Kefir Green Smoothie

Erick's Kefir Green Smoothie

After reading Donna Schwenk's recipe for a Kefir Green Smoothie, I was motivated to tailor it for my family. In particular, I needed to get rid of the banana. One of my little ones has a problem with bananas. So, after some experimenting and some suggestions from Selena, we've settled on this Kefir Green Smoothie recipe. It's not perfect, but it works for us.

The Recipe

Ingredients for Erick's Kefir Green Smoothie

• One cup (8 oz) dairy kefir
• 1/2 cup frozen fruit, heaping (and I mean REALLY heaping)
• 1 tablespoon coconut cream, heaping
• 1 tablespoon raw honey, heaping
• 1 teaspoon chia seeds
• a handful of spinach

Procedure

Put it all in a small blender. Blend until smooth. Enjoy immediately.

Variations

We like to vary the fruit. Strawberries are a bit hit, but they make the smoothing a bit brownish. We've found a mix of peaches, mangos, pineapple and strawberries that renders a nice light green color and tastes great. Blueberries are delicious, too, and the blue completely overwhelms the green from the spinach, so you get a nice blue smoothie that still has the green stuff in it. (That might be good for kids who are squeamish about green.

The green doesn't have to come from spinach. You could use any greens that you like.

You could try a different sweetener if you like. Grade B maple syrup might be nice. Or use stevia or rapadura. Whatever you like.

Make popsicles. The kids love 'em!


Erick's Kefir Green Smoothie by Erick G. Hagstrom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://erickhagstrom.blogspot.com/2014/08/kefir-green-smoothie.html.

Homemade Breakfast Sausage 3

Success!

Ok, so I thought this would take longer, but recipe #2 turned out to be a huge success. My wife claims that it's so good she wants to eat the kids' sausage! So, officially, we're done. We've found a good substitute for the chemical-laden stuff the stores sell as breakfast sausage.

That doesn't mean I won't tweak the recipe now and then, or try out other flavor profiles. But for the moment, this experiment is concluded successfully. Thanks for following along!

Homemade Breakfast Sausage 2

Homemade Breakfast Sausage

The Sausage Experiment, #2

This is the second post on my sausage experiment. If you read that post, you'll know that the first recipe turned out pretty good, but we all thought it could be improved. So for today, I tried just a little tweak. I added a small quantity of red pepper flakes to give it a little kick, and I used a slightly smaller clove of garlic.It's still going to be quite garlicky, though. But that's ok. We like garlic.

So, without further ado, here's today's recipe.

Second Recipe

1 pound fresh ground pork (from the supermarket)
1/4 tsp each of the following:

• ground black pepper
• basil
• coriander
• oregano
• thyme

one large garlic clove, chopped
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/8 tsp red pepper flakes

I just mixed it all up and let it sit in the fridge overnight, then pan fried as usual.

Family Reactions

 Stay tuned. We haven't tried it yet. I'll update this post when I get reactions.

The Sausage Experiment

On Avoiding Nitrates and Nitrates While Still Enjoying Breakfast

My family and I have come to understand that animals are good for people to eat. We pretty much need 'em. Even the fat, though grain fed animals produce more fat than is strictly necessary. But grass fed is so expensive. So we do what we can.

We especially enjoy our morning bacon and sausage, though I am a bit concerned about all of the nitrogen compounds present in those delicious morsels. We tried uncured bacon, but then I read or heard (don't remember where, so no source at the moment) that bacon processed in celery juice--rather than chemical nitrates and nitrites--actually contains three orders of magnitude more of those chemicals than regular bacon. Seems there's a chemical reaction between celery juice and salt that produces nitrates and/or nitrites. Makes sense. They had to come from somewhere originally. Cured meats have been made with nitrogen salts for centuries.

So how to avoid those nitrogen salts entirely? I've decided to experiment with making my own pork breakfast sausage, uncured and unceleried. So it's not really sausage in the traditional preserved meat sense. But I hope it'll taste something like sausage and help us enjoy our morning piggies without added chemicals. And in the interest of science--and to help me remember what I did last time--I'll be recording my recipes and family reactions right here.

First Recipe

1 pound fresh ground pork (from the supermarket)
1/4 tsp each of the following:

• ground black pepper
• basil
• coriander
• oregano
• thyme

one very large garlic clove, chopped
1/2 tsp kosher salt

I just mixed it all up and let it sit in the fridge overnight, then pan fried as usual.

Family Reactions

LOTS of garlic. Could cut back a bit.
Seems to lack zip otherwise. Maybe some red pepper flakes or cayenne?

My personal feeling is that I could add more of the herbs, too.

Wait, no sage?

That's right, no sage. My wife is breastfeeding. Sage reduces milk production. Don't want to feed the eaters and starve the drinker.