Whole Grain Chocolate Chip Cookies

OK, so I never pledged that this was going to be CleanWholeDelicious, AND WeightLossFriendly.  LOL  Besides, what fun is eating clean, whole, delicious foods if you can’t make dirty, nasty, sinfully scrumptious treats now and again, right?  This serves as a perfect introduction to the surprise I whipped up after work for the kids tonight-whole grain chocolate chip cookies.  Shh, don’t tell them these suckers are ‘good’ for them.  You’d be lying anyways, lol!  These aren’t good for you, they just aren’t as bad as eating baked goods with the standard bleached and ‘enriched’ all purpose flour.  If they didn’t strip all the whole grain goodness from it in the first place, they wouldn’t have to ‘enrich’ it!  Nothing difficult about these cookies, but be forewarned, the consistancy of the dough is a bit different than your typical chocolate chip cookie dough.  It kind of resembled moon sand (if you’ve ever had the displeasure of cleaning that stuff up), or, as more of you may be able to relate to, wet beach sand.  Don’t fret!  Just use a spoon to scoop, and use the palm of your hand to kind of mold the dough to the spoon, making little cookie ‘patties’ and placing them on the sheet.  Nothin’ to it!

Ingredients

6 tablespoons butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar, lightly packed
3 tablespoons molasses
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder 2 cups King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour
1/4 cup flax seed
1 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease two baking sheets.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, sugars, molasses, and vanilla.  Add in the egg, vinegar, baking soda, and baking powder.  Mix well.  Stir freshly ground flax seed into flour. Add flour mixture, one cup at a time.  Don’t over mix!  Mix in chocolate chips.

Mold with spoon and palm of hand into firm, rounded patties about 2″ across.  Place on cookie sheet and bake 8-10 minutes.  Do not over bake, as your moist cookies will become crisp and crumbly in a matter of moments.  Best to ‘check’ one around 8 minutes (via taste test, of course), and if they are still too moist inside, let them go a tad longer.

Results?  Delicious, whole grain chocolate chip cookies in under 30 minutes from start to mouth…and certainly wont last long, for sure!

Cold Soba and Steak

In today’s world, who the heck has time to come home and cook a delicious, healthy dinner?  I tell you, until I started making an effort to blog about healthy yummy recipes, I barely made an attempt.  This blog has rejuvenated three loves of mine: cooking, photography, and tonight, asian food. Mmm!  But it hasn’t waved any magic wands to insert extra time into my busy day, so I need this health kick to be quick and easy, as I’d imagine many people do.  This meal took all of 20 minutes to whip together.  I suggest you give yourself at least half an hour past that to let the dish chill in the fridge because, as the name implies, it is meant to be served cold.

Ingredients:

• 4 oz Green Tea Soba noodles
• 1 lb top round steak (thin and flat, like a flank steak)
• 2 tsp olive oil
• 2 tbsp seasoned wok oil
• 1 cup Napa Cabbage, shredded
• 1 cup of carrots, shredded
• Chinese 5 Spice powder

• 3 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1 tbsp truvia (or your choice calorie-free sweetener)
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 2 tbsp sesame seeds

Instructions:

Cook noodles according to package directions.  While they are boiling, score the steak across the grain in slices maybe 1/2″ apart.  Season generously with Chinese 5 Spice powder.  Heat oils in large skillet on medium-high.  Sear the steak on both sides, cooking to your preference.  Remove from skillet and let cool on cutting board.

When noodles are done cooking, rinse in cold water and drain well.  Toss them in a large bowl.  Now toss in the shredded napa and carrots.  Toss.

After steak has stopped dripping juicy goodness, slice as thin as you possibly can with a very sharp knife.  Place the sliced steak in a medium bowl.  Add to this the soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, ginger, sweetener, sesame oil, and seeds.  Mix well.

Add the meat and soy mixture to the veggie/noodle bowl and toss until everything is evenly distributed.  Cover and place in fridge until well chilled.  Serve cold.  Yum!

Whole Grain Zucchini Bread

With the 8 zillion zucchinis I have overtaking my garden, the obvious next step was to take my tried and true family recipe and healthify it to be presented on the blog….and to my kids!  Rather than try to sneak the tiny green shreds of goodness past them, I figured I could incorporate their help instead.  Besides, being a good role model is only so good when the kids are oblivious to what you are modeling, right?

This recipe incorporates two of my favorite healhy alternatives to traditional baking ingredients:  whole white wheat flour and agave nectar.  Using the whole wheat flour stunts the growth of quick bread, and I have to wonder if I used some baking soda in place of the baking powder, would the loaf risen more?  I suppose next time I will expirement and find out.  I don’t proclaim to be a know-it-all when it comes to cooking, and definitely learn better by doing, than by reading.  As far as the agave nectar, well, if you aren’t familiar with this stuff, you should be!  It’s much sweeter than sugar, only it doesn’t spike your blood sugar the way table sugar does.  That helps you keep your figure, as well as prevent going on a carb-crash roller coaster after eating a big chunk of this awesome bread.

Speaking of keeping your figure….if you are currently trying to watch what you eat, and have a problem keeping your servings reasonable when it comes to baked good, you might want to hold off on making this one for a while.  Sure, its full of whole grain goodness, but I’m telling you, its so delicious, it’s sure to be a diet buster and a true test of your will power ;)

Whole Grain Zucchini Bread

Ingredients

2 eggs, beaten
2/3 plus 1/4 cup agave nectar
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups grated zucchini
2/3 cup melted butter
2 teaspoons baking soda
3 cups whole white wheat flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup dried cranberries

Preheat the oven to 325°F . In a large bowl, mix together the agave nectar, eggs, and vanilla. Next mix in the zucchini and melted butter. Add baking soda, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Mix well. Add the flour, a cup at a time. Fold in the nuts and dried cranberries.

Divide the batter equally between 2 non-stick sprayed loaf pans. Bake for 1 hour or until a wooden pick inserted in to the center comes out clean. Cool in pans for 10 minutes. Turn out onto wire racks to cool thoroughly.

Makes 2 loaves.

Roasted Tomato Sauce

Hellloooo, yummy!  Why is it I have never heard of such a thing as roasted tomato sauce?  I’ll be honest, my idea of making spaghetti sauce consisted mainly of opening up a bunch of cans of assorted tomatoes, dumping them in a blender with some spices, zipping around a few times to remove most of the chunks, and transferring the slurry to a big pot to bring to a slow boil.  Not the all day event my mom used to endure every time she made her sauce….and it tasted just as good.  Sorry mom, but it’s true!  (sidenote:  this is also the woman who spent all day cooking our Thanksgiving turkey, waking before the crack of dawn, painstakingly basting it every hour….until I introduced her to those giant bags you can cook a turkey in!  LOL!)

Anyways, I ran across a recipe for roasted tomato sauce and thought, wow, that sounds like it would be really good!  I got home, plucked a bunch of tomatoes from the garden, quartered them up and seasoned them just so.  Tossed them in the oven for an hour, and presto!  Roasted tomatoes.  Let them cool a titch, toss them in the blender, pulse a few times until it resembled sauce and well what do you know?  I’ve got a tasty new sensation going on over here!

So here’s what you do:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Wash the tomatoes and quarter them.  Toss them in a bowl.
Douse them liberally with your favorite oil and balsamic vinegar.
Sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste.
Mince some fresh garlic and toss that in the bowl, too.
Lastly, add in some fresh chopped oregano and basil and you’re done.

Mix it all up good, arrange the tomatoes in a single layer on a baking pan, and slowly roast those bad boys for about an hour.  When they look all roastedly-delicious, pull them out and let them cool a bit before pulsing in your blender.

That’s IT!  Nothin’ to it.  Clean.  Whole. Delicious.  (….and good for you too!)

Intro to clean eating

So since some visiting here might not quite understand what ‘clean eating’ is (beyond scrubbing the veggies before cooking them, lol), I figure a good place to start would be to highlight this lifestyle.  Essentially, eating ‘clean’ means eating foods as close to the way nature intended them to be.  I read somewhere that if you have a product in your hand which takes you more than three visual thoughts backwards to get it to its natural state, it probably isn’t worth eating.  For instance, an apple.  Well, plucked right from the tree…as clean as it gets.  Unsweetened apple sauce?  Hmm, well, it started as an apple, then was cooked and mashed.  Clean!  Apple pie at McDonalds?  There’s so many visual steps between the tree and the package, my head hurts just thinking about it.

Ok, so that was an easy one.  Let’s go for a more difficult example.  Flour.  You know, the white stuff we bake with?  I think I was probably a grown woman before I understood everything that had to happen to get what used to be a wholesome grain, and turn it into the white powdery stuff I make cookies with.  As you could imagine, bleached white flour is *not* clean.  A clean alternative, however, would be something like King Arthur’s Whole White Wheat flour.  Don’t let the ‘white’ fool you.  This stuff is as whole grain as it comes.  The wheat is of a white variety, and is not bleached.  It makes for a great substitute in quick breads, cookies, and even pizza crust.  I’ve been fooling my kids with healthier versions of cookies, and they’ve had no idea.

So now we have a *very* basic peak at what clean eating is.  An easy way to think about shopping for a clean eating way of life is to think about shopping  just the perimeter of your grocery store.  Visualize it.  You walk in and immediately are greeted by fresh, delicious produce.  Healthy fruits and vegetables, all the way nature intended.  Make your way to the back and you’ve got your meats.  Work your way back out the other side and you’ve entered dairy land.  What is in all those aisles, on the other hand, is a bunch of over processed, highly refined garbage, with just a few spatterings of anything resembling natural.  You might veer down an aisle to grab some peanut butter or some whole grain flour, maybe some canned beans, but for the most part, what is down those aisles is what has been making America fat for decades.  I try to avoid aisle shopping at all costs!