These whole wheat sugar cookies can be whipped up in a few minutes, no fuss no muss – and they are great cookies. The combination of the nutmeg with the nuttiness of the whole wheat flour makes for a great combination. In fact, because of this no-nut nuttiness flavor they add great variety to the school lunchbox – and I’m assuming that if you have kids their schools is likely a nut free zone too.
Junior Baker engaged in cookie fabrication!
Quick easy recipes like this are an awesome way to introduce the younger members of the family to the joys of cooking. Get them hooked on this and other skills and you’ll probably give them a better foundation for a happy life than those “nut free” schools.
Combined with letting the kids go from whole grain to whole grain flours on the home built grain mill – that they can take apart and adjust – to cookies that go into their lunches and get offered up to friends and family with pride is such a cool way to demystify food.
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.
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.
Once you’ve tasted banana bread made with the rich taste of fresh whole wheat flour you won’t want to go back to the comparatively bland taste of loaves made with white four.
Whole Wheat Banana Bread – ready for lunch
As a quick bread this loaf is easy to pull together. Unlike many other banana breads I’ve tried that are sweetened enough to be deserts this rich load has less added sugar and relies more on the sweetness in the bananas combining with the nuttiness of the whole wheat flour to form a hearty snack or lunch loaf just begging to be combined with a few slices of aged cheddar.
Combined with cheese a couple of slices of this are a hit for lunches – adding healthy variety.
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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