Caramel Apple Cinnamon Rolls

Dough:
1 cup hot (not scalding water)
1/4 c granulated sugar
1 packet active dry yeast
1/2 cup shortening
1 tsp salt
3 to 5 cups flour

Mix the water, sugar and yeast in a large mixing bowl and allow it to sit for 20 minutes until foamy. Add shortening and salt, beat for one minute. Fold in 3 cups of flour and begin to knead. Add flour one half cup at a time, when the dough becomes sticky. Use as little flour as you can. Too much flour makes bead heavy.
Knead for ten minutes. Too little kneading will result in coarse bread.

Allow to rise for 45 minutes in a warm place until double.

Filling:
4 apples, peeled and cubed
Water
1 tsp. Lemon juice
2 tbs. Butter
1 tsp. Salt
1 cup sugar
2 tbs. Cinnamon

Boil the apples with lemon juice and salt. Strain and mash with a fork, leaving it a little chunky. Stir in butter.
Punch down bread dough and roll out to 1/2 inch thick rectangle.
Spread evenly with apple sauce and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Roll up and cut into eight slices.
Grease a cookie sheet and place the cinnamon rolls with sides touching. Let rise for 30 minutes in a warm place.

Preheat your oven to 375F and bake rolls for 20 to 22 minutes.

Topping:
Two cups of brown sugar
1 cup whole milk or half and half.
1/2 tsp. Salt
2 cups walnuts

Bring brown sugar, milk and salt to a boil I'm a medium saucepan stirring occasionally. Cook for 5 minutes. Spoon quickly over cinnamon rolls and top with walnuts before the caramel sets.

Homemade Peppermint Chocolate Syrup

Hey. It's peppermint and chocolate. I could tell you why I love it but I don't think I need to. It's that season, past putting pumpkin in everything and now we're moving on to eating and drinking ridiculous amounts of peppermint spiked concoctions!

You need:

Bottle to store the syrup
3 tsp pure peppermint extract (1 tbs or 1/2 fluid oz)
3 cups white sugar
1 1/2 cup water
1 1/2 cup powdered baking cocoa
1 tsp salt

In a large saucepan (the syrup will rise when boiling and boil over if you're not careful so make sure you use a pan with plenty of extra room), combine the sugar and water. Heat to steaming and whisk in the cocoa, salt and peppermint extract. Don't add too much peppermint, pure extract is really potent! Boil for 1 to two minutes, stirring constantly. Be careful of boiling over. Boiling hot sugar syrup can cause some nasty burns! Once it has cooled down enough to not melt the bottle (or shatter it if you're using glass), use a funnel to pour the syrup into your container and put it in the fridge.

Make sure you shake it well before using it, in case the peppermint extract rises to the top. That doesn't taste nice!

What do you do with it besides resisting the urge to drink it out of the bottle? You can:

Add it to coffee with some half and half or cream, or milk, or just drink it in plain coffee.
Drizzle it on your cheesecake.
Drizzle it on any cake.
Drizzle it on pancakes.
Use it as a dip for apples or other kind of fruit.
Use it in cocktails.
Use it in many baking recipes.
Stir it in milk, microwave, and you have peppermint hot chocolate - or drink it cold, even.

Really, you can add it to just about anything!

Oatmeal Nut Popovers

Pie Crust (flaky!)
 Hazelnut Spread
Sliced almonds
Oatmeal Streusel:
1/2 c butter
1/2 c sugar
1/2 c brown sugar
1 c rolled oats
1/4 c flour
1 tsp salt

Prepare pie crust, cut into 8" square pieces. Spread 2 tbs. Hazelnut spread down the middle. You can substitute almond butter, peanut butter, apple butter, even raspberry preserves or other fruit preserves. Top with 2 tbsp. streusel topping and sliced almonds.
Wrap, burrito style and poke the top with a fork. Bake at 375, on middle rack, for 35 to 40 minutes.

Home Grown Cantina

Welcome to the Festival of Food Carnival. This month, we celebrate Recipes from the Garden!  Hosted by Diary of a First Child and Hybrid Rasta Mama, you're welcome to join us next time, or if you have a previously published recipe you'd like to share, add it to the linky below.
***

What's not to love about a good cantina bowl? One of my favorite foods is Mexican-American and my favorite place to eat is Chipotle Mexican Grill. I know that Taco Bell has put out a pretty good imitation, and there have been many home recipes mimicking them both. I believe I have found the key to this specific flavor, however, and I have not only adapted the recipe to include more raw ingredients, I have dialed down the fat as well.

This is my healthy, more natural version of an already healthy and natural way of eating!

You may choose to add a seasoned beef or chicken, either tastes really nice. However, this recipe is meatless.

Notice my thick bed of lettuce in the above picture. This is one of those recipes where the fresher your ingredients, the better it will taste! Not all of my ingredients are grown at home, but most can be. Others can be found in your local farmers market. The few things that will need to be bought in the store can be bought raw and unprocessed. They are beans and brown rice, and of course some seasonings.

There are three layers to your cantina bowl (or burrito): Seasoned rice, black bean salsa and toppings.

Begin by cooking your beans. You will want to cook 1 cup of dry beans with however much water seems fitting. While it's true that you can buy canned beans, I prefer to cook from scratch. They do take extra time, but little work and canned beans contain some pretty ugly additives. I strongly suggest avoiding them. Simply cook the beans according to the package directions. They will take about an hour, two at the most. Cook them in the morning and allow them to cool. They will keep until you need them.

For the Rice

• 2 cups dried brown rice
• 2 cups water
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. garlic powder
• 1 tsp. onion powder
• 2 tps. chili powder
• 1/2 tsp. cumin
• 1 tomato, seeded and pureed
• juice from 1/2 lime

Add all of the ingredients into a pan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, or until rice is tender. Allow to cool

For the Black Bean Salsa

• 3 large ripe tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• 1 medium red onion, chopped
• 1 bell pepper, chopped
• 1 ear of fresh sweet corn, kernels removed (1 cup of frozen)
• 3 heaping tablespoons of chopped fresh cilantro
• juice from one whole lime
• 1 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. garlic powder
• 1 tsp. pepper

Chop all of the ingredients and toss into a large mixing bowl. Drain the black beans and rinse them. Gently fold them in. Allow the salsa to sit for a little while in the refrigerator. The longer it sits, the more the flavors will meld together.

Once the rice has cooked and cooled, and the salsa has had a chance to stew for a bit, put a cupful of rice in the bottom of a bowl and add some salsa. If you have meat prepared, you can add it as well. Finish with your toppings.

Toppings

• fresh lettuce
• skim mozzarella cheese
• Fresh chopped avocado

You may choose to add sour cream or a lime ranch dressing, but this is a very good start. Serve with corn chips or tortillas or eat it straight with a fork. I like to make a batch of rice and a batch of salsa and keep them in the refrigerator. Putting a bowl together for my lunch is then super easy and I can eat deliciously healthy all week long. In the summer months - with tomatoes, fresh lettuce, cilantro, onion and corn straight from my garden, wholesome home grown eating is simple but exciting!

Do you have a garden? Do you have a favorite recipe using whole fruits and vegetables?

***********

Please take a moment to visit the blogs of our other Festival of Food participants. The links in this list will be live by the end of the day, as participants are all in different time zones.

• Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama shares Grilled Fennel and Tomatoes with Basil! This recipe brings together some of the freshest, most vibrant flavors from her garden into a simple dish that even her wee-one adores!  You can also find Jennifer on Facebook.
• Luschka at Keeper of the Kitchen shares a simple, summery salad of kale and parmesan, one of the only crops Luschka's managed to keep away from the snugs and snails so far this year. You can also find Luschka on Facebook.
• Sam in a guest post at Hobo Mama shares a garlicky, sweet, salty, and tangy topping for salads, sandwiches, pasta, and burgers and pairs it with a delightful dish that will help you use up the tomatoes and spinach fresh from your garden or farmers' market! You can also follow Hobo Mama on Facebook.
• Lindy at Poppy Soap Company shares a recipe for Grilled Peaches with Balsamic Vinegar. This easy recipe pairs well with protein heavy meals as a decadent and easy side dish! You can also find Lindy on Facebook.
• Angela from Earth Mama's World scored some 'imperfect' veggies from a local farmer's market and turned them into a perfect rosemary roasted veggie dish! You can also follow Angela on Facebook.
• Amy at Anktangle details two different methods of preserving hearty summer greens (such as kale and chard) so you can enjoy the variety—and nutritional benefits!—year-round. You can also follow Amy on Facebook.
• Destany at They Are All of Me creates low fat, healthy mock ups of some of her favorite restaurant dishes, using whole foods and ingredients from her garden. You can also follow Destany on Facebook.

Stay connected! Be sure to "Like" the Festival of Food Carnival Facebook page.

Strawberry Fields 4ever

I'm so happy it's spring! I'm not even irritated that we keep getting bouts of freezing temps and snow. I've lived in the Midwest plenty long and I know to expect snow clear into May. I enjoy the bouts of warm temps when they come and allow a bit of leeway when it comes to my spring planting.


Each spring I usually put in a bit of landscaping. Whether it's putting in flower beds, building trellises or building a new walkway or fire pit. Last year I moved my little water garden from the back corner of the yard to sit beside the porch. We had goldfish in it, but they never seem to make it more than a season and so I've determined that we will have a froggy pond, not a gold fish pond. I even made a sign, see?

There are poppies, daisies and coneflowers planted around the pond.
When they come in, it will be quite a pretty natural look.

This year, we wanted to grow strawberries but because the large oak tree planted in the corner of our yard is shading the back half of our garden, we needed to find a new site. The old pond site was looking pretty atrocious. I thought about it and thought about it, and came up with a design using materials we already had to make a raised strawberry bed on that slope.




My determination faltered for about a minute when I first came back to this site and became overwhelmed
by the amount of digging and excavating it was going to take. But one thing I've learned digging a lot
of holes (I have built 4 in ground water gardens) is that a large amount of dirt is easily moved, one
shovel at a time.

 

Adam was fascinated by what we found when we turned over these rocks!



The fill spot from where the pond used to sit was sunken in a bit and we were looking to make a raised bed. It took quite a lot of digging on the slope to bring all of the soil down.

I used to live in a house which butted up next to a creek. There was a long steep slope from my back door down to this creek, and this slope was positively littered with limestone rocks. It took many days outside to dig up these rocks and climb up the slope with them to the back yard, but I had a lot of them and my first pond was gorgeous! When we moved, we decided to bring the pond (and the rocks) with us. But because the pond now sits partially beneath our porch and we have far fewer rocks around it, we have a surplus of them sitting in the corner of the yard. The kids helped me move the rocks back over to our site where I dry stacked a sixteen inch tall wall.

Karlie was a big help breaking up the soil and raking it towards the front of our wall.

 

One thing I've gotten pretty good at over the years is dry stacking limestone rocks so that it's good looking and won't fall over, even when little feet run across them.

add caption

There is plenty of room on the back end of this slope to build a second tier, for an herb garden. On the very top, I plan on growing some berry vines, such as blackberry, raspberry and blueberry.

I love that my kid dressed up like Bumblebee to help me in the yard.

We got some old weathered pallets from my next door neighbor and broke them up, cut them down, and made a little wooded "fence on the back end of the new bed. Adam had a lot of fun breaking them apart.

This little fence is to keep the bunnies out. They are jaggety on purpose.

We have a lot of bunnies in our neighborhood. Every spring the cute little shits eat up half of my produce as it's coming out of the ground. They're really fond of strawberry plants, so I built a barrier. The front and sides are raised and rocky, the rabbits will have a hard time getting in that way. On the back side, we dug a deep trench and then placed these posts to form a fence. They are purposely staggered in height for simplicity and for looks. Plus, it'll make it that much harder for the rabbits to find away over it.

We couldn't find our spade, so we used a kitchen spoon.

We planted around 28 June bearing straweberry plants. These are perennial, and will come back year after year if we take good care of them. That's why it was important for me to have a good place to keep them. I am expecting a pretty good crop to bake in pies, make strawberry shortcake, eat fresh and can into jams. Notice I did not say that I expect to have any for sharing.

Karlies favorite part is to water them in.

I expect this weekend to build the second tier and plant my herb garden.

I realized after I took this picture that I misspelled the sign.

So... Do You Want to Make Your Own Coconut Oil?

Welcome to the Festival of Food Carnival. In celebration of Spring, we're sharing real raw recipe ideas.  Hosted by Diary of a First Child and Hybrid Rasta Mama, you're welcome to join us next time, or if you have a previously published recipe you'd like to share, add it to the linky below.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a coconut. I love coconut meat, they taste similar to Brazil nuts, which are my favorites.

After a friend of mine shared an article on homemade coconut milk, I began playing around with my coconut. And then I bought another one, and another one. I started experimenting and researching.

I decided I wanted to make three things with coconuts: Coconut Milk, Coconut Flour, and Coconut oil. All of which can be very expensive and as my regular readers know, expensive ain't my thing!

One thing I discovered however, was that no website, blog article or Youtube video (that I was able to find) showed how to process coconuts in all three ways, simultaneously. So here you go! I will post the links to the pages and videos that I saw at the end of this article. I am not an expert on coconuts, but I am something of an expert on cheap!

Real quick, I'm going to bore you with some math.
Here, I bought five coconuts. They were 1.38$ each, and I picked up the largest ones out of the bin.
My yields from these 5 coconuts are thus:
1.5 cups of coconut oil
220 oz. of coconut milk
8 cups of coconut flour

All for less than 7$.
It's important here to note that had I chosen either the coconut milk OR the coconut oil, I would have gotten quite a lot more of each. But because I wanted both, the totals for each were less.

So let's get started!
Shopping for coconuts, you want to pick heavy ones. Shake them to see if they have plenty of liquid inside. Low liquid content likely means there is a hole or a crack and the coconut inside has been compromised.
Hold the coconut over a bowl and whack it hard with the back edge of a heavy knife. It splits in half magically! Sometimes the first blow does it, sometimes you need to hit it a few times.

I had all five coconuts split in just a couple of minutes.

You can save the liquid and strain it as it likely has bits of the hull floating around in it.

Some people add a bit of sugar to this and drink it up. I just processed it back into the coconut milk.

Another trick I read online. Put the coconut halves into a 350F oven for 15 minutes. This won't hurt them a bit!

When you take them out, you will find that they are a lot easier to remove from their shells, as heating them causes them to pull away a little from the outer hulls.

Turning the halves upside down on the counter and giving them another good whack with the back of a heavy knife will now cause them to pop out of their shells, most of the time. Otherwise, use a butter knife to pop it out.

I had a bowlful of large chunks of meat.

I chopped them up into pieces that my blender could handle.

Don't throw away the shells, they can be very useful!

Coconut shells make excellent mulch, they can be composted or burned. Because they are highly flammable, they are terrific fire starters for your summertime bar-b-q or weenie roast. You can also crunch them up and use them in your fish tank filter, water filter or other application instead of activated charcoal. Ground to dust, they are very absorbent and a great way to handle those pesky oil stains in your driveway. You can even use the dust as a facial exfoliant. So keep them!

Next step, into the blender.

Before adding liquid, use the crush setting and get the pieces as small as you can.

Obviously, this is not five coconuts. Only blend about a half a coconut at a time, unless your blender is a mean machine and can handle more.

I was using a cheap Sunbeam blender that I bought at a thrift store without a lid.

 Now add the liquid that you extracted from the coconuts. You will run out, so just use fresh water afterward.

Blend, blend, blend.

Because I was making flour with the solids, I took care to get my pieces as miniscule as possible. If I had a Blendtec, this would have been an easy thing. But my cheap little Sunbeam just went and went.

This is maybe one coconut. By the time I was finished blending, the bowl was filled to the brim. Looks like oatmeal and it smelled delicious!

It confuses me when people talk about keeping things on hand like cheesecloth.
Bandanas can be used for so many things! I always have plenty lying around.

Dampen the bandana and place it (or strainer, or cheesecloths over the mouth of a pitcher and scoop one or two cupfuls of the pulp into it.

Squeeze, and squeeze and wring and wring. You can be as forceful as you need to be with the bandana, you won't tear it, wear as cheesecloth would after a bit.

I was able to squeeze out enough super concentrated coconut milk to fill up six 24 oz. jars.

If you're only making coconut milk, good job, you all done! This is, as I said, very concentrated so you would want to dilute it quite a bit.

If you want to make the coconut oil and flour, read on.

After getting as much liquid out of the pulp as possible, dump the coconut grounds out onto a cookie sheet.

I had to use two of them.

Spread it out as evenly as you can, then place it in a 200F oven for a few hours to dry out.

Once the coconut flour has fully dried, run it back through the blender or a food processor to break it up further.

I placed my jars into the refrigerator and let them rest for several hours. The fat separated to the top.

If I was only making coconut oil, I would have wanted to put my milk into a bowl or some container that would allow me to scoop the cream out easily. But making the milk as well, I didn't want to remove all of the cream.

I ladled approximately
1/2 to 2/3's of the cream into a heavy bottomed pot.

I placed the pot on medium heat and went on with my day. There is nothing you need to do here, just check on it every so often.

After a while, you will see the oil begin to come to the top.

Continue to cook until you are unable to get any more oil out of the sludge. I would estimate that this took me about an hour.

You can see that I got about a cup and a half of pure virgin coconut oil. If I had taken all of the cream from the milk, I would easily have gotten over two cups.













I can't say that it was a blast to make all of this, as you can see it was a ton of work! Was it worth it? Oh yes! Especially the coconut milk. And as I said in the beginning of this post, all of these products are fair bit pricey, and making your own makes them affordable for just about anyone. In fact, going to a regular grocery store and purchasing cooking oil (corn, canola, vegetable) plus a sack of wheat flour, plus two gallons of cow milk would cost you at least double what I spent here for much, MUCH healthier products.

Stay tuned to this blog for recipes using coconut milk, coconut oil and coconut flour, as I can see this being something that I do on a regular basis!

Research Links:
Hybrid Rasta Mama; 333 Uses for Coconut Oil
WikiHow; 8 Ways to Open a Coconut
Homemade Desert Recipes; How to Open a Coconut
Wellness Mama; Homemade Coconut Milk
Whole New Mom; Easiest Coconut Milk Recipe - Improved!
Youtube: Raw Pleasure Australia; How to make coconut milk. (obnoxious music, but good video).
Ehow; How To Make Homemade Coconut Oil
Youtube: Christopher Silverton-Thong; Coconut Oil - Homemade
Trini Style; Homemade Coconut Oil

*********** Please take a moment to visit the blogs of our other Festival of Food participants. The links in this list will be live by the end of the day, as participants are all in different time zones.

• Gone are the days where dairy-free, gluten-free deserts mean a fruit platter! This "raw" cheesecake from Luschka at Diary of a First Child is a wonderful introduction to raw food, and is pretty simple to make too! You can also find Luschka on Facebook.
• Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama shares Tropical Twist Kale Chips, a recipe guaranteed to take your taste buds to the tropics! Kid love these tangy treats too!  You can also find Jennifer on Facebook.
• Sarah at Why Food Works discusses the importance of fat and enzymes - and offers up a recipe for a raw, 5-minute blender gazpacho that's perfect for warmer weather. You can also find Sarah on Facebook.
• Abbie at Farmer's Daughter shares tips for introducing Raw First Foods based on her experiences following baby-led weaning with her older son. You can also find Farmer's Daughter on Facebook.
• Destany at They Are All of Me shows to how she made coconut oil, coconut milk and coconut flour in her own kitchen, using whole coconuts. You can also fine They Are All of Me on Facebook.

Stay connected! Be sure to "Like" the Festival of Food Carnival Facebook page.

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Gearing Up for Growing

The light ground behind the trellises is the back half of the garden that
we cannot use this year.

It's SPRING! It's almost time to plant! I had a lot of fun this afternoon tilling up my vegetable patch with my shovel and getting it ready to tuck my little babies in their beds. Can you tell I like to garden?

This is my fifth year with this particular garden. You can see in the photo that it's quite a lot smaller than it has been before. Half as small, actually. There is a tree in the corner of the yard that needs trimmed back to allow enough sunlight into the back half of the garden. For now it's useless space, and that makes me sad. But a smaller garden will allow me to tend all of the plants more easily and I am hoping that the trade will equal larger, more lush plants with bigger fruits and vegetables.

In the past we have done container gardens and my very first real vegetable patch was a crop of contraband cucumbers I had growing underneath the back porch of an apartment I rented. I planted holly hocks and sun flowers in front of them so the managers couldn't see them from the street. Those little cucumber plants were pervasive and unruly! It was very hard keeping them out of sight and they even came back the following year with out replanting.

The light earth has seen four years worth of
gardening and has had most of the nutrients
leeched out of it. The black compost was
spread on heavily.

This particular patch of yard has seen a lot of gardening and it shows. Looking at the difference in color of these two soils in the picture above, it's obvious that my garden soil is pretty barren. But that black stuff, it's not ordinary soil. That's what a years worth of vegetable matter looks like after it has decomposed. And entire years worth of kitchen waste and yard scraps actually and I have tended my compost dutifully.

My compost bin is a large plastic container (and old garbage bin) with holes drilled along the sides and the top and a gaping hole in the bottom to allow decomposed matter to come out of the bottom. I watered it, turned it with a pitch fork and after the year, I raked it out along the ground to allow it to finish breaking down in the early weeks of spring.








There are many ways to make your own composter. I personally didn't fuss with layering. I notice a lot of experts like to have rules with the "proper" way to compost. While I am sure there is reason behind these rules, I doubt that my grass clippings will refuse to decompose if they are not adequately sandwiched between dried leaves and moldy broccoli.

How rich and black this compost was! That's pay-dirt!

The kids got new gardening tools this year from the Easter Bunny, and what a perfect idea! The Little Miss was helping me shovel the compost into our bin to carry to the garden patch.

While we were  digging out our compost, we found some garlic cloves that had sprouted. We found about twenty little ones, so we decided to plant them! I'm guessing they will be ready in the summer, with fresh garlic bulbs.

This year I am only planting five things. It was going to be four, but I couldn't ignore the hearty little garlic cloves. I've gotten myself in trouble in the past trying to grow too many things. I love vegetables, so of course I get greedy. Since last season, I have started my own business and I know that I won't have the time to weed and take care of quite so much.

My fence is a figure head fence. It has no real power, I know that. It's not going to keep the animals out or the children who decide to take a walk inside, but it does provide a visual stop for children who are running mindlessly through the yard too focused on their game to think of  helpless plants stuck in the ground to be stepped on by careless feet.




My garden layout is carefully planned to allow maximum sunlight to all plants,
and arranged by height following the directionality of the sun. In the past, we
 have had great luck with companion planting.

I am growing tomato plants along the trellises, and I will be buying seedlings. Every year I grow my tomatoes from seed and wind up with my heart broken after the rabbits have their way with the baby plants. The garlic will be in the back right corner. I will give those unruly cucumbers another shot, and have allotted them a large space in the front. Some jalapeño's and some lettuce should give us a nice summer salad. The garlic will go well with the wild onions that grow beneath the oak tree to make the dressing.









One if the tiny garlic sprouts we found
growing in our compost.

I am sure I will plant herbs in the corners after it warms up a little more, but for now this tiny garden is more than enough to make me happy.


Do you garden? What are you growing this year?

Thrifty Shrimp and Tomato Soup

I make this soup for my lunch on days that we had shrimp the evening before. Even better if we had shrimp creole!

I never through away my shrimp shells without first making a stock out of them. In this case, I took my trimmings from the vegetables I used in the shrimp creole and stewed them with the shells.

Shrimp shells
Bell Pepper bits
Onion ends and skins
Garlic cloves, whole
3 cups of water


I tossed these into a pan with a pinch of salt and stewed them for an hour. Afterward, I strained the liquid into a jar and set in the refrigerator for the next two days. You can also freeze your broth.

I take a cup and a half of the stock and whisk it with 2 tbs. of tomato paste and heat it on the stove.

The avocado is wonderfully creamy with the soup!

Warm and Hearty Salad

I don't know about you, but I really don't like a garden salad in the winter. Not only is everything out of season, but it's cold outside and I want something warm and rib-sticking!

This is:

Sautéed mushrooms
Lightly steamed broccoli
Avocado chunks
Cream cheese cubed

Lightly salt and that's all that's needed. :)

Make Your Own Hot Cocoa Mix - How and Why

Everybody loves a nice steamy cup of hot cocoa and these days, it's as easy to make as pouring hot water into a cup and mixing in some powder.

But do you want to know what's gross? Spending seven dollars for a large tub of premade powder, and opening it up to discover it's only 2/3's of the way full.

Do you know what's grosser than that? Supporting companies like or Nestle, who's business and manufacturing practices are deeply unethical and cause a lot of damage to our global community.*

And it gets even worse. Just look at the items on the ingredients list. Then, as if to insult your intelligence, Nestle claims their cocoa powder mix is good for you! They think you can't read (actually, they expect you're too busy or too lazy to read).

I don't claim to have the worlds healthiest diet, you will not find a complete absence of junk food in my home. I buy cheap sandwich cookies for my kids to snack on every week, and make most of my cakes from a mix. Oh, and I do buy canned frosting.

I haven't bought hot cocoa mixes in many, many years because I'm too frugal to bother. Besides it tastes so much better when you make it from home, even though it is more work to cook it on the stove.

Last week, my husband went to the store, and he did bring home the dreaded 1.73lbs. can of Nestle Cocoa powder. Rather than fret, I thought I would take the opportunity to do some comparing for the benefit of my household and for you!

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Here is the basic recipe:

1 part cocoa powder
2 parts sugar (adjust to your liking)
2 parts nonfat dry milk

You can mix the ingredients and put them into a jar. It doesn't need to be fancy, you can see I used an old jelly jar I had saved.
I did take the above photo before mixing so that you can see the ratio. It is very handy to mix in a blender, especially if you are using raw sugar, in order to break up the clumps of dry milk, cocoa, and powder the sugar.
It will look like this afterward.
You stir this into hot water, just like other mixes. You can also add it to coffee or tea.

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A couple of things about this cocoa mix. You will note that there are exactly 5 ingredients, rather than the 16 found in the Nestle. And although there is processing involved in the individual ingredients, I can say that dry milk contains no artificial growth hormones, and that the cocoa powder was not processed in unnatural ways (it was not processed with alkali). You may also have noticed that it is fat free.
 

    Now look at the label on the Nestle Can:

Not only are there over 16 highly processed ingredients on the label, but many of them are synthetic.

 

If you were to look up each of these ingredients (Wikipedia has information on all of them), you would find that some of them are known to have harmful side effects.

 

The biggest offender would be the artificial flavoring, simply because many flavorings aren't even tested for what they might do to us if we ingest them. Incidentally, if the cocoa in the Nestle hadn't been processed with alkali, which not only reduces the antioxidants by a large percent, the flavor would have been deeper and there would be no need for added fake flavoring.

What's really bothersome about this label, however is the fact that Nestle is actually claiming this stuff is healthy for you. There a few antioxidants, but far less than you would find in regularly processed cocoa powder. The calcium is also minute. Consider that there absolutely 0% vitamins, and very little protein, healthy carbs, or fiber, the very notion that anything in this can could be considered nutritionally valuable is revolting.

 

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* Claims against Nestle as an unethical food company are due to multiple infractions including: Buying cocoa from companies which use child slave labor, buying ingredients from unethically seized farms, targeting young children for the sale of nutritionally deficient unhealthy foods, destruction of rainforest (palm oil harvesting), misleading mothers about the harmful effects of infant formula and persuading them to not breastfeed, coveting and abusing natural water sources in the production of bottled water, and denying workers rights across the globe.


**While I shop at Aldi, which claims to be an ethical company (don't they all?) I admit that the origin of their food is quite obscure and it is difficult to find out any information on their products. There have not been any good or bad reports, but I cannot in good conscience claim that the cocoa I am using is the product of fair trade practices. I can only make choices based on information that I have, with in the constraints of my families budget. If you have any concrete and provable information on the origins and integrity of Aldi products, please let us know in the comments below.