Electric Pressure Cooker

I got an Instant Pot for Christmas. I actually got a few gift cards and used them to buy one for myself. I do use a pressure cooker for canning in the summer, but have never cooked a meal in one.

Originally, I was looking at another brand and saw the Instant Pot as another option. I had never heard of this brand but once I started reading the reviews on Amazon, I was convinced. LOL

I’ve been using it for over a month and just love it. I’ve made the best beef stew we’ve ever had in an hour. I also cooked a whole spaghetti squash in eight minutes.

It makes amazing rice, yogurt, oatmeal, cooks veggies quickly and meats tenderly. I don’t eat pasta, but people are making it in here in minutes too. It’s a slow cooker too!

There’s a Facebook group with over 30,000 people on it sharing recipes and tips daily. I really excited to be able to use this to cook in the summer and not heat up the kitchen.

The pot itself is stainless steel and it’s six quarts. You can make a quick and wonderful bone broth in it.

I’ve also adapted Nigella Lawson’s Praised Chicken recipe, cooks a whole chicken in 30 minutes (plus add 20-30 for pressure to come up and release). It’s easy and delicious.

Whole Chicken recipe

Ingredients:

1 whole organic chicken

1 tlb organic garlic olive oil

1 tsp organic Herbs de Provence

1 tsp Celtic salt

½ tsp organic pepper

½ cup vermouth or white wine

1 cup water

Directions:

Brown chicken in oil for a few minutes per side (using the sauté option) – turn off sauté and place the trivet (also stainless) under the chicken. Pour vermouth and water in the bottom and put the seasoning on top of the chicken.

Set the pressure cooker for 6 minutes per pound, plus four minutes – I usually round up just a few minutes as I’m at 1400 feet altitude.   When the pot beeps that it’s finished, turn it off and let it sit for 20 minutes or so to come down to pressure.

This chicken is SO good and you’ll end up with two cups of amazing broth at the bottom of the pot. Save that!   After we’ve eaten the chicken, I save all the bone and put it back in the pot, with some onion, carrot, celery and a bay leaf. Cook for 30- 60 minutes. Let the pot come down to pressure on it’s own.

Strain and you have a pot of chicken broth. Enjoy!

If you google ‘Instant Pot Recipes’ there are many links and so many more I plan to try. Click the link below to buy. (affiliate link)

Blueberry Coffee Cake – Gluten Free

I’ve been trying to make a coffee cake that was close to Ina Garten’s recipe that I put up a few years ago, but that was gluten free. This one comes very close! If you’re blueberries are frozen – let them warm up or it will take longer to cook.

Ingredients

Topping

• 1 cup organic almond flour
• 1 teaspoon organic cinnamon
• 1/2 cup Non-GMO Erythritol or Swerve or organic sugar
• 1/8 tsp Celtic Sea Salt
• 4 tablespoons organic or pastured butter, melted

Cake

• 2 cups organic almond flour
• 1 t. baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon organic cinnamon
• ½ Celtic sea salt teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup
• 1/2 cup organic sour cream
• 2 Tablespoons organic or pastured butter, melted
• 2 teaspoons organic vanilla extract
• 2 organic pastured eggs
• 1 cup organic blueberries

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Butter a 9-inch cake pan.

Topping:

Mix all topping ingredients until crumbly. Set aside.

Cake layer:

Mix wet and dry ingredients separately – I use a large measuring cup for the wet ingredients and stir together until well blended. Once well mixed add the blueberries. If they’re frozen, let me defrost or your cake will take longer to bake (learned that the hard way!)

Spread the cake batter in the pan, and then sprinkle the topping over the top.

Bake for 20-30 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean. Cool and slice.  Enjoy!

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Slow Cooker Osso Buco

I had some grass fed beef shanks in the freezer that I wasn’t sure what to do with, when I found a slow cooker Osso Buco recipe on the Cuisinart site. Perfect! I adapted it to beef, organic and instead of using canned tomatos used some of my San Marzano’s that I had frozen this summer. Just chopped them and added in.

It was delicious and we had enough for a few dinners. First we served it over baked Spaghetti Squash and when we ran out of squash ate it with fresh salad and sauerkraut. It takes a little prep work as you start but the flavors are worth it. So easy to make in the slow cooker! And would be wonderful for company too.

This recipe was for my six quart cooker. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

Grass Fed Beef Shanks, about 4 pounds total

1 tsp. Celtic Sea Salt

¾ tsp. organic black pepper, freshly ground

2 tsps. organic olive oil

6 organic garlic cloved, peeled

1 large organic onion, chopped

2 medium organic carrots, chopped

1 organic celery stalk , chopped

1 tsp. pastured organic butter

2 fresh rosemary springs (or 1 tsp dried rosemary)

1 sprig fresh thyme (or ½ tsp dried thyme)

1/3 cup dry white wine or vermouth

Either:   Six cups fresh or frozen organic Roma type tomatoes, roughly chopped (I used this!)

Or:    2 – 28 ounce cans of organic plum tomato’s drained and roughly chopped. (if you don’t have fresh/frozen)

1 tablespoon organic tomato paste

1 organic bay leaf

¼ cup organic chopped, fresh Italian parsley

Directions:

Season the shanks on all sides with ¾ tsp of the salt and all of the pepper.

Put the oil into a sauté pan on medium/high heat, add the shanks and brown on both sides, at least 6 to 10 minutes per side, until deeply browned. Once they’re done, place them on a plate.

While meat is browning, put the garlic into the work bowl of a food

processor fitted with the chopping blade; process to finely chop. Scrape down

and add the onion, carrot, and celery. Pulse 8 to 10 times, until

vegetables are roughly chopped. Remove vegetables and reserve. Add the

drained tomatoes to the food processor and pulse 5 times to chop. Set aside. (If you don’t have a food processor just chop everything a bit more fine to start)

Lower the heat to medium and add butter to the pan, add

vegetables, garlic, rosemary and thyme and remaining 1/4 teaspoon of salt.

Cook until vegetables are softened and slightly browned, about 5 minutes.

Add the wine and scrape up any brown bits from the bottom of the pot.

Simmer until wine is completely reduced, about five minutes.

Put the sautéed veggies in your slow cooker, stir n tomatoes, tomato paste and bay leaf. Nestle shanks in the liquid. Switch unit to Slow Cook on Low for 8 hours. Stir in parsley just before serving.

You can serve this on baked spaghetti squash, zoodles, any type of pasta you want. Also, sprinkle with organic crushed red pepper and organic parmesan cheese if desired.

Delicious and my husband said it was the best Osso Buco he ever had.

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GMO’s in the News

Some interesting articles in the news this month.

The first, which I am very happy about, is that the Federation of German Scientists Whistleblower Award was given to Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini. Monsanto and the other biotech companies smeared him after his rat study demonstrated the toxic effects of Roundup. Glad to see he’s getting supported from the European scientific community.

Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini has been honoured with the 2015 Whistleblower Award by the Federation of German Scientists (VDW) and the German Section of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (“IALANA”).

Prof Séralini received the award in recognition of his research demonstrating the toxic effects of Roundup herbicide on rats when administered at a low environmentally relevant dose over a long-term period. After the research was published, Prof Séralini was attacked in what the VDW and IALANA call “a vehement campaign by ‘interested circles’ from the chemical industry” as well as from the UK Science Media Centre. This smear campaign led to the retraction of his team’s paper by the first journal that published it. But Prof Séralini and his team fought back, countering the scientific arguments raised against their research and republishing their paper in another journal.

While Prof Séralini’s study was not a carcinogenicity study but a long-term toxicity study, the carcinogenic potential of Roundup was confirmed this year when the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency IARC published its verdict that glyphosate herbicides are “probable” human carcinogens.

Read more here:

http://www.gmoseralini.org/federation-of-german-scientists-whistleblower-award-goes-to-prof-gilles-eric-seralini/

GM Crops Now Banned in 38 Countries Worldwide – Sustainable Pulse Research

Sort of negates all the US biotech lies, doesn’t it…

Following the recent green wave of genetically modified (GM) crop cultivation bans across the European Union, Sustainable Pulse decided to research which countries have decided to officially ban the cultivation of GM crops around the Globe.

This research has led to the discovery that there is a growing swell of government level support worldwide for bans on GM crop cultivation for both health and environmental reasons.

Thirty eight (38) countries worldwide have officially banned the cultivation of GM crops and only 28 actually grow GM crops. The picture painted by the Biotech industry and the U.S. government that GM crops have been accepted by the majority of countries worldwide is therefore quite obviously wrong.

In fact many countries have recently started to put in place regulations to protect their population and environment from the environmental and health damage caused by GM crops.

Read more here:

http://sustainablepulse.com/2015/10/22/gm-crops-now-banned-in-36-countries-worldwide-sustainable-pulse-research/#.VjD2PqQmvfs

Study Exposes AquaBounty’s Bogus Growth Claims on GMO Salmon

For those of you who have read the Mary Shelley novel “Frankenstein,” you remember that the name refers to the scientist Victor Frankenstein, not the monster he constructed from body parts found in the local cemetery. The story has captured the public’s imagination for nearly 200 years, and “franken” has become a common prefix—and a pejorative—for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are made with cut-and-pasted genetic material from different species of plants, animals and microorganisms.

GMO salmon—or franken-fish, as it is sometimes called—is an Atlantic salmon whose DNA has been re-engineered with a “growth-hormone gene construct” made from genetic material of other fish. One of these fish, the ocean pout, is only as closely related to Atlantic salmon, taxonomically speaking, as a human is related to a porcupine or a platypus. This recombination of genetic material would never happen in nature.

Beyond being designed and engineered by humans and created in a laboratory, GMO salmon and Frankenstein’s monster may also share another defining feature—larger-than-normal proportions. AquaBounty Technologies, the company behind GMO salmon, has always insisted that its fish grow much faster than normal Atlantic salmon—but not larger. This is one of the most frequent claims the company makes—to journalists and even to financial regulators at the Securities Exchange Commission.

But, according to a recently released scientific review from the Canadian government, AquaBounty doesn’t have a shred of evidence supporting this claim. This is more than a little odd because AquaBounty calls GMO salmon the “most studied fish in the world.”

If it turns out that GMO salmon do grow larger than normal salmon, it would almost certainly provoke even further consumer opposition to the fish while also compromising the company’s pending risk assessment with the FDA. As Canadian government scientists note, a larger-than-normal Atlantic salmon would be able to eat larger-than-normal prey fish, and this expanded diet could expand the environmental impact of escaped GMO salmon.

Other important risk-assessment questions also emerge: What happens to the health of a GMO salmon that reaches ever-large proportions? What happens to the nutritional content of the fish for consumers? What happens to the hormone levels of this fish, which is engineered with a growth-hormone gene construct?

Read more here:

http://ecowatch.com/2015/10/22/gmo-salmon-aquabounty-claims/

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Four Ingredient Chicken Bake

I actually saw a version of this as a video on Facebook. It looked good and as I had pesto in the freezer and fresh tomatoes that needed using, I tried it and it’s great! Very easy to make and it was a hit.

Four Organic Chicken Breasts or Six Organic Chicken thighs – boneless and skinless

Organic pesto – if you don’t have any blend basil, almonds or walnuts, garlic, salt, Parmesan cheese and a bit of olive oil – and it’s pesto

4-8 organic Roma Tomatoes – I have San Marzano’s from the garden and it was about 2 per chicken breast to cover.

1 to 2 cups shredded organic Mozzarella Cheese

Layer ingredients, in order, in a baking dish.

Bake at 400° for 40 minutes and enjoy!

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Very worth watching and a this goes for vaccines as well.  Mom

Curried Zucchini Soup

My garden has been growing more zucchini then we can eat, and almost more then we can give away. LOL

I found this soup recipe and have made it twice already. My husband said he would be happy to eat it all summer.

It’s quick and easy and you can eat it either hot or cold.

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil (or half oil half pastured butter)

1 cup organic yellow onion, chopped

1 teaspoon organic garlic, minced or chopped

½ teaspoon Celtic sea salt

2 teaspoons organic curry powder

1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and sliced

2-3 pounds of organic zucchini, ends trimmed off and chopped

3 ½ cups organic stock (I use beef bone broth – you can use chicken, beef, veggie)

½ cup organic heavy cream (substitute coconut milk or cream for dairy free)

Directions:

In a soup pot, heat the oil/butter over medium high heat. Add the garlic and onions and cook, stirring until soft for about 3 minutes.

Add the curry powder, salt and cayenne and stir for about a minute.

Add the chopped zucchini; reduce the heat to medium and cook for 5-6 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the stock and bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer until the zucchini is tender, about 20 minutes.

Then blend the soup. The easiest way to do this is with an immersion (aka stick) blender. They are not expensive and are the best for soups, and making mayo and whipped cream. Either remove from heat and use your immersion blender until blended or put the soup into a blender and blend.

Then return to heat and add the cream, stir and simmer for another 2-3 minutes and either serve (we love it hot) or refrigerate until chilled. Enjoy!

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Gluten Free Blueberry Cobbler

We have a local blueberry farm that has really good prices so I stocked up. I was looking for a cobbler recipe and this one is amazing. Only take a few minutes to prepare and is delicious.

Ingredients:

3 cups organic blueberries

1 tablespoon organic lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon xanthan gum – optional but it’ll help thicken

1 cup organic almond flour

2 tablespoons organic coconut flour

½ cup sweetener of choice, I used non-GMO erythritol.

1 pastured organic egg, beaten

6 tablespoons organic butter, melted

Instructions:

Pour berries into greased pan. I’ve use a 9 inch square and also have used a    pie pan

Sprinkle with lemon juice and xanthan gum. I also pull out a tablespoon of the sweetener from the topping and sprinkle it directly over the berries.

Stir almond flour, coconut flour, sweetener and egg until mixture resembles        coarse meal.

Sprinkle dry mixture over berries.

Drizzle melted butter over topping.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes or until top is browned.

For an extra special treat, serve with homemade whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. Enjoy!

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Eggnog Ice Cream

My son had to have a tooth pulled and was on soft foods for a week or so. One of his favorite things was for me to make him an eggnog in the blender – 2 cups of fresh milk, 2 eggs, a few drops of stevia, a little vanilla and a bit of nutmeg – so good and it kept him very nourished while he healed.

I love eggnog and decided I wanted to make and eggnog ice cream. Found a great recipe in the Ben and Jerry Ice cream book that I adapted. Easy to make (no cooking) and delicious – enjoy!

Ingredients:

2 cups organic heavy cream

1 cup fresh organic milk

2 whole organic eggs

8 pastured organic egg yolks (you can freeze the whites – I made macaroons)

¾ cup sweetener of your choice – I use non-GMO erythritol

½ tsp nutmeg

Directions:

Whisk the eggs and egg yolks until light and fluffy – for one to two minutes. Add sweetener and whisk together.

Add milk and cream and nutmeg and whisk until combined.

Pour into ice cream maker and follow instructions. Enjoy!

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Spinach Bacon Quiche

Our chickens have been laying eggs like crazy this spring so I was looking for some good recipes. I have to say, this is the best quiche recipe I’ve ever had and the family agrees. This is my version from the excellent cookbook, Low-Carbing Among Friends, Vol 1 – link below. It’s full of great low carb, gluten free and Keto recipes and I use it all the time.

Almond Parmesan Crust:

2/3 cup ground almonds or almond meal, preferably organic

1/3 cup grated organic Parmesan cheese 2 tbsp organic butter, melted

1 organic pastured egg

Filling:

6 organic bacon slices

1 small organic onion, finely chopped

1, 10 oz package frozen organic spinach

8 oz organic cream cheese, softened

1 cup organic sour cream

5 organic, pastured eggs, beaten

4 oz organic feta cheese

1/4 cup organic grated Parmesan cheese

Directions:

Almond Parmesan Crust: In medium bowl, combine ground almonds, Parmesan cheese, melted butter and egg. Using plastic wrap, press crust into 9-inch springform pan or 10” deep dish pie pan. Bake in 350°F (180°C) oven 10 minutes.

Filling: In large skillet, cook bacon until it gets somewhat crisp. Set aside to drain on paper towels. In bacon fat, cook onions over medium heat until soft.

Squeeze liquid out of spinach and add to onions along with bacon.

In food processor or in bowl with electric mixer, process cream cheese. Add sour cream and process. Add eggs one at a time, while processing, until smooth. Stir in feta cheese and Parmesan cheese and process again. Pour mixture over vegetables and bacon; stir to combine well. Pour over prepared crust.

Bake in 350°F oven 50 minutes, or until set. Allow to stand 10 minutes before cutting. Sprinkle with extra Parmesan cheese, if desired. Enjoy!

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