Peanut Butter & Jelly Milkshake

Dairy Free Gluten Free Health Parenting Recipes Treats

Peanut Butter & Jelly Milkshake

Mellow October 29, 2012 21 Comments

This is how we eat on hot days. No need to run the oven or stove. This is light and refreshing... Just take some cool fruit and blend! It's also a delicious, sweet treat instead of ice cream. The heavy cream gives it the richness of a milkshake, but substitute with any kind of milk if you prefer something other than dairy.

This milkshake is tasty without needing any concentrated sweeteners. Bee pollen provides a bit of sweetening, but is way more nourishing and nutritionally balanced than honey. If you don't have any, you could substitute with honey, if desired. It would still be delicious with just the grapes and banana for sweetening, really, but I like adding bee pollen for its nutritional benefits.

You will need some frozen grapes and a frozen banana to make the recipe, so make those in advance if you haven't got them in stock.

Ingredients:

1 frozen banana (here's how we freeze them to perfection)
2 c frozen grapes
1/4 c peanut butter (see how we make it ourselves here)
1/4 c heavy cream (or 1 c alternative milk of choice)
1 tb bee pollen (or honey, if desired)
2 c water (use less water if using milk instead of cream)

Blend until creamy & smooth. Enjoy!

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Vacation From Toys

Health Holiday Parenting Unschooling

Vacation From Toys

Mellow October 10, 2012 29 Comments

Of course, we started out with the plan of having very few toys- just a select, manageable number of well-chosen, handmade toys, preferably from natural materials. That plan started to fall apart before our first baby was even born, when from all directions came the well-intentioned gifts.

Ah, presents. We try to encourage experience gifts, but rarely does anyone take us up on that ;)

Babies don't need a lot of stuff, but in our culture, having a baby is a massive consumer event. It doesn't stop as they grow, either. Kids are fun to buy presents for, and giving gifts is a nice way to connect with family & friends. Plus, kids like to collect stuff. My youngest has had collections ranging from broken bits of safety glass, to hazelnuts found under his grandma's tree, to brightly colored plastic pellets collected in just about every park we've ever been to. He is unstoppable. He loves anything small and shiny.

Odin finds all the tiny, beautiful things wherever we go.

Wherever it all comes from, however it's collected or amassed, it's good to get away from it. Here is where vacations come in. On trips, no matter how long, we never pack a single toy. From short trips like an overnight visit to their great grandparents' house, to several days at the ocean, we only bring the essentials to keep ourselves comfortable, plus a camera for capturing memories. Bringing our own entertainment would seem redundant.

Playing dominoes with grandma: This is how Loki wants to spend every vacation. It's really about connecting with each other.

The point, when traveling, is to experience a new place, and connect with people. Toys are a distraction and get in the way, but more specifically, they make it feel like you haven't gone anywhere. It would be like Nik & me bringing our computer. We can waste our time on it at home; vacations are sacred. It's good to get away from all our toys, and really experience our surroundings.

The boys help chop up invasive scotch broom to burn. Without things like electronic handheld distractions, kids can be useful! Plus, they really experience their surroundings.

For the actual travel time, we don't need a portable dvd player. We have a car radio for a change of mood or lulls in the conversation. We have several sheets of song lyrics printed out, so Nik & I can annoy our kids with our favorite songs. We have all kinds of family car games in our arsenal, and we often make up new ones on the spot. 

Some car games involve looking for letters of the alphabet on signs and license plates. We go through in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order, finding every letter. A lot of miles pass before we get through every letter in order! On our last trip we made a game of finding all the colors of the rainbow in the scenery, adding several more that we thought should be included in our search, like metallics, and brown. My seven year old loves answering math questions, so we've spent a lot of car time coming up with different math problems for him. We also play a lot of "20 questions", though we never actually keep track of how many questions get asked. My kids love counting how many taxis of each color we see on every car ride- I can never believe how excited they are to see yet another taxi ;)

Yes, it's a long drive, but we can make it! Look out the window, talk, sing, fall asleep...

The car is a great time to just talk. The kids have each other to chat with. We talk about memories and things we are excited about, and Nik & I answer their questions about anything and everything. 

Now, every family probably does these things sometimes, but I know a lot of kids come to expect a dvd every time they get in the car, and don't know how to handle a car trip without some Disney movie to watch. What starts out as a luxury soon becomes a need. I see car rides together as valuable time to connect with the kids, and it's so often squandered. Some important conversations happen in the car, and they will never have a chance if everyone is absorbed in a movie. 

Also, don't undervalue the joy of simply staring out at the surroundings. A view of an old farm, an open landscape, a forested road, or watching a mountain getting closer: these help to build excitement about the trip, appreciation for nature, and geographical knowledge as well.

Finding shapes in the clouds.

Once at our destination, more often than not, there are things for kids to play with. Most likely any toys there are different than what we have at home, which in itself makes them interesting to my kids. If there are no toys, even better. As ubiquitous as toys are in our culture today, I often think of how kids played in past generations, where they might have only one doll during their entire childhood, or in other cultures even today, where the idea of marketing to children would be absurd because of extreme poverty.

These kids still play. They might play with songs or stories, or they might wrestle or play hopscotch, or they might make use of other materials around the house or village, such as fabric or rocks or leaves. In fact, it has been argued that supplying our kids with tons of toys reduces their own power of imagination. They let the toys direct their play, rather than utilizing their own creativity.

Odin learns to use a knife while camping.

On camping trips, the boys spend a lot of time whittling sticks or throwing rocks into rivers. It may sound dull, but it's amazing how many ways you can challenge yourself at rock throwing. There is the classic skipping stones, a pastime you could spend many hours at, finding the perfect stones and perfecting your throw. Also, a new game of ours is to send a leaf floating down the current, and then try to sink it with a well-aimed rock. It's challenging, and fun!

Exploring what lives under the rocks at low tide.

We do bring a kite with us to the ocean. It's one of the few times we use it and unlike a lot of toys, a kite requires being out in the world and experiencing the weather and surroundings. We'd bring kayaks too if we had them! I do question whether the kite is even necessary though, since we can happily spend hours combing the beach, examining critters, shaping the sand, and following bird footprints in wild pointless loops. 

What if the weather's bad, or you're stuck for some other reason inside a motel room? I always bring a book for myself to read when I need some downtime, as well as a notebook to write in. For the kids, it's easy to bring a small stack of books, either favorites or ones they haven't read for a while, or a mix of both. Beyond books, we always find something to do, and it does not involve turning on the tv.

Loki came up with this solo game of word making with a bag of letter tiles he found during some downtime at the cabin.

I think often when people pack for trips they worry too much about preventing boredom, so they pack so many things into their bags and into their itinerary, that there is barely room for the real adventure of experiencing the trip, being flexible, and taking things as they come. A fully planned out itinerary may be fun to create, but when it comes down to it I think all that running around leaves people feeling more drained than before their vacation.

Relax.

I did a lot of backpacking when I was younger, and one of my favorite things about it was how exhilarating it felt to be able to carry everything I needed on my back. Perhaps the mark of a minimalist, it was liberating to discover I didn't need all that stuff back home. I loved that feeling and wanted to travel all the time.

I think there is a little minimalist in all of us, discontent with consumerism and our culture of too-much. When we vacation with less, we give our kids the space they need to become a little less attached to those things that normally fill their days, and realize life is still full. Maybe they can experience it a little more when they're not surrounded by stuff.

Below are Amazon Affiliate Ads. Any purchase made through them helps support our family. Thanks in advance!

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How To Make Fresh Roasted Homemade Peanut Butter

Dairy Free DIY Gluten Free Health Parenting Preservation Recipes Treats

How To Make Fresh Roasted Homemade Peanut Butter

Mellow October 02, 2012 38 Comments

We stopped buying peanut butter, and all nut & seed butters, about a year ago, and determined to make them ourselves. After experimenting with several methods, we finally got it down. Here's how you can make a spreadable, lovely, rich & flavorful organic peanut butter at home. You control the ingredients so this will be the freshest peanut butter you can get- and you can really taste the difference!

The secret, we discovered, is giving the peanuts a very long time in a food processor. If you blend for just a couple of minutes, you will have a crumbly, dry nut butter that will barely stick to itself and be difficult to spread. Give it a few minutes more of your time and attention, and it will transform into a spreadable, creamy, perfectly textured nut butter.

Starting with raw peanuts and roasting them yourself will make a huge difference in flavor. Fresh roasted nuts are so delicious, and the quality of flavor declines with age. Roasting nuts without burning them takes a lot of dedication. There seems to be a fine line of doneness, which I often cross. One batch of peanut butter we made looked chocolatey, the nuts were so over-roasted (some might say burnt). I was ready to toss them to the chickens but we decided to give them a chance and, even though it was super dark, that batch of peanut butter still tasted really good! It had the slight bitterness of dark chocolate or coffee, but even my kids liked it. Still, I would not intentionally make them that dark! If you don't try to multitask while roasting them, they will turn golden brown and delicious.

To roast, place nuts in a pan in a 350 degree oven. Stir after about 8 minutes, and then stir more often after that, until they are done. Roasted nuts will get slightly darker, with split, dry skins. Even if they get a little brown, you will have a tasty peanut butter, but go for golden if you can.

We used to use a cookie sheet and roast the nuts in a single layer, as shown in the photo above. However, we found that it's just as effective, and a bit easier, to layer them more deeply in a cake pan. They might take more time in the oven this way, but you can roast tons more at a time, and stirring is easier in a deeper pan. 

Once roasted, let the nuts cool completely. You don't want the nuts to be hot in the food processor. Still slightly warm is OK. We have a 7 cup food processor, and I think it handles about 4 cups of nuts perfectly. Since we usually roast about a half gallon of nuts, we often blend in a couple of batches so we don't overfill the food processor. 

Be prepared to give them time in the food processor, including stopping periodically to scrape the sides with a spatula to make sure it's all getting incorporated. This takes patience & perseverance, but you will have some lovely peanut butter in the end, and have one less thing to buy that comes from some factory.

We usually add salt once the nuts are thoroughly macerated, but before they are truly creamy. We use Celtic sea salt. Choose whatever salt you like and add it gingerly. We add maybe a teaspoon of salt for every quart of nuts, but everyone has a different salt threshold. Start with this ratio, and add more if you like.

When you blend it with patience & perseverance, you will be rewarded with a creamy, spreadable peanut butter, and a wonderful feeling of having made something so perfect from scratch. Try it with this simple, raw blended fresh berry jam.

Organic raw peanuts can be purchased in bulk from Azure Standard, a natural foods distributor. Below are Amazon Affiliate Ads. Any purchase made through them helps support our family. Thanks in advance!

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