Undercover Recipes: Baked Cinnamon Apples with Creamy Honey Cashew Butter

Every now and then I whip up something in the kitchen that no one in my house full of pickies can seemingly get enough of their fill.

This is one of those recipes. And I kind of don't mind. With no refined sugar, no grains and no packaged ingredients while boasting healthy fat and the hearty goodness of in-season fruit, as far as I'm concerned, the kids and hubby can eat as many helpings as they please of this Baked Cinnamon Apples with Creamy Honey Cashew Butter dish.



What began with having a surplus of apples and not nearly enough room in the dehydrator to preserve them all led to a brilliant find: not only are baked apples good when bathed in cinnamon, vanilla and butter.

They are all the more fabulous when they take a dip with homemade honey cashew butter.

Admittedly, this recipe takes a little work, but if you love the cashew butters, as everyone in my house does, we make it in bulk once every week or two and keep the fridge shelves lined with it for such soiree dessert nights.

Honey Cashew Butter 
{this recipe has been adapted from The Rawtarian}


Two cups of soaked and sprouted cashews
1/2 cup of unsweetened shredded coconut
1/4 cup of raisins
1/2 teaspoon of pink Himalayan salt or sea salt
1 teaspoon of fresh honey
a couple grates of lemon peel
3/4 cup of water

Toss everything into your blender or Vitamix in the order listed above and blend until smooth and creamy. Consistency should be less dense than peanut or almond butter but not watery either. Refrigerate and use in any way you'd use any other nut butter.

Baked Cinnamon Vanilla Apples



Five peeled and diced medium to large apples in an oven-safe pan with lid
Two Tablespoons of butter {use coconut oil to make this dairy free!}
3/4 teaspoon of cinnamon
dash of nutmeg
dash of cardamon
three splashes of vanilla
1/4 cup of water

Preheat the over to 350 degrees. Peel and dice the apples and toss them into an oven-safe pan. Cut two tablespoons of butter into several chunks and intersperse the butter among the apple pieces. In a separate dish, mix dry spices together with a fork. Slowly sprinkle the dry spice mix atop of the apples and butter, evenly distributing among all of the apple pieces. Add three splashes of vanilla to the apple mixture. Pour 1/4 cup of water into the bottom of the pan, taking care not to wash spices from the apples. Cover with a lid and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.



After the apples are finished baking, immediately place a few heaping spoonfuls of cashew butter atop and then mix it all up.

Enjoy! And? Prepare to dish out seconds.

Living Healthfully: When Food Proves It Matters

The heat spread across my face breaks apart and flees the moment the cold wind rushes into me.

I am sweating bullets, and I am grinning like an idiot, riding out the door of a doctor's visit on a windy gale of hope and astonishment, high above the ground I walked in on.

During 3-year-old E's evaluation, she'd said much of what we suspected was happening inside our youngest's body: poor digestion, inflammation, candida overgrowth in the gut suppressing his immune system -- much of which can be helped holistically and through simple remedies like taking digestive enzymes to help break down proteins.

It's good news, yes, that he can be treated well without strong herbs or medications or, gosh, that he can be treated in any way other than just following a life sentence strict elimination diet, avoiding those key foods that seem to irritate those of us whose digestive tracts are far more sensitive than most.

So I'm riding high on that hope, but I'm also thanking God for what has been sewn into our youngest's small body: real, nourishing food.

Little ones with such weak digestion normally have various, plentiful nutritional deficiencies that delay their growth and development; E, our little lineman, is pretty nutritionally rich.

Some parents say that they try to feed their kids healthy food, the doctor says after scanning his body, but you two actually have.

Wait what? We have? Despite the no broccoli and his desire to eat only pasta-esque dishes? Really?

These are exactly the words needed for parents who have been scrupulously trying to help heal a visibly and invisibly ailing little body in any ways they can -- avoiding gluten {his sensitivity} like it's rat poison, making foods from scratch the majority of meals*, sneakily pureeing vegetables into any sauces or meatloaf or homemade breads that promises to hide even the vaguest shade of green.

These are exactly the words needed for parents who have begun suspecting more and more that the list of ailments from which our children, from which we suffer are consider "normal" are rooted deeply in nutrition or lack thereof.

That by the vast grace of God of all the messages that are broadcast constantly about health and healthy food, we heard, amid all the noise, the ones about what it takes to build a healthy body from the inside out, from the cell level.

So I'm riding high and the nervousness bound up and wound tightly in my stomach has unraveled and come apart at the sharing of the words from our crazy-smart doctor:

we are not crazy.

We are not crazy for fighting the school-snack fight with our oldest.

We are not crazy for having a food budget that is almost double that of what it used to be

And we are not crazy for having been so invested -- time, money, energy-wise -- in what our family has been eating.

There is something to this whole food journey we've been wildly trying to navigate that is finally, finally, finally showing itself true and well and alive in a little boy who could be much worse for the wear had he been on the Standard American Diet his mother and father and brother have been weaning off for the past three years since his birth.

I take those words home with me, hold them close as I offer praise to God for E's body and the ability He gave it to heal itself through the foods He intended for us to eat.

I take those words home with me, hold them close as I begin to wonder how I can possibly even begin to share {without sounding like a broken record or uppity or preachy or judgey} how food has been proving it matters in my life, E's life

because I desperately and passionately desire for it to prove it matters in, well, all of our lives.

And I finally feeling a little braver and beginning to think I might not be crazy for it.

{Just keeping it real: we don't eat perfectly all of the time; we just simply strive to eat well 80 percent of the time. My kids would swim in a vat of mac n cheese if we let them, and they can list at least six menu items on the Culvers **shudder** menu from having gone there on non-mommy endorsed dates.}

Everyday Life: The Fight I Will Keep Fighting

Our battle begins early in the morning the first day of school on the shaky ground of school snacks.

At G's school, each child in the class brings snack for the entire class a few times a year.

I love the concept.

In theory.

In practice, it doesn't work for us ... mostly because I know too much and believe what I know so passionately that I can't erase it. At all.

While goldfish crackers and colorful yogurt tubes look innocent, I know these foods beyond the simple breakdowns of calories and macronutrients and ingredient labels. I know what vegetable oils heavy in omega-6s do to the heart muscle and yogurt loaded with processed sugars and dyes can do to the body at the cellular level as well as chemically.

And because I now know all of this {I mean, as well as I can know it without having a degree}, I simply cannot fathom allowing my little ones to eat these foods daily. Now, I'm not totally crazy; we normally follow an 80/20 rule where 80 percent of the time we eat whole foods dense in nutrients while 20 percent of the time we let kids be kids. Or adults be adults, as we would be the case for John and his affinity for cherry-flavored pops.

But every day? Well, I can't stomach it.

So neither will he, even to his dismay.

His deep irritation rises while I'm in the thick of cooking eggs on the stove.

He grunts and groans and huffs and sighs and elaborates a well orchestrated argument. Normally, my ears are all his, but to this particular oration, they may as well be deaf.

There are few things for which I will dig a thick stake into the ground and then sink my heels into the soil just as firmly.

The first is that God is good all of the time. No matter what.

The second is that John and I love each other and them relentlessly and whole heartedly.

The third is that food is more than calories and carbs {and the like} and taste; it's meant to connect us to the soil and each other, to nourish, heal, sustain.

And there's nothing about goldfish and graham crackers or the like that connect or nourish, heal or sustain. There's just not. And those foods have popped up often enough in past daily snack itineraries that even friends who are much less rigid have questioned why we are serving what we are serving in school and other child-centric settings.

Once he's said his peace, he stares at me and stomps one foot on the ground as if to put the exclamation mark on his action-pack deposition; I see the buddings of a lawyer emerge in the satisfied smirk on his face.

But what he doesn't know is that even the world's best orator attorney couldn't sway a jury against a passionately honest mother bear who knows what she knows with every fiber of her being.

I crouch down, and I give my closing statement, feet firmly planted in the soil I know to be truth, concluding that he will be choosing healthy snacks from our pantry, fridge or counter daily and bringing them to school for his snack every day,

and I round out my closing statement with the one truth I know best

-- the one that fuels my fire beyond any knowledge or research or biology or chemistry --

"because I love you."

With that the jury is sold.

And I can even see in the cross-examining attorney's eyes that he, too, has been won.

UPDATE: If you're reading this in the archives, you'll definitely want to read the update to this post because the cross-examining attorney ended up only being sold momentarily! We learned a really important lesson from this that I'd hate for anyone to have to go through. 

Share the Love: The Unhealthy Truth

**THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. The winner chosen by random.org is Michelle.**

We're not eating the same food that graced our grandparents' plates.

Heck, we Americans aren't even eating the same food as our European and Asian counterparts.

Surprised?

Take macaroni and cheese for example. Kraft actually sells a cleaner, healthier {if mac and cheese could be considered healthy} version of macaroni and cheese without the added food dyes and made with whole food ingredients other countries that have deemed dyes and artificial growth hormones and genetically engineered crops too risky for human consumption; after all, no human studies have been conducted on the safety of such practices or consumption.

Just compare the list of ingredients*:
U.S. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese

Enriched Macaroni Product (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate [Iron], Thiamin Mononitrate [Vitamin B1], Riboflavin [Vitamin B2], Folic Acid), Cheese Sauce Mix (Whey, Modified Food Starch, Whey Protein Concentrate, Cheddar Cheese [Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes], Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Potassium Chloride, Contains Less Than 2% of Parmesan Cheese [Part-Skim Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes, Dried Buttermilk, Sodium Tripolyphosphate, Blue Cheese [Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes], Sodium Phosphate, Medium Chain Triglycerides, Cream, Citric Acid, Lactic Acid, Enzymes, Yellow 5, Yellow 6) 

U.K. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese

Macaroni (Durum Wheat Semolina), Cheese (10%), Whey Powder (from milk), Lactose, Salt, Emulsifying Salts (E339, E341), Colours (Paprika Extract, Beta-Carotene) 

I was first introduced to this little tidbit of information during a luncheon with Robyn O'Brien, sponsored by Stonyfield.

While I wasn't shocked, the facts fueled the fires in my heart to continue to talk about what we are feeding our bodies, working together with people like Robyn to educate and motivate. Robyn herself is an advocate for food safety having penned the book The Unhealthy Truth, which details her experiences and findings about the relationships between food allergies and illness in relationship to the way the U.S. allows its food to be grown, raised, handled, enriched and genetically modified.

Robyn shared with a group of Chicago bloggers how she was initiated into her food advocacy role by fire when her youngest suffered a violent allergic reaction to eggs, spurring her to create the Allergy Kids Foundation as a resource and education group to increase awareness about what we are consuming.

The whole foods advocate in me mostly believes that if we simply moved away from consuming processed foods like macaroni and cheese, we would have much less with which to be concerned.

But that's not entirely true anymore -- because we're not eating the tomatoes or beef or yogurt that our grandparents ate when we purchase many of these conventionally grown, raised and formulated foods. 

Take for example the little cups of yogurt we buy in the store and deem healthy because, gosh, it IS yogurt after all. Once I discovered all of the artificial ingredients in the low-calorie-but-yummy yogurts I'd been consuming and taking note of the brands whose farmers have not pledged to treat their dairy cows with growth hormones or been certified organic by the USDA, I realized that I needed to look more closely at ingredient lists used to produce the foods my family was consuming.

We've now switched to brands like Stonyfield and Nature's Path, two companies that are committed to partnering with farmers who farm the way our great-great grandparents and all of the generations before farmed -- and who are committed to using only real food ingredients that have not been genetically modified or chemically altered in their foods.

I know what some are thinking. There's too much ground to cover, too many battles to be fought considering how far many of our farmers have ventured into conventional practices like using pesticides and GMO seeds and companies that have taken to using artificial ingredients.

But we all have a voice.

As Robyn said at the lunch -- she was just a mom of four who was serving her kids frozen waffles for breakfast before she started digging into the facts. She didn't want to know about our food supply and she was totally happy with what her family consumed. But when health was compromised for one of the little people she loved most, she was spurred to action, to knowledge, to advocacy.

Many of us don't have a health crisis to spur us to action. There is power, though, in being proactive with our health!

And can I just say -- our votes count. 


We women have the power to band together and change what companies put on the grocery store shelves.

Every time we spend a dollar on food, we vote. 


Every time we make one small change toward the better in our grocery purchases, we vote. 


Companies are getting the message. Let's keep soaking up information, making better decisions in doing so, continue sending the message loud and clear.


After all, we have little lives that are counting on us to send it.

***Giveaway***

Stonyfield has generously offered to give away a copy of Robyn O'Brien's book The Unhealthy Truth. Also included: a Stonyfield canvas bag, the Stonyfield Yogurt Cookbook, Stonyfield coupons and a few other goodies. 
Simply leave a comment sharing what small change her family could make in grocery purchases so as to promote overall wellness.  {Or you can say a change you've already made toward healthier eating!}
For an extra entry {and to help spread the word about food integrity in our country while motivating other parents to get involved}, tweet:
"The food we eat should be REAL food! I'm taking a stand for food integrity w/ @Stonyfield @TheUnhealthyTruth @HyacynthW http://bit.ly/opaCPM"

*special thanks to Robyn O'Brien for listing out these ingredients as published on Healthy Child.
Full disclosure: I was not compensated for this post or asked by Stonyfield to write about my lunch experience. Simply, I am passionate about helping further education about our food while advocating for how we can all live the healthiest lives possible. No purchase necessary to win. Winner must be 18 years or older and live within the United States. A winner will be randomly selected October 10, 2011.


This post is linked with The Green Resource at Sorta Crunchy, A Delightful Home, The Greenbacks Gal and Live Renewed.