Chicken Enchiladas and a Smoothie

After school today I made the kiddos a tortilla with cheese. They also ate Thrive mangos, and a smoothie. I keep kefir grains and make the kefir into a smooth when its ready. I save the powder from the bottoms of my fruit cans to mix into the smoothies. The freeze drying process removes 98 % of the water from the food. Some of the fruits have turned into powder at the end of the can from jostling around during shipping.

I Love Left Overs!

Some people don’t like left overs but I love them. It means less time cooking for me. Its like residual food. You make it once and you can keep eating from it time and time again. Up to a point of course.

I am addicted to Downton Abbey. My good friend loaned me season 3, the first three episodes. I was up much later than is good for me last night watching several episodes. This morning I was sluggish about getting breakfast made. So when Julz asked, “what’s for breakfast?”.  I asked her, “do you want quiche, oat bar or waffles?” Three choices!! And we are living on our food storage! I had some natural leavened waffle batter going on my counter from the How To video I made about it, which you can view below. So that was easy to throw together. I used Thrive eggs instead of fresh in the waffles.

Coconut Mango Chicken

Heather Lorimer is a Platinum Thrive Consultant, a mom of soon-to-be four, and a former home economics teacher. She has a fabulous blog about cooking with her food storage. I have been eyeing the Chicken Mango Stir Fry on her blog for several months now. Tonight I cooked it up with some modifications. Yes I am a modifier.

Rather then telling you the differences between the two recipes. I am simply going to explain what I did for dinner, inspired by Heather.

Finally a Quiche

It has been in my plans to make a quiche for breakfast (I know its not a breakfast food necessarily) while I am living on my food storage. I had two Marie Calendar pie crusts in my freezer. I could also make a pie crust with flour, oil and water, but frozen are easier. Since I have them, I might as well use them.  Every time I’d think about baking up the quiche I couldn’t decide what ingredients to put in it. Finally this morning after my run I decided. Yay! The quiche would have, spinach, mushrooms, onions, sausage, and cheese of course. We love Thrive freeze dried sausage.

Sprouts

I am a salad girl. I love a big green salad with all sorts of fresh vegetables, nuts, seeds, fruit, a little blue or feta cheese. A light homemade vinaigrette. Unfortunately storing lettuce is difficult if not impossible to do. I was cleaning out my plastic food container drawer when I found a green wire mesh lid for a wide mouth canning jar. This triggered a memory of when I bought a small packet of salad sprout seeds. I had never done anything more with those seeds. Now that I am doing my food storage challenge I dug out the packet of seeds and watched a youtube video on how to sprout seeds.

Steel Cut Oats, More Waffles, Taco Soup

Thrive Tortilla SoupGrowing up my mom would make oatmeal for breakfast and I hated it. Despised it. I would NOT eat it. I am very mindful of my experience as a child and allow my children to listen to their body when it comes to food and eating. We have healthy food available and not a lot of junk. Especially these days. Yesterday my kiddos were snacking on Thrive fuji apples and freeze dried peach slices. I am confident they are getting the good vitamins and minerals they need.

Cinnamon Rolls

photo (1)

I found a recipe from the blog Moms Who Think.  I have never made cinnamon rolls without yeast. But those take 2 1/2 hours or longer to make with the rise time. We wouldn’t have been able to eat them until 9:30 at night or later. This quick bread recipe worked out well. I didn’t use all the butter, I only used 2 tablespoons and the rest of the butter I substituted with oil.

My Reese was satisfied. I have in my fridge some honey nut cream cheese I used to make the frosting. It was all good enough, but I still prefer my yeast cinnamon rolls. Next time I will start them earlier.

Natural Leavened Waffles, Left Overs, and Broccoli Rice Casserole

Mr Incredible and I went to a natural leaven bread class last year, it was a date I planned. We actually really enjoyed it. Now I have natural leavening and use it for quick breads like waffles and pancakes. The following week was a class about how to make loaves of bread using natural leavening. But we had a conflict. So I never graduated to making loaves of bread with natural leavening.

I love these waffles with real maple syrup and butter. I make them with brown rice flour. Lately, I love to grind my short grain brown rice into flour for these waffles.

Cupcakes from Food Storage

Apparently Julz and Pagey have been watching too many episodes of Cupcake Wars. All P would talk about today is making cupcakes. So we did. I found a darling blogger who spent countless hours and ingredients searching for the perfect vanilla cupcake. I really admire this in a blogger, because it saves me so much time and hassle. I can just take what she’s done and move forward with a well tested recipe. She did recommend using the highest quality ingredients. And a must have for a good cupcake according to her is cake flour. Well I don’t store cake flour in my food storage. So I found this recipe/modification for cake flour.IMG_0884