One Green Voice

Hide and Sneak

Sometimes good ideas come from an unexpected source. Other times they come from the usual well of wisdom. I am fortunate to have many wise people in my life.  My friend Lesley is one of them. Wise and creative. One of her talents is choosing a fantastic recipe and immediately seeing ways to substitute healthier ingredients that taste as good or better than those originally suggested.  

The other evening she told me how she is now substituting ground sunflower seeds and/or flax seeds for part of the flour in cookie recipes - simple ways to up your fibre and protein while adding all the good fats and other nutrients found in these seeds.  

A few days later it was time to make pizza crust. Borrowing a page from Lesley's book, I replaced 1/2 cup of flour with 1/2 cup of ground flax seed.  The end result looks a little different but, despite having replaced 1/6 of the flour in the recipe, tastes almost the same.  My son didn't even notice the difference.

Wish I could say the same for the millet/walnut/zucchini/mushroom et al eggplant rolls ups I spent way too long making this afternoon.  They were baked in tomato sauce and I smothered his in goat cheese.  I thought them divine.  My son did his usual "Yummy!".  "Yum".  "Uh, Mommy, do I have to finish this?"

Can't win em all. 

Rediscover the Convenience of Non-Stick Cookware

I just made chilli in my new non-stick pan and I have to tell you about it.  The pan, not the chilli, although the coconut oil makes it really yummy, but I digress.  A year ago, my blog entry about non-stick cookware would have been really short.  "Stay away from it! There are toxic chemicals in the coating which will leach into your food and your air. And in case you need more convincing, the manufacturing process uses additional toxic chemicals that also end up in our atmosphere and our bodies. Stainless steel is the new/old holy grail".  End of story.

Thermolon by GreenPan has changed all of that.   These pans do everything good non-stick does (and more) without adding PTFE (Polytetrafluoroethylene) to your food and our air.  This is a good thing because I have never seen a recipe that calls for PTFE.  As an added bonus, the pans are manufactured without using PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic Acid), another additive we can do nicely without.  My only other suggestion is to watch for the 4 mm pans as they apparently last longer than the 3 mm pans albeit, no surprise here, for a bigger price tag. 

In summary, this cookware looks like a duck and quacks like a duck but it isn't a duck.  It's sort of a happy bionic duck - they can even go into the oven at high temps!  So go ahead and enjoy non-stick cooking again.  I sure am!