Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Awesome Whole What Crepes

Usually when I make whole wheat recipes, they taste meatier than I'd like, so I expected a meaty and hearty crepe, which is totally opposite of what a crepe should be; HOWEVER, I really liked this crepe. It was light, not meaty, delicious and versatile. It's super simple, classy and healthy.
1/3 cup of whole wheat flour
2/3 cup of milk
3 eggs
a BIT of salt.

1. mix together dry ingredients.
2. create a mini well and add in the milk
3. mix in the eggs and whisk thoroughly
4. heat up a wide and large pan. Place a bit of olive oil at the bottom of the pan and let it heat up on high then when it's gotten nice and hot (BUT not hot enough so that the oil begins to steam up) then turn your heat onto medium and carefully ladle the batter into the pan. Use your ladle to maneuver the batter around in a circular motion so that you can spread out the batter. Careful not to rip the crepe, but it's easy to fix :) Make your crepe nice and thin and then you'll know it's ready to flip when you start seeing tiny little holes in your batter. Don't flip too early or else your crepe will rip! It'll have an almost tortilla appearance when you flip. It should flip perfectly. You shouldn't have to re-grease your pan after one crepe. Maybe after every 2 or 3 crepes :)
This recipe yields about 4-5 crepes, depending on the size of your crepes. These crepes are relatively small for crepes.

I like to serve this in several ways....
1. Cinammon, agave nectar (or honey) and cottage cheese recipe with strawberries topping.
2. Pesto, smoked salmon and french beans
3. Turkey breast, thousand island dressing and arugala

This is a no fail recipe! Good Luck :)

Chewy Granola Bars

Homemade Healthy Chewy Granola Bars
I guarantee that this recipe will be chewy and delicious. I initially didn't want to add peanut butter to this but I noticed it tasted much better with peanut butter and it was more gooey with peanut butter. It was really yummy. I decided to make this recipe because I didn't like how sweet the granola bars at the store was, so I made my own. Here we go!

You'll need...
2 cups of old fashioned oats (NOT INSTANT)
1/3 cup of honey
1/2 cup of whole wheat flour
1/4 cup of peanut butter
1 tablespoon of canola oil
1 cup of unsalted peanuts
1 cup of raisins
1/3 cup of cranberries
What Germ (to your liking)

1. I toasted my oats for about 10 minutes on a dry skillet on medium heat.
2. While the oats were toasting, I roughly chopped my peanuts to prepare for the epic mixing.
3. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees
4. I first mixed together the oats, flour, raisins, peanuts, and cranberries. (add your wheat germ now! I couldn't find it so I didn't get to put it in for extra nutrition.)
5. I then mixed together my peanut butter and honey in a separate bowl.
6. mix in your wet ingredients with your dry ingredients.
7. Your mixture shouldn't be too wet but it should be considerably wet... It should be pretty wet though.
8. Pour your yummy mixture into an 8x8 pan and bake for 30min.
9. You'll get super yummy and chewy, sticky half inch tall granola bars.

**add honey to your liking; I don't like mine terribly sweet but this bar was pretty sweet :)

Orange and Strawberry Smoothie

Orange and Strawberry Smoothie
I love smoothies at Juice it Up and Jamba Juice, but their drinks are always full a zillion calories and their prices are really jacked up. So I figured I can create a super simple smoothie recipe that won't burst my budget but quench my thirst. Shall we begin?
A handful of whole frozen strawberries (about 1 1/2 cup)
Fresh juice of 3 whole oranges (about 1 cup)
1 to 1/2 teaspoons of organic agave nectar

1. Take out your strawberries to let them soften for about 10-15 min while you juice your oranges.
2. I juiced some oranges that weren't really that sweet so I added agave nectar to sweeten things up. A little low glycemic agave nectar went a long way for me. I recommend that you don't add more than 1 to 1/2 teaspoons of agave nectar, it'll get too sweet.
3. Blend it all together for about 20-45 sec.

It's that quick! I like to switch it up by adding different frozen fruits. I like to add unsweetened raspberries, mangoes, pineapples. But the more frozen fruit you make, the longer it'll take to blend and the more frozen it'll get. So try to keep it to a 1 to 1.5 orange juice to frozen fruit ratio. The good thing abut this smoothie is that it doesn't melt that easily because it doesn't have any ice cream or yogurt, but it's really smooth!
So good. Try it! It's much healthier.