Kids and cookies – a great way to get them hooked on baking
The “Bigger is better” school of thought isn’t always true, but at least where cookies and kids are concerned it carries a pretty strong appeal.
While a lot of cookie recipes have difficulty scaling up from the average to the jumbo to the ginormous this one is perfect for building the bigger cookie – so big in fact that you should be using pizza pans to bake them in.
Wedges of the giant whole grain cookie – before gobbling
This basic cookies is great on its own – or toss in a cup or two of chocolate chips, smarties or chopped nuts.
If you’ve got kids who are baking with you this is an easy recipe to get them excited about playing around in the kitchen. If your junior baker has trouble mixing the batter with a wooden spoon consider picking up a danish whisk which speeds mixing while reducing the effort required to a fraction of that a wooden spoon.
Using either whole wheat or whole barley flour is a great option for these cookies. Give them a try with your junior baker or to satiate your own inner junior baker.
I think there is a general perception that crepes are difficult to prepare. Nothing could be further from the truth – they are far simpler to prepare than the pancakes we’ve already written about.
The reason for the misconception may be that they represents a bit of an indulgence when wrapped with a sweet filing – sliding closer to desert than dinner or breakfast. But, by using whole grain flour (provided it has been ground very finely) is a great way to improve the nutrition and taste of this awesome breakfast meal. shhh don’t let on that this wonderful breakfast is both easy and healthy.
In this case the crepes were paired with freshly prepared cherry sauce, but you can wrap them around pretty much any sweet filling.
Whole wheat crepes – tilting the pan to distribute the batter
If anything, the secret to getting good crepes is in the wrist, being able to tilt the frying pan or skillet to thinly distribute the batter. Hand in hand with that is the need for a good non-stick surface. It’s no secret that I am partial to my cast iron cookware – and my frying pan is a hand me down from my grandmother – cast in long defunct foundry that was located less than an hour away from my home. It has such a nice surface that the crepe will slide across the pan when the lower surface has cooked. The cast iron is also nice in that it holds the heat and cooks the crepe while off the burner with me tilting the pan. That said, the pan is heavy and the handle usually hot enough that I wrap the tea-towel that graces the handle of my oven around the handle of the pan to reduce the heat transfer. If your wrist isn’t up for the challenge a lighter non stick pan that you can manipulate may serve you better in this role.
I grew up picking blueberries around our cottage in Northern Ontario… and not just picking a sour cream container worth to get enough to sprinkle on cereal in the morning but rather enough to fill freezers with blue bounty to last until the next season.
I still pick large amounts of blueberries, I’ve become pretty practiced and can usually out pick the other members of my family and now I have my kids along with me – learning to be comfortable in the bush, as well as gaining an understanding of the lasting reward that hard work can bring through a year of blueberries in baking.
These blueberry muffins call for whole barley flour – my preferred whole grain flour for sweet quick breads, I find the taste sweeter than whole wheat flour. Given I also like to diversify the grains in my diet this is also a good means of achieving that. But, if you don’t have access to whole barley flour substitute whole wheat.
Enjoy these, and if you can get out picking take some time to sit in the bush, let your hands do the work while your mind gets to ponder over the issues of the day.
Mocha cookies made with barley flour – together with milk!
There are requests, there are pleas and then there are demands. These cookies demand a tall glass of ice cold milk. In fact the dairy farmers should be handing out these very cookies to folk approaching grocery store cashes who don’t have milk in their basket! They are frankly awesome.
Now, some chocolate cookies have loads of oooey gooey good chocolate in them. These by contrast don’t overwhelm you with that taste – but they are addictive!
If you want to have folks rethink baking with whole grain flours – these might just be the way to win them over.
Apple see a lot of use in my home. Our fall harvests from the neighborhood trees in a good year can be substantial. The best of these are kept for fresh eating, seconds are peeled, sliced and dried or frozen for pies, apple braids and the like, those that are a bit softer get transformed into apple sauce that we can, and finally the really bruised ones get turned into apple cider on the homestead press.
Apple Spice Loaf with Barley Flour
So we end up using a lot of apple sauce through the season, and this apple spice loaf is one of my favorite recipes. It’s a quick loaf – so it honestly doesn’t take more than five minutes to mix the ingredients, put it into a silicon loaf pan (which means I don’t even need to take the time to butter and flour the pan) making it a cinch to pull together. In spite of being so easy – it is a lovely loaf the blend of apple and spices is lovely. While the loaf is a great accompaniment for a nice cup of tea or coffee it most often serves as a bread substitute in our lunches, adding variety to our brown bags. Made with whole grain flour – and I usually use whole barley flour for quick breads – it fills you up and keeps you satiated.
I think this is a pretty good example of better living today – you get a great rich filling and wholesome loaf, add diversity to your meals that sees you content to skip the cafeteria line for lunches and uses some of the bounty around us. It is also a great example of how easily all this can be pulled together. It honestly takes more time to wash the bowl than it does to prepare the batter and slide it into the oven.
Of course, you don’t need to use your own apple sauce or even flour you’ve produced at home to get a very nice product. So take five minutes to make this apple spice loaf and add some great baking to your lunches.
Rhubarb is a great plant to have in your garden and deserts made from it serve as an awesome culinary awakening for deserts to be offered up fresh from the new season. It’s such an easy perennial crop to have that you should be growing it.
There are so many great options for deserts and preserves using rhubarb but this has to be my favorite. In fact it’s what I made with today’s first harvest of rhubarb. The sweet richness of the custard combines so wonderfully with the bite from the rhubarb it’s an absolute delight.
Rhubarb custard pie components ready for assembly
I used whole wheat pie shells, but you could use shells made with white flour or purchased if necessary (but really, if you can bake something like this, and certainly if you grow some of your own food you should consider building a grain mill for yourself – it’s well within your capacity)
Even better this recipe can be whipped together in only a minute or two. Click on the post title for the full recipe.
You might reject the idea of using whole wheat flour for pie shells and other sweet products. That would be short sighted. Whole grain flours add wonderful flavor that is missing from white flour where all the flavor has been removed.
A few amendments need to be made to account for the lesser ratio of gluten compared to recipes which feature white flour, but these are easily done.
Whole wheat pie crust rolled out on parchment paper
I know a lot of folks are intimidated by the prospect of making pastry, and it can be a challenge to roll out and transfer the crust into the pie shell. While you can chill the dough to make it easier to roll out an even easier way to get the job done is to roll out the crust on parchment paper or a silicon baking sheet. Then place a pie tin on top of the crust, slip a hand under the parchment or silicon sheet and flip everything over, then gently peel the parchment from the crust.
If you have any breaks fix those by pressing the crust together with your fingers and trim the crust that overhangs the pie tin.
This recipe yields about five 9″ pie shells – if you make a double crust pie you’ll use two crusts.
Whole barley flour works wonderfully in a host of baked goods – in most cases I prefer it to whole wheat flour for cookies and sweet quick breads – and so does my junior baker.
You might have a bit of trouble finding whole barley flour unless you mill it yourself, but that is one of the advantages of having your own mill.
Barley flour peanut butter cookies ready for the oven
While I know that these could be scaled down to bite sized if you engage the junior baker the cookies are always going to be jumbo sized. It’s not every cookie that will scale up nicely – but these do just fine, and you can adjust the baking time to suit the level of chewiness you desire – from wonderfully chewy to crisp.
Cookies are probably the greatest reason to get and use silicon baking sheets – they practically banish cookies with burnt bottoms, so don’t waste your ingredients or effort by forgoing its acquisition.
So, whether you have a junior baker or not these are great PB cookies so make yourself a batch.
I think one of the most common afflictions that touch our society is not obesity – though that is certainly a concern, but rather “over-complication-itis”. OK, so maybe the medical community won’t be adding this affliction to their standard list of diagnoses but that doesn’t mean it isn’t prevalent, nor that it isn’t serious. So, how would you diagnose someone suffering from “over-complication-itis” – well it’s simple… or rather it is an individual who lacks the ability to see simplicity. More precisely, an individual who lacks the ability to examine and break down processes that lead to final products into their simple components.
Brunch – fresh whole wheat bagels with smoked salmon accompanied by asparagus
These bagels provide a case study. Bagels are awesome, but I bet if you asked most folks who buy them – even those who purchase them from shops that make them right in front of the customer if they could make them – they’d balk at the suggestion. The complexity exists only in their minds.
If you’ve been following these posts we’ve shown our favorite tried and true bread recipe, we then showed how to take the same recipe and use the dough to make some awesome buns – by forming the dough and baking it in the oven, bagels just add one step to the buns – boiling the formed dough before baking. That’s it. Really, no need for a wood fired oven, no need for a food science degree or even to convert to Judaism. Those things might help but if you make them personal prerequisites you might as well check yourself into an institution with “over-complication-itis” because you won’t be checking out all of the opportunities that exits out here in the real world.
For those of you that haven’t dialed 911, click on the headline for the simple recipe instructions.
Oh, and the solution for obesity – eat reasonable amounts of good food – like these fresh whole wheat bagels and engage in physical activity.
Growing up my parents had a pretty leave-it-to-beaver division of roles. My father brought home the bacon and my mother cooked it. They were both pretty happy with that division, and it’s only been since his retirement that my father has started baking. But, like most rules there were exceptions – two in this case. When camping my father did all of the cooking, and when pancakes were on the weekend menu – well those were his too. He got pretty good at making pancakes.
Maple syrup from our own trees to complement whole wheat pancakes
Those pancakes were always made with plain old white flour and smothered in syrup – often pancake syrup rather than real maple syrup. Now, I’m not exactly up for the division of roles that suited both of my parents but, I still love pancakes and so do my kids. That said, in my home pancakes are made with freshly milled whole grain flour – usually whole wheat, and the syrup is real maple syrup.
I love how the richness of the whole wheat combines with sweet maple flavor. It’s interesting too, how four good sized pancakes with a drizzle of syrup forms a meal that satisfies for hours whereas it took a pile of white flour pancakes in a sea of syrup to fill me up at the table.
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