Stevia

I am growing Stevia in my garden.  It's doing it's own thing and growing okay.  It's a straggly plant, but is still alive after a full growing season.  It did flower a few months ago and I expected that it would die.  But it has finished flowering and has continued on and added some new growth.

That has got me thinking that this may actually be a useful plant.  If it's going to keep on growing without needing too much input from me, it has some very real potential to be a convenient sweetener in the kitchen.

Stevia tastes many times sweeter than table sugar.  Just chewing on one small piece of a leaf is a bit too sweet for me.  It tastes sweet, but in an artificial way like artificial sweeteners do rather than sugar does. Even so, I was hoping that I could start to incorporate it into some of my baking.  Particularly now that I am tossing sugar out of the family diet.

The two main methods of using fresh stevia leaves (ah la an internet search) are:
Dry and crush the leaves and use as a powder
Boil leaves in water and create a syrup that you store in the fridge.

Each of these methods seem like a step too far for a lazy cook like me. One other method suggested was to throw a few leaves in your cup of tea and steep them with hot water.  Now this sounded more like me, straight to the point and no mucking around.

So I thought maybe if I could come up with some recipes where the stevia leaves are steeped first in a hot liquid and then the strained liquid is added to the other ingredients.  Then I would just need to experiment to workout approximately how many fresh leaves it takes to produce the desired amount of sweetness. At the moment I have no idea.

This afternoon I made some chocolate.  I wanted it to be barely sweet.  Just sweet enough to take the worst of the bitterness off the cocoa.

This is what I did:

I melted cocao butter and coconut oil in a saucepan and put in a small number (10) of stevia leaves.  I left them to steep in the liquid for around 5 minutes.  The liquid was not too hot.
In another bowl I put my cocoa powder, then I strained the liquid mixture into the dry.  I squeezed and pressed the stevia leaves to get as much 'juice' out as I could.
This worked and did sweeten the mixture, though I would probably need to use more.  I am trying to cure myself of a sweet tooth, so I was deliberately keeping it as low in sweetness as possible.

Now to experiment and try the same method in some other things.  For something like  a cake, I imagine that I would need quite a few stevia leaves.  The other thing I would try and remember to do is to bruise the leaves before adding to the hot liquid to steep.  I have also read that boiling the leaves in too high of a temperature will render them more bitter.  So perhaps pouring boiling water, or milk, or whatever over them and leaving them to steep for a while could be the go.  I also imagine that 5 minutes was probably on the short side for length of time to steep them.  Next time I would try it for much longer, for example, at the beginning of baking the first thing I would do is prepare my stevia, crush it and steep it, then get on with the other components in the recipe.

I'm pretty happy that I can grow my own sweetener.  Now to find a convenient way to use it and incorporate it into my cooking. :)

Time to get the chop

I was sitting in the Park in Bellingen under a massive Bunya Tree with Ellie when the call came through on Steve's mobile phone.

I knew that I had accidently left my phone at home even though I assured Steve that I had it with me as we left the house earlier that day.  As it turned out I had picked up Sarah's phone instead, which looks identical to mine. When Steve's phone rang I figured that there was a reasonable chance that it was for me.  I answered.

"Hello, Steve's phone"
The person on the other end greeted me by name and then informed me that she was "Jenny, from day surgery and that Steve was ready to receive visitors.  He's dozy but doing okay."

My first thought was that I didn't want to see him when he was all out of it and groggy from the anesthetic.  I liked my husband vital and full of life, that was the way that I wanted to see him.  I felt myself starting to drag my heels.  I had to coax Ellie back into her pram and then hike back up the steep hill to the hospital.

As I commenced my walk I felt a wave of depression descend upon me.  Steve had been 'fixed up'.  This wasn't some corrective piece of surgery, this was a mutilation, a severing of a key part of him.  And not only did it effect him, it was of direct consequence to me. This operation signalled the end of our child bearing days, and even writing about it now, some hours later, that fact still makes me sad.

We are old enough and have four beautiful children to be able to legitimately call it a day.  But it still makes me sad to finally say unequivocally that this is it.  No more chances of feeling that wonder of a new little life forming in my belly.  It is one of the most amazing and incredible things that can happen to your body, and now that will never happen again.  I feel I need to mourn.  As I walked back to the hospital that is what I did, I felt tears welling up in my eyes, and they weren't from climbing that bloody steep hill either. (Why did they put the hospital at the top of such a big hill?)

I/We knew that the day was coming.  After the birth of Ellie, we felt we had to make a decision, that really we can't keep doing this and having babies.  Particularly after the hoo ha with me clotting up this time.  To have another pregnancy would really be a risk.  Logically, the decision is easy.  No more babies, lets get 'the chop' and be done with it.  Move on, know that there wont be anymore surprises in life.  We can plan our future, blah, blah, blah. But, emotionally it is a whole other story.

I left the decision and the logistics to Steve.  I really didn't want to have anything to do with it.  I knew that the outcome was going to make me sad, so I preferred to sit with denial instead.  Then just as it started to look like they had forgotten Steve and his name was never going to come up on the waiting list, we got a call three days ago.  Three days ago.

Three days, is not long to finally and emotionally face that this is really going to happen.  Three days is way not enough time to get a decent amount of mileage out of teasing and stirring Steve about, manscaping performed by burly Mr Sisters, and what if the surgeon slips? And myriad of other jokes that I and others could make at his expense.

That's what Sarah and I did last night, making jokes about Bellingen and what type of drug fuelled hospital stay he was likely to encounter.  Our hilarity brought Evan out to the living room, wondering what we were talking about.  When we told him that dad was having a vasectomy tomorrow he was quite taken aback on two fronts.  I think he was keen for another baby brother or sister, and he made the comment, that did that then imply they were all mistakes?  I get where he is coming from, because I had the same thought myself.  By surgically rectifying this having babies thing, it sort of sends a message that our children are a medical problem that needs fixing.  Of which they definitely are not.

So now it's done.  Unless one escapes before the pipes are clear, no more babies in this family, until the kids decide to start the next generation.

Happy First Birthday Ellie

 Today, just one year ago our darling Ellie was born.  As with each of the kids, their first birthday has always marked a very special and emotional time for me.  It has always been natural for me to remember the amazing thing that was unfolding exactly one year ago. The fact that my body was in labour, our baby had decided that the time was right, and into the world popped another beautiful, much loved baby.

When babies are only one year old they aren't really old enough to understand what's happening.  Why do these crazy people hand me parcels and then open them for me? But the things inside the parcels are pretty cool.  Why are these crazy people singing at me and actually letting me have cake? And why does that mummy person keep getting all misty-eyed and gooey over me? - well more than normal.

For me the first birthday is a celebration for everyone else, me in particular.  As bub is hardly aware of what a birthday is, that first birthday is a very poignant moment.  This newborn life that in the space of just one calendar year has changed and developed so much into an active lively toddler.  One that can walk, communicate, have opinions, feed herself, laugh, cry, play and pretend.

What an amazing year it has been, and what an amazing addition to our family she has become. So very much loved and adored. Now we look forward to her next year of life, where I guarantee that by her second birthday she will have a pretty good idea of what's going on when the celebrations roll around again.

Happy First Birthday, my beautiful baby girl.  I love you so much.

Mum xxxxx

Food for Thought

When I was a child growing up in the 1970's I envisaged a future of food where we all would be eating a single pill that would provide our complete nutrition and thus do away with the need to eat food.

How different the actual future is.  With more variety of food than ever before and cooking shows amongst the most popular shows on TV, eating is still well and truly alive.  Kitchens are getting bigger and fancier, there are more places to go out and eat, and the access to foods from various cultures and the proliferation of super foods has shown that in no way are we ready to give up eating for a nutrition packed pill.

Imagine life, though, if this future had come to pass.

Firstly, all that time spent shopping for, preparing, eating and cleaning up after food would vanish.  That would amount to enormous hours of the day that we could reclaim to do other things.
Secondly, imagine the extra storage space in our houses. Plates, bowls, pots, pans, casserole dishes, cutlery, the "good" crockery, could all go, freeing up mountains of cupboard space.  Also the pantry would be a thing of the past, and who would need a massive fridge anymore?  The oven, the cook top, the microwave, the dishwasher, could all go.  There would be just so much stuff we could get rid of and then have so much less clutter to deal with and so much more cupboard space.  Now that's something I definitely need.
Thirdly, it would eliminate that whole issue of trying to eat a balanced diet and the weighing up of the pros and cons between various ways of eating.  But here is the crux of the matter.  How could any responsible scientific organisation possible come up with the perfect diet encapsulated into a nutrient rich pill when they can't even agree on what constitutes the optimal diet for humans?

For the past 30- 40 years we have been fed the mantra of low fat, high carbohydrate as being the way to live a healthy life.  I believe it, I've grown up my whole life being taught this.  It hasn't stopped me from having an 'apple shape' rather than a pear shape, which is now deemed unhealthy and a precursor to syndrome X and it's attendant diseases of modern living such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Nice.  But to a certain extent I feel a bit powerless as my father and his mother before him had the same 'apple shape'. Was it diet related or was it genetics? At least they didn't have to suffer the indignity of being told that they have a waist to hip ratio that is going to kill them.

It is tempting to basically ignore any government health warnings from this day forward.  It seems that no one really knows what they are doing in the field of nutrition. Hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown at all manner of studies trying to prove which is the optimal diet for us. All that seems to happen is that the studies are either inconclusive, are interpreted according to whoever is reading them's bias, or are instantly disproved by another study.

The bottom line is, there are just too many variables in the modern diet because it is such a cornucopia of variety.  To scientifically isolate one variable is well nigh impossible. People have slightly different genetic make up and respond differently to different diets too, which further complicates things.

I have come to the conclusion, after much reading about how the caveman diet is our optimum diet, that although that maybe true on an individual basis, on a population basis a high carbohydrate diet is better.

Think back, 10,000 years ago, we switched from predominately eating meat to growing and eating grains.  We may also have introduced a bunch of chronic degenerative diseases that became more apparent as we became clever enough to eliminate the other major killers of misadventure and infectious disease.  But these chronic diseases of modern living, still allow us to live long enough to reproduce, so they are not bad enough to impact on our survival as a species.  And this is the point.  Our population got to the point where it had to evolve to move further up the evolutionary scale.  As a population, we are incredibly healthy and successful. Perhaps as individuals not so much.

But, agriculture allowed us to guarantee a food supply that had never been guaranteed before.  It lessened our day to day reliance upon capturing or picking fresh foods because now we could store vast quantities for long periods of time.  It also meant that less people were needed to be involved in the actual procurement of food and that freed others to go and progress civilisation.  In the last 10,000 years not only has our population sky rocketed but our civilisation has moved ahead in enormous leaps and bounds that just wasn't possible while we were existing day to day on a tenuous food supply.

So in order for the human race as a whole to make the next development leap and form societies, government, religion, culture, science, technology, the list goes on and on, we had to free ourselves from the grip of the hunter gatherer lifestyle.  This is evidenced by the hunter gather cultures still in existence in the last few centuries, who were primarily living very primitive lives until they were introduced to Western civilisation.  Their rates of chronic disease were low, to the point of non existence, but their populations were relatively small and isolated which impacted their ability to develop technologically.

Reverting to a hunter gatherer diet is a luxury that affluent Westerners can embrace.  It may make their individual health outcomes more positive.  But for the entire world population to revert to such a diet is unsustainable.  We just don't have the capability to feed the whole world on a predominately meat diet.  That ultimately means that the third world and poorer populations will be fed with the cheaper high carbohydrate model and be prone to chronic disease, while the affluent will live long happy lives.  There is an inequality here.  Our success as a species has meant that we are destined to be less healthy individually.  It's a small sacrifice we all make to ensure the species remains strong.  Like herds who have their strength in numbers and can afford to sacrifice the weak few, so that the herd as a whole survives.

If this be the case, then governments trying to control what we eat and haranguing us about our health to do it is futile.  Basically we are damned if we do and damned if we don't.  Arguably Western nations have the wealth to manage expensive health budgets that deal with chronic disease.  It may be the pay off we have to make to avert the greater evil, that of starvation and malnutrition.

As I ready myself and the family for an experimental dietary change to explore the hunter gather diet epitomised by the Paleolithic diet I find myself reducing cupboard stock of carbohydrates and legumes.  I am starting to feel slightly unsettled by this, and we haven't even begun the diet yet. As the large fridge in the shed which houses the 'staples' of rice, pasta, bread mix, flour, dried beans and legumes becomes emptier and emptier I start to feel a small pearl of worry forming. It is ironic that the very carbohydrates that supposedly store themselves as excess fat on our bodies are the same carbohydrates that we store in stockpiles outside the body in order to protect ourselves in lean times.  With an empty 'store' of carbohydrate staples I feel vulnerable.  What if there is a truck strike, or we have an event that wipes out the electricity for a few weeks?  Focussing our diet on just meat and fruit and vegetables is a predominately fresh food diet.  It is extremely reliant on me being able to access the supermarket, butcher and greengrocer.  We grow a few of our own vegies, fruit and herbs and have our own eggs, but in reality, these will not go anywhere near providing adequate calories or nutrition for our family of 6 if the need should arise.  By having a fridge and pantry laden with carbohydrate foods, a short breakdown in the food chain supply, although inconvenient, would not be catastrophic.
As the one who is primarily responsible for the provision of food in the house and the mad one who is proposing we trial this diet, I feel a small sense of responsibility here.  Obviously the likelihood of some disaster occurring and interrupting the food supply is slight, but it is not entirely out of the question either.  Should I cover my bases and stockpile some emergency food in case of need?  After all the advent of agriculture cemented our survival as a species because it insured as against this very thing. But as the Paleolithic dieters advocate, all carbohydrate (particularly refined) needs to be gotten rid of in order to avoid temptation.  Refined carbohydrate is the evil one in all of this, the most likely culprit of chronic disease and obesity, but it is also the food that is least perishable and so the most useful in times of food shortage.

It is a dilemma. Oh wouldn't life be so much simpler if we just had a pill to take and all these decisions would not need to be made.

A Day in the life of a toddler

I have made a couple of signs to pin on the toilet door.  Because yes we are at THAT stage of every toddler's development when the lure of the toilet bowl is just too great.
Yesterday I poked my head round the door to the toilet and noticed a toilet brush, a full roll of toilet paper and the toilet paper holder were all shoved expertly down the toilet hole. Now it takes an expert toddler to manage this feat.  Most of us mere mortals would only be able to fit one thing at a time down the hole in the bottom of the bowl.  But with the rugged determination that only a toddler can muster, Ellie managed three sizable items.

In addition to this she had also unrolled most of the roll of toilet paper, strewn the empty rolls both inside and outside the toilet area and deposited the toilet brush holder down the hallway where she had also emptied its contents of old toilet water onto the floor.

This all occurred while the whole family (excluding Steve, who has to go to work in order to keep us in the lifestyle we have come to expect) were lounging around inside, zonked out by the heat, in quite close proximity to where this was all happening.  Ellie obviously decided that the best way to beat the heat was for a spot of water play, and what better place than the handy toilet bowl.

So the signs have gone up, reminding everyone to close the doors and keep the rampaging toddler out.  Whether they will have any effect will remain to be seen.

Sign inside the door:

Remember the rampaging toddler

Please remember to close the door when you are finished :)

and on the outside of the door:

You know what I want to do if I get in here

So remember to keep the door closed....just sayin

Attack of the killer cockroach

When you have house guests you like to at least try and put up a façade of cleanliness.  Just before they arrive you put extra effort into making the house look presentable.  Some of those cleaning jobs that you have put off because you are either too lazy or bored to tackle, suddenly need to be done as a matter of urgency.  You maybe a lazy disorganised slob, but you don't want your house guests thinking that. So either successfully or unsuccessfully you give the whole place a spit and a polish and hide away the worst of the clutter behind bulging cupboard doors.  As long as they don't look too closely or open the wrong doors you should be able to fool them for a little while at least.

Not so when the cockroach that  you had disturbed and frightened under the fridge earlier in the day while you were cleaning the floor makes his grand appearance especially for you house guest.

Steve has his brother Al up visiting us for a few days.  We picked him up from the airport and deposited him in our dining room for a catch up chat and a cup of tea.  Now Al is from Queensland, so no cockroach is going to faze this guy. But his most recent jaunt has seen him stop in and visit us after having spent a week in Canberra.

Now I can only guess, as cockroaches don't normally charge out from under my fridge and assault my house guests.  In fact I can't actually remember it ever having happened before.  Sure late at night the odd cocky would make a quick dart across the floor from one protective piece of furniture to another, but in broad day light and running straight at someone? No never.

Well this cockroach was a fool.  If it thought it could wreak its revenge on me from being forced to cower under the fridge in terror earlier in the day by attacking one of my house guests, it had another thing coming.  I can just imagine it eyeing Al off from amongst the dust and grime under the dark fridge.  It would have put on its hyper sensor alerts and determined that here was a fella from Canberra.  An area that rarely sees cockroaches.  It would have plotted its dastardly plan to dash out and scare the crap outta the house guest, hopefully making him leap onto a chair in sheer terror.  Then the cockroach could have strutted around like Arnold Swartzneigger before resuming its sentry under another piece of furniture.

Now this evil plan would have worked if it had chosen a true Canberran like, perhaps, my sister.  He would have got himself a good deal of squealing and arm flapping to accompany the assent of terror up upon the chair. But Al, is a Queenslander, he eats cockroaches for breakfast.  And big ones too.  Not these pathetic little mamby pamby ones we have in NSW, but big muscley Queensland ones. So when the smart arse cockroach made his brave dash for Al he met his demise in a spectacularly rapid fashion. 

If cockroach stomping was an Olympic sport, Al would be a world champion.  This cockroach never stood a chance. The moment Al noticed the tell tale movement in the corner of his eye, he moved with lightning speed and stomped down with his bare foot fair on the cockroach's back. Splat. Cockroach got flattened and guts went spurt.  It was so second nature to Al I don't think that he even realised he'd done it at first.

As I tittered with slight embarrassment, muttering something along the lines of 'Oh I don't know how he got there, we don't normally have cockroaches' I bent down to wipe him from the floor with a tissue.  In true cockroach form, this is why they will one day rule the world, he got up (with no guts) and tried to run away.  You have to give him credit for his tenacity, but this creature was never going to survive, not when we had the world champion cockroach stomper in the house.

That was one cockroach who should have chosen his quarry more carefully.

Yummy Moist Chocolate Cake

I have made this amazing wheat free chocolate cake before, it is so moist and delicious.  This time I have varied it slightly to try and make it a bit more healthy.

Emma's version of Red Kidney Bean Chocolate Cake

 

 

 

 

Ingredients

1 Can of red kidney beans (420g) I use my own from the freezer that I have previously soaked and cooked.
1 egg
1 tablespoon of water or coffee
1 tablespoon of vanilla
Put all the above ingredients into a food processor and process until smooth.  In a mix master bowl place the following ingredients  and beat them together:
200g dextrose
5 eggs
1/2 cup of light olive oil
Once they are light and fluffy add in the red kidney bean mixture. Beat or mix to combine. Then fold in the following ingredients and mix well:
80g of cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of bicarb soda

Pour the mixture into a lined spring form cake tin and bake for approximately 50 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. When cooked it will pull away from the sides a bit. Remove from oven.  It will contract slightly as it cools.
Serve with yoghurt.  Delicious.

Notes

Now most people sift their cocoa, and that is a very good idea.  I am a lazy cook so I rarely sift mine.  I do get a few lumps of cocoa in my finished cake, but I prefer to think of them as unsweetened chocolate chips.

This cake turns out very moist and the kidney beans are not noticeable in the finished cake.  It is very chocolatey and tastes far more wicked than it is.