This year, a friend asked me about making and sharing a mix of the beans. I thought the sharing was a great idea, because I don’t have room or desire for another 65 pounds of bean soup mix! So I sent out an email to the group of local people who participate in my every-other-month-ordering from Hummingbird Wholesale in Eugene (bulk natural food warehouse). A half dozen people are interested in splitting the bean soup mix. That’s great with me!

The reason I believe mixing the beans ourselves is preferable to purchasing a mix is because we can ensure getting a great variety of all organic beans. The mixes available through Azure Standard are either: a big variety of beans, but they’re conventional beans; or a small variety of organic beans. No mix offers both variety and organic.

With enough people interested, I went ahead and ordered 12 different beans, 5 pounds each, from Azure Standard: adzuki, black, chana dal (small garbanzo), great northern, kidney, pink, pinto, red, navy, yellow split pea, green split pea, and lentil. Due to allergies among the group, I will not be including soybeans or barley. The per pound price turned out to be $1.41. I don’t know yet if all the beans will come in until the order arrives next week.

If this interests you, I’d suggest you consider asking around to see if any of your friends or family would like to go in on the mix with you. It is a great thing to do with a group, but if you can’t find anyone to share the mix, do it small-scale. Go to your local natural food store and from the bulk bins, purchase just one pound of each of any beans you wish to include. Then mix those together for your own manageable size soup mix.

Here’s my recipe for making soup from the bean soup mix. It is so delicious! Everyone I know who’s tried it, loves it.

12-Bean Soup

• 3 cups of 12 Bean Soup Mix
• 2 quarts water or vegetable stock
• 2 Tablespoons dried minced onion or 2 t onion powder
• 2 Tablespoons dried parsley flakes
• 1 Tablespoon cumin
• 2 teaspoons dried basil
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 large can diced tomatoes
• salt & pepper to taste

Place beans in a large stockpot. Cover with water & soak overnight. Drain the beans. Add water or vegetable stock. Add the seasonings (except salt & pepper) and diced tomatoes. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 1 1/2 hours, or until the beans are tender. Add salt and pepper, to taste.

Options:

1) Add brown rice during the last hour of simmering, or serve over warm brown rice.

2) If you’re not allergic to barley or another gluten-grain such as wheat or kamut or spelt, add about 1/3 cup of any of those whole, uncooked berries to the soaking and proceed with the recipe as directed.

3) Add one pound of grass-fed beef stew meat to cook along with the beans (don’t add during the soak).

Crockpot Method

Soak beans overnight. Drain and rinse. Place in crockpot with all ingredients except salt & pepper. Cook on low 8 hours or until beans are tender. Salt & pepper to taste.

Options:

1) Serve over cooked brown rice.

2) If you’re not allergic to barley or another gluten-grain such as wheat or kamut or spelt, add about 1/3 cup of any of those whole, uncooked berries to the soaking and proceed with the recipe as directed.

3) Add one pound of grass-fed beef stew meat to cook along with the beans (don’t add during the soak).

© Copyright 2008 by Wardeh Harmon of gnowfglins.com.

To Give the Mix Away as Gift

You will supply the beans, the seasonings and the directions. The recipient will supply the diced tomatoes, salt and pepper, and meat (if using).

In a quart size jar, put 3 cups of the bean soup mix. You may also add 1/3 cup of barley, or other whole grain berry, to the bean soup mix. Put all the seasonings in a little baggie. Add it to the jar.

Cut and paste the recipe text into a text editor. Please include my name and website (© 2008 Copyright Wardeh Harmon of gnowfglins.com). Print out a copy of the recipe.

Decorate the top of the jar with fabric and/or ribbon, attaching the recipe to the jar by hole punching the corner of the recipe and threading the ribbon through the hole before typing around the jar.

Alternative method: Sew a fabric bag (use sturdy and flexible fabric, about 6 x 10 inches) and use that instead of the jar. Put the beans in the fabric bag. Add the baggie of seasonings. Tie the bag closed with a twist-tie and then cover that with the ribbon, which is also threaded through the recipe’s hole punch.

I have narrowed down the source of the bitter taste I got when using the Blender Baking Method. Vinegar (souring the almond milk) reacts with the baking soda to create a soapy-bitter taste. However, even after eliminating baking soda, the baked goods still yield a bitter taste. There’s another culprit reacting with the vinegar: gluten-free baking powder from Ener-G Foods. I’m not sure which ingredient in the baking powder is reacting with the vinegar, but one of them is.

So in my weekend cornbreads that were semi-successful, my solution was to eliminate both vinegar and baking soda but keep using the baking powder.

Over the weekend, I tried two times to make cornbread, using allergy-free variations of Sue’s recipes. The batch pictured here (100% corn flour) was the prettiest, but its texture was too cakey and not hearty enough for most of the family. Still, we liked it. In fact, I loved it. The other batch (3/4 corn flour, 1/2 buckwheat flour) was heartier, but didn’t rise as well or keep as well, yet most of the family preferred it. Jeff is still looking for that “perfect” cornbread (he loves cornbread).

When these (which I stripped from the branches and dusted) are fully dry, I will store them in the freezer.

I mostly brought home paste tomatoes, for my own processing, but couldn’t resist those brandywines, for regular and fresh eating. I have eaten so many… delicious!

Last year, I was given many tomatoes and I turned them into cooked tomato sauce. This year, I couldn’t bear to cook the tomatoes to death while I preserved them. (Fresh is best, you know.) So I whizzed many of them in the Vita-Mix and froze the chunky raw sauce in quart size zipper-seal freezer bags. Many others, I have sliced into 1/4″ slices for rotations through the dehydrator at a low 100 degree temperature (so as to keep those enzymes viable). I finally broke down and purchased 4 additional trays for my American Harvest dehydrator, to maximize the consumption of energy required to run it. The trays were on sale at Bi-Mart for 10% off. That means I’ve had 7 trays of tomatoes drying at all times. This is far more productive than I used to be, when I could only dehydrate 3 trays at a time.

There’s not been a frost and the tomatoes are still producing at that farm, so they say. So on Wednesday, I’m going to get more. Call me crazy, but how can I turn down the opportunity of acquiring bushels of home-grown, natural, local tomatoes? I have to admit, the kitchen is full of a sickly sweet tomato fragrance, but I think I can handle it for one more week.

• 2 pounds grass-fed ground beef
• 1 medium onion or 2 small onions, diced
• 4 cups cooked and cooled quinoa*
• 2 to 3 teaspoons sea salt, or to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
• 1 tablespoon dried basil

Brown the ground beef in a deep skillet over medium to medium-high heat. Leave it pretty chunky (that’s our preference; you can chop it up to smithereens if you want).

Add the diced onions and let them saute in all the yummy beef juices.

Add the cooked quinoa, salt, pepper, and basil. Mix without smushing up the quinoa. Let it all come to a warm temperature.

Taste and adjust seasonings. Serve.

To add a yummy touch, put a bit of shredded goat cheese on top of each person’s serving.

*To cook quinoa: Rinse 2 cups of quinoa grain in a fine mesh strainer under cold running water for 2 minutes. Put the grain, 4 cups of water, and a dash of extra virgin olive oil in an 8-cup capacity pot. Bring it to a boil. Turn down the heat to maintain a gentle simmer while covered. Let simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from heat. After about 15 minutes, fluff with a fork.

© Copyright 2008 by Wardeh Harmon.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

An egg with a deep yellow to orange yolk is rich in carotenoids. A hen can’t control the yolk pigmentation on her own; the yolk’s color is determined by her diet. Good food (plenty of insects) and sunshine yield yolks with a nice, rich color. These two eggs I fried this morning, one for Jeff and one for me. That rich orange one is amazing, isn’t? It makes the yellow-yolked egg look shabby, even though that’s a pretty good egg, too.

On Saturday, I ground the completely dry grains into flour and used my usual sponge-method of baking bread to create these two loaves. They’re really not too pretty. But they tasted good and they were nice and chewy, if not a little dense.

My Bosch mixer had a hard time with the kneading because there was too little dough to fill the bowl and help the dough turn over. I ended up kneading by hand some and it never got to be springy and elastic like I wanted. And the thing with sprouted grain flour is that when you’ve used it all, you’ve used it all… You’re at least three days away from having more! I anticipated that I wouldn’t have enough flour for two full loaves, so I made some eyeball adjustments at the beginning. The dough still ended up a little on the wet side, but what could I do? I added about 1/4 cup of potato flour. Then the dough didn’t stay warm enough even though I had it rising by the warm oven and stovetop. But it did pretty well.

What really got me down was that I felt I’d lost my bread-baking touch. But I think I’ll get it back with a little practice.

So here are my not-perfect sprouted kamut loaves. Haniya tolerated them fine. Everyone’s so excited about having more bread soon! I’ve got 8 cups of kamut sprouting, but then I’m out of kamut until I can get more. Azure is out of it more often than not. I had to wait for those 5 pounds for three months. A friend and commenter here once told me about an ancient grain that is grown here in the Pacific NorthWest, emmer. I’d like to try some of that!

Some people suggest that the soaking and/or sprouting can aid in the digestion of those grains. I can’t say that this will work for everyone. In fact, I’m not even sure it is going to work for us. We’re still trying it out. (We have two gluten-intolerant people in the family and one wheat-sensitive person.)

The method for soaking grains involves taking the whole grains and grinding them up in a blender container with a cultured milk product or a non-dairy acid milk (such as 1 cup of almond milk with 1 T of raw apple cider vinegar or lemon juice). A sweetener and an oil can be added, too. The whole mixture is left to soak for up to 24 hours, which aids in the breaking down of problematic nutrients. (The main one is phytic acid. As far as I can tell, research is all over the board as to whether phytic acid is good or bad. I’m going to leave that issue alone and sort it out later. My main consideration here is to see if soaking helps my family member’s tolerate gluten-containing grains.) After the 24 hour soak, one blends the batter more smoothly (it is pretty grainy after the first grinding) and adds the leavenings and eggs (or egg-alternative such as flax seed meal). Then one bakes the bread, muffins, waffles, pancakes, etc.

Last Thursday, I made some kamut-corn cornbread, following the Blender Cornbread recipe in Sue Gregg’s cookbook. Kamut has gluten, corn does not. I soaked the grains for 24 hours in almond milk with raw apple cider vinegar. The good news: Haniya, my daughter who is gluten-intolerant, had no reaction to the bread! The bad news: the bread had a bitter aftertaste. Very subtle; tasted much like soap.

On Friday, I made Blender Waffles using the same method, but different grains (brown basmati rice and millet, which are both gluten-free). Again, the bitter/soapy after taste. Yet the texture and initial flavor was awesome.

On Saturday, I tried 100% corn (no kamut) Blender Cornbread, only this time, I used half the amount of apple cider vinegar. Still the same bitter/soapy after taste.

The common ingredients in both recipes were: almond milk, raw apple cider vinegar, gluten-free baking powder, baking soda, salt, agave, flax seed meal. I can safely rule out the grains from being the cause of the taste because no one grain was used in all three recipes. I believe I can also rule out the flax seed meal, agave, baking powder, almond milk and salt, because I use those all the time in baking and never have this result. That leaves the apple cider vinegar and baking soda. I do use baking soda sometimes, but so rarely that I am going to include it as a possible culprit. Halving the amount of vinegar didn’t help. So, I think maybe the baking soda and the vinegar are having a reaction. In my next attempt, I will leave out the baking soda. I’m hoping for a good result. The results so far have been so promising that I’d like to make this work.

One note I would make is that I had more success with this method when I used the Vita-Mix dry container, especially when grinding/blending whole corn. In fact, the whole corn being ground in the wet container caused even my Vita-Mix to shut off automatically due to the engine heating up.

If you have any thoughts or ideas to help me, I’d appreciate it! In my next post, I am going to write about the Sprouted Kamut Bread I baked which was semi-successful.

I know that viewing my site has been unpredictable for a few days now. I’m very sorry about that. I can share more later, if anyone’s interested. The details aren’t that important.

Please know that I care about all of you who read here and I am very sorry for any inconvenience and/or inefficiency you’ve been experiencing here lately. It will likely continue for a few days more and then I hope all will be smooth sailing…

God bless you all! I will catch you up on all of it later, if you’d like.

In her own words, the Real Food Living ministry is:

“Real Food Living is an informational ministry and a labor of love. Our vision is to encourage people who desire to live more healthfully. Whether you are just starting out or you are looking for new ideas, we are here to help! Real Food Living offers information, resources and encouragement for families seeking how to incorporate real foods and whole grains into their diets, learning how to make healthy foods from scratch, homeschooling, homesteading, using natural health options, loving our families and God, taking care of our homes and living simply.”