yield higher juice from same amount of vegetables, but also higher amount of minerals and enzymes. High speed juicers kill enzymes due to heat that is generated while juice is extracted. Investigating variety of juicers before you make a purchase will be time worth spent.

I am replacing my old juicer with new, and after researching various juicers my choice is Green Star  GS-5000 Elite juicer.  It has a unique technology that uses magnetic plates to extract 68% more minerals then other juicers.

Green Star GS-5000 Elite

Omega J8006

Omega VRT350

My second and third choices were Omega J8006  and Omega VRT350.

I encourage you to take time and research which juicer is right for you and your family.

Weight Matters

It's last week before Christmas and baking is part of every night's activities. This year I am baking two breads to give as gifts and to take to parties: Whole Wheat Christmas Stollen and Whole Wheat Banana Nut Bread.  As I am milling Whole Wheat grains and making the dough, I quickly discover that measuring by volume does not produce the same result for store bought flour and home milled flour. I have to measure by weight. But how do I find out volume equivalent in weight for my favorite recipes? Each flour has different weight.

My neighbor has a scale I can borrow, and I start weighting the flour. The scale is old and not consistent. After researching several books on home milled flour I follow suggestion to measure 150 gr of grain for 1 cup of store bought flour, then mill it in the mill.

I make a great discovery in my King Arthur Whole Grain Baking cookbook, all the measurements are given not only by volume but by weight! This will make it a lot easier. Now, what recipe should I make first? Perhaps the Dark and Dangerous Cinnamon Buns?

Honey Wheat from Fresh Milled Flour

I am baking my first loaf of bread from freshly milled flour in my new KTEC Grain and Flour Mill (K-Tec). I milled a mix of five grains: 3 cups of red wheat berries, 2 cups of white wheat berries and 1 cup mix of oats, spelt and rye berries. The recipe I am using is for Honey Wheat bread (ingredients below) from The Bread Machine Book, by M. Lambert. It is for bread machine's 1.5 lb size loaf. I have made this bread previously from store bough flour and will be able to compare the outcome.

I use exactly the same measurements as in recipe, and first difference that I notice, the dough ball is a lot smaller. It looks almost like I need more flour, but since consistency is good, I leave it alone.

Dough tastes very good, the best tasting dough I have ever tasted. It has some new taste to it that I have not experienced before, and that is what the freshly milled flour gives - unmatched taste.

As bread rises and bakes, it still looks small. I have set bread machine to whole wheat setting, which takes longer to rise and bake. When bread is finished, it comes out smaller then one made form store brought flour. Crust is little harder.

Changes to make:

1. I need to measure weight of flour by volume for store brought flour and add the same weight of home milled flour to make sure I have the same amount.
2. Set crust control to light crust.

Honey Wheat Bread (makes 1.5 lb loaf for bread machine)

• 3/4 cups milk
• 6 tbsp water
• 3 tbsp butter
• 3 tbsp honey
• 1 1/2 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 1/4 whole-wheat flour
• 3/4 cups bread flour
• 1 tbsp yeast

Christmas Stollen

Christmas Stollen is traditional German Christmas bread. It is more like a cake, sweetened with honey, has fruits and marzipan and is covered with powdered sugar. Any bread that has fruits and nuts in it sounds good to me.
 
I am making stollen using recipe from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day book, written by Jeff Hertzberg MD and  Zoe Francois. This is the third recipe I will be trying from this book, and to be honest, first two came out just OK, not  great.  But I have a feeling that this bread will come out good.

I mix the ingredients and let them sit in the container to rise.  List of ingredients are listed below. This time I am letting dough sit twice as long then what recipe says and it does double in size in four hours.

Two days later it's baking time. All the bread in this book is made this way - you make the dough, let it sit in refrigerator overnight or longer, then take a chunk out of it and bake the bread.

 I get the dough and roll it out, adding white chocolate chips and sliced almonds in place of marzipan.

Why Mill Flour Yourself?

Countless essential vitamins and oils are lost in today's commercially processed flours...all in the name of convenience. Remember when grandma would spend the greater part of the day in the kitchen making the most nutritious meals she could she would use what we call today the Stainless Steel Grain Mill to make the flour and grain for her bread, deserts, and many more goodies. To ensure that today's store bought flour will last on shelves, all traces of the grains bran and germ must be removed. Why must they be removed? Because once the bran and germ are milled, they can only last up to 72 hours at room temperature before going rancid. Since the germ is packed with vitamins B and E, much is lost by it's removal. This removal process also results in a loss of up to 26 essential vitamins necessary for proper nutrition. Valuable roughage which our bodies need to absorb and remove unwanted toxins and poisons within our digestive system.

Commercial processors have tried to 'enrich' flours with vitamins B1, B2, Niacin, and Iron...but it still cannot make up for the many other valuable vitamins lost. By milling your own grains, you can utilize all the essential vitamins and oils by milling and using as needed.

Health problems such as Obesity, Diabetes, Hypoglycemia, Heart Disease, Bowel Cancer and Tooth Decay are just some of the major diseases on the rise since the introduction of white flour in the 1900's. Many intuitionalists agree that white flour and other refined foods are largely responsible.
(http://homesteadharvest.com/grainmill.html)

Criss Cross Applesauce

This weekend my college son is coming home for a short visit. We have not seen him for more than  three month, and I am sure he has grown even more. When I say that to him, he always says: " I am not growing, you are shrinking". Hey, what's up with that!?

I am baking Cranberry Wheat bread, and this time I am adding some applesauce. I m still keeping in sunflower seeds and flax seeds, and counting on applesauce to make the bread fluffier.

As I watch the bread rise it does not seem to rise fast enough. But I have a lot of last minute things to do and I get back to those. Before I know it, bread is finished baking. And it looks perfect - the round top is sitting high and some cranberries and sunflower seeds are visible through the golden brown crust. A second wave of aroma of cloves and spices surrounds me as I take the bread out of the pan and put it on the rack to cool. Applesauce did bread good. It is definitely a keeper.

The next morning I am baking another loaf for my son to take with him back to college. He liked this bread a lot, and I am glad to send a wholesome and nutritional home baked bread with him. It might be the only food that is preservative free and not over-processed that he will be eating next week. Note to myself: check on postage options for loaf of bread.

Ingredients in the loaf of bread pictured: Water, white flour, wheat flour, honey, olive oil, apple sauce, cranberries, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, yeast. I used bread machine to mix and bake it.

More Cranberries and Nuts, Please!

Since I love breads that have a lot of berries, nuts and seeds in them, today I will “improve” the Cranberry Wheat bread that I have been making for last few weeks. It’s really good bread for breakfast or with salad or soup.

I am adding some roasted sunflower seeds, walnuts and more dried cranberries (Craisins). As bread is baking, it smells very good. I smell aroma of cinnamon, cloves and freshly baked bread. Yum!

Finally it is ready and I am taking it out of the oven. The top of the bread is not as risen as it should be, it is flat but not caved in. I should have added more yeast to compensate for the “improvements” added by me. Slice of bread is a lot more dense, and a lot darker, but it tastes good. This recipe still needs more improving to do.