The October Unprocessed Vault: Day 29

During October: Unprocessed, Catherine Enfield realized she could safely eat at Chipotle restaurants because their food fit the definition of unprocessed ingredients. Last week she came across their Boorito processed food costume contest and decided to talk to her friend, Nicole Rogers, who happens to be a Chipotle corporate employee.

Alexandra Jamieson’s passion is helping professional women enhance their ability to excel and achieve, using healthy food as a catalyst. Today she shares three easy, healthy, delicious, and unprocessed desserts that you’re sure to love.

Within a couple of weeks you’ll have enough homemade vanilla extract to last you a long time.

Halloween is just around the corner, and I’d much rather indulge in a rich bowl of this Maple Butternut Pudding than store-bought candy.

If you use any or all of these ten naturally delicious and unprocessed flavor enhancers in lieu of salt, you’re doing your body and heart a big favor.

So rather than becoming a large, centralized farm, we’re recruiting small family farms to join us as suppliers. We now have more than 35 family farms producing eggs for us in seven Northeastern states. They’re all good, hard-working people who are committed to family farming.

“It’s not often that a recipe starts, “First, wait for a cow to have her calf…” Yet that is where the story of this recipe begins.

Before you can change your habits, it helps tremendously to understand how habits work. Charles Duhigg, in his wonderful book, The Power of Habit, describes it as a cycle with three distinct steps: the Cue, the Routine, and the Reward.

Yesterday we had another fun Google Hangout! Suzanne and I invited Anne Lawton and Jane Ibbetson to join us; they both participated in October Unprocessed last year, and have continued on since then, making some pretty big changes in how they (and their families) eat. Here’s the re-play.

I actually don’t crave full-blown desserts these days. These little, no-bake bites usually offer both satisfaction and nourishment – something that cake can’t do! They’re part snack, part dessert, and completely customizable to your current sweet tooth.

This wheat berry salad has an earthy warmness to it, a tad nutty but only slightly, and depending on what other ingredients are mixed in, the wonderful ability to suit any season.

Equally rich in color and in taste, purple sweet potatoes land on the slightly sweeter side of the flavor scale — so much so that my daughter refers to them as “birthday cake potatoes” — which got me thinking: why not make a homemade cake batter with this wildly hued vegetable as the star? Even better, why not use the sweet potatoes to make a naturally dyed frosting, too?

When I ask people what their least favorite part of cooking is, I often get a somewhat sarcastic answer: DOING THE DISHES! There’s really no way around the fact cooking creates dirty dishes — but there’s a really simple way to drastically reduce the number of dishes you dirty while making food, which of course means less time spent washing dishes.

These little mummies are a modified apple dumpling that uses scraps of pastry dough to simulate bandages, apple slices for the bodies, and little bits of dry cranberry for the spooky, otherworldly eyes!