I sprouted split peas…  and made soup from them. Sprouted peas don't produce the smooth, creamy consistency of traditional split pea soup, but the texture is a nice change. If you prefer creaminess, you can press the cooked soup through a sieve… or whirl cooked, cooled soup in a blender. According to The Complete Sprouting Cookbook by Karen…

I know. I know. Valentine's Day is over. yet I continue to make chocolate. Dick couldn't be more thrilled. Chocolate and he are best buds. Tonight, he even suggested a recipe for "Black Bottom Cupcakes" that he discovered in his Minnesota Street Rod Association LineChaser Magazine. They are made with chocolate chips, coconut, and cream cheese……

I wanted to surprise Dick tomorrow on Valentine's Day with some brownies tucked into his bag lunch to take with him to his car show. My time was limited today, though, so I didn't have the luxury of trying a second recipe if my first attempt turned disastrous. Brownie recipes vary greatly. What I personally look…

Whole grain bread is always a good choice, but dipped in an egg/milk mixture that includes blackstrap molasses, then coated in sesame seeds* and wheat germ, with banana slices between… well, the nutrition quotient increases considerably in this pumped up version of the classic French toast. Our breakfast this morning came from one of my go-to cookbooks titled Smart…

It's not easy to find a good tasting gluten-free bread. Bob's Red Mill has done did it! It is a yeast bread mix that has a slight taste of pumpernickel, probably from the molasses and caraway seed. In place of rye flour as in typical pumpernickel bread, the mix contains buckwheat flour, garbanzo bean flour, fava bean flour,…

This recipe's original name is almond-honey power bar. I found it on EatingWell.com. After my revamping, the name no longer fits, so I came up with my own name… bran-apricot power crunch. The original recipe calls for unsweetened whole-grain puffed cereal (e.g. Kashi's 7 Whole Grain Puffs), but I used Nature's Path Organic Smart Bran with 13 grams fiber…

These are seriously the best guiltless chocolate chip cookies you've ever sunk your teeth into. Well, maybe not guiltless… but moreso than the typical recipe. One of the ingredients is tahini, which is a paste made from ground sesame seeds that has the consistency of peanut butter. I cut the sugar content in half and they are perfectly sweet. The original name…

Sometimes nothing but waffles will do for breakfast, so I perused EatingWell, a site I visit often, and found a recipe for Whole-Grain Waffles. Good choice. They were light with a hint of vanilla flavor and a slightly grainy texture from the cornmeal, so I renamed them cornmeal waffles as a memory trigger when searching for my recipe to prepare them again.   Cornmeal…

My classes that I am taking to earn a Bachelors Degree in Holistic Nutrition focus on choosing foods that are locally available in the present season or that you have canned, frozen, dehydrated or stored in a root cellar from last summer's garden bounty. Before I began my college classes, I was inspired by Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable,…

I made this "squeaky clean" on-the-run apple drop biscuits recipe two times in the past week. Both times they didn't form a characteristic biscuit mound like the photo in my January/February 2010 issue of Clean Eating Magazine. The recipe calls for 4 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp baking soda. I immediately questioned what I thought was…