Guilt-Free: Breakfast

I love waffles. They are definitely my favourite breakfast food. And how easy is it to pop some frozen waffles into the toaster and voila!

And yet I know how terrible those things are for me. And honestly, they never taste as great as homemade waffles. But there are just so many ingredients and it takes so much more time and effort to make them from scratch.

So I came up with a compromise that actually works pretty well for us. We do make pancakes/waffles every week or two. We have a recipe that makes batter you can use for either pancakes or waffles, so it's just as easy to pour the batter in a pan or in the waffle maker (which you can buy for less than $20 these days). We make a double batch and freeze the leftovers.

Just like that - frozen waffles with the goodness of whole ingredients and without the padded junk from the store-bought variety. Love it!

Recipe:

1 1/2 cups flour
2 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp baking powder

1 1/2 cups milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 egg
3 tbsp oil/melted butter

Mix dry and wet ingredients separately. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and add wet mixture. Stir with wooden spoon until combined (may still have lumps).
Drop by 1/4 cup (or so) into a frying pan (med heat) for pancakes, or into a waffle iron for waffles.

This basic recipe allows for much free play - add chocolate chips, cinnamon, or any other favourite ingredient to change things up.

Guilt-Free: Food

Doesn't the image of grandma's homemade cooking hold such wonderful memories in your mind? I can recall sitting at the counter in my grandmother's kitchen as she artfully cooked a scrumptious meal, or watching her pounding the dough into bread, or pulling out a fresh batch of cookies. The ingredients were natural, the food deliciously reflecting the wholesome heart.

Today the convenience of packaged food assaults our tastebuds. As I've made a move away from these items, I have begun to notice the blandness of my old diet. The times when I throw something "convenient" into the oven for dinner results in a general unhappiness with the meal. It just doesn't taste the same.

Of course, we don't have the farms to grow our own food, and often it's just not possible or practical to obtain whole, natural ingredients to cook everything from scratch. But there is one thing that I have found easy and tasty to make on a regular basis: bread.

No, I don't grind my own flour, and no, I don't pound and re-pound my dough, attending to it all day while it rises. But I do embrace my fantastic breadmaker. Many of you likely have one collecting dust on a shelf or in the basement. Maybe it's in view in the kitchen but is only used a few times a year. I treated this delectable machine the same way for the first few years I owned it. I never seemed to remember to pull it out; I forgot to throw in the ingredients until I actually needed the bread; I didn't have the ingredients to make anything other than white bread.

Then one day I made up my mind. The breadmaker sits in my kitchen at eye level. I bought a large bag of white flour, as well as one of whole wheat and rye. I stocked up on bulk yeast. And as I experimented with different flavours of bread, I stocked up on the extra ingredients needed also. And I stopped buying bread on grocery day.

Now we almost always eat homemade bread. I pop the ingredients in at night, set the timer, and wake in the morning to a fresh loaf. Sometimes I forget - and we go without bread (actually fairly easy to do, and it regulates the amount of bread we eat as well). It's not the end of the world. Now, it's a habit - and that's really where the battle lies. Once you get into the habit of it, it becomes second nature. I've already had to replace the gears inside of my machine from so much use. But we now regularly enjoy:

White bread
Whole wheat bread
Honey oat
Rye
Pumpernickel
Chocolate
Coconut
Multigrain
12 grain
Cinnamon raisin

As well as:
Banana bread
Pizza dough
Cinnamon buns
Dinner rolls

Yet to try:
Pretzels
Jams

So, have I whet your appetite yet? Enjoying these homemade treats have been just that - a delicious treat! Don't be discouraged if habit is slow to form, or if you go through spurts (I still neglect mine at times). Slathering a homemade dinner roll in butter and feeling it melt in your mouth even once in a while will be more than worth it!

Guilt-Free: The World Around Us

I often feel so preoccupied with my little life that I rarely get a glimpse of the world spinning around me. I know there are wars and conflicts, political turmoil, scientific discoveries, view-changing art, environmental concerns...the list goes on and on. Even closer to home there are election issues, community events, social crises, economical woes. I hear tidbits on the television newsflashes or see headlines in the newspaper boxes, but I admit I'm ignorant as to the details behind the issues.

Sometimes it seems easier to just go on living in my little world, seeing to the day-to-day needs of my family (or job). Other people are dealing with the problems, right?

But then I think that I really should be a little more aware. Ghandi said to "Be the change you want to see", so how can I hope for a more peaceful world, a more stable country, a more understanding community, if I just hope someone else will deal with it?

In an effort to be a little more educated about what's going on around me, I've tuned into the CBC radio 99.1. We leave our radio in the bathroom and in the kitchen tuned to this station, so that for 20 or 30 minutes a day we hear some of the world and local news headlines. This is at least a start. But in between the news reports that occur every half hour, there are interviews, documentaries, investigations, and analysis of the issues effecting us all. Sometimes they are about events I'm well aware of (it's hard to miss the federal politics lately), but sometimes I am amazed about what I hear (like about an inmate pregnancy program in prisons). Often I get to hear two sides to the story (Israeli and Palestinian interviews in Gaza).

It may only be a smattering of information, but it's more than I used to have. And listening for 20 minutes means you hear an entire subject presented. So I may just be able to comment at the next gathering I'm at, and sound a little more "tuned in" to the world around me!

Bonus: CBC also dots their programming with Canadian music and culture, so I get caught up culturally also!

Guilt-Free

Inspired by my recent post about living life without the burden of guilt, I wanted to start a short series about ways to boost different areas of your life without the heavy load of "shoulds," "coulds" and "woulds".

There are lots of things I'd like to be doing for myself, for my kids, for my husband and for my home. But instead of feeling the joy associated with them, I feel the guilt of not being able to do them fully, properly, or the same way other people do them.

So for this series, I want to explore easy and simple ways to add things to your life. Some ideas will be things that work for me, some will be things I hope to incorporate in my life, and some may be just wishful thinking for the future. Feel free to add your comments and ideas, suggest a "guilt-free" topic, or simply follow along.

Here's to living with joy!