We started a new thing. And you know how that goes — you start something new and it sends your world out of whack for a while.

We started a Tuesday morning thing, which I think is going to be very good, but the Andersons are not a morning people.

That is one of our family traits. Like growing up, I knew this family that always smelled like frabric softener and you went to their house it smelled like fabric softener even if they were cooking pot roast or had their Christmas tree up.

It’s just like that, only we don’t function so well first thing in the morning.

And so now we have this Tuesday thing, and we need to get there on time every week for the next seven weeks. I overcompensated last week and got there 25 minutes early and we sat in the parking lot trying to divert our eyes so no one would dub us the “Eager Beaver Family,” because that is decidedly not one of our things.

The biggest problem with going somewhere early (once we have set out full wardrobes the night before and packed lunches and all that)  is that we need to have breakfast, and I sort of insist it has to be a nutritious breakfast because we can’t all have public meltdowns at 10:30, because then we are the “Public Meltdown Family,” and that is even worse than being the Eager Beaver Family.

This is a lot of pressure to put on a muffin. After all, muffins are essentially naked cupcakes in many cases — loaded with sugar and simple carbohydrates. I for one am a sugar sensitive person, which means I can’t eat a sugary/simple carbohydrate breakfast without potentially doing something really embarrassing later like falling asleep or crying.

And so I decided to challenge myself to create a more nutritious muffin for us to eat on Tuesdays. Paired with a hard-boiled egg and a cup of almond milk or tea, I figured this would be a wholesome-enough way to start a crazy-busy day.

And so, the Cinnamon Pecan Muffin was created.

But then I really got to thinking, and it occurred to me that I can’t serve the same muffin every Tuesday for 7 more weeks because that would just be boring. And so I enlisted some help. I have heard back from lots of really talented muffin makers who are excited to take part in the Muffin-Up Mondays Challenge, which officially kicks off today.

And there’s still room for a baker or two. So if you have a healthy muffin recipe you would like to share, send me an e-mail at kanderson@imorganic.com.

Together, let’s take on the world of sugary boring muffins that lead to crashes an hour later.

Start with these guys and let me know what you think!

Cinnamon Pecan Muffins

1 1/4 cups whole wheat pastry flour

1 cup rolled oats

1 tbsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 cup pecans (reserve 12 halves for topping muffins; chop the rest)

1/2 cups maple syrup or agave*

2 eggs

1 cup milk (we used almond milk)

1/4 cup butter, softened

1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. In a medium bowl combine butter, eggs, milk, sweetener and vanilla. Mix thoroughly. In a separate large bowl, mix flour, oats, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Add wet to dry. Mix until just combined. Carefully fold in chopped pecans.

Fill a 12-cup greased muffin tin. Top each muffin with a pecan half. Place tin in oven and immediately reduce heat to 400. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Yield: 12 muffins.

* I’ve made it both ways. I prefer the flavor of maple syrup, but agave is nice because it does not cause an insulin spike.

Note: You can also make a tin of mini muffins, but you’ll have to watch them closely and cook them for a shorter time so they don’t dry out. Also, a standard mini muffin tin will leave you with some batter left over.

Happy Muffin Making!

Sweet Potato Phone …

Did you ever stop to taste a carrot?  Not just eat it, but taste it?  You can’t taste the beauty and energy of the earth in a Twinkie.  ~ Astrid Alauda

An assortment of recipes, books, blog posts, or other things that inspired me this week.

Magic Stairs

Nature in a Nutshell

Jan Brett’s Bread

Good Guide

Easy Little Bullfinch Pattern

What is inspiring you this week? Please tell us about it in the comments below!

Making bread used to be a regular part of our week here.

Mix, knead, punch, rise … we were bakers — busy bakers filling our home with the smell only a loaf of fresh-out-of-the-oven bread can bring.

But then we had to give up wheat for a while — something I hadn’t seen coming. I had suspected plenty of other allergies in our family, but never wheat.

Wheat hit me hard — harder than dairy or citrus or bananas or soy or peanuts or even corn, and any as corn allergic person will tell you, corn is in EVERYthing.

Beyond the rice-y birthday cakes and the sticky pancakes, the hardest thing for us was losing the ritual of baking bread.

It left a hole in our week, and for a long time made everything feel a little off.

Wheat was the last potential allergen we reintroduced after an extensive elimination diet that lasted a year and careful food trials. Unlike bananas, which were a celebration when we tried them again, we introduced wheat with trepidation.

We wanted our bread-baking back. And we wanted it the old way, not the gluten-free loaves of teff and arrowroot way; or even the spelt way.

Those grains are fine, and truly helpful for people with true allergies and celiac disease. But we wanted, just once, a loaf of our old bread.

I am happy to say that so far our wheat trial is going OK. I spit three times and knock on the desk as I say that, of course.

Slowly, we are bringing back our days of baking bread — which for us has always been so much more about the process than the result anyway. It kind of has to be that way with young kids, I think. But the results are nice too.

The house smells like bread today. And things feel kind of right again.

***

We have a couple of stand-by bread recipes we make. The one I am sharing today came from my friend Rachel, who so generously shared it with me after a book club meeting several years ago. I still have the print-out of her e-mail and I remember I made her bread for the first time the very day I received it.

Sunflower Bread

2 tsp yeast

2 cups unbleached flour

1/2 cup sunflower seeds

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 1/3 tsp salt

2 2/3 tbsp honey

2 2/3 tbsp oil

1 1/3 cup water

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl. Knead on a flat surface or in a stand-up mixer until dough is smooth. Allow to rise in a covered bowl in a warm spot* for about an hour and a half or until it has doubled in size. Punch down and transfer to greased bread pan. Allow to rise for another hour. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes.

* I like to bake bread on days I am doing other baking and let it rise on the warm stove top. 

I am so excited to share a recipe with you from my crafty friend Laura.

As I mentioned yesterday, our house gets incredibly dry this time of year. And that translates into really dry skin for me.

I have what women in my family refer to as “The Nanny Itch,” named after my grandmother who used to get awfully scratchy from December until about June. I realize that the poor woman probably needed a humidifier, but unfortunately there’s not a whole lot I can do about that now.

What I can do is arm the other women in my life with Laura’s awesome scrub, which helps slough off dead skin and leave the skin underneath moisturized and glowing.

Laura’s recipe, which she created by pulling all the best parts from various recipes calls for non-organic sugar because it contains more beneficial acid than organic sugar. It is also slightly cheaper, but certainly organic sugar could work here too.

I also added a very small amount of lemon essential oil to the recipe. I figured a scrub would be a great wake-up in the shower, and lemon always makes me feel cheery. I do have a word of caution though — some people can be sensitive to lemon essential oil. And it should always be diluted well. I used 4 drops for my recipe, just a little lemon in the background. If you have issues with lemon or have very sensitive skin, you may want to consider another essential oil, like lavender or rose (but do not use rose oil while pregnant). And of course, you can skip essential oil altogether — the scrub will still be very effective and leave your skin looking and feeling great!

So experiment! Have fun! Share with the women in your life who need a little skin pampering this time of year (which I think is all of us).

Lemony (or not) Sugar Scrub

(fills 3 1.5-ounce containers; I halved the original recipe)

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup coconut oil

3 vitamin e capsules (cut open and squeeze out oil)

3/4 tbsp aloe gel

3/4 tbsp cocoa butter

4 drops essential oil like lemon, lavender or rose

In a small pan, mix coconut oil and cocoa butter and melt over medium heat until liquified. Pour into a glass bowl and add sugar, vitamin e, aloe gel and essential oil. Mix well to combine. Store in airtight containers. 

Scrub, scrub, scrub!

A few weeks ago our naturopath suggested that we purchase a humidity gauge to find out where the humidity was at in our house. My son’s eczema always seems to get worse when we turn on the furnace each year, and we all suffer really dry noses and throats, dry skin and static hair that looks like a science experiment.

I was really surprised to learn that the humidity in our house was very low (around 19 percent), but since getting the gauge and installing a humidifier, we are all feeling a lot better.

I was even more surprised to find out that keeping humidity levels at between 40 and 50 percent can actually help lower your thermostat, because “wet” heat feels warmer than “dry” heat.

Do you suffer from humidity problems in the winter? How to you keep your home comfortable  this time of year?

It is one of the simplest things you can do to go green — using a reusable water bottle in place of buying bottled water.

And yet, these bottles have a built in problem. Using them every day means they can get dirty and stinky and filled with germs, especially this time of year.

Don’t worry — I’m here for you.

I’ve been running a kitchen experiment the past few days. And because I was trying really, really hard to do my job well, I let some water bottles get nice and disgusting. Like, left them with water in them for a few days, let them collect some dust … I even went out and caught a cold. Really — that was all for you.

I have read about various ways to sanitize water bottles, and I can’t ignore that there are products made for this very purpose. Sigg makes a tablet you can drop in that includes ingredients like baking soda and citric acid, but also a couple of things with less familiar names like Taed (a.k.a. Tetraacetylethylenediamine), Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate, Subtilisin, PVP/VA and Copolymer. Then there is “fragrance.”

And there’s a price tag — up to 9 bucks for 20 tablets.

For my household experiment I went cheap and natural with first vinegar and then baking soda.

Both of these have great sanitizing power, both are cheap, and both are pretty safe as long as they are not used together, in which case you will make a water bottle volcano that your kids will probably love.

Most of our water bottles here are stainless steel. I do have one that is BPA-free plastic, so I used both in my experiment.

First, I used about a 1/2 tsp baking soda* and hot water for each bottle. I soaked the tops for a while in a tub full of water with a little baking soda added in. Then I rinsed everything thoroughly.

The bottles were fresh and clean with no funky aftertaste.

The problem is, I repeated the experiment a few days later with vinegar (1 tsp/bottle* and some added to a pan of water for soaking the tops) and guess what — the bottles were fresh and clean with no funky aftertaste.

So I can not endorse one method over the other.

I have also read about using fresh lemons or other natural household products …

But I’m wondering what you do — how do you clean your reusable water bottles? Please share your solutions in the comments below!!

* I have to be honest, I am not measuring here — just estimating!

For the past week we have practiced each day …

“How old are you?” I ask.

And she gets so quiet …

“Four,” she says shyly.

She wished for a Twinkle Twinkle Little Star present and a wallet “for gold” this year, but that isn’t what she likes best. She likes the cake, and the candles and especially the song.

But the best part for me is the same each year — remembering the day she was born — holding her for the first time after an unexpected delivery that didn’t go how I wanted or hoped.

But then it was OK, because she was here and safe.

This little girl who was pulled into the world before her time has taught me a lot about acceptance, and about embracing things the way things are.

And she reminds me to always be grateful. Because things could have gone differently.

On that day four years ago, I was the one who received a gift. It is the best gift I could have wished for on that cold January morning, when I woke up to meet my daughter, and knew that everything was going to be OK.

And of course, it has only gotten better every day, especially on days like today when we celebrate all that she has become …

Happy Birthday, Sweet Girl

Greeting the morning snow …

A snow crystal is a letter from the sky. ~ Ukichiro Nakaya, Japanese scientist

An assortment of recipes, books, blog posts, or other things that inspired me this week.

Two upcoming birthdays in our home reminded me about this post:

The Good-Enough Birthday

Boost Your Immune System Using Real Foods

Recycled Valentine’s Day Wreath

Amazing Little House Decorated with Found Materials

The Best Way to Warm Your Car

What is inspiring you this week? Please tell us about it in the comments below!