Need your help!

Hi everyone! I have a bunch of things planned to blog this week, but today I wanted to ask for your help. I am in the running for a contest to win a year supply of organic milk. I would so love that! But I need your help!

Would you please take a second and vote for me?  Chanelle Neilson

http://simplegoodandtasty.com/polls/who-do-you-think-should-win-simple-good-and-tastys-school-lunch-challenge

Thanks so much!

Weekday Breakfast Ideas

Busy mornings can make you want to reach for the packaged breakfast cereal. These are two breakfasts that we have on weekdays that take about 5 minutes to prepare and are packed with nutrition. If you chop the fruit for the parfaits or the veggies for the skillet ahead of time, it will be that much easier to get on the table.

Fruit and Yogurt Parfaits are a simple breakfast that my family gets really excited about. Even though it is really simple to make, it seems like a treat. It's all about the presentation! We serve these parfaits in our tall stemmed glasses, so the kids think they are really lucky and we are having something very fancy.

Fruit and Yogurt Parfaits

Ingredients:

Yogurt
Chopped Fruit (I used blueberries, strawberries and bananas)
Granola

Directions:
Layer yogurt and fruit in a glass. Top with granola.

Breakfast Veggie Skillet

Ingredients:

Olive oil and butter for sauteing
2 Eggs
Chopped Veggies ( I like zucchini, onion, avocado and tomato)
Cheese (Gorgonzola is my favorite)
Sea Salt and pepper to taste.

Directions:

Chop veggies. Heat butter and olive oil in skillet, saute veggies until tender (If using avocadoes and tomatoes, you can add these later) . Add eggs, cook until done. Add cheese and tomatoes. Top with avocado. Season with salt and pepper.

This post is part of Finer Things Friday.

Pig's Head Torchon

I have a special recipe today for Pig's Head Torchon. It uses a real pig's head, shown above. The original recipe is from The Momofuku Cookbook.


I came across this pig's head from my local freecycle group. Freecycle is a group where people give away things they don't need any more- things like old furniture, kids clothes, books or... pig's heads. A woman posted a list of things she had to give away, and way down at the bottom, she listed:
"2 Pig heads -- yes, pig heads. Frozen, organic, happy (mostly), free-range pigs we had raised & butchered. We got the head and thought we'd make something exotic with it but we haven't. I thought maybe someone knew what to do with it and would be happy to get it ?"
Well, though I had no idea what to do with it, I am always up for trying new organic free range animals and was happy to get it!


I didn't tell my husband when I went to pick it up, but later that night, I couldn't keep it a secret any longer.
"Why is the garage freezer plugged in?" he asked.
"Oh, I got some pig parts today."
Something in my voice must have tipped him off, "Chanelle, what kind of pig parts are we talking about?"
"Oh, you know, just parts of a pig..."
"Chanelle!" (If you've ever heard Ricky Ricardo call out "Lucy!" you'll know the tone he was using here.)
"Well, the head part. And she gave me a heart too! And some fat to render into lard!"


Needless to say, he was not as excited as I was. The thought of eating the head of any animal just plain grossed him out. I have been giving a lot of thought to this pig, particularly this pig's head, as it has sat in my freezer for the past week or two. We are so disconnected from our food supply. In Food, Inc., they point out that there are no bones in our meat anymore. Most of the meat we buy is off the bone. It kind of separates us from the fact that this is a real animal we are eating. I think that, in a weird way, it shows respect to the animal to eat all of it. There's a philosophy out there about this, called head-to-toe eating, where you try to use ALL of the animals edible parts. It also shows respect for the earth as we try to waste less and use all that we can.


With all those thoughts in my head, it was time to deal with the head of the pig. First I boiled the head with some vegetables. Then came the hard part: separating the meat from the um, unusable parts. I expected to be grossed out by the eye; it really wasn't so bad. The tongue and the teeth were by far the "ickiest" part (to quote my mom).  Regardless, I got through the meat picking and on with the recipe. This is what it looked like when I got through picking the meat.

I separated the meat from the fat to make the torchon. I then added salt, pepper and roasted garlic to the meat. I layed a layer of fat on plastic wrap and lay the meat on top of that. There is a surprising amount of meat on a pig head, mostly around the jaw. But since this pig was skinned (a good thing since I didn't have to look at the snout), I didn't have a big layer of fat. You can see in the picture below that there is much more meat than fat.

The next step is to roll it all up and refrigerate for 2 hours.

After refrigerating, you are supposed to slice it into 1 inch slices. My little roll didn't stick together, I think because there just wasn't enough fat/ skin. So, I improvised. I got out the food processor and pulsed the fat and the meat together. I was then able to form the meat and fat into little patties.
I dipped each patty into 3 bowls: flour, egg and water mix, and bread crumbs.
Then I fried them for a couple minutes on each side in a mixture of butter and olive oil.

The final verdict? 
Pretty good! My 5 year old ate 3, my daughter liked it and ate one, I ate two, and my husband... well, he knew it was pig's head and he tried it, so I think he gets points for that.


This post is part of Pennywise platter Thursday.

Banana Coconut Walnut Muffins

The original recipe for these muffins comes from Ina Garten on Food Network. I've made a few healthy changes, like swapping out half the white flour for wheat, reducing the sugar by more than half and swapping half the butter for coconut oil. You can use all butter in this recipe, but I like to use some coconut oil for a little added sweetness; I feel like it lets the recipe get away with less sugar. If you don't have coconut oil (or don't want to use half a cup of the pricey ingredient), you can use all butter, but you may want to increase the sugar to almost 1 cup. That sounds like a lot, but it's still half of what the original recipe calls for, and this makes 18 large or 24 regular sized muffins.

Eat with butter for added fat and raw milk for extra protein.

Banana Coconut Walnut Muffins

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups sprouted wheat flour
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 - 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled
• 1/2 cup virgin coconut oil 
• 2 extra-large eggs
• 3/4 cup whole milk
• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup mashed ripe bananas (2 bananas)
• 1 cup medium-diced ripe bananas (1 banana)
• 1 cup small-diced walnuts
• 1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
• Dried banana chips, granola, or shredded coconut, optional

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Line 24 large muffin cups with paper liners. Sift the flours, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Add the melted butter and coconut oil and blend. Combine the eggs, milk, vanilla, and mashed bananas, and add them to the flour-and-butter mixture. Scrape the bowl and blend well. Don't overmix.

Fold the diced bananas, walnuts, and coconut into the batter. Spoon the batter into the paper liners, filling each 1 to the top. Top each muffin with dried banana chips, granola, or coconut, if desired. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the tops are brown and a toothpick comes out clean. Cool slightly, remove from the pan, and serve.

Living With Real Food: A husband's perspective

I asked my husband James to write something for this blog. Here's what he came up with, unedited by me. I'm glad to hear that he is willing to give new foods a chance, since I have a special surprise for him later this week. (Check back, it'll be a good one ;)  

Living with real food: A Husband's Perspective

This post is from the guy who is eating all this “simply real food”. My wife is an amazing cook, unfortunately I am not an amazingly adventurous eater. Lets just say when we first got married I didn’t eat salad or much of anything else that you couldn’t find on a kids menu at a local restaurant. I pretty much grew up on hotdogs and macaroni and cheese despite the encouragement from my mom to eat new and heather things.  You couldn’t use any amount of reasoning with me, for instance, “if you don’t eat…fill in the blank…you won’t grow up to be big and strong” yeah well I’m not buying it, I was a tall kid and I ended up being six foot 10 inches, so try again. I’m a picky eater and I don’t like food changes, enough said.

Chanelle and I have been married for ten years and I am happy to report that I can now eat a salad and actually enjoy it. In fact I even think mac and cheese is pretty disgusting (wow, never thought I would say that). These changes did not come easily nor did they come quickly. I am still kind of a picky eater but I am much better than I was. My wife broke me in easy. Actually, she tricked me into eating a lot of stuff at first, like putting ground beef into a salad with ranch dressing and crushed up chips on it, looked like some kind of weird nachos to me. I caught on after awhile but she still sneaks secret ingredients into our meals; stuff that she knows if I knew was in my food I wouldn’t eat. I don’t hear the, “so what do you think?” question as much after dinner anymore because she knows before I answer I’ll say, “I don’t know, what was in it?” Truthfully, I really like most, if not all, dinners she makes. Regretfully, I gave my wife way more grief than I like to admit about our food changes. Some things I still think warrant a small amount grief like when I ask, “what do you want for Valentines Day?” and she says, “a real cow” or when I ask her what she wants for her birthday and she tells me, “chickens in the back yard”. Seriously woman, our backyard is not that big! No room for any type of farm animal.

While writing this I have come to the same conclusion that I always do, my wife loves our family and she will do everything in her power to make sure that she takes good care of us. So to anyone that has a hard time with food changes I say give it a chance. Do I love all the simply real food changes? Not always, but we are able to talk about what works and what I seriously will not eat (I still hate sea food). In the end Chanelle is an amazing cook, an amazing mother, an amazing wife, she is simply the real deal.

This post is part of real food wednesdays.

Real Food Basics: Eggs

The Real Food Basics series covers the difference between industrial (grocery store)  food and traditional, real  foods.

Recently my husband visited an egg farm as part of his job. He met the farmer and was allowed to see inside the henhouse. The man had two henhouses, actually. One was tenement slums for chickens, all crowded in together, and the other gave them space to move. "Free range," he explained. These hens are all fed the same feed. They all live inside all day, though one set of hens has more space. 

The farmer explained to my husband that free range eggs cost more because the chickens eat more. They have room to move, so they are burning more calories and eating more feed. But, he said, "Might as well buy the cheap ones, the eggs are all the same."

There is another kind of egg that I go to some effort to get- a real egg from a happy pastured raised chicken. I call them happy chickens to distinguish from "free range" or other misleading labels. A happy chicken gets chicken feed, but also goes outside in the sunshine, pecks at grass and bugs and produces healthier eggs because of it. This is a better life for the chicken, and it also produces better eggs.

Real eggs from happy chickens are different than what you find in the store. The yolks are brightly colored orange, due to the greens and insects added to the diet while they are out pecking at the ground. A study done by Mother Earth News found that pastured eggs had:

• 1⁄3 less cholesterol

• 1⁄4 less saturated fat

• 2⁄3 more vitamin A

• 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids

• 3 times more vitamin E

• 7 times more beta carotene

Nourishing Traditions explains more about the ratio of omega-6's to omega-3's. "Organic eggs from hens allowed to feed on insects and green plants can contain omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids in the beneficial ratio of approximately one to one, but commercial supermarket eggs from hens fed mostly grain can contain as much as nineteen times more omega-6 than omega-3!"  That is a huge difference.

Search out a farmer in your area who sells real, pastured chicken eggs. Or, raise chickens in your own backyard (a goal of mine for the future). The yolks are brighter, the flavor is richer, and they are more nutritious. 

Giveaway winner announced

Congratulations Tiffany!

You are the winner of $25 of jewelry from Sontina's creations.

(The winner was picked at random from random.org.)

I will contact you with details.

For those of you who didn't win, check out her website and great prices so that you can order your own beautiful jewelry creation!