Mexican-style quinoa black bean salad

Ingredients
3/4 cup quinoa (uncooked)
1 1/2 cups water or broth
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups cooked black beans. Or one 15 oz can
1 large red bell pepper, diced
1 grated carrot
1 cup corn.  Cut fresh right off a cob is obviously the yummiest,  but   frozen or canned is totally fine too.
1/2 bunch cilantro, or more, chopped
1 small bunch chives, snipped into bits with kitchen scissors. Or 2 chopped  green onions
1 scant cup crumbled cotija cheese

Dressing
1/3 cup olive oil
Juice of 1 lime
1 clove garlic
1 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp salt
Fresh ground pepper

Optional garnish ideas
More cilantro
Avocado
Fresh tomatoes or salsa
Sunflower seeds or pepitas

Directions
Rinse quinoa in mesh strainer, then combine with broth or water and salt in medium saucepan. Bring to a boil, cover, turn to low heat and cook 20 min.  Let stand, covered for 10-15 min, then fluff with a fork and set aside to cool. *

Blend dressing ingredients. I love my stick blender for this.

Toss the black beans, quinoa, veggies, herbs and cotija together in a large bowl. Drizzle the dressing over it and gently mix. Can be served right away at room temp or will keep in the fridge for several days.

*Note: I seem to notice that letting the quinoa stand covered and letting it cool mostly BEFORE mixing it with the dressing creates a "fluffier" texture, as opposed to "mushy."

I love this recipe for a healthy, budget-friendly lunch, dinner or potluck!

Happy eating!

Date-sweetened, chocolate almond bars; gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free

These are super versatile, easy to make and kid-approved!

Ingredients
1 cup pitted dates
1 cup water
2 cups almonds - or for a more budget-friendly version, use whole      oats for some or all of the almonds!
4 Tbs coconut oil
4 Tbs peanut butter, or more....
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp sea salt

Directions
Combine dates and water in small saucepan.  Heat gently until dates begin to soften. Mash the dates with a fork and keep mashing until a paste forms. Remove from heat and add cocoa powder, coconut oil, peanut butter, vanilla and sea salt.

Place almonds and/or oats in the food processor and process on high until finely ground.

Add the date mixture to the almonds in the food processor and mix until well combined.

Line a loaf pan with wax or parchment paper. Scoop the mixture into the lined pan and mash with the back of a spoon until even. You can also cover it with wax paper and use your hand to smush the mixture down and even it out. Place in the freezer until fully chilled. Remove and cut into bars. Store in the freezer or fridge.

There are endless variations to these!   I often add unsweetened coconut.  I have also subbed dried apricots for half of the dates. Sunflower seeds, flax seeds, raisins, dried cherries.... Also, the measurements in the recipe are quite forgiving! For example, add more pb if you like that flavor, or omit it entirely if you don't!  As long as you have enough wet mixture to hold it together, you're good!

Eat these alongside some spicy or mint tea while you watch TV after the kids are in bed....at least that's how I do it.

Happy sugar-free eating!

Tiny home tour

We are a family of five living in about 350 sq feet.  I know, that's like a mansion in the tiny home world!  The truth is that when we bought this house in 2010, I had no idea there was a whole "tiny house movement." Our motivation was that it sat on 4 acres in the country, but still only 6 miles from town, AND we could afford it!

Our original plan was to add on to the little house. Instead, my husband (the Jack-of-all-trades, can-build-anything guy) came up with the idea to transform the pole building on the property into a house. He started working on that in late 2011, when we were pregnant with our first. He has done over 90% of the work himself.

We are inching closer to being able to move into "the big house" (very exciting for us)! But in the last six years, through the arrivals of our three kids, we have learned how to make the little house work for us.

When I got pregnant the first time, I had a minor freak-out in my brain about the fact that we lived in such a small space: "Who does this?" I thought!   Actually. MANY people do this. And I'm not just talking about all of us "first world" tiny-housers. Millions of people all over the globe for thousands of years have lived and raised their families in tiny spaces, untold numbers of them with no heat or running water.
With that in mind, I put my heart toward being content in my little space, owning it, and not caring what other people think.

Here's a mini tour of what some of the little house looks like.

Kitchen. It took me way too long to figure out that to gain space, I needed to go UP! UP OFF the counter. My husband fashioned the shelf in the pic below out of an old cabinet he salvaged. He took the doors off, added some shelves and painted it with some brown paint, also salvaged.  The little metal thing under the clock is something from an old refrigerator (as near as I can tell) that I found at Goodwill for $2.  It keeps a few more things off the counter.

Credit for the photo directly above and the one at the beginning of this post goes to my talented sister-in-law, Acacia. 

http://www.acaciaphotos.com/

The dining room.  The booth was one of the very first "projects" we did when we bought the house. We found the black booths at the ReStore for $50 and picked up the red one later off craigslist for $35.  It's a bit tight, but I still managed to sit at it pregnant.  ;)  It has served us well. We spend a lot of time at it since it gets good light.  When company is here, this is often where we sit. 

The "living room," as well as the awesome custom closet my husband built, will have to come in a future post when I figure out how to photograph them well!  For now, I'll leave you with a video of how we fit 3 kids and 2 adults in one tiny bedroom!

Chocolate sweet potato cupcakes, sugar-free, gluten-free, dairy-free

The inspiration for these cupcakes came from this recipe:
http://www.spoonfulofsugarfree.com/2013/07/15/flourless-chocolate-cake-made-with-almonds/

Here is my adaptation, made with sweet potatoes and with the addition of a sweet potato frosting!

Makes 12 cupcakes

1 1/2 cups almond flour or almond meal * see notes
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup pitted dates *
Boiling water for soaking dates
6 small sweet potatoes, or 3 medium, or 2 large, baked and peeled.
3 eggs
2 T coconut oil
2 tsp vanilla

Frosting
This will use some of the dates and sweet potatoes from above, plus
4 T coconut oil
1/3 cup peanut butter, or other              nut butter
2 T cocoa powder
1/2 tsp vanilla
Pinch salt

Directions
Soak dates in boiling water for about 15 min or longer. You can do this while baking the sweet potatoes.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Line a muffin tin with paper wrappers or grease very well with coconut oil. I recommend the cupcake wrappers, though.

Mix dry ingredients: almond flour/meal, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt.
In a food processor or with a stick blender, puree the sweet potatoes with the soaked dates and about 1/4 cup of the date-soaking water.

Transfer 1 cup of the sweet potato/date puree to a mixing bowl. (The remainder will be for your frosting)
To the mixing bowl, add the coconut oil, eggs and vanilla and whisk until smooth.
Add wet mixture to dry.

Divide batter evenly into 12 cupcakes and bake 10-12 minutes (note, my oven runs HOT. You may need to bake longer) or until a knife comes out almost clean. Don't overbake!  
Let sit 10-15 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Meanwhile, blend the remaining sweet potato/date puree with the rest of the frosting ingredients. If it's still warm, let it chill a bit in the fridge before frosting the cooled cupcakes.  I did the old ziplock bag with the corner snipped off trick to frost these.


*Notes
Almond meal, which you can buy or make yourself by grinding whole almonds, will make the cupcakes have a "crunchier," more"rustic" texture, depending on how fine it is ground. Almond flour makes a more refined texture, like cupcakes made with regular wheat flour.  You can also use a mix of both.

I used only 1/2 cup of dates and they were sweet enough to satisfy my kids and me, but may not be sweet enough for some people. The original recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups dates, and that's for the cupcake batter only! That makes them very sweet and taste like traditional cupcakes.  1 cup is a good middle ground, I think.

Enjoy!

Rambling thoughts on giving, saving, generosity, frugality and stinginess

I am not a generous person by nature. I am a super-saver a little too obsessed with being frugal.  

A little over two years ago, Jesus rescued me from my misery and I became a Christian.  In that time, God has been nudging me to trust Him instead of my savings account.  In fact, since I became a believer, I have watched our savings account go from $20,000 to about $500.  (the reasons why don't have much to do with this post).  God saved me just in time really, because the old me would have been an anxious, obsessed mess, full of blame and hatred and resentment toward my husband, scrambling to make some extra cash and stow it away. Not that it's bad to be a saver, but for me, it was an idol, something I placed above God.

Soon after I started following Jesus, I learned that I needed to start tithing to my church as an act of obedience to Christ. The wrench in that was that my husband was not a believer at the time.  Now if you have been in this situation, you surely have wrestled with what to do.  I dabbled in all the options: 
-don't tithe 
-tithe only on my income, which is little to nothing since I am a stay-at-home-mom 
-make some extra money by donating plasma and give that away (I only did that once and when I tried to do it again, my then 18 m.o. cried so much in the childcare that they told me I couldn't donate)
-tithe without my husband's knowledge (deceitful)
-tithe 5% of our income, using the rational that half of everything we have is mine, so I can give away 10% of that.

None of these felt quite right. I don't think there is a good answer to this dilemma, except to keep praying about it and trust that God knows your true heart's desires.

My husband has become a believer in the last 6 months (a miracle in itself) and now we do tithe.  Which brings me to giving.

I have been having the itch to give, a feeling I can only attribute to God's working in my heart and life, since, as I said before, I am not a generous person by nature. And now I'm finding myself in another tricky situation.  The easy thing to do is just to give when I want to, to whom I want to, and how much I want to. Since I take care of paying all the bills, I could do this. It wouldn't require having difficult conversations with my husband. But that's not the right path. Neither can I bombard my husband with pleas to give to this or that.  I keep praying about this, because I want us to give together, united.   

Lest you think my husband is stingy, he is not.  He is more generous by nature than me.   He works hard so I can stay home with our small children. We live pretty frugally and do without a lot of things. But at the same time, we live in abundance. 

Every month, I wrestle with what to save, what to give.  And every month, we have enough, enough to be comfortable and content, not go into debt, AND enough to give.  Sometimes, it doesn't even make sense on the spreadsheet, but somehow it works out in real life.


  

Peeling the Onion

I've had this image in my head lately of an onion as an analogy of how God helps us move forward in our lives.  We have layers and when we're ready, God peels off a layer.  It exposes the softer, maybe smellier(?), layer underneath and brings new tears.  Kinda hokey, I know.  For me, it's helping me see how God has moved me deeper. Also, it's helping me as I watch friends in trial. 

I have a couple of dear friends who are really "in the fire" right now.  The bedrock of their lives is shifting.  I have been through some significant challenges in the last couple of years, but currently, things are pretty even. That's not to say there are no ups and downs, but at the moment, there are no major catastrophes in my life that make me wake up and walk around each day with my heart in the pit of my stomach.  I've just come through something like that, but, for now, I'm past it.

So from my current perch, I find it too easy to look at my girlfriends' situations and feel like I know exactly what I would do in their situation.  And to make judgments in my head and give my friends unsolicited advice about what *I think* they should do.  But when I look back at my own trajectory, I realize that one could say, "you should have done x,y and z" sooner."  "You should have had those boundaries a long time ago."  Maybe, but I wasn't ready.

I'm learning to let God peel the onion.  My girlfriends are faith-filled, prayerful women. I KNOW that they are trusting and praying their way through the fires they find themselves in.  So while there MAY be wisdom I can impart to them (ie, if God wants to use me to help take off the next layer), I'll leave that up the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, I will trust God to peel off the next layer in their lives and mine, when He decides we are ready.

Cheesy Spaghetti Squash

Spaghetti squash is my favorite of all the squashes. Less sweet and less "squash-y" tasting.  I use it wherever I might use actual spaghetti or other noodles; for example it goes great with meatballs or just with tomato sauce and fresh-grated parm. Here's my recipe for it with cheesy sauce. 

Squaghetti squash with cheesy sauce

2 small-med spaghetti squash or 1 very large one

olive oil

salt

Sauce

4 T butter

4 T flour

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

3/4 tsp dry mustard (or a squirt of yellow mustard or Dijon will work too)

3 1/2 cups milk

5 cups mixed grated cheeses (I used medium cheddar, extra sharp white cheddar and mozzarella, since that's what I had on hand, but the possibilities here are many!)

Topping (optional, but yummy)

3/4 cup dry Italian style bread crumbs

3 T melted butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Cut the stem(s) off the squash.  Then stand the squash on the cut end and cut it in half.  Scoop out the seeds.  Brush insides with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and place cut-sides down on a foil-lined baking sheet. Bake 30-60 min (depending on the size of your squash) or until they are easily pierced with a fork. Cool.  Once cooled, scoop out the squash into a large bowl. Or, if you want to save a dish, scoop it directly into a 9x13 baking dish.

Meanwhile, make your cheesy sauce:

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over med-low heat. Add the flour, salt, pepper and dried mustard and whisk continually for a few minutes to cook the flour.  When the mixture smells a bit like cooked pie crust, begin to pour in the milk slowly, whisking continuously. Cook over medium heat, stirring continuously, until the mixture thickens.  

*(Note: sometimes this can feel like forever, or it can seem like it's not thickening.  If you've been whisking for awhile, just call it good. Once you add the cheese and let it cool a bit, it will thicken up).

Remove from the heat and add the cheese. Stir until melted and blended.

Mix the sauce with the scooped-out squash and place in 9x13 baking dish.

For the optional topping, combine 3/4 cup dry Italian style bread crumbs with 3 T of melted butter and spread atop your cheesy squash.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 min, or until topping is browned and cheesy sauce is bubbling.