Family Wilds

Banana Bread (GF)

This is one of our favorite baked recipes, especially for snacks on hikes and during outdoor play.  As you can tell by all of our other recipes, we choose to feed our daughter a gluten-free diet with little to no processed sugar.  You could easily make this recipe with gluten flours, and with regular goat or cow milk butter.  Just use the same measurements.  Also, if you're really jonesin' for some sweet banana bread use as much sugar as you would like, but it is really good with just a little bit of local honey (good for allergies, too!).

Dry Ingredients

1 1/2 cup of gluten-free flour.  We use:

• 1/2 cup brown rice flour
  
• 1/2 cup coconut flour
• 1/2 cup tapioca starch

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 - 1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp xanthan gum (not essential to this recipe, if you don't have it, don't sweat it)

 Wet Ingredients

2 -3 tb local honey (or more if you want it sweeter!)

1/2 cup coconut oil (or butter)

1 1/2 cup ripe mashed banana

1/4 cup plain goat or cow yogurt (or sour cream)

2 large eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Whisk together dry ingredients

3. Mix together wet ingredients.

4. Slowly mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients until combined.  Final batter will be thick and sticky.

5. Oil the bottom and sides of a single loaf or 9x9 square pan.  Square pans are nice if you want to cut the bread into snack bar shapes (these are great for tiny hands).

6. Bake for 25 - 30 minutes until golden on top and toothpick and be put in and pulled out cleanly.

7. Let cool completely (especially if using coconut oil; see below).

Notes - Coconut Oil

We use Nutiva Coconut Oil for most things requiring cooking oil (actually, we have an amazon.com subscription for it, so 2 new jars are sent to us every six months). We will often use it as a butter replacement as well, if we don't, then we use goat milk butter.  It is organic, cold pressed (fresh fruit not dried), unbleached, undeodorized and very importantly, unhydrogenated.

If you use coconut oil, the bread will be very soft and moist until completely cool.

We like to store it in the refrigerator for up to 5-days (if it lasts that long).  If you use coconut oil, the refrigerated bread/bars will be somewhat denser than if you use regular butter.

Finally, these taste great heated up.  If you use coconut oil the density will definitely change when you heat it to to a more soft and moist bread.  Density shouldn't change much if you use regular butter.

Let us know if you try it!

-Nea

Thanks for stopping by! You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  We have more content there and share posts from our outdoor blogger friends.

Disclosure: The link above is an affiliate link (it's also what we are subscribed to through amazon.com).

Sweet Potato Latkes (GF)

By now, you all know that we love Weelicious and often modify recipes we find there to fit our needs.  This recipe is no different.  We've never had latkes before, much less sweet potato latkes, but decided they sounded amazing.  We're pretty much in love with them, and think you will be too.  Our modification is for a gluten-free version, but please, by all means use gluten if you want to.  These are somewhat similar to our last recipe; vegetable pancakes (gf).  We are big fans of the portability, versatility, and yumability of both (we made that word up).  They pack great for hikes. 

Ingredients: 

3 cups of grated sweet potato

2 tbsp of brown rice or sorghum flour

2 heavily whisked eggs

1/2 tsp seasonings (we use paprika, garlic and onion powder)

Oil for pan cooking (we use coconut)

Directions:

Combine ingredients thoroughly

Heat saute pan over medium

Add 3 tbsp oil

Flatten latkes to 2.5-3 in diameter

Cook on 5 minutes per side or until golden

Place on cloth or paper towels to drain and cool

Notes:

Makes around 20 latkes

These ingredients combine easily and quickly, the cooking can take a while unless you have a big pan that can fit a fair amount; it takes about 10 minutes to cook one.

Enjoy warm, cold, dry, or with apple or pear sauce.

These freeze nicely wrapped in wax paper and placed in freezer bags

-Nea

Vegetable Pancakes (GF)

We found a recipe on Weelicious (where we find and modify many recipes, like our WOW Big Kids Bars) for veggie pancakes.  We modified it a little to meet our dietary (gluten-free) and CSA (we get a lot of different and delicious veggies every week) needs.  We change it up frequently depending upon what we have in the fridge, what flours we have on hand and what toppings we might be able to be creative with.  These are great for hikes.  They taste great warm, but taste equally as good cold.  They're small, light, and easy to put quickly into your pack, and later, your stomach.  These are one of our little hiker's favorites.  Enjoy! 

Ingredients:

1/4 cup Milk (we prefer goat's, but cow's would be great too)

1 Egg

1 1/4 cup of grated vegetables (zucchini, summer squash,  medium carrot, okra, etc.)

1/2 cup brown rice or sorghum flour (or combination)

1 tsp of salt

1/2 tsp baking powder

Oil (we prefer coconut - organic, cold pressed, non-hydrogenated)

Directions:

Mix flour, salt and baking powder

Combine dry ingredients into wet ingredients

Heat saute pan over low/medium  to medium heat and add 1/2-1 tbsp oil

Cook the cakes for 3 minutes per side or until nicely golden

Notes:

Variations to this recipe are easy.  Use any type of baking flour you prefer and/or various vegetables as long as they are semi-firm to firm when grated, sliced, or diced finely.  Toppings are great additions as well.  We've used ketchup, cheese, pasta sauce; combine a few of those and you get little pizzas!

You can freeze them once cool and reheat in the oven when ready. 

If you're new to FamilyWilds.com, please consider following us on Facebook and Twitter.  We post lots of other content and share posts from our growing list of outdoor blogger friends there.  Thanks!

Flash Freezing Blueberries

We are very proud members of a community supported agriculture (CSA) program through Long Hungry Creek Farm.  Every Monday, Jeff Poppen (aka, the Barefoot Farmer) and his crew harvest and load organically and biodynamically grown produce onto a truck and send it from Red Boiling Springs, TN to a location in Nashville.  We just show up and take a whole bunch of delicious food home for a really low price.  I could go on and on about our CSA, our farmer and his farm, and one day soon I will.  We plan on making a trip out the LHCF over one of the next few weekends.

Although our CSA farm does not grow blueberries, they have a deal with a local farm, Hidden Springs Orchard, that does.  Every year we have the option to buy big beautiful blueberries by the gallon for $30, which is anywhere between $10 and $20 less than we would pay in a grocery store.
This is always one of my personal favorite times during the CSA season, as I believe it will be for our daughter.

She LOVES blueberries and may have eaten her weight in them tonight had we not cut her off.  She already eats blueberries in some form at least 5 days a week, but there is something about these particular blueberries that just taste so much better. So, what do we do with so many blueberries?  We will eat a bunch, bake with a bunch, and then freeze the rest.  Freezing takes as much care as the baking.  As many of you know, if you just throw fresh produce in the freezer the texture will be changed significantly when they thaw.

To avoid mushy blueberries we opt to flash freeze what we aren't going to immediately use.  Food that has been flash frozen is frozen much quicker than what would happen at typical household freezer temperatures.  This is important, because the slower a food freezes the larger the ice crystals are that form within the food.  When thawed, the large ice crystals within food leave the structural integrity of the food compromised ,i.e., mushy.  Flash freezing food allows for much smaller ice crystals, which keeps your food and you happy.

We don't have the ability to use our freezer as a flash freezer easily, so we go low tech and flash freeze our fruit and veggies in a cooler with dry ice.  Fortunately, we don't need to do a lot of flash freezing, otherwise this process would get real tedious, real fast.  Here are the steps we take to flash freeze blueberries:

1. Place dry ice in a closed cooler for 30-min. to an hour (to get the cooler nice and cold).
2. Rinse the blueberries.
3. Allow them to completely dry on towels.
4. Place blueberries on the bottom of a clean cooler, not allowing any to sit on top of another.
5. Place dry ice over the blueberries (we use shot glasses to hold up a small grill, and place the ice on the grill). Note: Many people place dry ice on the bottom of the cooler.  They then put blueberries on a cookie sheet and set directly on the dry ice.  We would recommend doing it this way.  We don't have a big enough cooler for our cookie sheet, or a small enough cookie sheet for our cooler, so we cannot. 
6. Close cooler and let sit for 45 minutes.
7. Remove frozen blueberries, place in dated freezer safe containers and put in freezer.
8. Enjoy structurally sound and delicious blueberries whenever you want!

Here are a few notes about handling dry ice:

• Avoid contact with your skin.
• Do not swallow...ouch!
• Do not store dry ice in the freezer; the fan will cause it to evaporate quicker.
• Store it in a cooler instead.
• When finished, set it aside and out of reach of children.  It will eventually evaporate.

So, have any of you tried flash freezing produce? What has worked for you?

-Pablo

WOW (Walking Outside With) Big Kids Bars (GF)

We recently ran across a very delicious recipe for oatmeal bars from Weelicious,  and thought we might play around with it to see if we could come up with a good hiking snack that suited our personal preferences (gluten-free, goat's milk, trail friendly - dense and packed with protein, which is especially awesome in Winter).  This is what we came up with, WOW Big Kids Bars.  It is very trail friendly; you don't need to bring a lot with you, and what you do bring doesn't have to take up much room. 

We started giving these to our daughter at about 14-months-old, without nuts.  She really likes them as does her bff (whose mom helped name these bars - Thanks Courtney!).  As prepared below, they have the approximate density of Clif Bars, but are generally more moist.  We love to hear variations of these recipes, so please share your variations if you make some.

Update: At 22-months-old, our daughter still loves them...a lot (almost as much as her beloved vegetable pancakes).  Her school provides food, but we send all of her food with her from home.  We send these when the menu calls for nutrigrain bars as a snack.  She never comes home with leftovers!

Ingredients 

1 cup steel cut oats, ground to fine flour

1 cup quinoa, ground to fine flour

1/2 cup sorghum flour

1/2  cup coconut flour

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp xanthan gum

Pinch of salt

1 medium to large mashed banana

½ cup fresh or frozen blueberries (optional)

1 1/2 cup whole goat’s or cow's milk

2 Tbsp local honey

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup dried fruit(s) of choice, cut to safe/preferred size

1/2 - 3/4 cup walnuts or pecans, whole or chopped to safe/preferred size

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all flours, xanthan gum, salt and cinnamon in a bowl.

In a separate bowl, mix banana, milk, honey, egg, and vanilla, blueberries (don't worry about mashing the blueberries - if you are worried about them becoming mashed, then add them frozen).

Slowly mix the dry ingredients into the wet. The dough will be heavy and dense.

Mix in the dried fruit and nuts.

Place dough into an oiled (we like coconut oil) pyrex pan (we use 9x9).

Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until cooked through and golden on top.

Allow to cool, and cut to size.

These will keep 4-5 days in the refrigerator.

Notes

You could use 2 cups of steel cut oat flour, as opposed to 1 cup oats + 1 cup quinoa.  If you do that, but still want more protein (as provided by quinoa), try adding a bit of salba seeds when you grind the oats into flour.  Salba is a very rich source of  many different vitamins and nutrients.

Coconut flour is really good stuff, but if you don't have any on hand, just use more sorghum flour.

One cup is a pretty large amount of dried fruit; feel free to add less.  It won't hurt the recipe.  There's  no sugar in this recipe, so if you're really looking for sweetness, you'll need to get it primarily from the fruit and honey. Also, this amount of fruit helps maintain the moistness of the bars. 

If you want to make this recipe without eggs, try adding another 1/2 banana instead.  The bars may not bake quite as dense as the ones pictured, but they'll work!

*We added dried plums to the bars pictured, and didn't include nuts. The little one likes them bite sized.

You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  We have more content there and share posts from our outdoor blogger friends.  Thanks!

Chicken Bread (GF)

Okay, so “chicken bread” sounds gross, but chicken bread is pretty awesome.  A better description might be “stuffing bread”, but it's not nearly as fun to say as “chicken bread”. We were playing around with leftovers in an effort to make something full of protein we could send with our daughter to school. 

What we came up with is actually a prefect hiking/camping food.  It is packed full of protein, cooks  dense and heavy, which means it actually travels on the trail pretty light.  You don’t need to take a lot of it with you, and what you do take with you doesn’t need to take up a lot of room.  It’s like a thanksgiving dinner flavored power bar…okay, again, we know it sounds gross, but it’s really not!  Our daughter loves it as much as we do. Play around with the pre-cooked ingredients - pears, cranberries, fennel, beets...

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups pre-cooked: chicken (diced to your size preference), mashed potato (white, red, sweet, whatever), finely chopped sweet onion, carrot, apple 

1 egg

2 tablespoons olive oil 

1 1/2  - 1 3/4 cups luke-warm chicken stock*

1 1/2 cups quinoa flour (we grind quinoa in a blender)

1/2 cup brown rice flour

1/4 cup corn meal

1 tsp. xanthan gum (it will cook best with it, but you can make it without)

1/2 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp (or more!) fresh ground pepper

**pinch salt

Directions

Note: We make a weekly slow cooker meal, which often involves all the pre-cooked ingredients and results in delicious stock.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the pre-cooked foods, egg, olive oil, and chicken stock until egg is mixed in well, and apples and carrots are mashed thoroughly.

Mix dry ingredients thoroughly.

Add all dry ingredients to wet, and knead well.

*You may need to add some more chicken stock to the mixture if it appears too dry.  Don't add too much though, you want the dough to be thick and dense.  Also, if you add any pre-cooked mashed foods like carrots, potatoes, apple, etc., it will probably be delicious, just rememeber that you may need to adjust for some increased liquid content of mashed foods, especially for fruit.

Place dough into an oiled (we like coconut oil) pyrex pan (I use a 9x9).

Bake for 30-35 minutes.

We usually cut it into squares and eat them as snacks on the trails.

It will keep refrigerated for 4-5 days.