Add 1/2 tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil or unrefined virgin coconut oil per cup of grain (optional). Add 1/4 teaspoon of sea salt per cup of grain (optional). Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cover. Allow to simmer for time listed, or until tender and all water is absorbed if you soaked it. Do not lift lid during cooking time, except very quickly once or twice to make sure it is simmering gently. After time required, turn off the heat and remove the pot from the burner. Let stand, covered, for about 15 minutes. Fluff with fork. All done!

Also see the Gluten-Free Grain Cooking Chart.

Grain Cooking Chart

information from “Enchanted Broccoli Forest” by Mollie Katzen

*Soak, don’t cook.
**Rinse first.

Cold grain salads really hit the spot during the summer. We live on them all summer long!

On Saturday evening, I took cold cooked millet and mixed it together with shredded roast beef, goat feta cheese, diced onions, olives, garlic, herbs, salt, pepper, extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The dinner was great and cooling on a day that reached 100 degrees.

In this post, I’ll share a general formula for creating your own cold grain salads, based on the foods your family enjoys and what your pantry contains.

The Grain

In a cold grain salad, the grains should be soaked, cooked, then chilled ahead of time. It is good to do your cooking in the morning when it is still cool – or better yet, if you have a roaster oven, you can set it up outside to cook your grains, which won’t heat up your house at all. These are some of the (already soaked and cooked, then chilled) grains we’ve used in cold main dish salads:

• Brown basmati rice
• Wild rice
• Quinoa
• Millet

Refer to the Grain Cooking Chart (or the Gluten-Free Grain Cooking Chart) for grain/water ratios, along with directions and options for overnight soaking, which is very important to aid in digestion.

The Meat

You’ll also want to have some type of meat, already cooked and chilled. The meat can be plain, as it will get seasoned in the salad. Or, if you cook it already marinated, it will add flavor to the salad. Either way, it is delicious! These are great meats to include in a cold grain salad:

• Pastured chicken chunks
• Grass-fed shredded roast beef
• Grass-fed ground beef (when cooking, keep it chunky, but small chunks)
• Wild-caught salmon chunks
• Pastured pork bacon bits
• Chunks of pastured pork ham
• Chunks of pastured pork or lamb sausage

The Add-Ins

There are so many add-ins. This won’t be exhaustive:

• Diced veggies, such as onions, peppers, zucchini, squash, cucumbers
• Veggies, such as peas or snap peas
• Sliced olives
• Chunks of raw cheese ~ feta, cheddar, etc.
• Cold, cooked beans ~ pintos, black beans, garbanzos/chickpeas

The Dressing

The dressing is really up to you. Our favorite is a viniagrette made from extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar (sulfite-free), salt, pepper, garlic, and herbs. Also good would be a honey-mustard, a natural ranch-type dressing (I’m working on a super good one right now), or a yogurt/kefir based herb dressing.

You mix up all the ingredients. Taste, taste, taste (of course to adjust seasonings). It is best to let it chill for an hour or so, to let the flavors mingle together. Another tasting might be necessary to make seasoning adjustments.

Try one! Let me know what you mix together and how your family likes it! Feel free to share what else you do for cooling eating during the summer.

Just warning you, the process is a little complicated.

Put about 1 cup of chevre in the food processor, add a tablespoon of raw milk, and blend until smooth. Add more milk and blend, tablespoon by tablespoon, until the “cream” is the right consistency. Chill or serve immediately.

See how hard that is?

I think you can do the same thing with yogurt-cheese (labni/labneh/labani) or kefir-cheese, too. Has anyone tried this before?

The reason I love this is because we get very little cream from our goat milk, due to its being naturally homogenized. Although a little cream rises to the top if the milk is left undisturbed in the fridge for a few days, it is not that much, nor do I have that much time to wait. Yet I am able to make a batch of chevre from whole milk every other day – which gives me plenty of cheese to turn into this “sour cream.”

The other way to get sour cream from chevre is not to let the whey drip out as long. (This also works as a mayo substitute!)

I’m submitting this post in Fight Back Fridays! – how are you fighting back for real food?

I would like to share what you know with the great and inspirational readers of gnowfglins.com. Send your favorite kitchen tip(s), accompanying photos, and your website address (optional) to: tips at gnowfglins dot com. 

I did get back to the corn tortilla dough I mentioned on Tuesday. I’m grateful because the tortillas turned out so awesome! Several things helped me roll them out.

• Flour the rolling surface with corn flour.
• Use a smaller amount of dough and roll each out to a smaller size; this increased manageability.
• Put a piece of plastic (I used one side of a gallon-size freezer bag) between the rolling pin and the dough.
• Use a spatula to gently scrape each tortilla off the cutting board.

For the lunch, I put a scoop of leftovers (brown basmati rice, pinto beans, and roast beef, warmed up in a separate pan) on each cooked tortilla. On top of that went goat cheddar cheese. The whole thing ended up being somewhat hand-sized. It wasn’t the most graceful thing to eat, but we kind of held the whole thing rolled up a bit in one hand while leaning over our plates with our mouths to gobble up the yummy meal. We sure didn’t care about being graceful when the lunch was so delicious!

I can’t tell you how much this meal costs, but I’m sure it was cheap. I purchased all the naturally-grown meal components in bulk – the rice, beans, grass-fed beef, and corn. This meal is also frugal with time, as I had the dough ready ahead of time. And the meal is frugal with our resources, as I used up leftovers instead of tossing them or letting them spoil.

Please share any ideas you have for quick, cheap and frugal lunches!

This post is part of Pennywise Platter Thursday ~ please visit and see other submissions for frugal real food ideas!

I’m sure I’m not reinventing the wheel on this oatmeal – but here’s how we’re eating our oatmeal lately. It is sweet from the milk, raisins, and a bit of stevia. Depending on how sweet you like your oatmeal, you may want to add raw honey, too. Soaking the oats the night before in an acid medium ensures maximum benefits and assimilation of nutrients. It is not hard to do, just needs to be done ahead of time. It is a good job for kids to do before bed! Beyond nutritional benefits, you’ll find that the soaking decreases the cooking time necessary in the morning ~ thick rolled oats take just 5 minutes to cook! If you want to save more time for yourself in the morning, add the cinnamon and stevia the night before.

The night before, combine in pot:

• 3 cups thick rolled oats (use certified gluten-free oats if desired)
• 3 cups filtered water
• 6 tablespoons Kombucha, kefir, whey, or buttermilk

The next morning, add:

• 3 cups raw milk
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon green leaf stevia powder (optional)

Bring to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer. Let cook, covered, for 5 minutes, or until thick. Turn off heat. Stirring gently, add:

• 2 tablespoons virgin, unrefined coconut oil
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup organic Thompson raisins
• 1/4 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
• 1/4 cup chopped nuts (soaked and dehydrated according to Nourishing Traditions, pages 514-515)

Spoon into bowls. Add raw milk for the liquid (or cream!). Enjoy!

© Copyright 2009 by Wardeh Harmon.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted by Cheeseslave.

Rich Soaked Oatmeal ~ Lately, I’ve taken to soaking oats overnight in half the liquid needed for cooking (along with a glug of whey or Kombucha) and then in the morning, adding the rest of the liquid in the form of milk for the cooking. The resulting oatmeal is rich and sweet and soooo delicious! We also add chopped (soaked) nuts, raisins, unsweetened shredded coconut, cinnamon and some green leaf stevia powder. I’ll add a recipe for this soon!

Traditional, Homemade Corn Tortillas (in progress) ~ Following the recipe at Cheeseslave, I made the dough for traditional corn tortillas. This involved boiling and then soaking whole corn in pickling lime. It soaked for a week before I got back to it ~ which is good: the longer the better, I gather! Then I went to make the tortillas and I’m stuck. Or I should say, the dough is stuck. I cannot figure out how to roll it out so it will stay in one piece when transferring it to the cast iron skillet for cooking. Is my dough too wet? I’ve used plastic bag barriers, cutting boards for pressing them flat and round (which works great), but when I go to get them in the pan, I cannot. Any suggestions? I could sprinkle some corn flour for rolling out. I’ll try that today. We’d sure like to eat the tortillas! I rolled out some of it on the back of a baking sheet and made some crackers, which were super good, although they stuck to the pan, too. There was a little bit of an aftertaste. I cannot say that it was offensive, it was just different. Which leaves me wondering: is this the way traditional corn tortillas are supposed to taste? or did I not rinse the lime off well enough?

Feta Cheese in Olive Oil Brine ~ I made this feta cheese, which doesn’t require refrigeration and is stored in quart size jars covered in olive oil. This coming Friday, after it has aged for one week, we’ll be able to test it! As of this morning, after milking, I have three gallons of milk in the fridge waiting to be turned into… something. More feta? Trying mozarella? I don’t know if I’m up for trying mozarella today, too many phone calls to make and too many other things to do. So perhaps another batch of feta. I could also get some yogurt going, again. I didn’t keep my first attempt going.

Continual Batching of Beef Stock ~ We got the call; our 1/2 grass-fed beef will be ready to pick up this week from Oakland Lockers. Embarassingly, I had many packages of beef bones taking up space in the freezer! Gotta free that up, so I’ve been making batches of beef stock continually in the crockpot since last Thursday. Each evening, I put bones and water and raw apple cider vinegar in the crockpot and cook for 24 hours. The next night, I start the next batch. Almost one whole shelf of the freezer is free now. The bones are full of meat, which has provided the most tender, flavorful main dish components all these days since late last week. I’ve cooked rice in stock twice and it is to-die-for! The rest of the stock is going in the freezer for later use. It doesn’t take up as much space this way.

Fantastic Brown Rice and Goat Milk “Sour Cream” ~ Along with the soaked oatmeal, I’ll be sharing recipes for fantastic rice and how we get an easy sour cream from our goat milk chevre. We’ve been swooning over all of them!

So, that’s it for me ~ what’s twisting in your kitchen? I would love to hear!

I have neglected to write at the conclusion to the Beyond Sugar Challenge, where we gave up all concentrated sweeteners (refined and natural) for the month of May. So here it is at the end of June and I think I’m finally ready to talk about it!

Truthfully, I was a little disappointed. That is what kept me from writing. I expected (hoped for) all sorts of good things to happen: boundless energy! weight loss! cure for anemia! Any of those would have made me wildly ecstatic. Perhaps my hopes were set too high.

We ended the challenge strong ~ without having broke it. Since then, we’ve had local raw honey a handful of times, but mostly rely on dates and raisins for occasional sweetening. Our UPS man brings candy for the kids, which we tossed in the trash during May, but which I let them eat in June. Choices!?

Looking back on the goals I articulated at the beginning of the challenge, I see some successes. Here’s a recap.

• Weight loss ~ about 5 pounds for me, initially
• Energy boost ~ don’t know, perhaps
• Overall health improvement ~ don’t know, perhaps
• Improvement in seasonal allergies ~ nope, they’re still strong
• Bumps on arms go away ~ nope, still present; I think cod liver oil will go to work on these
• Depression/mood swings improvement ~ perhaps an improvement for me
• No headaches ~ a little better for me, Jeff did not get any migraines
• Improved PMS symptoms ~ yes, this was better, praise the Lord!
• Break addiction to sweets (I think I am the only one who is truly addicted) ~ nope, I still crave chocolate and find it hard to resist
• Appreciate the true flavors of foods ~ we’ve enjoyed fruit more, along with new cultured dairy foods, and kefir, which I adore
• Learn to be satisfied — no, more than satisfied — with the rest of God’s foods ~ I think we’ve grown to appreciate other foods more

It is hard to isolate the effects of dropping concentrated sweeteners from our diet. At the same time we did this, we also got dairy goats and began having dairy foods, raw and cultured. This made it easier to bear the deprivation, but also could be the source of some of the improvements we saw. Also, allergy season hit me big time and without any natural remedies that even made a dent in my symptoms, I resorted to OTC antihistamines, which I swear made me gain that 5 pounds right back. Ugh.

So where do we stand now? We are somewhat liberated from sweeteners, and for that I’m glad. Going without broke our family’s dependence on having sugary sweets throughout the day and after dinner. We think twice about what we serve and tend to err on the side of less sweetening or no sweetening.

How about you? If you cut back sweeteners, or did without, what were your results? How do you feel about the change(s)?

"Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From The Local Food Front" By Joel Salatin

I’m becoming a die hard fan of Joel Salatin – like everybody else! Part of what I like is that he sounds so much like my husband. Those two would get along great! The latest book I’ve been devouring is “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From The Local Food Front.” It is a confirmation and an eye opener of just about everything that bugs us about our industrialized, centralized society.

Every chapter is a gem, focusing on one topic and the related battles Mr. Salatin has fought (sometimes winning and sometimes not). The first chapter is a recap of the original article that spawned the book, and in it he lists the most basic things he wants/wanted to do which are (you guessed it) illegal: on-farm processing, on-farm seminars and agri-tainment, collaborative marketing, employing local youngsters and interns, build a house the way he wants to, and opt out of the system. All of those requests seem completely reasonable, but surprise, surprise, they’re illegal!

Then the rest of the book, each chapter focuses in depth on those issues and more, including: Raw Milk and Dairy, Custom Beef, Organic Certification, Restaurants, Predators, Zoning, Labor, Housing, Insurance, Taxes, Bioterrorism, Avian Flu, and Mad Cow. There are more, too, and each one of them made me laugh, pull my hair out, and cry in sympathy.

He’s got some good quotes in there from government officials spouting the party line. He has to say over and over again, “I’m not making this up, folks,” because the officials say such ridiculously stupid, non-sensical things.

The whole book is loaded and important. Truly, every person – every person – who is interested in local, traditional, healthy, wholesome, unadulterated, safe food should read this book and talk about the issues. These issues need more exposure and more people talking about them and more people fighting for them (me, included). The reason is that most people are complacent. And when we’re complacent, we don’t care and we don’t do much about things that are important. But I didn’t say that as well as he did:

…health inspection bureaucrats have almost absolute power in many ways. The rule fiefdoms and enjoy a complicit, duplicitous American populace that assumes all is well as long as the fridge is full of beer, the toilet flushes, the TV remote works, and the sofa holds them up. To be honest, I am far more frustrated with complacency than I am with unscrupulous bureaucrats. If this book makes us angry with unscrupulous bureaucrats, I hope our righteous indignation will stir us to cast off complacency, and that is the beginning of integrity and accountability.

Any farm/food-entrepreneur who cares about food, community, earth, and people who dares to dream of making a living around those ideas is virtually assured not to make it. The labyrinth of rules and regulations makes those dreams nearly impossible. Just one of the reasons for the impossibility is because so much expense is required to have the right “facilities” to be producing “safe” food within the law. If the people who want to do it right are not able to do it, we will all suffer. Things can get worse. They seem pretty bad to me right now (when I consider some of the things we want to do and can’t).

Joel Salatin writes,

If it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that no person can ingest a morsel of unsafe food, then only government-decreed food will be edible. And when that happens, freedom of choice is long gone, because the credentialed food will be what the fat cats who wine and dine politicians say that it is. In the name of offering only credentialed safe food, we will only be able to eat irradiated, genetically adulterated, inhumane, taste-enhanced, nutrient-deficient, emulsified, reconstituted pseudo-food from Archer Daniels Midland, “supermarket to the world.”

I’ll tell you what, I don’t want to shop at the “supermarket to the world.” I want the choice to buy whatever food I want from whoever I want. I want the choice to grow it or raise it myself. I want the choice to sell it to others, without having to put in a separate refrigerator or pantry or a wheelchair entrance. I want the choice to build simple structures on my property that will help us achieve those ends, without jumping through permitting and inspecting hoops. I want the freedom of taking responsibility of my own actions. I want the freedom to make decisions about how I want to feed my family.

So buy or borrow – and then read – the book already. And let me know what you think, how mad you get, and what you’re going to do about it!

I’m submitting this post to Fight Back Fridays!, hosted by FoodRenegade. Some great posts over there – check them out!

Many fruit-sweetened desserts or other recipes, including my own, call for whole dates or date pieces which are blended into the wet ingredients. Don’t get me wrong, I love dates and usually have them at all times ready and waiting in the freezer! A few weeks ago, when I was getting low on dates, and also thinking that maybe we could save some money, I started experimenting with using raisins as a sweetener instead. It is working!

I can’t really give you hard and fast directions. What I hope to give you is some inspiration to try this yourself. Be sure to come and share how you used raisins as a sweetener! I am looking forward to being inspired by you!

Two Methods for Using Raisins as Sweetener

Here are just two methods of using raisins as sweetener.

• Blended up or ground up ~ If it is a smoothie or ice cream or a raw milk drink (such as Vanilla Milk or Chocolate Milk), I put the raisins in the Vita-Mix wet container instead of dates and proceed with the recipe as is. I will use the same amount of raisins as I would have dates. Jamie commented and said that she now routinely adds raisins to their smoothies instead of honey!

• Whole ~ The use for this is in breakfast porridges, puddings, even sweet breads, muffins and cookies. For instance, since the Beyond Sugar challenge, we don’t sweeten our breakfast porridge  at all anymore with concentrated sweeteners. Instead, we rely on the natural sweetness of the raisins and the lactose in the milk.

Can you think of more applications? Please do share!

Cost Savings in Using Raisins as Sweetener

Since I’m going to share this frugal tip in The Nourishing Gourmet’s Pennywise Platter Thursday, I better go on and compare prices, to show you how much you can save.

• 1 pound of organic, whole Halawi dates: $4
• 1 pound of organic, Thompson, seedless raisins: $2.20

Both prices are current prices from Hummingbird Wholesale in Eugene, OR. The date price can be had by purchasing a 5 pound minimum, while the raisin price reflects purchasing a 30 pound box. I believe that Trader Joe’s raisins are similarly priced even though smaller quantities are available. Can anyone confirm this?

You can see that pound for pound, raisins are almost half the price of dates. If you can find moist date pieces (datettes) and if you can afford to buy a quantity of them (a 40 pound box is what I can get), those will save you even more, since they cost just $2 per pound, even less than raisins.

I think I remember paying 99 cents a pound for organic raisins around 6 years ago, at Trader Joe’s. Weren’t those the days?

Please choose organic raisins – otherwise you know the grapes that made them were sprayed to death on the vine.

This post is part of Pennywise Platter Thursday at The Nourishing Gourmet ~ go on by and see what other frugal, real food, kitchen tips have been shared!

GMO-Free Food List ~ A great list for those of us who avoid genetically modified foods. In the list, Jenny (from Nourished Kitchen), lists all the food brands that source gmo-free ingredients. You’ll want to print the list and keep it in your purse when shopping!

Bee Restored Natural Hand Lotion Bar from Raynblest Farm ~ Raynblest Farm in Elkton, Oregon (pretty close to where I live) offers a hand lotion bar for overly dry, overworked hands. You use it like a bar of soap, only without water. Rub it between your hands. The lotion goes on and stays put, providing a moisture barrier that won’t wash off easily ~ so hands that are constantly working, in and out of water, stay supple and moist. This has been a great help to me since we began the adventure of having dairy goats. Those first few days of milking goats, my hands were screaming for moisture, red and itchy. It was quite painful. I keep my bar of Bee Restored close by and what a difference!