Lisa on August 26th, 2011

Mesquite: it’s for more than just burning. And providing shade if you’re in the Arizona desert. Turns out that the pods the tree bears are edible (just as the wood is burnable), so if you let the pods dry out and grind them up, you have flour. A fragrant, fine flour that will make you [...]

Continue reading about Cookies Do Too Grow On Trees!

Lisa on February 11th, 2011

There are many ways to make a cookie great: use a natural sweetener like sucanat that contributes flavor as well as sweetness to your cookie, use a variety of whole-grain/whole-food flours like sorghum flour or teff flour or peanut flour that will likewise add dimension of their own to your cookie, and use a rich-tasting, [...]

Continue reading about Making Cookies Crunchier…and Chocolaty-er!

Lisa on November 5th, 2010

Even though The Great Pumpkin Day has come and gone, pumpkins are still everywhere we look, and they’ll still be seasonally “in” when winter has us in an icy grip.  (Not looking forward to the slick streets, but I am looking forward to soft white carpets of snow making the neighborhood look like it’s been [...]

Continue reading about A Post-Halloween Pumpkin Treat

In the world of natural sweeteners — i.e., unrefined sweeteners like maple syrup and molasses — there aren’t as many solid sweeteners as there are liquid ones.  Normally, this works out fine when baking, because most baked goods include liquids (which allows you to tinker with the overall total amount of liquids), but some baked [...]

Continue reading about Creating Tasty & Healthy Chiffon Cakes (Amongst Other Things)

Lisa on June 22nd, 2009

Although I don’t have much of a sweet tooth (these cookies are dusted with sea salt), when I get the urge to bake cookies, I reach for sucanat.  It stands for “sugar cane natural” and is essentially dried sugar cane–no more, no less.  It’s the only cane sugar that has not been stripped, refined, and [...]

Continue reading about Sweet Flavor

Lisa on November 22nd, 2008

For many of us, gingerbread is a favorite holiday treat…albeit a very buttery, sweet one. But it doesn’t have to be that way! For this tweak, I’ve substituted unsweetened applesauce for some of the sugar and butter, used sucanat and dark molasses instead of white sugar and light molasses–this means more iron and more flavor–and [...]

Continue reading about Gingerbread, Meet Applesauce

Lisa on October 19th, 2008

A new tradition begins! Every week, I’ll take on a much-loved-but-unhealthy recipe and tweak it to make it more nutritious. (By “nutritious,” I mean using better-quality fats and a wider variety of ingredients. More diversity in your diet = more vitamins, proteins, fiber…all the good stuff. Besides, it’s fun to try new things!) I’ll include [...]

Continue reading about Tweak of the Week: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Lisa on August 2nd, 2008

When I was living in Costa Rica, I visited a sugarcane and coffee plantation.  Standing in the 100-degree sun surrounded by bamboo-like sugarcane and bright red coffeeberries was an amazing experience…and so was tasting a piece of raw sugarcane that one of the workers snapped off and handed to me.  Now I know what sugar [...]

Continue reading about Sweeteners