Today, March 14th is "Pi Day" (3.14.....), and because we are trying to cut back on sugar, I made a raw vegan healthy apple pie.
Raw Vegan Apple Pie
Ingredients: Crust:
1 cup of dates (pitted and chopped)
1 cup of nuts (walnuts or almonds)
Filling:
5 apples (choose ones you like to eat!)
Bit of lemon juice (about 1 TBS)
1/2 cup dates
cinnamon (to taste)
nutmeg (pinch)
3 tsp chia seeds (optional, but holds everything together better)
Preparation: Crust:
Soak dates in some warm water for about 15min, then drain.
Meanwhile, put the nuts in a food processor (I use my ninja) and pulse until very finely chopped. Remove and set aside.
Pulse the dates until finely chopped, then throw in the nuts and pulse some more to combine.
This should hold together when you smush it - press into a pie pan.
Filling:
Peel the apples. Chop up 2 of the apples and put in the food processor with the 1/2 cup dates, lemon juice and spices. Pulse and blend until it looks like apple sauce. Throw in the chia seeds and pulse a bit more to combine.
Chop the other 3 apples (peel if you want) into small pieces. Stir into the apple mixture.
Put the filling on the crust and sprinkle on some more cinnamon if you want.
Thats it! Pretty easy to make and healthier than most pies.
The "sauce" makes it look like a cooked pie
mmmm pie....
Levi approves, he wanted to taste it when I was taking pictures but I made him wait until after dinner.
Levi lost his first tooth! And it was on 4/4/2014 and 1:40pm and took about 7 weeks from loose to fallen out. He told me it was hurting him, so I said "Let me see" and just picked it out of his mouth!
I really dislike the gap-tooth look so I was hoping to wait a while longer for this to start happening (I was nearly 8 when I lost my first tooth), but I guess it had to happen some time. He was so excited about it!
Anyway, as usual, and event requires a bit of sewing, so this is what I came up with:
My mom told me about a conversation she had with one of her friends about family meals. Her friend asked what our "go to" meals were and my mom answered "lasagna". But truthfully, I can't remember the last time we had any!
We like to try new recipes and have a lot of variety, so I guess we don't really have any 'go to meals'. Maybe that's part of why Levi will eat just about any food you offer him, or at the very least, take a "no thank you bite".
So one of our biggest issues is keeping track of recipes we want to try, we are often searching through magazines, pintrest recipe lists, and recipe books to find "that one recipe that had___ in it and looked good". I've come up with a way to help organize!
Two of our favorite magazines for recipes are Vegetarian Times, and Food Network Magazine. Food Network tends to have less complicated recipes, plus the format of the magazine is easier to follow. Of our family of 5, we have 2 vegetarians, and one with lots of food allergies, so we have to accommodate everyone. The vast majority of our meals are 100% vegetarian so that helps!
So anyways, here is how I do some meal planning with a food magazine, this could easily be adapted for online recipes as well, especially using pintrest.
First, choose your magazine. Food Network has LOTS in each issue, and most can easily be adapted to vegetarian/allergy friendly.
Next, go through and pick out what looks good. I let Levi look through too and fold over pages of things he likes!
Once you find something you want to make, write down the title of the recipe (use the title in the magazine if it doesn't have a picture index like Food Network) and include the page number (to make it easier to find later) Then write down all of the ingredients that you will need to buy. Things that are ALWAYS in your house, you can skip, such as spices, and basic things. When you write your list, you can change any ingredients you want, like using a different veg, or using almond milk instead of regular, or whatever you'd like.
As you do this, you will also notice overlaps - maybe a few recipes call for vegetable broth, or parsley or whatever. This can help you with deciding what to have when, because maybe you want to use up that parsley within a couple days so it doesn't turn into green slime in the bottom of your fridge, so you will plan to have those two meals the same week. Or if several recipes call for green apples or tomatoes, you might buy a whole bag instead of just a few because you know you will use more.
Cut out the set of ingredients, like the pic below.
And stick them back in the magazine on the right pages (its best to cut them out and stick them in the pages as you go, instead of spreading them all over the place)
Now, when you make your grocery list, you will just put your basic items and household stuff on it, and grab the little lists from your magazine of whatever you plan to cook. You can either just carry the small lists with you (which is what I do, I tape them to the big list) or transfer the ingredients to your main list (which is a pain, but my dad likes to do it).
Then just make your meal, knowing you have everything you need!
These were yummy Italian cabbage wraps, modified to be totally vegan!
That's it! I probably made it sound more complicated than it really is, but it works for our family, and doesn't take up much time. I also like that its not a "set" day of the week that you have to have each meal, its easy to adapt as much as you want because each list is separate and easy to grab on your way to the store. What do you think?
I planned some games for the kids, but when they saw that there were worms, they went for those instead! And then just explored and played on their own. It was such a beautiful day out! I love just watching the kids interact with one another.
Levi got some new pj's (he picked them out, he likes the feet!)
Levi made stir fry all by himself - fried an egg, cooked some mushrooms, cooked some lettuce (I know, strange stir fry ingredient), reheated some rice and added sauce. I helped him put it on the plate but he did everything else all by himself with no direction/help.
We put up a new lamp, the other one was super ugly and covered with fake pears and apples, fake leaves and a good thick layer of dust.
And Levi did an art project for our space unit study:
Space Art:
Trace circle shaped objects onto white paper
Paint circles using watercolor paints, its o.k. to go beyond the lines. Copy images of real planets or design your own.
While that dries, use a stiff brush or an old toothbrush to flick white paint onto black paper (use liquid paint like poster paint, not watercolor for this)
Cut out circles, and glue them onto the black paper.
So this week:
Sunday: Went to see Obama
Monday: Mr. Science
Tuesday: Beachside Kids Explorers Club
Wednesday: Babysat neighbor kids all day, gymnastics
Thursday: Babysat neighbor kids all day, Co-op
Friday: Homeschool Trading class, babysat neighbor kids half day
Saturday: Music Together class, chiropractor, Levi's first real football game
Sunday: church
On Levi's birthday we went on a field trip to Ben and Jerry's, where we got to watch a video on ice cream making, see the back areas of the shop, learn how cones are made, ask question and EAT ice cream (the best part!)
We decided to learn a little more about ice cream at home as well.
Unit study sources: Homeschool Share 2TeachingMommies (used the graphing activity and dice game from here) From Cow to Cone (these are the videos we watched on our field trip- they are pretty good!)
On our Ben and Jerry's tour, first the kids watched a video about how ice cream is made, "From Cow to Cone". It really did explain the process well.
We got to go in the back and check out the freezer.
A little sign they had on the door in the back room.
The back room
Supplies behind the counter
Then they did a cone making demo (the cones had dairy, so Levi couldn't taste them!).
First pour the batter onto the greased cone maker.
Roll it up.
Like this:
Or, put it in a mold to make a bowl.
The best part, of course was eating the ice cream.
Over the weekend we learned more about ice cream and ice cream making. We got out our trusty old ice cream maker, this one has a inner chamber that you stick in the freezer overnight. It has an outer container, a paddle, a handle, and a lid and thats all you need! You can dump pretty much anything in there and it will make ice cream in a short time.
One of the projects Levi did was design his own ice cream carton label. He decided on "Chocolate Freeze Pudding" flavor, so we recreated this with tofu mixed with cocoa powder and thinned with some almond milk.
We also learned that ice cream gets its texture from the air that gets mixed in. So with this mixture, we put some directly into a tupperware and put it in the freezer, and the rest we made in the ice cream maker.
More on the ice cream experiment, as explained by Levi (by the way, it WAS soft to begin with, but got harder overnight. Not sure why, maybe b/c it was a non-dairy mix or something, our other ice cream flavors stayed soft!)
We did some other activites as well:
Alphabetizing ice cream ingredients (this is the first time he has put things in alphabetical order so we used a ABC board to put them on to help out):
A science experiment: What is the effect of salt on ice? We put some ice in each cup, added salt to one and then observed. The cup with salt melted faster, but felt colder. We talked about how salt was used to make ice cream.
After Levi went to bed, I tried to make myself a milkshake, and this is what happened. So much for that! After cleaning up the (huge) mess on the kitchen and myself, I skipped desert.
We played an ice cream game, this one I found as a printable, but it would be super easy to make. I couldn't find any dice for some reason so we used a spinner.
For our version of the game, you spin, and then pick the appropriate piece. If none were left, you took it from the other player. To win, you had to have at least one of each flavor and 1 cone.
We did a craft project, a spin on the "paint and marbles in a tray" painting technique. We used ice!
It came out kinda neat, with a rainbow sorbet sorta look. Levi used the finished artwork to decorate a letter he wrote to Ben and Jerry's thanking them for our field trip. We will have to drop it off to them at some point (and eat some more ice cream while we are there, of course).
He is getting a lot better at actually attempting to draw things with more detail instead of just a super simple super quick scribble of something. He also carefully colored the cone in and had some pretty good handwriting for the note!
(sorry it looks orange, not sure whats going on with my camera lately)
And here is the finished lapbook!
We have friends with us all this week, so back to learning about Oceans again on the weekend!
