For many of us, Memorial Day represents an extra day off, massive sales at the shopping mall, and the first big barbecue of the year. For those of us who have not been directly touched by military service, I think it would serve us well to remember all of our vets and current service men and women.

After the Civil War, many towns set aside days to remember those who had died and commemorate the end of the war. In 1868, General John A Logan declared an official Memorial Day (formerly known as Decoration Day) to take place on the last Monday of May.

Today, Memorial Day is set aside to remember all of the men and women who have died in service to our country. Whether you agree with the politics or not, we feel the men and women who put their lives on the line at home and abroad deserve a big THANK YOU! Around the country there will be parades and flags flying in honor of our fallen heroes, instead of cringing or being put-out by the traffic, I challenge you today to remember that every soldier is a father, mother, son or daughter, not just a number to support the government imitative of the day.

Happy Memorial Day from all of us at Bob’s Red Mill.

Recently a woman came into the store and inquired about sprouted wheat bread: what it is, how to make it, the benefits/disadvantages, etc. Although we currently don’t use sprouted grains in our baking at Bob’s Red Mill, it’s an interesting subject gaining popularity. People are drawn to bread using sprouted grain for various reasons, most of them related to the health benefits that can be  gained. Here’s a little background to clear up some confusion on sprouted wheat.

What is Sprouted Bread?
Sprouted bread is a form of bread made from whole grains that have been allowed to sprout, that is, to germinate. It is often eaten uncooked, or slightly heated, by proponents of raw foods. Sprouted breads are usually made with grains that have a low glycaemic index such as wheat, rye, spelt, oats, linseed, and barley.

History of Sprouted Bread
The earliest recipes for sprouted bread come to us from the Essenes, a Jewish monastic group that flourished from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD. They are credited with the first recorded techniques and recipes for Essene Bread which is made from sprouted wheat and prepared at low temperatures. These two techniques insure the maximum possible vitamin content for this food. The sprouting also breaks down the lectins and other substances that some individuals may be sensitive or allergic to.
In more modern recipes, sprouted grain bread is made with additions of yeast and gluten which produce a more edible loaf.

Benefits of Sprouted Bread
The benefits for sprouting grains are numerous. Through sprouting, all of the vitamins and nutrients stored in the grain are released. Many of these nutrients are usually lost during the cooking process. Additionally, the process of sprouting helps convert the carbohydrates found in the grains into maltose. This aids digestion as the enzymes in sprouted grains essentially predigest all of the vitamins for you before they hit your digestive track. The body is then more able to incorporate all of the good vitamins you are receiving.

All types of sprouted grains, in bread or eaten raw, are high in protein, fiber, and phosphorus. Specific sprouts have additional benefits. For instance, mung bean sprouts are high in iron, vitamin C, and potassium where as sunflower sprouts pack punches of vitamins A and C.  Calories and carbohydrates are reduced by sprouting grains used in bread.

How to Make Sprouted Bread
You make sprouted bread the same way you would make a typical loaf of bread with the exception of adding the appropriate measurement of sprouted grains to the flour. A website that might be helpful in guiding you through the process of all things sprouting is sproutpeople.com. Check out these two recipes for baking bread using sprouts from Sprout People.com and visit their site for even more inspiration!

Whole Grain Sprout Bread
Essene Bread

Released in 2005, the guidelines on diet and exercise recommended by the USDA are starting to feel a little outdated. Fortunately, they are in the process of revising the guidelines for 2010. The 2005 guidelines recommend that adults engage in at least 30 minutes of exercise every day. For children, they recommend 60 minutes.

This is just to maintain a healthy heart, for weight loss and weight management, they recommend even more exercise. I love to work up a sweat, but even I have trouble finding 30 minutes to dedicate to exercise on some days.

The number one thing to keep in mind is that your 30 minutes do NOT need to be done all at once—10 minutes here and 20 minutes there, still count as 30 minutes. This idea has always been hard for me to accept, but it’s true. On the flip side, your 30 minutes are really only useful to your health if they are above and beyond your normal routine. Depending on your activity level at work, you may need to step it up a notch. If you take the stairs every day to get to your office, you’re going to have to find another way to boost your activity.

Here are some tips for getting those extra 30 minutes every day:
1. If you’re not already doing it, take the stairs to your office or your dwelling.
2. Fit in a walk on your lunch hour. A 15 minute walk (even if it’s a loop around your parking lot) will get your blood pumping and sharpen your mind.
3. This sounds a little silly, but after a few days you’ll get over it. While going through your morning routine, fit in some squats and lunges as you go back and forth from the bathroom to the bedroom.
4. Try the “Hit Every Muscle in 5 Minutes” routine from Fitness Magazine. They also have some great 10, 20 and 30 minute routines.
5. After work, fit in a walk with your partner, coworkers or a good friend. Not only will the walk boost your energy, but it will bring you closer to your walking partner.
6. Make your chores count! Add lunges to dish washing and turn up the intensity on your mopping.
7. Sign up for a race or join a team sport. It’s amazing how motivating a race date or team sport can be!

You can find more tips for fitting in exercise from the Mayo Clinic here.

Here is a fabulous recipe for Lemon Vegan Agave Muffins. Not only are these muffins egg and dairy free, but they contain no refined sugars! They are simply sweetened with agave and notice that they use chia seeds as a binder. If you are new to chia seed baking, look forward to an upcoming article all about these amazing seeds. Hope you enjoy the recipe!

 

 

 

Vegan Lemon Agave Muffins

2-1/2 cups Bob’s Red Mill Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt

Measure and combine.
1/2 cup safflower oil
1/2 cup rice milk
3/4 cup agave syrup
1 T. chia seeds mixed in 1/2 cup warm water
2 lemons juiced and zested

Incorporate wet ingredients and pour into dry ingredients. With a spatula or a wooden spoon, mix together until combined. Be careful not to overmix, or the muffins will become chewy. Bake at 350 degrees for 18-20 minutes. Makes 8- 4oz. muffins. Keep in an airtight container for up to 3 days, but of course they are best right out of the oven.

The argument over the importance of protein is over, but let’s rehash it a bit., okay? Protein is a vital ingredient of every cell in the body. Hair and nails are made of protein. Your body uses protein to build and repair tissues. You also use protein to make enzymes, hormones, and other body chemicals. Protein is an important building block of bones, muscles, cartilage, skin, and blood.  If there is something important going on in your body, protein is involved. Just like fats and carbs, protein is a “macronutrient,” meaning that the body needs a bunch of it every day. Unfortunately, our bodies don’t warehouse protein for when it’s needed.

Usually, we thumb our noses at products that are derivatives of some otherwise healthy food. We’re all about advocating for nutrition from the whole food, just as it was grown. Keep it simple, right? Well, every once in a while we see something that doesn’t exactly fit our ethos, but has benefits that are so compelling that we just can’t resist. That’s protein powder. Aside from being absolutely necessary for life, check out what a powerhouse it is.

Rebuilds muscles faster

Boosts energy

Increases the body’s fat burning

Makes you feel “full” longer

Improve the appearance of you hair, skin and nails

So whether you’re a jock trying to bulk up your biceps, a busy mom struggling to stay strong through her step class, or just someone trying to lose a few of those lingering Winter pounds, a diet high in protein has some real benefits for you. Getting it into your diet is easy. Along with our plethora of protein rich whole grains, Bob’s Red Mill has three fantastic protein powders to make a boost to your protein intake easy as can be. We have Whey Protein Powder (made from Oregon’s best milk) and two plant-based powders, Soy Protein Powder and Hemp Protein Powder.

Unlike many other protein products in the marketplace, ours are simple, unflavored, natural, and inexpensive. What’s more, these three products are so easy to use! You can protein to just about anything, but the best way to use them is with a refreshing breakfast or post-workout smoothie. Here’s how we like to make them at the mill

1/2 cup frozen Berries 1/2 banana 2 Tablespoons Protein Powder 3 Tablespoons  lowfat Vanilla Yogurt 1/2 cup Skim Milk 2 Tablespoons Flaxseed Meal 2 Tablespoons Honey

Direction? Put it all in a blender and mix until smooth. Enjoy.

Whether you are looking at it from an ecological standpoint or a health one, the more research you do, the more it makes sense to try to reduce your intake of meat. While you may not choose to go entirely vegan, you might still want to pick one day a week to try to avoid eating meat.

Cooking beans in a crock pot is an easy, gluten free solution to creating a number of meatless meals to satisfy you through the week. There are so many different flavors and styles of beans available that you can create a wide variety of meals with very little effort. Plus beans are high in protein and fiber and low in fat, so they make a great meal if you’re trying to get in shape for summer.

Our basic household recipe for cooking beans in a crock pot is this:

Rinse beans
Put rinsed beans in crock pot and add water and a little salt.
Set crock pot to “low”
Leave alone for 8 hours or so
Turn off crock pot

Many recipes add in a step of rinsing and soaking the beans overnight before cooking them, but at my house we think that the beans actually have more flavor if you simply rinse and cook them. Since we don’t bother with the soaking step, we usually put enough water in the pot so that it appears to be a little more than 2/3 filled with water. The 8 hour cooking time is also negotiable, so you can leave the pot on longer for softer beans, or cook them less time for harder beans.

For extremely simple meals, you can serve the beans over rice, or combine your beans with tortillas and cheese to make burritos. If you want to get fancy later in the week, you can use your beans in delicious summer salads, refried beans, or even in making your own vegi-burgers!

In Portland, you can find nutritional yeast (aka vegetarian food yeast) at almost every restaurant catering to a vegetarian clientele. It’s a funky orange-yellow color and can range from a fine powder to larger flakes. It smells a bit yeasty, a bit nutty and a bit cheesy, but what’s the deal? What is this funky ‘hippie dust’? (Truly, I have seen it called that before.)

Nutritional yeast, which is not to be confused with Active Dry Yeast or Brewer’s Yeast, is a deactivated form of the microorganism Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The yeast is pasteurized and placed in a dryer to deactivate the yeast and bring out its nutritional properties. The yeast, which is gluten free, has a flavor reminiscent of cheese and is rich in amino acids, B-complex vitamins, niacin, folic acid, zinc, selenium and thiamine. Bob’s Red Mill’s nutritional yeast has been fortified with vitamin B-12, as well.  Nutritional yeast is popular with vegetarians and vegans whose diets can be deplete of B-complex vitamins, especially B-12.

Nutritional yeast won’t make your bread rise or your beer ferment, but it is excellent sprinkled over popcorn and pizza. It can be added to breading for tofu or meat to increase the flavor and nutritional value of the food. The yeast is also a wonderful addition to gravies and sauces or used to create a non-dairy ‘cheese’ sauce for those who are vegan or who cannot tolerate dairy.

Here are some great recipes for turning this funky dust into something delicious and nutritious!

Nutritional Yeast Cheese Sauce from Bob’s Red Mill
The Best Cheesy Uncheese Sauce from Karina’s Kitchen (gluten free)
Hemp Burgers from Bob’s Red Mill
Best Vegan Macaroni and Cheese (in the world) from VegWeb.com
Old Fashioned Macaroni and Cheese from Flavor Vegan

First of all, you’ve got to make sure that your bike is in decent working condition. If it’s been quite a while since you last rode anywhere, you might want to go get a full tune up before trying to go very far. Check on all the basic things like noticing if your tires are full of air or totally flat, and if your gears still work. If you find that you have to fill up your tires quite a bit, it is a good idea to check the next day to make sure they haven’t gone completely flat again.

Next, find all your bicycling stuff. Locate your helmet, blinky lights, water bottle, fancy biking gloves or clothing. Check to see that the batteries in your blinky lights are still charged, and that your clothing still fits. You might want to do a quick smell check of all your gear before you put it on again.

On the weekend before you are planning to start commuting, go for a bike ride of a similar length to the commute you are planning. If you’ve never traveled by bike to your job, you should probably try out the actual route to make sure you are not in for any surprises. Many roads that seem fast and convenient for commuting in a car are terrible on a bicycle. Check a map of local bike routes to see if there are any particularly dangerous hazard points or better streets to bike on. In Portland, many bike great bike routes parallel busy traffic heavy streets.

You might even discover that there is one route that is better to ride on the way to work and a different route that is better for the ride home. For instance, I found that on my trip to work I have one very steep downhill that is fun for speeding to work in the mornings, but that I dreaded biking back up after a long day at work. Through a little research I planned a different, less direct, but much less steep route for the way home. On the other hand, if you live really close to where you work, you might want to find an adventurous workout route that includes challenging hills for your ride home.

So if those are the necessary steps to get ready for a bike commute, the following is my personal selection of (completely optional) first day commuting tricks that just might make that first ride to work one that you actually want to repeat. I always find that if you have a great time doing something the first time you try it, you’re much more likely to stick with it through those inevitable not-as-good days.

1. Select your work outfit ahead of time, and bring it into work a day before you try your first commute. This way you can be light as a feather on your first ride of the year.
2. Bring a kit of things like deodorant, a hairbrush, and makeup (if you wear it) that you can leave somewhere at work.
3. Plan a nutritious breakfast ahead of time, especially if you need coffee to think straight!
4. Pick a day that has no chance of rain but that is also not too hot. You don’t want to make yourself miserable on your very first trip.
5. If you bring your own lunches, pack your lunch the night before and make sure it is leak proof. It’s better to put some old plastic bags and rubber bands around any containers that look iffy, rather than get to work and find that you have chili all over everything in your backpack.
6. Try your first commute on a Friday. That way if you are exhausted by commuting you’ll have the whole weekend to recover.
7. Since you picked a nice day, and it’s also a Friday, you might want to locate a restaurant with a nice outside patio halfway home. This will break up your ride in a relaxing way so that it will seem like hardly a commute at all. In fact if you can convince some friends to attempt a bike commute on the same day, you could make a bike commuting celebration of it!

When making Gluten Free bread, you can expect a different consistency than that of typical wheat breads. While wheat breads require kneading to develop the gluten proteins into an extensible but elastic dough, Gluten Free bread dough gets it’s consistency from xanthan gum added to the flour. This means kneading isn’t required and simply a good mix will do. Here in the Bob’s Bakery, we like to mix on medium-high speed for about 4-5 minutes

Take care not to overproof your bread before putting it in the oven. Letting it rise high above the pan will let too much air into the dough and cause the loaf to collapse either in the oven or after removal. When we make our Gluten Free breads in the bakery, we seldom need to let our loaves proof for more than 20-25 minutes. While your loaf might not look doubled in size, it will most likely gain height through oven spring during the first few minutes of bake time.

Gluten Free bread keeps best in the fridge or freezer, unlike typical wheat bread which can last just fine at room temperature. Slice your bread while it is still slightly warm and then place it in one or two plastic bags. It will then be able to last for a while and maintain its consistency. To create the right-out-of-the-oven flavor and texture, heat a refrigerated slice in the microwave for 10-20 seconds before enjoying!

When making Gluten Free bread (or any yeasted product), measure out your flours ahead of time so they are at room temperature. Gluten Free flours, unlike wheat flours, store best at refrigerated temperatures. Simply pulling cold flours out of the fridge will cause the yeast to take a much longer time to react. We sometimes hear people asking why their bread is having trouble rising and often the case is that the ingredients are too cold for the yeast.

When you start experimenting with Gluten Free baking of any kind, you should stick to Gluten Free recipes until you feel comfortable with the changes of consistency and workability. Once you start getting the knack for it, you can try adapting some of your favorite “regular” recipes with some of these tips:
Find flours with higher protein contents to build structure. For instance, a rice flour will not give your bread loaves the same sturdiness as an amaranth, sorghum, or teff flour would.

Gluten-free breads will require more liquids than the equivalent wheat bread recipes require. When you convert wheat breads to gluten free, be sure to add extra water, milk, oil, honey or other wet ingredients to make sure that all of the flour is properly incorporated in the dough. Your gluten-free bread dough should be too wet to knead but thicker than cake or muffin batter.

Try out alternative ingredients in your favorite recipes to see what the effects are on the finished product. Ingredients such as eggs, carbonated water, and even gluten-free beer can act as natural leaveners that can give a fluffier crumb and a fuller volume.

Have fun! Gluten Free baking of any kind can take a while to get used to so be sure to take it lightly and have a good time.

Below is our Gluten Free, Dairy Free Bread Recipe. Give it a whirl to try out your new skills!

Bob’s Red Mill
Dairy Free Wheat Free Bread

Mix together with a spoon in a small bowl:
5 Tbsp Cornstarch
1 Cup Water
Yeast Packet (found in Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Bread Mix)

When corn starch is dissolved, pour into large bowl and mix in the following (with spoon or dough hook on upright mixer):
1 2/3 cups Rice Milk
¼ Cup Vegetable or Safflower Oil
1 Tsp Apple Cider Vinegar
Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Bread Mix

Pour Mixture into a Bread Pan and let rise until dough is just above the top of the pan (30-40 minutes).
Bake at 350 degrees for one hour, rotating pan once during the bake. Remove from oven and let cool on wire rack Enjoy!

Tip: For a lighter crust color, cover pan with tin foil or place a cookie sheet (above the bread pan) on a higher shelf in the oven during the bake.

In honor of Celiac Disease Awareness Month, I asked our tour guide, Christie Coykendall to share with you how she discovered that she needed to be gluten free. Here is her story.

I thought I was suffering from menopause for TEN YEARS! I just couldn’t get my old energy back.  It seemed like the month I turned 50 I had gained 20 pounds and couldn’t get it off. My immune system was so low I’d catch every cold that blew into the neighborhood. I remember crying one day because I felt so awful, thinking there must be something really wrong with me because I was eating all those high powered vitamins and buying all those super energy tonics and I still felt sooo tired all the time.

I’m naturally an outgoing, friendly person but as soon as the door closed behind the outside world I’d collapse on the couch and sink into despair. Deep inside what I really feared was the inability to focus my thoughts.  I’d be talking to my son and point to the refrigerator but say, “Put it in the stove,” or something else equally disjointed.  I had to stop reading books because I just couldn’t remember what one page had said by the time I turned it over. I remember thinking frequently how nice it would be to die and be able to just rest.  Then one day a sympathetic clerk in a health food store suggested trying a wheat free diet.  I read up on the gluten-free lifestyle and thought about it for a few weeks.  I didn’t have the typical digestive symptoms but as she said, “Why not just try it.”  I faithfully read every label and didn’t cheat at all.  I remember so clearly that first week-end, I woke-up feeling alive.  It was amazing!

I’ve been on a fairly strict gluten-free diet for two and half years now.  I learned I’m a second-day processor so if I eat something with wheat I get a “gluten hangover’ the next day, feeling tired, groggy and depressed all over again. I lost 25 pounds the first year without even thinking about it.  Four months after I went GF I got a part-time job at Bob’s Red Mill giving the daily factory tours.  It’s a high energy job that I love and I’m proud to say I haven’t had one sick day since I started.  Now I get to share my story every day and encourage others to ‘just try it.’

My favorite BRM product? I love the versatility of the new GF Vanilla Cake Mix. Strawberry shortcake season is coming up and I’m tasting it already!