Carey Jane Clark

Crockpot Banana Bread

January 29, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Consistency is a tough battle. We haven’t been 100% successful in our effort to keep homeschool on schedule, but we’ve been successful more than not, and we’ve definitely all seen the benefits of keeping on track.

My day begins at least an hour before everyone else’s, at 6:00. It’s the early morning that wins or loses the battle for me, and often if things are going to fall apart, they do so at breakfast. Eating gluten-free in China means we don’t eat a lot of bread because eating bread means baking it for ourselves in our toaster oven and we grind our own brown rice flour ahead of time. Just to recap, that means I have to have:

ground the rice flour ahead of time with my hand grinder
have all the ingredients on hand, including tapioca and potato starch flours in addition to the aforementioned rice flour
found the time to hand-mix and bake the bread in our toaster oven

That may not seem like a lot of steps, but somehow it just is. Gluten-free recipes by their very nature are high-maintenance affairs with a ton of ingredients.

And so, in the effort to please my crowd, I am constantly in search of the “perfect” collection of breakfast recipes. I think I may be getting closer. In the past–those late mornings before my new year’s resolution–in the dark days of late homeschool and questionable productivity during homeschool hours, I’d make banana muffins for breakfast. The reasoning here was that they didn’t take as long as banana bread to bake. Both options are great on the gluten-free front because I can use buckwheat flour, which is readily available (already ground) at our local market.

But the clean-up and the last-minute preparation always put me behind schedule in the mornings, so something always had to give–my exercise time or homeschool starting on time–or both.

Enter Crockpot Banana Bread!

What an amazing invention. I mix it up the night before, pop it in a stainless-steel bowl inside my crockpot on a rack, stumble out of bed in the morning at 6:00, turn the switch on the crockpot to “high,” go about my morning routine, and right about when I should be calling out, “Breakfast is served,” it’s ready! (The smell in the kitchen during the morning routine is pretty wonderful too.)

I found a number of different recipes for this, but I like a lot of banana in my banana bread, so this is the one I arrived on, and then tweaked it just a little bit to make it even more yummy. If there’s a downside to this bread, it’s the number of bowls necessary to mix it up–one for the mashed bananas, the wet ingredients, the eggs, the dry ingredients, and the finished batter. But since I’m doing it up the night before, they’re all washed and put away by morning anyway, so it’s not that big a deal, and the taste and convenience of this recipe the next morning make it totally worth it in my books.

So without any further ado, here it is, my new favorite recipe for Crockpot Banana Bread:

Ingredients:

1 ¾ cups flour (I use buckwheat flour for a GF recipe)
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup butter (vegan conversion: grapeseed or coconut oil)
1/3-1/2 cup honey
2 eggs, well beaten (vegan conversion: 2 flax eggs)
1 ½ cups well mashed overripe bananas (2 or 3 bananas)
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions:

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. With the electric beater on low, fluff the shortening in a small bowl, until soft and creamy. Add the honey gradually. Beat in the eggs in a slow stream. Add the vanilla. With a fork, beat in 1/3 of the flour mixture, 1/2 the bananas, another 1/3 of the flour mixture, then the rest of the bananas, and finally the last of the flour mixture. Fold in the walnuts, if using.
Turn into a greased and floured baking unit or a 2 1/2 quart mold and cover. Place on a rack in the slow cooker.
Cover the cooker, but prop the lid open with a toothpick or a twist of foil to let the excess steam escape. (Don’t forget the toothpick–your loaf will be too moist without it. It’ll still taste great, but it won’t come out of the “mold” very well. Ask me how I know this!)
Cook on high for 4 to 6 hours. Cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Serve Warm.

Note: I know this recipe says 4-6 hours. The person who originally wrote the recipe without my modifications noted that hers was ready in about two hours, and that was my experience as well. All slow cookers are different.

Enjoy!

The “Sacrifice” of Staying at Home

January 22, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

I’m realizing these days just how brainwashed by the culture at large we can become. Although in many ways I have practiced the renewing of my mind by the Word of God (Romans 12:1), I’ve been challenged recently to do that even more. To give up ideas that are practically force-fed us by the culture we grow up in, and embrace thoughts that may run counter-culture, but line up with Scripture.

Both in China and “back home” in Canada, I often run into women who say they envy me that I “can stay home with my children.” They go on to tell me how they simply couldn’t afford to do the same. Others tell me they admire my patience. They smile and say they wouldn’t possibly have the patience to do what I do–as though they could never aspire to the sort of sainthood it must take to stay at home and school my children. I bite my tongue.

I will tell you now what I’ve wished I could tell them. Staying at home with my children was never about what we could afford or about an overabundance of resources or patience. Certainly there are days when my patience has been spread thin, when my voice is hoarse at the end of the day from trying to talk over three noisy children on the chance something I say might penetrate some way somehow. There are days–hold onto your seat–when I’ve failed.

And as far as being able to afford it, we have made what some would call sacrifices. We made the decision that I would stay at home when my husband’s salary hovered somewhere close to $20,000 annually. He worked for a charitable organization, and we lived in one of the most expensive cities in Canada.

We do not own our own home. We currently don’t even have a car–we use public transit all over our city here in China.

But we have never been without. We have always had more than enough food on the table, friends close at hand, love, laughter, understanding, grace. God has always provided.

We have made what some would call sacrifices. We could have taken the safe path, followed the road most traveled, done what we could “afford,” and not spent these years instilling values in our children, making memories and helping to forge character, but in the end, in our books, that was the greater sacrifice. One we weren’t willing to make.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

January 21, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

I’ve mentioned how our new schedule has transformed our homeschool and how happy I am with it. The older kids had given me some positive feedback, but Sprout sometimes isn’t as happy to warm up to change. Last night, however, she dictated a letter to her cousins. I was so impressed with the things she thought to mention, without any prompting at all, I had to share.

Dear ______ & ______,

I miss you very much. For my birthday, I got a Baby Alive just like ______’s. I wrote a letter once before to tell you this, but I think you didn’t get it. And for Christmas, I got a small bear and a doll bed and Sweetpea and I got a big play kitchen. And for Christmas, we baked cookies: sugar cookies, shortbread cookies and thumbprint cookies. Mommy got a timer. It’s been helping homeschool a lot. We also made a schedule for homeschool. I like it. Sweetpea and Pumpkin went to a birthday party on Saturday. I didn’t go because I got to go to a friend’s house after my ballet class. (She goes to the same ballet class as me.) I made a picture frame. I’m planning to put in a picture of Socks and me. Socks is our first cat. Sweetpea found her outside. We have another cat. His name is Butterscotch like the ice cream flavour. He had little spots of the colour. They sometimes come into our bedroom at bedtime and they curl up on the bottom of the bed.

Love,
Sprout

- Carey Clark

Indian Chickpea Curry

January 15, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Today I’m joining the “Try a New Recipe Tuesday” blog hop over at Home to 4 Kiddos. In a previous post, I mentioned my New Year’s resolutions. I withheld a few from that list, lest anyone should think me overly ambitious and, well, crazy.

But one of my resolutions for the year was to introduce more vegetarian cooking to my repertoire. Back home in Canada, my parents have started eating on the Hallelujah Diet–primarily raw foods. While I’m not ready to go in that direction, I am interested in going vegetarian more often, partly for the health benefits, and partly because the cost of beef and lamb has risen dramatically while we’ve been here for the last (almost) year.

The other thing I wanted to do is use my crockpot more and shop once a week. The habit here is to go to market daily, and since it’s right around the corner, and if you’re not organized, it’s an easy one to fall into. The problem is I don’t really have time to be schlepping to the market every day. Once a week shopping and a little planning affords me much more time in my daily schedule to be with my kids, or even–dare I say it–to sit down and put my feet up once in a while.

I stumbled on a slow cooker vegetarian cookbook, and I’ve been trying a few of the recipes out on my family. Since a friend who was visiting brought me some bags of dried chickpeas/garbanzo beans, something we normally can’t get here, I decided I’d give this a try. It was a big hit!

Ingredients:

1 Tablespoons olive oil
1 Tablespoons garlic, minced
1 small sweet onions, peeled and diced
1 Tablespoons ginger, minced
1 large carrot, peeled and diced
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
1 Tablespoons curry paste, mild or hot
2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. coriander
2 cans chickpeas
1 can diced tomatoes
salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste

Directions:

1. Rinse and drain chickpeas.

2. Heat oil in large saucepan and saute garlic, onion, ginger, and carrot until onion is translucent.

3. Transfer vegetable mixture to an 8-10 quart crockpot.

4. Add all other ingredients and turn crockpot on low heat.

5. Add more vegetable stock if liquid does not cover all the ingredients.

6. Cook curry on low for 6 hours.

7. Season to taste and serve.

Notes: Okay confession time. Whenever a slow cooker recipe tells you to put things in a frying pan first and cook them, then dump them in the slow cooker, I skip this step. Works fine. Maybe it would taste better if you made it the other way, but I wouldn’t know because I never do it that way. Call me lazy. Go ahead. But I just saved 15 minutes and a second dirty dish.

If you don’t have (or can’t get) Indian curry paste, like we can’t, this worked great as a substitute: dashes of cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, a pinch of turmeric and a whole fresh red chili.

Don’t have any cans of beans on hand? Did you know that 1/2 an hour in the pressure cooker using the natural cooling method afterward allows you to cook beans from the dry state without any pre-soaking and have them ready to use in less than an hour? Favorite tip for using any kind of bean. And every self-respecting Chinese kitchen has a pressure cooker, so naturally, so do I.

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