Homemade Crockpot Yogurt

What you will need:

Crockpot

1/2 gallon (8 cups) whole milk (or 2%, but the thicker the better)

Measuring cups

1/2 cup starter yogurt, any flavor (must have live active cultures, check the container for these words- most store bought yogurts will work for this) Can also just be 1 whole individual serving size container

Whisk

Blanket

This yogurt is so easy! 

Put the milk into the crockpot and turn on low.

Set timer for 2.5 hours

Turn crockpot OFF

Set timer for 3 hours

Do this step quickly!

Remove 2 cups of milk from crockpot, whisk in 1/2 cup of starter yogurt then add to crockpot and whisk together. Put lid back on and wrap the entire crockpot up in the blanket. Leave like this for 8-12 hours. We usually just do it overnight. 

That's it!! 

In the morning stir your yogurt, put it in a new container, and stick it in the fridge! If you want Greek yogurt, strain through a fine sieve until it reaches the desired consistency. You can then use the liquid (called whey) collected in place of buttermilk in recipes. 

Vegetarian Taco Casserole

My husband affectionately calls this dish "Taco Irene" because, well that's my name and I invented it! This is a cheap and easy meal! I used to eat this with spicier salsa when I was overdue with my first baby and it always gave me "stirrings" like I might go into labor. I never did, but when I made this dish for a friend she DID go into labor that night! It hasn't worked like that since but I do like to make this for mothers who are about to have their babies. Maybe that's just my thing. 

Ingredients

-1 cup rice, uncooked (we use brown rice to add a little extra health boost)

-2 tablespoons homemade taco seasoning or 1/3 package of taco seasoning

-2 cans or 2-3 cups cooked beans (I usually use a combination of kidney and black) 

-1 jar salsa

-tortillas (optional)

-shredded cheddar or nacho & taco cheese 

How to make it

Cook rice according to directions but add taco seasoning to the water. When cooked, begin layering with tortillas on the bottom (if using), rice, beans, salsa, cheese, then tortillas again and so on. 

Cover and bake at 350 for about 30 minutes until heated through. 

I didn't get a picture of the finished product. But it was good! I like to serve this with a dollop of sour cream and corn on the side. 

Homemade Taco Seasoning

I have found that this tastes similar to the store bought stuff but I love making my own because I can control the amount of salt. We love it in our family!

2 tsp minced dried onion

1 tsp salt (or sea salt)

1 tsp chili powder

1/2 tsp cornstarch

1/2 tsp crushed red peppers

1/2 tsp garlic powder

1/2 tsp cumin

1/3 tsp oregano

Mix all ingredients together. Add a few tablespoons to 1 lb ground beef with 1/4 cup water. Let simmer until water is mostly gone. Enjoy!

Lactation Foods Fit For the Whole Family

My very own creation- lactation granola bars. 

Since the twins have had some pretty major latch issues and won't nurse, I have been exclusively pumping to provide their milk. They are currently getting about 70-80% breast milk, but that changes rapidly from day to day. If I had one baby I would have more than enough! So in addition to pumping around the clock, I have been trying to increase my milk supply naturally through food. There are four basic ingredients that I have been using to do this: oatmeal, brewer's yeast, flax seed, and almonds. I have made cookies, granola bars, smoothies, and parfait, and they have all shown some sort of an impact on my milk supply. Crazy, but true! You can find any number of recipes for lactation cookies online but these recipes are the ones I use because they are fast and easy. Who has time to bake 2 dozen cookies?!

Lactation Preacher Cookies (no-bake)

So far I have noticed these giving the biggest and most obvious boost in my supply. A day without these and I only manage 2-4 ounces every time I pump compared to 4-6 ounces. Once I start eating them again it only takes a couple hours to notice a difference. 

1 stick butter

*2 cups sugar 

1/2 cup milk

4 tbsp cocoa powder

1 tbsp vanilla extract

1 cup peanut butter

3 cups oatmeal 

3 or 4 tbsp brewer's yeast

1/2 cup ground flax seed

1/2 cup sliced almonds, crushed

Melt butter over medium heat then add sugar, milk, and cocoa. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring often. Boil for 1 minute then remove from heat. Add vanilla and peanut butter, stirring until peanut butter is melted. Mix in all other ingredients. Drop in spoonfuls on waxed paper and let sit for a couple hours to harden. 

Enjoy a cookie (or two) every time you sit to feed the baby or pump. 

*You can use less sugar but the cookies will not harden as well on their own. They will need to be kept in the fridge. I used 1.5 cups and they were still good but goopy unless refrigerated. 

These are very popular cookies in my family. This is what I found in the kitchen after a fresh batch had been made recently:

Someone was sneaking some cookies!

Lactation Parfait

No recipe here, but I wanted to tell you about my new favorite breakfast! I use frozen berries- either strawberries, cherries, blueberries, or a mixture. I thaw them a little in the microwave then add old fashioned oats, homemade yogurt (find my recipe here), 2 tbsp ground flax seed, 1 tsp brewer's yeast, and sugar. Usually a couple teaspoons to cover up the horrendously terrible brewer's yeast taste! On days that I don't eat either this or regular oatmeal with flax seed and brewer's yeast, I struggle with my supply in the middle of the day. It's amazing how my supply can be so fickle! 

Lactation Granola Bars

I found a recipe for honey oat bars in a cook book and it inspired me to fit it to my own lactation needs. My family loves these so much that I might need to impose a limit because I will need to make more very soon! 

1 stick butter

1/2 cup sugar

2/3 cup honey

1 tsp cinnamon

3 cups oats

1/2 cup raisins

1/2 cup sliced almonds, crushed

1/2 cup crushed peanuts

1/2 cup flax seed

1/2 cup chocolate chips

2 tbsp brewer's yeast

Melt the butter over medium heat. Add the sugar, honey, and cinnamon and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring often. Let boil one minute, stirring constantly, then remove from heat. Add all other ingredients and mix well. Push into 9x13 baking dish lined with wax paper. Place in refrigerator for at least an hour. Cut into desired shapes. 

If using chocolate, these would probably be best to stay cold so they don't get so goopy. In the future, I might not use chocolate chips, although they sure do make them GOOD! You really can add anything you want to these. I thought about coconut but I didn't think it would go well with raisins. You can add dried cranberries, dried cherries, other kinds of nuts, the possibilities are endless! For lactation purposes, I would keep the brewer's yeast, flax seed, and almonds, though. I'm sure that no matter what you put in these, they will taste great! 

Note: you can find brewer's yeast with the nutritional supplements, not baking items. I ordered both the brewer's yeast and flax seed from Amazon. 

Now go ahead and enjoy these, whether lactating or not! 

Time and Money Saving Tip: Hamburger

Buy hamburger in bulk (especially if you find it marked down or on clearance) and cook it up all at once when you have a little extra time.

I browned about 4.5 lbs (which we would stretch and use for about 6 or 7 meals) and made the remaining 3 lbs into ready made hamburger patties. 

It only took about 20 minutes to brown, 20 to make 9 patties (2 meals for us), and about 30 minutes to make 2 small enchilada casseroles (which will make about 2 meals for the four eating individuals in our family). 

Divide into individual containers to freeze the remaining ground beef and the next time you want a quick meal (we like spaghetti and tacos for this), just pull one meal's worth out of the freezer! And now we have 9 meals out of 7.5 lbs of marked down ground beef. 

Christmas Cinnamon Rolls/Mounds

Oysters, cinnamon rolls, fruit salad, and hot chocolate. Sounds quite delicious! That's my husband's family's traditional Christmas breakfast. It doesn't sound much like a breakfast of champions for a diabetic, does it? I guess the oysters would be fine, if they weren't cooked in Bisquick like pancakes. But I don't even like oysters to begin with so I guess there's not a whole lot left for me to enjoy except a little bit of fruit salad. It's times like this when I wish that I could be on medication so that I don't have to worry quite as much about my diet! However, I really want to avoid taking more meds so I had to find an alternative. I scoured the internet for low carb cinnamon roll recipes and finally found a few that I was able to combine to make my very own recipe! I call them: Cinnamon Mounds! I'll explain why later.

I really hate finding recipes online that are about 95% pictures but can understand why people take pictures every step of the way. Some people are more visual learners. But I just want to READ a recipe and ignore all the other junk. However, I feel the need to make this educational and entertaining so I took a few unnecessary pictures. I'm sorry if you are like me and just want to read the recipe.

Irene's Cinnamon Mounds
Ingredients for mounds:
2 cups almond flour
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 Tbsp baking soda
1 Tbsp baking powder
3 Tbsp flax seed (optional, but more fiber=more health benefits!)
2 eggs
2 Tbsp unsweetened applesauce
1 Tbsp unsweetened almond milk
1 Tbsp honey

 I tried to do one of those cool ingredient pictures you see on every other blog but it didn't turn out that great. I'm just not much of a photographer (or baker).

 Filling:
1 1/2 Tbsp melted butter
1 Tbsp cinnamon
1/4 cup Splenda/sucralose (I used Walmart brand sucralose)

Icing:
3 oz cream cheese
3 Tbsp unsweetened almond milk
1/2 cup splenda

1) Add dry ingredients to medium sized mixing bowl. Add wet ingredients to small bowl and combine. Pour wet mixture into dry mixture and stir.

This is where I think I messed up a little bit. My tablespoons of applesauce turned out to be pretty heaping and I think it made this stuff just too sticky. I read that it would be sticky anyway, but this was beyond the realm of sticky and more like nasty goop (that just happened to smell like cinnamon apples)!

2) Form mixture into a ball and refrigerate at least 20 minutes until harder. I kept mine in all day because I ran out of energy and simply could not get past this point. 

3) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a piece of wax paper with cooking spray (clever, never thought of this before) and press dough flat into a rectangle. I highly suggest using your hands because it is just too sticky for a rolling pin. 

4) For the filling: Combine splenda and cinnamon in small bowl. Brush melted butter onto flattened dough then sprinkle with cinnamon/splenda mixture. 

5) Using a pizza cutter (or knife, or whatever you have), cut 5 strips to roll up into rolls. 

Looks pretty great, right? Oh, you just wait!

6) Begin at one end and roll each strip with the cinnamon/splenda mixture inside. The first strip rolled beautifully. The rest stuck to the paper and my fingers like nothing else! I tried squeezing the cracks together but that just broke the dough apart more and made it stick even more to my fingers. These made gigantic rolls/mounds so I cut them in half and glooped them in a greased baking dish. 

I was sad and I must admit, the evil pregnancy hormones reared their ugly heads and made me cry a tiny bit. Every past baking failure came flooding back into my head. But I quickly realized that the way they look will not affect how they taste and I was just fine!

7) Place in oven and bake for 25 minutes. They will be browned along the edges and on the top. 

8) Icing: Using an electric mixer, mix cream cheese and milk until well combined. It will be a little runny. Add splenda and continue mixing until smooth. Spoon over cinnamon rolls after they come out of the oven. 

They don't look too bad covered in icing!

It tasted pretty good but left that typical sucralose after-taste in my mouth.

Overall, I think these are good as long as I call them cinnamon mounds. Adjusting expectations can often help you view things differently! As long as I don't expect this to be just like a cinnamon roll, I can be happy and enjoy my mound. :-) 

Another Food Post

I feel like all I write about or think about lately is food. It will be so nice to go back to eating almost anything after the babies are born! I'm going to educate you a little bit in the diet of a diabetic. You see, one slice of bread, whether it be whole wheat or white, has around 15 grams of carbohydrates, which is considered 1 serving. That means that having a sandwich gives me about 30 grams of carbs (or 2 servings) plus whatever else may be in the sandwich and all of the sudden I have just eaten about half of the carbs that I am allowed for the day (that's a SLIGHT exaggeration). But I am really excited about these wraps that I found at Kroger the other day.

I think they're technically flour tortillas but I am just going to use them for making wraps. One tortilla has 14 g of carbs, 9 g of fiber, and 5 g of protein. Anything that is high in fiber (above 5 g) kind of cancels out some of the carbs because high fiber foods are digested more slowly, so it's kind of like each tortilla is only 5 g of carbs (kind of)! Plus anytime you have carbs, you should be eating protein as well. The way I understand it, protein somehow helps the carbohydrates absorb slower into the blood stream. At least I think, someone please correct me if I am wrong. And I'm supposed to be eating somewhere around 100 grams of protein a day so I love finding things that have a little hidden protein in them. So anyway, today I had tuna with light mayo on a wrap with low fat mozzarella cheese and fresh spinach. I couldn't really tell the difference between this wrap and others that I have tasted even though it is SUPER healthy. This was exactly the kind of lunch that I need every now and then to be reminded that being a diabetic for the moment really isn't all that bad. The only problem I see with these wraps is that they cost a lot more than I really want to pay. So even though I want to eat them every day, I will have to use them sparingly. HOWEVER, I love knowing that there is GOOD food out there that I can eat guilt free.