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Month: July 2012

Gluten Free Veggie Pasta

Posted in Gluten Free, and Homemaking

When you have lots of veggies available, you tend to add veggies to pretty much everything that you’re making. On Monday night, I made a marinara meat sauce that was loaded with veggies and served it over pasta. Since the fridge and freezer were looking pretty empty (except for the veggies), we had pasta again last night. This time, I just made a nice veggie pasta with no marinara sauce. It was a light, yet filling summer dinner. I’m giving rough ingredient measurements below. If you can’t have, don’t have, or don’t like a certain veggie, just replace it with…

Unjunk Your Junk Food

Posted in Reviews

Unjunk Your Junk Food book description: Join the edible (R)evolution! You don’t have to give up junk food just to eat healthy – just make smarter choices. Discover yummy alternatives to your favorite treats. Unjunk Your Junk Food is a quick and easy guide to healthy choices for the snacks you crave, savvy alternatives to conventional brands, tips for reading food labels and recognizing false claims, nutritious ingredients to look for and dangerous additives to avoid, and much more. Now you can have your cake and eat it too! About the authors: Andrea Donsky and Randy Boyer are health and…

Allergy-Friendly Food for Families Giveaway

Posted in Reviews

Allergy-Friendly Food Cover

Allergy-Friendly Food for Families book description:

Allergy-Friendly Food for Families is the most practical and kid-friendly collection of recipes that exists for the important, ever-growing audience of allergy-aware families. When you’re desperate for ideas for what to make for dinner (or lunch, or snack time), you want recipes from someone you can trust, that don’t require a lot of fancy ingredients, and that include food the whole family will love to eat. The five most common allergens in kids are covered: wheat, dairy, eggs, nuts, and soy. Food should be delicious; family time should be fun. With this book you’ll find both. For more information visit allergyfriendlycooking.com.

About the publisher:

Kiwi is the premier, bimonthly magazine about raising families in the natural and organic way. The magazine supports and encourages parents to make green, healthy choices when it comes to food, home life, and more. It helps families balance their green ideals with their busy lives and schedules, and helps parents raise their children the healthiest way possible.

Allergy-Friendly Food Inside the Cookbook

My thoughts:

Allergy-Friendly Food for Families is a beautiful, colorful recipe book that features many fun recipes for a variety of ideas. The tag-line reads 120 gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free, egg-free and soy-free recipes everyone will love. The way I read this was that the recipes were friendly to all of the allergens, but I was incorrect. That’s okay though because this recipe book has a wonderful (and I do mean wonderful), easy-to-read, color-coded labeling system that allows readers to quickly see at-a-glance which recipes will fit your family’s specific allergy needs. I have to say that this was the best system that I’ve seen, and I totally appreciated it.

The recipe book has a brief into into allergy-friendly living and some helpful hints for those who are new to the lifestyle. The recipes are broken down into 6 sections: breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, snacks, and parties. In addition, Allergy-Friendly Food for Families gives ideas and tips on how to build a natural, allergy-friendly pantry. It includes a handy metric conversion and equivalents chart which is helpful. Also included is your typical alphabetical recipe index in addition to a recipe index by allergen. Throughout the cookbook, there are Cooking with Kids segments that help you bring your kids into the kitchen.

Allergy-Friendly Food Tab System

At the back of the book, there is a coupon for one free year of Kiwi magazine. You’ll want to pay attention to the expiration date on it if you want to take advantage of the offer. (My expires October 15, 2012.)

I found that quite a few of the non-gluten-free recipes could easily be converted to gluten-free such as the carrot cake breakfast cookies. (Can you say yum?) The ones that couldn’t easily be converted normally revolved around yeast bread type recipes. The only thing that I would have liked to see more of in this cookbook would be pictures, but that’s mainly because I really like to see pictures with most recipes. (I’m a very visual person when it comes to food.) The pictures that are in the book are beautiful. The cookbook had a nice variety of recipes, and even though they were considered kid-friendly, they were still great adult recipes.

Would I recommend this cookbook to someone who needs an allergy-friendly cookbook? Yes – especially if you’re looking for fun, kid-friendly recipes. Would I recommend this cookbook to someone who doesn’t need an allergy-friendly cookbook? Yes! The recipes in here are great whether or not you need to be allergy-free.

***Giveaway***

One of my readers will have the opportunity to win a copy of Allergy-Friendly Food for Families. Rafflecopter giveaway ends July 31st.

Learning to Make Homemade Skin Care Products

Posted in Homemaking, and Homeschooling

Munchkin is having fun with her natural health class. This week, she’s learning about natural skin care products. As she’s looking at products to avoid (and why), she started to get more excited about making her own skin care products with natural ingredients. The first thing on her “to do” list was cleaning out some old lip balm containers as she was going to be making her own lip balm. The funny thing was that cleaning out the lip balm containers was a longer process than actually making the lip balm. She was pretty proud of the end result. She’s…

When God Answers…

Posted in Christian Life

Today, I’m doing something a little unique for me. I’m featuring a guest post by my friend Heidi Kreider as part of her virtual book tour. I had the opportunity to read Heidi’s book in Kindle form when it was first released and truly enjoyed it. Now, the book is in print for the first time, and I’m so excited for her reaching this milestone. I believe you’ll enjoy hearing about Heidi’s journey… I sat with 4000 other women. She stood and spoke. She spoke with sincerity and authority…. authority that comes from first-hand experience. She spoke of her childhood…