How to make the crust:
3 cups Fresh Ground (FG) Whole Organic Red Wheat
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 C Olive Oil
1/2 C Water

Preparing the Pie Plates for cooking:

If you would like to see the pie crust in the plates before I added the apples go to this entry on Whole Wheat Sugar Cookies to see a visual. I did not have enough dough to fill up the second pie plate, so next time we make this recipe, I will probably just do one pie and put a double crust with some on the bottom and some laced on top.
The next video clip is of the spices being ground. The recipe for the apple mixture is:
3 lbs of Organic Granny Smith apples peeled and sliced
juice of one lemon
2 C Agave Sweetner
1 tsp sea salt
4 Cardamon Pods (just the seeds)
8 Whole Cloves
1 Cinnamon Stick
1 TBS Whole Flax
1 TBS Whole Fennel
1/2 of a nutmeg fresh ground with a nutmeg grater
I’m not sure why the sound on this video clip did not register, but here is the picture. I used the mortar and pestal to get the cardamon seeds out of the pods and threw them into my electric spice mill with the rest of the spices and seeds.
After fresh grinding the spices and juicing the lemon, I threw all of the ingredients in with the apples and mixed them well.

I poured the apple and spice mix into the pie crusts, which I had prebaked for twenty minutes, and then baked them at 350 for about 40 minutes. Here is a clip of the finished pies:

Truth be known only Paul and I ate the pie. The children all chowed down on the other desserts we made that night and would not even try the pies. But I enjoyed eating it for several days, and one morning had a breakfast of pie and some herbal tea. It was yummy. The spices help preserve the pie, and it actually tasted better after it had sat for a couple days in our covered cake plate.
Jenny Hatch

Now that the Democrats have won the house and senate and are charging full speed ahead to ruin our economy and lose the war, I thought it would be a timely thing to take a break from blogging for a couple weeks.

Democrat plan for Iraq…
We have a very busy concert season coming up. Paul and I will be performing the Messiah with the Colorado Repertory Singers and our children all have Musical Concerts in the coming weeks. We also plan to have a great week of Thanksgiving festivities, with ten whole days off school, and sharing wonderful meals together.
To help Celebrate thanksgiving I thought I would share some of my favorite food entries in this post as well as some of my favorite photographs from this past year. Enjoy!

My all time high traffic post! Making Muffins!

Wheat Cookery

Happy Thanksgiving 2005


Hot Kamut Cereal

Spelt

Whole Wheat Organic Waffles

Jenny Hatch

Cooking Pot with Mixing bowl all clean and ready to go!
Last night I made some Barley and Mung bean Soup with Spiced Kamut Muffins. Here are some pictures and the recipes, with instructions…

Peeled Vegetables
Ingredients for Mung Bean Soup
2 TBS Olive Oil
1 Onion
3 Garlic Cloves
1 Sweet Potato
1 White Potato
1/2 C. Green Mung Beans
1/8 C Whole Unhulled Barley
1/2 tsp. FG (Fresh Ground) Black, Red, and White whole Peppercorns
1 tsp Sea Salt
Stock:
1/2 C Oatstraw Tea
Peels from White Potato
1 TBS Sea Salt
10 Coriander Seeds
4 Cardamon Pods

In a large cooking pot saute chopped vegetables in Olive Oil until tender.

Fresh Grind the Peppercorns in a seed mill.

Soak the mung beans in boiling water for twenty minutes before adding them to the vegetables.
Fresh Grind the whole Barley in a seed mill until it is well cracked, then toss it into the soup pot. Make up the stock pot using the ingredients listed hard boiled in two quarts of water for twenty minutes. Strain this water into the soup pot when the vegetables are soft.

Simmer soup for an hour and then gently blend with a hand held blender. I just quickly blend it until the soup is thickened, but not mushy. Add in the final tsp of sea salt and let it sit for a couple minutes hot in a soup bowl. The final resting phase really incorporates the flavors of this amazing soup!

Paul and I chowed down two full bowls of soup each. Please note it is Vegan, and no animal ingredients were needed or wanted. The little bits of bean and grain made for a complete protein, and gave amazing flavor and body to the soup. By quick grinding the barley and soaking the mung beans for twenty minutes, this soup cooked up rather quickly, and did not need the hours it usually takes to soften whole barley. The simmering temperature I cooked it on was higher than a low simmer, and I did this to hurry the soup, but if you do it, you need to watch it to make sure it does not burn.
With the soup I cooked up some Kamut Muffins with a half cup of Fresh Ground Spices.
Here is a shot of the grains being ground in my electric mill:

Grinding whole Kamut

Kamut Flour

Mixing the dry ingredients in the mixer:
Recipe:
Spiced Kamut Muffins: (Double Batch)
4 Cups FG Kamut Grain Flour
1/2 C FG Golden Flax Seeds
10 Whole Cloves
1/4 Whole Nutmeg
1 whole Cinnamon Stick
2 C Sugar
1/2 Cup Agave Sweetner
2 C. Goat Milk
4 Organic Eggs
1 Cup White Flour

Mix dry ingredients together well, and then start adding in the wet ingredients. Add in two cups of Goats milk.

Here is a shot of my gallon of Agave – if you purchase this larger size container, the costs go down markedly – $25.00 for this gallon at Vitamin Cottage

Organic eggs give an amazing amount of high quality protein to anything you cook them with. After you add in all of the wet ingredients, just mix the dough for a minute or so until it is well mixed. This recipe was a little too wet, so I added in another cup of white flour to thicken it up. Muffin dough should be very thick.
Please note this recipe does not contain any oil, salt, or leavening. It simply does not need it. The muffins have an amazing spicy taste, and although very sweet (I’ve learned I have to add in the sweeteners to get my children to eat them), they are very nutritious.

Bought this organic cooking spray at Wal Mart.

I use an ice cream scoop to put the dough into the muffin pans, it is much quicker and gets the perfect amount of dough into the small muffin pans. One scoop for the small pans, and two scoops for the large muffin pan.

Muffin dough in the small pan with Dora the Explorer muffin paper. You have to be a little careful about these muffin papers. Jeff, who is twelve opened up his lunch one day and his friends had a field day teasing him about the Dora muffin papers. I bought them for Ben, who at three loves to watch Dora the Explorer…

Finished Muffins – Bake for 20 minutes at 350

The soup and muffins together made a wonderful meal.

Ben eating a muffin!
Jenny Hatch

For lunch today I cooked up some Chimichangas. My children love to eat Mexican Food, and this is everyones favorite!
For the filling I used a quart size bottle of Beans that I cooked in the crock pot last week. Here is the recipe for the beans. They were yummy!

One large Organic Beef Soup Bone
5 C Dry Pinto Beans
1 C Amaranth
1 TSB Sea Salt
10 Whole Coriander Seeds
2 Onions
1 tsp Cumin
1 TBS Flax Seed
1 TBS Fennel Seed
1 TBS Psyllium Seed
1 TBS Brown Mustard Seed
1 TBS Golden Mustard Seed
1/4 tsp Cayenne Pepper
2 Quarts of Water
Mix the Seeds and Spices togther in an Electric Seed Grinder. Add all ingredients to the crock pot and turn the heat up high for the first day. For the next two days cook the beans on the lowest setting. Bottle The Beans and keep in the fridge for up to 4 weeks.
Here are some pictures:

Spices after grinding

To Make the filling for the Chimichangas:
Brown one pound of ground sirloin beef (Sirloin has the highest protein content). Pour one quart of the bean and amaranth mix into the skillet. Add in one box of Frozen Organic Spinach, 1/2 of a quart of Sams Club Salsa (the white corn and black bean is our favorite)

This Salsa is so inexpensive! A whole quart costs less than two dollars and is so tasty! It is chock full of beans and corn and everyone at our house loves it. I use it both in the filling for the Chimmys and also as a garnish.

Fill a white flour tortilla with 1/2 Cup of the filling and place a slice of cheddar cheese on top. Then fold it in thirds and thirds again to make a square shape. I fry them in Olive Oil for about ten minutes. Five minutes on each side at a medium heat. Then serve with salsa, sour cream, rice, and any side dish you like. The picture at the top shows the Chimichanga with rice and a side of Chicken Livers.

Here is a picture of them frying, you can see the white basmati rice cooking in the pan on the back of the stove.

Why add Amaranth to beans?
Amaranth significantly ups the nutritional quality of any vegetarian foods. Even though I cooked the beans with a beef bone, which significantly improves the flavor of the beans, the protein content in the beans is significantly less when cooked without the grain.
Adding Amaranth to the beans completes the protein and gives a wonderful full bodied flavor to everything cooked with the beans like chile, tacos, chimmys, and bean dip.
The spices I added in also give a wonderful taste to the beans, and make them much more digestible.
I often get asked how I can stand to be around my family when I feed them so much gassy food. Beans, Whole Grains, etc…are known for causing excessive gas. We really don’t have that problem, and I believe it is because the seeds, herbs, and spices I cook with help all of us to digest the foods much better than if we did not eat them. When my kids eat excessive amounts of sugar and chemicals they tend to get nasty gas. But the beans and grains don’t bother them. Perhaps it is because I have always eaten these foods while pregnant and nursing and so they are used to digesting them.
The nutritional value of your food skyrockets when fresh whole spices are ground into them as you cook. The fennel especially does amazing things to any food it is put in. Flax and psyllium have been used to cleanse the bowell for generations and used in this recipe do not overpower the flavor of the food as they sometimes do in other recipes.

Sometimes I like to eat a big bowl of beans and grains. It is a great high energy food that keeps me going for hours.
Jenny Hatch

These past few weeks I have been preparing a menu to use through the school year which would utilyze our food storage rotation to the greatest advantage. We have a ton of food (literally) which needs to be rotated out. The oldest grains are going on fourteen years old, and we need to seriously start eating it.
Each day I plan to make some dough for bread, rolls, or scones, and also a batch of muffins and/or cracked grain cereal for my family to eat. This will help move our food storage foods into our diet and give greater variety of nutrients and foods. Because I have suffered from food allergies my whole life everything I have studied on how to prevent this in my children points towards a four day food rotation diet, where you don’t eat the same food for four days. This menu was really designed to get the greatest variety of foods in our diet. It does not demonize one food over another, nor does it depend on one food to eat each day. Most of America functions on white refined wheat flour and some form of cow’s milk dairy products. Wether it’s pizza, or cookies and milk, or cereal and milk, or cheese and crackers, so many of the foods we eat each day revolve around the denatured and devitalized wheat berry combined with some form of cows milk.
One of my goals in setting up this diet was to rotate as many foods as possible into each month of eating. With the belief that variety is the spice of life, I figure the more types of grains, beans, seeds, and milks my family eats, the more nutrients they have to develop bone, blood, and brain tissue.
I thought I would share this menu with any of my blog readers who are interested. In the coming months I will occasionally share recipes and pictures as I do the cooking.
Jenny Hatch
Monday #1 – Red Wheat and Sesame with Cows Milk
B – Pancakes
L – Sub sandwich
S – Baked Chicken-Roasted veges/green beans (2 chickens)
D – Apple Crisp
Tuesday #1 – Oats and Brown Flax with Rice Milk
B – Scrambled Eggs
L – Leftover chicken
S – Pot Roast, roasted potatos and peas
Wednesday #1 – Brown Rice and Psyllium with Soy Milk
B – Muffins and Fruit
L – Whole grain crackers, cheese cubes, and veges
S – Sloppy Joes with French fries and salad
Thursday #1 – Rye and Golden Flax with Goats Milk
B – Broccoli Quiche
L – Peanut butter and jelly
S – Pizza with garden salad
Friday #1 – Kamut and Brown Flax with Cows Milk
B – Fried Potatos
L – Turkey sandwich
S – Chinese Feast – with Egg rolls, pot stickers, and rice
Saturday #1 – Spelt and adzuki with Rice Milk
B – Waffles
L – Burritos w Rice/Nachos (Make double batch burritos)
S – Beef Stew with cornbread
Sunday #1 – Amaranth and mung with Soy Milk
B – Cracked Wheat
L – Canned Soup
S – Chimichangas with brown rice and black beans
Monday # 2 – Quinoa and basmati rice with Goats Milk
B – Muffins and Fruit
L – Burritos
S – Italian Sausage Spaghetti w/ garlic toast (Double Batch)
D – Lemon Bars
Tuesday # 2 – W Wheat and Brown Flax with and Cows Milk
B – Omelet
L – Yogurt fruit cup
S – Cheeseburgers and sweet potato fries
Wednesday # 2 – Red Wheat and Sesame with Cows Milk
B – French Toast
L – Chimichangas
S – Chicken Soup with biscuits
Thursday – # 2 – Oats and Brown Flax with Rice Milk
B – Oatmeal
L – Hoagie sandwich
S – Enchiladas with white rice and fresh shredded lettuce
Friday – #2 – Brown Rice and Psyllium with Soy Milk
B – Fried Potatos
L – Cold spaghetti
S – Greek Feast – with Spinach pie and Greek salad
Saturday – #2 – Rye and Golden Flax with Goats Milk
B – Broccoli Quiche
L – Hummus with pita and veges
S – Leek and Potato Soup with biscuits
Sunday # 2 – Kamut and Brown Flax with Cows Milk
B – Yogurt fruit cup
L – Baked ziti or casserole
S – Potato Bar with Chile (Bake double batch of Potatos)
Monday # 3 – Spelt and adzuki with Rice Milk
B – Fried Potatos
L – Spinach pie and salad
S – Beef Stir fry with Lemon Rice
D – Ice Cream Sundae
Tuesday # 3 – Amaranth and mung with Soy Milk
B – Muffins and Fruit
L – Pasta Salad
S – Macaroni and Beef Bake with Creamed Spinach
Wednesday – # 3 – Quinoa and basmati rice with Goats Milk
B – Scrambled Eggs
L – Tortilla wrap with meat and veges
S – Chicken Parmesan with fresh garden salad
Thursday – # 3 – W Wheat/Brown Flax with and Cows Milk
B – Waffles
L – Whole grain crackers, cheese cubes, and veges
S – Chicken Stir Fry with Pasta
Friday – # 3 – Red Wheat and Sesame with Cows Milk
B – Omelet
L – Stuffed pitas
S – Mexican Feast – with pinto bean tacos and nachos
Saturday – # 3 – Oats and Brown Flax with Rice Milk
B – Oatmeal
L – Canned Soup w/ Grilled Cheese
S – Indian Feast – Curry Rice, chickpeas w/ cinnamon/chapitas
Sunday # 3 – Brown Rice and Psyllium with Soy Milk
B – Scrambled Eggs
L – Pizza – Purchase hot pockets (4)
S – Beef Tacos with Spanish Rice
Monday # 4 – Rye and Golden Flax with Goats Milk
B – French Toast
L – Yogurt with granola to mix in
S – Au Gratin Potato with Roasted Turkey
D – Gingerbread
Tuesday # 4 – Kamut and Brown Flax with Cows Milk
B – Cracked Kamut
L – Peanut butter and jelly
S – Twice Baked Potato with Fresh Salad
Wednesday – # 4 – Spelt and adzuki with Rice Milk
B – Spelt Muffins and Fruit
L – Sub sandwich
S – Oven Fried Chicken with Creamed Potato and peas
Thursday # 4 – Amaranth and mung with Soy Milk
B – Omelet
L – Peanut butter and jelly
S – Lasagna with garlic toast
Friday # 4 – Quinoa and basmati rice with Goats Milk
B – Fried Potatos
L – Turkey sandwich
S – Thai Feast – with Pad Thai and Basmati Rice
Saturday # 4 – W Wheat/Brown Flax with and Cows Milk
B – Pancakes
L – Cheesy pita bread
S – BBQ Chicken with steamed asparagus and spinach
Sunday # 4 – Red Wheat and Sesame with Cows Milk
B – Cracked Wheat
L – Baked ziti or casserole
S – Super Nachos with rice, beans and roasted chicken
Special meals for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Birthdays