Dear Generation Y…..The Pillsbury Dough Boy and I

May 12, 2015May 12, 2015 Gigi Bowman2 Comments

The Pillsbury Doughboy balloon floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday, Nov. 27, 2014 in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP) — The Pillsbury Doughboy balloon floats in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

I was born in 1959. For the most part I grew up with all the “new and improved” in life. The sixties and seventies were a time of ‘wonderful’ new inventions and conveniences so that people had more time for…..work? I’m not sure what the reason was but I grew up with the likes of the Pillsbury Dough Boy and the Kool-Aid Kid. Sweet N’Low and Twinkies. I had no idea until now that making biscuits was as easy as spending 10 minutes putting together some flour, buttermilk and baking soda. I didn’t realize until 55 years later that I could make my life more convenient by living longer and eating right rather than spending time going to the doctor –as I watch my parents, generation Y, make a social life out of doctor visits.

Why was it so hard for this generation that bore me to get vegetables from a market rather than opening a can? Why was a frozen TV dinner or pot pie turned into a nightly meal for most of my peers? Why did we stop putting butter on our bread and opt instead for a ‘crown’?

Taystee Cakes, My-T-Fine Pudding, Shake ‘n Bake, Cheez Whiz, Spaghetti O’s….. It took me until now to realize I could cook with real ingredients and whole food and make these same things from scratch in the same amount of time….. And I work, clean my house, paint furniture, fight the state, run for office, run organizations, food shop and play and watch TV and have time to write a blog too…. Was it worth all that ‘convenience’ to live on a daily regime of pills to keep you alive generation Y?

Now we not only have chemicals in our food but our entire food system is destroyed by a company that used the same ‘ingredients’ to kill the enemy in your war against the Vietnamese –the chosen enemy at the time to keep the military industrial complex alive and happy. Somehow in return for ‘convenience’ your children grew up on toxic chemicals with tiny marshmallows until their own children –our children today– live in a world diagnosed with acronyms and are prescribed more chemicals to ensure they are customers for life to the heads of the state of Big Pharma.

What happened? When did a biscuit become thirty something chemicals with some salt on top? When did the Pillsbury Dough Boy become the biggest balloon at the parade to the smiling faces of a generation of chemically poisoned children?

Well I’m here to tell you that you can do it. You can make biscuits. You can make biscuits that require only a few ingredients and it will take you the same amount of time as it does to pop open a can and separate the little disgusting chemically induced dough pieces and slide them into the oven.

Recipe:

2 Cups of Flour

2 tsp of Baking Powder

1/2 tsp of Baking Soda

1 tsp of Salt

1 stick of Butter

3/4 cup of Buttermilk

Pre-heat Oven to 425 degrees. Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda & salt. Cut 6 tablespoons of cold butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse meal. Stir in buttermilk. Place dough by ice-cream scoop size lumps onto a parchment lined baking sheet. Brush with a little melted butter. Bake 10 – 15 minutes until tops are golden.

(I used all organic ingredients and added fresh herbs – sage, rosemary and thyme)

Yeah, that’s real hard to do……

The dough boy needs to die off because he’s killing us and our kids. Foods of convenience –thank you for nothing generation Y. Why did you forego real food for chemicals in a box? Time for us to go back to basics.

Gigi Bowman, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Clean Food

Died and Went to Heaven, Chocolate Pudding

February 8, 2015February 8, 2015 Gigi Bowman1 Comment

Real Food. You can’t compare anything to it –but it will cost you! Growing up on My-T-Fine Chocolate Pudding I missed that taste but since I’m only eating clean food in my home these days I can’t bring myself to buy a box of powder called pudding that includes ingredients I abhor.

Sugar, Cornstarch, Cocoa (Processed with Alkali), Food Starch Modified, Salt, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed and Soybean Oils, Artificial Flavors, Calcium Carrageenan (Texturizer), Artificial Color (Contains Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Red 40, Blue 1), Milk, Autolyzed Yeast Extract (Contains Glutamate), Soy Flour.

Yes, you’re adding your own milk –which in itself, if you’re not using raw milk, has its own set of poisons– but as far as I can see it’s just another processed food I grew up on that brought a fast and furious sweet tooth into my life and made me believe that I can eat anything I wanted within 10 minutes time by pouring it out of a box, adding milk and stirring.

I missed that taste of My-T-Fine pudding. I tried the organic version and that tasted like crap and I was about to relent and go buy a box of this childhood-in-a-box chocolate fairy dust powder when I came upon a recipe for real homemade, all natural ingredients, chocolate pudding….. and it cost me big time. When I say it cost me, it cost like $10 bucks to make 3 servings and a lot of time…… was it worth it? You betcha!

Chocolate pudding is a special treat. It’s not something you’re supposed to eat every day or every week –it’s something you make once in a blue moon like a chocolate cake for a birthday or blueberry muffins for a special Sunday treat. But growing up in the processed-food-world of my childhood I thought that pudding along with Twinkies, Tasty-cakes, Devil Dogs and Cheez-its were something to have on hand for nightly gorging in front of I Love Lucy reruns…. and I taught this to my kids when I went grocery shopping and made sure to pick up the packages of Oreo’s, Mallomars, Yodel’s and a Nestle’s Quik box of goodness to wash down with our antibiotic enhanced milk! But hey, the kids were drinking their milk and this made for good bones! “Got Milk?”

So today I bring you REAL chocolate pudding. The kind that cost $10 bucks to make, that I will not be making very often. The kind that I will savor every bite of and lick off my fingers too….. This yummy deliciousness is like dying and going to chocolate heaven.

Deep Chocolate Pudding

(my ingredients are in parenthesis)

7 oz. Dark Chocolate (I used 2 organic Trader Joe’s Cocoa Bar’s at 3.5 oz each)

2 Cups of Whole Milk (mine was raw)

1 Cup of Heavy Cream (mine was raw)

3/4 cup of sugar (organic and I used less –about 1/2 cup)

1/4 cup of Cocoa (Cacao Powder Organic raw)

1/4 tsp salt (Mediterranean pink Sea Salt)

1/4 Cup Cornstarch (Organic Cornstarch)

1/4 Cup [1/2 Stick Butter] (Raw with Celtic Sea Salt)

3/4 tsp of vanilla extract (I didn’t use it because I forgot)

Chop chocolate into very fine pieces. Combine chocolate, 1 3/4 cup of milk, cream, sugar, cocoa & salt in a large sauce pan. Stir vigorously with a whisk over medium heat until mixture simmers and is smooth and thick. Stir the remaining 1/4 cup of milk with 1/4 cup of cornstarch together and whisk into the chocolate mixture. Simmer for a minute while whisking and scraping sides. Add butter and cook one minute more. Stir in vanilla. Makes 5 cups.

All I can say is enjoy. Lick your fingers, lick your spoon. Lick the pot and don’t do this too often! Not everything in life is meant to be indulged on a constant basis 🙂

Gigi Bowman, Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Clean Food

Milk Chicken? …..and Bone Broth Soup – 2 Meals for the price of one :)

January 5, 2015January 6, 2015 Gigi Bowman7 Comments

Why is there a question mark in the title? I realize that I’m spending more time in the “pursuit of clean food” portion of my blog than I am in the Life and Liberty –but perhaps my life of liberty has become clean food? Anyway, the bottom line is I love to cook, I love finding new recipes and trying them out –and along the way I’m going to try things that perhaps may turn out great –or may turn out not so great –or even suck….. so I’m sharing, learning and teaching at the same time. I wish I could talk to Mrs. Ron Paul about this stuff dammit –her and her new gorgeous kitchen that Ron Paul bought her. Someone please tell her to unblock me on facebook! (that’s another story for another time lol)

Well here goes with the Milk Chicken. There are quite a few recipes for this on the net and basically they are all the same –but what I got at the end of this I blame on the cast iron Dutch oven that I talked about previously. Turns out that my little chicken…..sort of melted into a creamy sagey melding of flavors that was almost too flavorful.

Here is the original recipe by chef Jamie Olivers

and here is what I made

1 Soy Free Organic Chicken from the “farm” 2.5 to 3 lbs

10 cloves of organic garlic, unpeeled

1 cinnamon stick stolen from my daughter the holistic massage therapist in training who has a cabinet with her potion ingredients in the basement –the recipe called for a 1/2 stick but I could not figure out how to cut it in half lol

2 1/3 cups of raw milk

1 handful of fresh organic sage (leaves taken off stems)

Zest from 1 lemon –the recipe called for two but I only had one

S&P, butter, olive oil –more milk and a little water at the end.

This was the chicken after I browned it and drowned it in the milk

First I took the fresh chicken and fried that sucker up in olive oil and butter after I seasoned it with sea salt and pepper and kept turning it over in the cast iron frying pan until all the sides were nice and brown.

I transferred it to the red cast iron Dutch oven and pre-heated the oven to 375 degrees, threw all the ingredients above into the bottom of the pot, put the chicken in the center, and poured the milk over it!

That’s it. Now I wait. 2 1/2 hours in the pot at 375 degrees….. lets see what comes out…..I’m going to make some mashed potatoes and pour that milk gravy right over it.

….or so I thought lol

What the hell is this??

OK, so I checked out some pictures of other people trying this recipe and no one else’s looked like mine. Apparently that cast iron Dutch oven is like the terminator of food stuffs –put a chicken in and it disintegrates. The chicken has the consistency of pulled pork –and that is not such a bad thing but it’s nothing like the recipe said it would be!

After forking off the chicken from the bone I was left with a bowl of bones (which I will use later for bone broth) and I found I had to add a bit of milk and filtered water to continue to cook the chicken on the stove top in order to scrape off some of the brown bits along the side which had a lot of the flavor –why let it go to waste?

Anyway –so now I have two meals for the price of one and it was probably the most flavorful chicken I’ve ever eaten. It’s also healthy and all that garlic, which disintegrated, will probably stave off any disease for at least a week lol. I served it with some nice organic, skin-on, mashed potatoes which I made with raw butter and raw sour cream and sea salt and cracked black pepper and I heated up some frozen organic peas from Trader Joe’s.

What pissed me off is that it’s really hard to get all the bones out –probably because it was a pretty small chicken –of course I did not get one bone in my plate but my husband did. Murphy’s damned laws. No cook ever wants the people they are serving to get the bones dammit.

Anyway, it really was delicious but I probably won’t be making it again –there are just too many recipes in my future and unless something is so damned good that I need to eat it over and over, I usually try not to make the same thing twice. So I’m giving this the one-time hat –not that I’ve ever judged anything by hats before or by how many times I’ll make them or will consider making them –but why the hell not? It’s a good idea! lol This is nothing like my organic linzer tarts that I made for Christmas that I will make over and over again because they were like dying and going to buttery-raspberry-apricot heaven (and I have to make sure that I give them away because the ones that I didn’t give away are a permanent part of my fat ass right now lol) –oh, here are those linzer tarts….. I might not tell you how I made those or wait until next year lol

UPDATE:

Remember part 2 of that chicken –the bone broth?
Well, I let it simmer on low all through the night and all day. About 18 hours. I strained it –picked off the chicken pieces that were left and threw them in the broth. Added whatever I could find in the house –so again, here we have Kitchen Sink Soup lol –maybe I should just name this blog “The Kitchen Sink”.

I added, fresh organic kale. Organic pinto beans. Organic celery. Three large organic mushrooms –hell everything I use is organic so I’m going to stop saying that word and just assume it’s all organic.
Parmesan cheese, lemon juice, a little bit of apple cider vinegar, parsley, dill, lemon pepper, sea salt and cracked black pepper and left over black rice……. it’s simmering now. This soup is so healthy we’re probably set with enough vitamins for the month of January with this soup alone 🙂
Going to eat it with some Kalamata Olive Sourdough bread and raw butter. YUMMY!!!

Gigi Bowman, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Clean Food

Don’t Throw Out That Sour Raw Milk! — And Why You Should Be Drinking Raw Milk Instead of Dead Food

January 2, 2015October 8, 2019 Gigi Bowman2 Comments

What do you do when your milk goes sour? You throw it out! It’s awful, it smells and it’s enough to make you barf if you accidentally pour it into your coffee. “Pasteurized milk is dead food –there are no enzymes or probiotics present and the only thing you can do with it is throw it out.” says Sarah, the Healthy Home Economist. But what do you do when raw milk goes sour?

First of all, in most states raw milk is illegal, go figure. That is how the government seems to work –the good things are illegal and the foods that poison us are available in abundance. I live in New York where raw milk is not illegal, though I must get it directly from the dairy farmer (this is about the only thing good about living in New York, lol) so I am lucky to have the choice of drinking raw milk. When raw milk goes sour, or clabbered, it is safe to drink. It is also nutritious because it is loaded with enzymes and probiotics. When raw milk starts to sour, it simply means that beneficial bacteria called probiotics have started to use up the lactose (milk sugar) which causes the milk to no longer taste sweet. Go ahead….drink it if you like but the list of creations you can make from soured raw milk is endless from kefir to yogurt to baking biscuits! –today I made quiche.

Since my house is already an organic/GMO free household I had a lot of the ingredients I needed hanging around in the cupboard when I noticed my milk had soured so quiche was the best choice for what to do with my chunky, gross looking, sour raw milk. I probably could have taken the time to whip up a nice crust but I just didn’t want to. It’s New Year’s day today and I didn’t think any stores would be open but when my husband and I took a drive around town to pick up a few things I saw that Wild By Nature was open and I was able to pick up an organic Wholley Wholesome pie crust, 2 for $4.50, which is pretty reasonable, and a bag each of organic spinach and organic broccoli rabe. I like to use frozen spinach when making quiche because it makes my life easier –did you ever notice HOW MUCH fresh spinach you need to cook in order to equal a 10 oz. bag of frozen spinach? Hey, I love to cook as organic and clean as possible but I also try to cut cost whenever possible –certain frozen organic vegetables, like spinach, are worth using. So with what I had hanging around the house, including my two cups of curdled milk, I managed to whip up a broccoli rabe and cheddar quiche and a spinach, mushroom and bacon quiche.

These ingredients are what I had in my house –you can make a quiche with whatever you find in yours. The bottom line is you need 4 eggs, a cup of cheese and a cup of sour milk –or you can use regular milk if you like as well but the purpose of this article was what to do with that awful looking raw milk in the fridge with all the nutrients and I would NOT recommend using sour pasteurized milk –throw that out in the garbage where it belongs!

Spinach, Mushroom & Bacon Quiche

Pie Crust (homemade or store bought if desired)

1 bag of organic frozen spinach 10oz or an equal amount of fresh if you are able to)

4 large mushrooms, sliced and sautéed in a little olive oil with garlic, green onions, and shallots

3 slices of bacon cooked and minced

1 cup of raw white cheddar cheese (use whatever cheese you can find in your fridge)

1/3 cup of Parmesan cheese

4 soy free organic eggs (this is my choice but regular eggs will do too)

1 cup of curdled raw milk

Sea salt and crushed black pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees then place the pie crust in the oven to bake for 10 minutes. Make sure to poke some holes in the bottom of that crust so that it won’t rise in the center and explode.

Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees. After letting the pie crust cool a bit place the spinach (thawed and well drained) on the bottom of the pie crust. On top of the spinach layer the sliced mushrooms that have been sautéed in a little olive oil with the garlic, shallots and green onion. Next layer the freshly cooked and still warm bacon bits. Lastly, layer the cup of cheese on top making sure to spread everything evenly on the bottom of the pie crust. Then slowly pour in the 4 eggs and curdled milk that you previously whisked together. Pour it slowly and let it be absorbed by the mixture in the pie crust little by little. Sprinkle the top with some more Parmesan cheese and salt and pepper and place in oven to cook for 45 to 60 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean and it is nicely browned on top.

I made two quiches because I had two cups of curdled raw milk. The other one had broccoli and cheddar –there were less ingredients but the broccoli took up a lot more space than the spinach. I managed to use every drop of the egg/milk mixture in each quiche. I was careful and there was no spillover in the oven!

Anyway, this will last in my fridge a few days and everyone will be able to grab a healthy organic lunch or snack that is filled with nutrients from curdled milk that ordinarily would have been poured down a drain. That would have been sinful. Now I have a sinful duo of tasty quiche instead!!