Veggies, Veggies everywhere and Fall is approaching Fast.

My garden is now overflowing with fresh produce but the nights are getting cooler and we have come close to a frosty night a couple of times all ready. So with that being said, I am starting to think of new things to do with all of this produce besides sell it Saturday mornings at the local Farmer’s Market. I live in a rural community which values the availability of fresh produce. People around here really do a lot of canning and preserving. It’s impressive really, this is my first summer to try my hand at any sort of pickles but I’m pretty happy with the quick ones I did so I know you will like them too. I mean, what better way to insure you are giving your family the best produce into the winter months but to ‘put it up’ (preserve, pickle, can….) yourself.

If you don’t all ready eat beets, please try them. These are by far my favorite vegetable so if you haven’t tried a fresh boiled or roasted beet in ages, DO.

Here is another good thing to do with beets and it’s easy and really pretty.

Simple Marinated Beet Salad

5 medium sized whole beets

Clean the beets and put them to boil in a large pot of water until they are fork tender. This takes about 25-30 minutes for 2” beets.

When the beets are done, drain and run under cool water until they are cool enough to handle. Hold a beet in your hand and squeeze the skin off. It peels off very easy and is fun to do. Slice the beets into thin slices and put into a med sized bowl.

½ of a sweet onion – sliced thinly

3 T olive oil

5 T cider vinegar

Pinch sea salt

Pepper to taste

½ t Dijon mustard

Combine everything in with the beets and refrigerate for a couple of hours before serving.

Strawberry Mousse Low Carb Delite!

Surfing around the blogs for healthy foods I found one called "Healthy Indulgences" which ended up being a super cool landing page for those of you doing Atkins style dieting( Hi Marvin!) or for others who have joined the bandwagon who feel sugar in all forms are forms of the devil herself. The recipe on her page called for sugar alcohols or splenda--but that is not how we want to prepare our recipes so I decided to try her recipes with a Squeaky adaptions to it. I added more fruit, more lemon and more gelatin to make up for it being less "sweet". Kids loved it!

Strawberry Mousse
1 lb fresh strawberries-hulled and chopped
1 cup heavy cream
3 tbls lemon juice
2 tsp lemon zest
1 tbls Vanilla
2 tbls unflavored gelatin
1/4 warm water

Set gelatin in a bowl and add the warm water and allow it to melt. In a food processor or blender add strawberries lemon juice and zest and blend thoroughly. Add this fruit puree to a sauce pan and heat until warm--adding in the gelatin stir to let it full dissolve. Cook for 5 minutes--then remove from heat to cool. While the strawberry mixture is cooling add 1 cup light whipping cream and vanilla to a bowl and whip on high heat until very stiff peaks are formed. Fold in the cream with the now cooled off berry mixture. Once the berries and cream are fully incorporated set in the fridge for 2 hours which allows the gelatin to do its job.
Other good ideas:
--Serve over Angel Food Cake
--Serve with our Protein Waffles as a dessert
--Serve with fruit compote





Calories Per 1 cup Serving: 94
Carbohydrate: 6 grams
Fiber: 2 grams
Fat: 7 grams
Protein: 2 grams

Go eat Dirt Balls! Only 100 calories a pop.

When I was a little girl I would play in the sand box for hours on end. I would create mud pies, mud cakes--6 course mud meals even! Sadly, no one would eat them for me but that did not stop my creations!

In our book , Squeaky Gourmet, we have a recipe called "Dirt Balls" which pulls on the little girl heart strings--reminding me of the sand box and all those hours wasted on mud food when I could have been making dirt balls that everyone would eat. (This recipe was recently mentioned on the NPR show on KAXE--listen here to the interview) So I enlisted the help of my own little girls to help me make Dirt Balls as a wonderful gluten free snack for the kids (and adults who long for the days of mud pies!) These were devoured by all of the kids soon after we made them.


Dirt Balls
serves 14
1/4 cup toasted oatmeal(old fashioned)
2 tbls sunflower seeds
1/2 cup natural peanut butter
2 tbls unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup bittersweet chocolate chopped fine
1 tsp vanilla
2 tbls roasted almonds chopped fine
1 pack stevia or 3 tbls raw honey


Toast the oatmeal in a non-stick skillet set on medium heat until they are browned. This was a great job for my 6 year old to work on since it is not highly explosive or flammable or anything and she felt like a big girl using the stove with me.


Setting the almonds aside; use your kitchen mixer add the remaining ingredients and blend well. We used raw honey in our mix because we have some allergy sufferers in the family and raw local honey helps build your own immunity to allergy triggers--but it has to be local honey to get the benefit. Once the oats are toasted to your liking you can add them to your coffee grinder or food processor to chop them up a bit before adding to the mud like mixture on the mixing bowl.


Make small balls about 3/4 in diameter , roll in your hands and then roll in the almonds. Now, this is where the fun came in for my 5 year old daughter as she was enlisted to create the dirt balls from the mud/mortar like substance we had created. Of course she did not want to roll them in the almonds, she preferred sprinkling the almonds on so they lost a bit of the rock effect.



Other Good Ideas:
--Add in dried cherries, coconut, puffed rice, crushed bran flakes,powdered milk or even protein powder
--roll in cocoa powder or cinnamon
--use different nut butters


Calories Per Serving: 92
Fat: 7 grams
Protein: 3 grams
Carbohydrates: 7 grams






Check out Fight Back Friday for more Real Food tips, recipes and more!

Summer Frittata

OK, let's face it--eggs are really underrated in their versatility and they still have such a bad reputation thanks to the "anti-egg" campaign of the 1990's. I am not sure how we came about degrading such a natural wholesome goodness of the egg--which is full of good fats, good vitamins and rich in proteins. We think of eggs as boring, additive ingredients made to make a dish more cohesive. So I wanted to rethink the egg and rethink breakfast, but in my genius rethinking of the egg I ended up with an old classic--a Fritatta. A frittata is basically an open faced omelette--once again making the egg the background scene for a main dish. Let me just emphasise, though, that the egg in this dish is as much a benefit to this dish as a 400 small block engine is to the Camaro.

Summer Frittata
serves 2
4 whole large eggs
1/2 cup shredded zucchini
1/4 cup shredded peppers
2 cloves garlic pressed
1/2 small onion shredded
1/2 sweet red pepper shredded
1/4 cup fresh cilantro chopped finely
2 fresh basil leaves chopped finely
2 ounces feta crumbled

Preheat a non stick skillet on medium heat. In a mixing bowl beat eggs until frothy. Add in the rest of the ingredients except the feta. Pour the Frittata batter into the pan, moving the mixture around to ensure there is no pan showing. Cover and cook until egg is firm--about 7 minutes.
Invert egg onto a serving platter and top with feta cheese. Serve warm.

Calories Per Serving: 235
Protien: 17 grams
Carbohydrates: 7 grams
Fat: 15 grams



Other Good Ideas:
- You can vary the vegetables in this depending on the season. Shredded potato, squash, peas, brocolli etc
-You can serve this cold making it an excellent ( I wanted to say egcelent I admit it) luch box menu item

Another Garden Fresh Day

I love it when I walk out to the garden early in the morning and I get inspired to create something new in the kitchen. Today was one of those days. My heirloom beans (2 kinds shown) were going crazy and I really wanted to know what the tiger stripe ones were going to taste like. I intended to let those grow and dry on the stalk for dry soup beans but I tasted one of them fresh and thought they were great so I added a few for color.

Lemon Basil gives a wonderful extra flavor to the beans so try to find some or better yet, grow your own. Herbs are quite easy to grow and can usually take heat and low water conditions of the late summer. Enjoy!

Lemon Basil Green Beans

1 pound clean and trimmed fresh green beans
1 T olive oil
½ lemon – juice
Pinch lemon zest
2 T fresh Lemon Basil – minced- or any fresh basil you can get
Pinch sea salt
Pepper to taste

Boil beans for 5-10 minutes until fork tender. Different variety of green beans cook faster than others. When beans are cooked drain off water and place in a medium sized bowl. Add rest of the ingredients and toss well. Serve warm.

Another cooking option is mix everything together with the raw beans and throw on the grill. That’s what I did.

If you want a cold dish or salad, add about ¼ cup cider vinegar and more lemon juice then refrigerate until chilled tossing a few times before serving.

Angie from Fatburningtips4women.com gave us a nice review!

I remember Angie from back in the BFFM Yahoo group days--wow what a long strange trip it has been for both of us. Hey--what have you done in the last 6 yrs to increase your health? You know--since you are reading this blog and all--I was wondering what you have done--or better still what will you be doing for your health and fitness over the NEXT 6 years?
Check out the world of fitness and health Angie has created--oh yeah and check out the review of Squeaky Gourmet while you are there ;)

Cool Avocado Blueberry Dip

Blueberries should be falling off your bushes now--right? I took a walk out in the woods behind my house the other day ( OK I was looking for my dog which had managed to run off while I was staring at my pumpkin plant) and there were still so many blueberries on the bushes! I was thrilled that we could have another go with more blueberry recipes from the fresh wild fruits. Of course my excitement wore off when I was walking back to my house and was stung by a bee--but my dog had arrived back home before me so it was a mix of emotions--mostly burning pain.

This recipe brings blueberries outside of the box and into a new light. My kids really enjoyed the dip with the fruit--my pickiest eater even loved it. Blending things like yogurt which has fantastic properties for balancing digestion, blueberries which are flooded with antioxidants, and avocado which is such a good source of heart disease prevention was a delicious reward.

Cool Blueberry Avocado Dip

8-ounces low fat plain yogurt
1 rip Avocado peeled and cored
1 cup ripe blueberries rinsed
1tsp Lemon Zest
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Dash of Cinnamon
Dash of Salt
Stevia to taste

Add the fruit, yogurt & vanilla to your blender and blend until the blueberries are fully mixed in. Add the salt, cinnamon and stevia tasting to assure it pleases your own taste buds--as some people enjoy it sweeter than others. Serve with fruit immediately or keep covered and refrigerated.

Other good ideas:

-use this as a topping for granola
-use this as a dressing for fruit salad
- a wonderful addition to a salmon dish

This recipe is adapted from Squeaky Gourmet www.squeakygourmet.com by Maureen Jeanson and Jamie C. Wilson