Go to cereal aisle of a typical grocery store. Now, start reading the ingredients of your favorite cereal. Is High Fructose Corn Syrup on the list? More than likely. I have found only 3 cereals from the top 3 cereal makers that do not have HFCS. They are GrapeNuts, Shredded Wheat and Cheerios. There may be more but my local grocery does not carry them.

I like to know what’s in the food I eat. That’s why I make a lot of our food from scratch. I found a recipe for grapenuts and tweaked it with my own twist.

Homemade GrapeNuts

In a large bowl mix your dry ingredients (as always organic is best):

• 3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup sugar (Original recipe called for brown sugar but regular works too. I just add Molasses.)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut
• 1 1/2 cup oatmeal
• 2 tsp cinnamon

Pour in:

• 2 cups sour milk or buttermilk (you can make milk sour by adding 1 Tsp of vinegar to it)
• Before blending in the milk add:
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

Mix it all together and pour onto a greased baking pan.

Bake at 375 for 15 minutes.

Remove from oven and let cool completely.

When cooled use a food processor to break it up into smaller grapenut size pieces (I make mine a little larger so that I don’t have a lot of tiny crumbs).

Bake at 300 for 1 hour. Stirring every 15 minutes. Turn the oven off and leave in the oven until morning.

That’s it. I love to eat mine with vanilla yogurt and blueberries. Uumm, uumm good!

For a long time I’ve been wanting to start a strawberry patch. Finally, last spring we bought some plants from the county 4H. We prepared a bed down by the creek. Adding compost to the soil we planted them in hills. To keep the chickens out we built a primitive fence around the strawberry patch using sticks and twigs we gathered from the woods (this spring we rebuilt it using bamboo). Then we waited…

We waited for Spring to come around again, anticipating the ripening of our first Strawberries. We have been watching the strawberries flower and then develop little green berries for about a month now. Well, yesterday was the day. I went down to the garden and peered over the strawberry fence. There they were, nice plump red berries!

I was tempted to pluck one off and eat it right then and there. But this was a special occasion. I wanted to get some photos of them before I picked them. I had to wait a little while longer because Charley had gone to town and had taken the camera with him.

Finally, after supper, I took my photos and then picked 7 beautiful, red, ripe organically grown Strawberries. I enjoyed my 3 1/2 berries with a bowl of my home made cereal with a few dolops of vanilla yogurt and a little milk. Ummm Ummm Good!

I can’t wait to make pies, shortcake and ice cream with the strawberries we harvest. But, I need to remember to put some away for those winter time treats.

It’s very satisfying to know that the things we do here at the River Rest takes us one step closer to being self sufficient. Looking back, I see that we have come a long way. But we still have a long way to go.

Yesterday was my birthday, I rose early and ventured to my favorite trout stream and spent the morning basking in the beauty of the wilderness. I caught, and released many fish. I returned home in the early afternoon to find another egg in the hen house, that made three. So I decided to fix myself a birthday feast.

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I no longer find comfort in eating foods prepared by a minimum wage employee using mass-produced, chemically grown foods from a corporate farm raised by minimum wage employees. This includes fruits, vegetables, and meats injected with hormones and antibiotics and raised in deplorable, overcrowded, inhumane conditions. [Read more →]

Take a look at the ingredients on your Ketchup bottle. If it contains High Fructose Corn Syrup then you need to take it immediately to the trash can & dump it. Better yet, dump out the contents, wash out the bottle & make your own ketchup! [Read more →]