I will stick with coconut bliss, being already on the diabetes train and all. But I think I could feel good about giving this to my kids.

P.S. Apparently I lied about that last one being… uh, the last one.

He used to walk part of the way. Then one day he announced to us that his bike might need a tune-up, because he can’t use first gear in the front. OMG!

That weekend, mama got some greasy hands, and the kid got, effectively, a new bike. The next week he was biking the whole way.

He noticed that even with a good breakfast, he needs food when he gets there. And even with a good lunch, he needs food before he heads home. So we went off looking for some energy bars. And most of them were made out of all kinds of weird stuff. But then we found… tadaa! Larabars!

According to their website, each flavor has no more than six ingredients. (“Cashew Cookie” has two: dates and cashews.) Check out this ingredients list for the “Ginger Snap” flavor.

• dates
• almonds
• pecans
• ginger
• cinnamon
• cloves

Carbs and Flavor

They’re sweet. No denying it… and that could be good or bad, depending. Ginger snap has 220 Calories, and 19 non-fiber carbs. They provide lots of fuel for my boy’s bike ride.

But probably not for me. The company claims that for “many diabetics” the whole food carbs don’t significantly raise blood sugar. I have only tried a few bites, so I can’t say.

I could make them myself

… but why? I have to admit, I’m kind of sick of making butter out of raw milk, and cooking everything from scratch. (Ack! Did I say that?) This once, I’m just gonna go with it.

Have you tried Larabars? Have another favorite bar? I’d love to hear about your experience!

Me: “No!”
Brother: “Yeah.”
Me: “Shut up! Do you like them?”
Both: “Yeah!”
w00t!

Ok, so we have a whole bunch of squash. Seriously.There was this part of the garden, see, where we’d dumped the chicken compost. We’d only ended up using half the garden space, because we got tuckered out. So the place where the pile was just had the leftover compost, sitting on hard clay. Someone gave us winter squash plants, and we put them out. They went everywhere!

Mostly our garden didn’t produce much. First year, very clay soil, not much added. But when the frost-warning came, we found something like a dozen huge butternut squash to pick.

The good news about this recipe is that it’s yummy, and made of pretty good stuff. The bad news is that a dozen muffins only used up about a third of a squash.

Winter Squash or Pumpkin Muffins

Big bowl ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup raisins (Optional. I liked both ways.)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp ground cloves
• 1/4 tsp salt

Small bowl ingredients

• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 cup cooked squash
• 3/4 cup yogurt (adjust for consistency)
• 3/4 cup xylitol (use stevia, sugar, brown sugar, honey, you choose)
• 1/4 cup melted butter

Directions

Combine the dry ingredients in a big bowl. In a small bowl or, if you’re me, in your 4 cup pyrex measuring cup, whisk the egg, and stir in squash and yogurt (or pumpkin and buttermilk) and sweetner, then stir in the melted butter. Stir the liquid into the dry ingredients just until the flour mixture is all moistened.
Smear a very thin coat of butter on the muffin cups. Hint: I use an air-bake pan, that has two layers of metal with air in between. Bottoms never burn. Ever.
Fill the tins about 1/2-2/3 full. Bake at 325° for about 25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.  (Disclosure! The original recipe said 350 and 25-30 minutes. You know what I’m gonna say. Experiment.)

Cookies

If you run out of muffin tin space, this also makes nice cake-cookies. They’re very soft, not for storing, but they taste yummy. Just put blobs on a cookie sheet and stick them in the oven with the muffins. (Use an air-bake cookie sheet to protect the bottoms!)

Aspirations

These cookies are pretty much made of real food, but I aspire to learning to cook well without baking powder, and maybe without baking soda. If you need a factory to make it, I figure it’s not really real food. For now, though, these are pretty darn yumzie.

I think food wins. Partly ’cause someday, I really do want somebody to buy the t-shirt! But also ’cause I realized that I have lots of places to write the other stuff, and also… ’cause, even though I can’t think of much to say about walking in the dew through the garden to pick cabbage, I do love the foodies. :)

Anyway, I want to talk about flatbread.

I love this because it’s made from actual whole wheat. Not “50% whole wheat” like the stuff I’ve been seeing at the store. And the coolest thing is that it’s so easy that even I succeeded in making it the first time.

• 1 cup warm water
• 1 Tablespoon active yeast
• 2 Tablespoons honey (the yeast needs a real sugar to be quick)
• 2 1/2 cups fresh whole wheat flour
• 2 Tablespoons oil
• 1 teaspoon salt

Mix the water and honey, sprinkle on the yeast and stir it in. Stir in about half the flour. Set the bowl in a warm place for about ten minutes. Mix together the rest of the flour, the salt, and the oil, and blend it with the first part.

Squish it in your hands or knead it for about ten minutes. Roll the dough in balls, about 2″ in diameter.

Roll out each ball until it’s 1/8″ thick or so. You don’t want them paper thin… try experimenting.

I cooked mine in an iron skillet that I’d heated to “medium” — Lay the flattened dough in the hot, ungreased pan, and cook for 1-2 minutes per side. (Use the lid to hold in heat, if you like.) You could also cook them on a stone in a 500+ degree oven, but I liked using the iron skillet, and it worked well.

I can’t believe how easy it was!

My husband and I were at our favorite local store, and I was buying some almonds because, well… yum! Anyway, I was thinking of raw almonds, but I saw him eyeing the roasted almonds, so we thought we’d get some. I tasted one of the roasted almonds, though, and… there was definitely something missing. It was easier to chew, yes, but the flavor was missing something very rich and meaty, like the smell of baking bread. I think it’s the taste people are calling umami.

Anyway, he wanted roasted, so we got both. In the picture at the top, the first bowl is the store-bought roasted almonds, and the second is the raw almonds. The third? Those are almonds I roasted—or maybe toasted—at home. They turned out so delicious and very much like the raw. I was so happy my toes curled.

How to Make Toasted Almonds

I used my really cool crank-handle popcorn popper with no oil or anything. Low heat, let it warm a little, then throw in a cup of nuts and stir for 2-3 minutes until they’re hot, and a little toasted. The more roasted you like them (or toasted) the longer you can do it. Try about 5 minutes, and watch for cracking skins. I like them as close to raw as possible, though.

How to Make Roasted Almonds

If you don’t have a popcorn popper, you can bake them in a 350° oven for about 10 minutes, stirring once or twice during the cooking. I’d experiment though, and find the shortest time that makes them easy to chew. You don’t want them as “roasted” as the ones I got at the store!

I need some new ideas. If you have a favorite food made out of, you know, real food, leave a comment.

I didn’t know anything about chard until this. I mean, I’d heard of it, but I used to eat food that came in boxes, and Chard does not come in boxes. But now I have it growing out of the ground in my yard, and apparently it’s food, so what to do?

Well, I asked around, and a friend who is also just learning told me she learned how to make it from her friend. She described the method I’m about to tell you, and said they’d done it and sampled several different flavorings, like picante sauce, garlic, and lemon. I thought it would be good with the mushrooms we’d bought earlier, and I was right. It turned out great!

Of course, you could use a different kind of mushroom as well. I would have liked to have more mushroom in it… so maybe a less expensive one!

Swiss Chard with Morel Mushrooms

We picked a lot of Chard. When you cook down the leaves, they don’t take up much space, so you need a big handful for each person. After washing the leaves, we pulled the leafy part off the stems. Then chopped the stems into little slices that looked a little like celery slices.

We sauteed the chard stems in butter in the iron skillet — that’s what the black is. I was nervous about the flavor (it’s pretty bitter when it’s raw!) so I kept tasting the sauteed stems. When they started to become clear, I added a bit of salt (not much) and tasted, and suddenly it was yummy. I knew then that it would go nicely with the murshrooms.

Then we started chopping the mushrooms. I guess morels are usually sliced in half lengthwise, but I wanted the flavor to blend with the chard, so I sliced them in rings.

And here’s the finished product. It was a little bitter, but it was subtle. It was also very savory, and quite delicious. I’m looking forward to making more.

We can only change so much of our diets and our lives at one time. So what changes are urgent, and what can you put off for a while? How do you decide which “vices” you can hang on to? It’s a very individual choice, isn’t it? And the big question for me has been whether if I hang on to some “vices,” I will get gradually better, and be able to give them up, or whether I’m just fooling myself. My body used to tell me that the best possible food was either cookie dough, (butter and sugar, with a touch of refined flour for balance) or cinnamon rolls (butter and sugar, with a touch of refined flour for balance). I know that in the past, I’ve switched to artificial sweeteners (the epitome of industrial food) and later discovered my sweet-tooth was as strong as ever. Soon, I was back to the cookies and cakes I’d thought I was free of.

Now, I’ve given up almost all sweets, but hung on to a few crutches. Mainly choco-perfection chocolate which is sweetened with a natural fiber-based sweetner that doesn’t affect blood sugar or insulin. I’ve been diluting them, by melting a small chunk of the chocolate in some coconut oil, and then cooling it in the freezer. The other day, I was at the grocery store, and bought myself a bar, and ate a piece straight. And you know what? The sweetness of it was really unpleasant. I discovered that I’ve actually freed myself of the desire for super-sweet tastes. What good news!

The moral of this story is that if *I* can get to the point where the idea of eating cookie dough is *gross* — anybody can.

Over the next few weeks (now that I’m back) I want to talk more about the process of transitioning away from industrial food toward real food. How do you decide which sweeteners to give up first? What about convenience foods? Is organic more important, or local?

If you have tricks you use to wean yourself off industrial food, or vices you still cling to, leave a comment!

I don’t know anything about the Eat Clean Diet. What I do know is that, flipping through this book, I saw recipe after recipe that was made of real, honest food. I’m pretty excited to see something like that on mainstream shelves. Seriously, other than a bit of baking-powder and some salt, I didn’t see anything that wasn’t just plain food — you know, plants and animals.

Oh, the joy!

Ingredients

• 2 cups peanuts
• 1 Tablespoon honey
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Sometimes you can get the peanuts ground at the grocery store, but you can also grind them pretty easily in your food processor.

Start with 1 Tablespoon of honey and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt for 2 cups of peanuts. But you’ll want to modify these, depending on how much your people like commercial peanut butter, and how hard it is to get them to accept change. :)

How to make the peanut butter

1. Put the peanuts in the food processor. If you want crunchy, keep some of the peanuts aside to add at the end.
2. Add the honey and salt.
3. Process.
4. Stick your finger in and see if it’s good. I mean, don’t stick your finger in. That’s dangerous. Use a spoon!
5. Add more honey or salt, if needed. If it’s stiff, you can also add a teaspoon of canola or some other oil, to make it smooth, but you probably won’t need it.
6. Add the rest of the peanuts and process a bit more, so until the “chunks” are a good size.

It’s easy to make great peanut butter at home, without high fructose corn syrup or any other weird stuff.

For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I’m talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way the way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia dating to the Carter administration. The latter was when, in 1977, a Senate committee had issued a set of “dietary goals” warning beef loving Americans to lay off the red meat. And so we dutifully had, until now.—Michael Pollan

A Canary in a Coal Mine

It’s said that coal miners would keep a canary in the mine with them, because the canary would react to dangerous situations (gasses in the air) before the miners could detect them. If the canary keeled over dead, the miners knew to get out of there!

I think I — and people like me — are just like those canaries. I’ve spend a lifetime eating industrial food, culminating in a couple of decades of high-fructose corn syrup in everything from salty snacks to spaghetti sauce to… yes, bread. The result? A condition that runs in my family, variously known as Metabolic Syndrome, Syndrome X, Dysmetabolic Syndrome, Insulin Resistance, or pre-diabetes.

And “normal” people all seem to think they’re immune. I want to say “People! Stop doing this! Your body will rebel too, eventually.” You might think you’ve escaped it, but did you know that 20% of people aged 60 or older have diabetes? Twenty percent! Obesity rates have soared over the last 20 years. Is that because our characters have become weaker and weaker? Or maybe because we’re eating junk?

It’s not bread’s fault

I’m pretty sure that real wheat, ground whole, and mixed with water and allowed to grow yeasty, then baked, isn’t the murderous villain that it’s cousins are. (By cousins, of course, I mean everything from Wonder Bread, made of styrofoam, I think, to the “100% Whole Wheat” bread available at the local grocery.)

But my body doesn’t work anymore. I’m afraid it might be too late for me to give up industrial food.

Industrial Low Carb Bread from Hell

Some times when I’m sick of not eating bread, I get this lovely stuff from Great Harvest. It’s pretty good. Not heirloom wheat allowed to rise slowly, without sweetners to rush the yeast, but it’s still good.

Other times, though, when I know that bread is making my insulin levels soar, and wearing out my pancreas, or whatever, I break down and buy — and eat — crap like this “5 Net Carbs” bread. Sad, but true.

I’ve talked about sugar-free chocolate, and the mix of xylitol and stevia I use. I’ll even admit to the occasional diet soda. Until you’ve had to give up your own home-made jams, most bread and grains, and every single sweet thing you’ve ever eaten, don’t judge me for the soda pop, ok?

Real hippies eat grains

I want to eat a lovely, sustainable, grain-based diet. I also don’t want to die early, having achieved full-blown diabetes and a weight over 300 lbs by my 50th birthday, blindness by 60, soon followed by amputated limbs, and, eventually, death. What’s a hippy to do?

For now, I’m aiming for some balance, however frustrating. I have a few industrial food-like substances that serve as crutches. And I’m gambling that a real food diet, with a reasonable amount of whole, real grains (and I don’t mean this stuff) will help me recover before it kills me. I allow myself one slice of Great Harvest bread with my local, delicious eggs in the morning, even though I shouldn’t, and I eat brown rice or millet with dinner.

Come back and ask me in a few years, and I’ll tell you whether it worked or not.