"He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth." Psalm 104:14
Here are a couple more healthy foods that also happen to be really yummy. One of the churches in our area has a weight loss program called HOPE or Helping Others by Providing Encouragement. One night we took some of these kale chips. Everyone tried them and agreed that they were delicious. They may not look too exciting, but you can’t tell a kale chip by its looks. :-)
Kale Chips
Ingredients:
Kale
Extra Virgin olive oil
Sea salt or soy sauce
Spices
Parmesan cheese
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 250 degrees.
Break up kale into small pieces. Mix whatever spices you like and some sea salt or soy sauce with a small amount of extra virgin olive oil. Rub flavored oil onto kale leaves. Sprinkle both sides of kale leaves with parmesan cheese. Place kale leaves on a stainless steal cookie sheet.
Bake in oven at 250 degrees until slightly crispy.
Remove from oven for about 15 minutes. Stir kale leaves if they are not cooking evenly. Return to oven and bake until kale chips are crispy and crunchy.
Remove from oven. Let cool. Enjoy.
Note: Taking them out of the oven for about 15 minutes during the baking time helps the chips to get done more evenly without burning.
Sour Dough Bread
At breadtopia.com there are instructions for making a sourdough bread starter and lots of wonderful recipes and tips for making the sourdough bread. The recipe for the starter will work for any flour that contains gluten. I do not recommend trying it with gluten-free flours such as rice flour. I tried it once and do not plan to do it again! The rice flour starter did make a nice looking bread, but it smelled and tasted like something rotten!
Though I do have problems with wheat, barley flour is not a problem. And barley makes great bread and biscuits. The sourdough starter recipe worked good with barley too. You can find it explained here - http://www.breadtopia.com/make-your-own-sourdough-starter/ . Just use barley flour instead of the white or whole wheat flour.
For baking the bread, I used the instructions at breadtopia.com for making the spelt no-knead bread. The only thing that needed to be changed was the “stretching” time and method. Barley dough has to be stirred gently. It cannot be stretched - unless you enjoy very gooey fingers! :-)
Also, barley does not have very much gluten. Therefore it should not be stirred too close to baking time. It seemed to work well to stir gently at least two or three hours before baking. The dough can be left on the top of the stove to rise more while the oven is pre-heating.
The result is really delicous, though the crust is a little chewy. Here is a picture of the final product. It tastes as good as it looks!