LILL's LIST

Do you like mushrooms? This is a good thing from what I’ve been reading lately. Mushrooms are just full of beta-glucans. What’s that when it’s at home? Well, it’s a soluble polysaccharide, if you must know, and they’re some of the best immune-system boosters you can find.

They support your immune system by ramping up the macrophages, the white blood cells that search out and destroy invading viruses and bacteria. The quicker the macrophages get to the source of the infection, the sooner they destroy the germs that are causing your cough, sniffles or sore throat.

Although there are other foods like oats and barley and such that contain polysaccharides, they’re just not as effective as the beta-glucans in mushrooms, especially the more exotic – to us – mushrooms. That doesn’t mean that eating white button mushrooms isn’t good for you, it is. So if they’re your favorites, by all means add them to salads and sandwiches and your favorite recipes.

Most mushrooms contain a good amount of beta-glucans, but Shitake and Reishi contain the most. This is why they’ve been popular in both Ayurveda and Traditonal Chinese Medicine for centuries. Whether you get them from an extract or in your stir-fried noodles or in a Bella burger, it’s all good.

So, with flu season upon us, what better time than now to order in pizza with ‘shrooms, add mushroom soup to the menu or dine on pasta with mushroom sauce. And don’t forget the onions and garlic which are also good for fending off the flu and colds.

Studies show that people who eat breakfast lose more weight than people who skip it. One way to turn yourself from a breakfast-skipper to a breakfast-eater is by making sure that you have something that you’ll really WANT to eat in the morning.

Muffins are a great choice. They’re easy to eat right out of hand. They can be as healthy as you want them to be with the addition of fruits or veggies. Best of all, if you make them yourself, you can keep the calorie count to a minimum and the nutrition to the max.

Here’s a recipe that uses a boxed mix as a shortcut, although you could also use your own Oat Bran Muffin recipe. Just remember that this will probably change the calorie count.

The apricots can be exchanged for any similar fruit. Dried apple, pineapple, cranberries or blueberries are good substitutions. Also, you can vary the juice to suit the fruit that you use. Think cranberry juice cocktail or pineapple juice.

Apricot Muffins

Number of Servings: 9

Preparation time: 25 minutes

Ingredients:

1 box oat bran muffin mix or recipe for oat bran muffins, prepared according to directions except for the liquid

3/4 cup juice (apple, orange, etc)

1 large apricot, peeled, pitted and chopped

1/2 cup golden raisins

Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 ºF. Use light olive oil to just coat 9 muffin cups. In a medium mixing bowl,

combine muffin mix and juice just until moistened. Do not over-mix. Gently stir in raisins and apricots. Spoon the batter into muffin cups until almost full.

Bake 12-14 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean when you insert it into the center of a muffin. Remove muffins from pan and cool them on a wire rack.

Nutrition Facts

Servings: 9

Serving size: 1 Muffin

Calories: about 260 when prepared from boxed mix

Autumn is my favorite season. This could be because apples are my favorite fruit and fall is apple harvest time. Right at the moment, I’m sitting here tapping my foot and wishing that the Macs and Paula Reds and other early apples would hurry up and make way for my all-time favorite apple: Wolf River.

Now, unless it’s right off the tree, you probably wouldn’t want to just eat a Wolf River. They’re tart and they don’t keep well. But if it’s a baked apple you want – as it so often is with me – the Wolf River is your fruit. It’s large – some are downright huge. It holds up to baking and its taste actually improves with oven cooking.

The following recipe will also work with other “baking apples” if you can’t find a Wolf River in your neck of the orchard. My second choice for baking is Honeycrisp, Jonathan or Braeburn. Although many cookbooks recommend Granny Smith and Golden Delicious for baking, I don’t. I find that baking kills the flavor of the Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples come out mushy and almost sour, or at least that’s what my tastebuds say.

Simple Baked Apple Recipe

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Wash 4 organic apples. Core and make a slice across the bottom to help them stand up, if you want. Fill the place where the core was with a quarter of the following mixture:

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ginger

a pinch of salt

Drizzle apples with 1-2 Tbs of ONE of the following: maple syrup, honey or molasses

Then pour 1/2 cup of ONE of the following over apples: apple juice or cider, cranberry juice or any other liquid you like that goes well with apples and doesn’t catch fire when exposed to oven heat.

Baking time varies with the apple variety, so check them after 45 minutes and keep checking until a fork inserted into them goes in easily. Let them rest for ten to fifteen minutes after they’re done which will give you time to go out and get the vanilla ice cream in the big freezer in the mudroom, if you live in Maine.

If you prefer to nuke your apples, you can use the same ingredients, but just microwave in a suitable container at high for about 5 or 6 minutes and then check with a fork. This can get messy, so cover them with waxed paper.

If you like, you can add nuts and any spice you like to the apples before you bake them. However, then they wouldn’t be Simple Baked Apples, now would they? So, I don’t.

There’s still time. Don’t panic. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Solstice (like us) or something completely different, there’s still time to come up with a present that is earth-friendly, homemade and frugal as all get-out.

But before you get out the fruitcake recipes, consider these options, which may be just different enough to please even the most persnickety family and friends. My favorite is something I received last year. It’s the present I’ve used the most and its recipient was in my thoughts every time I used it.

My friend gave me a beautiful old teapot that she got for a quarter at a thrift store. It was nice, but even nicer were the 100 teabags that came with it. They were half organic black tea and the other fifty were various herbal blends. The really neat part of the whole thing is that she had removed the tags from every one and wrote her own little taglines.

It is SO neat to pull out a “Cold Cure” teabag when I’m feeling kind of stuffed up and read: “Let my warm thoughts fill your heart while this hot tea chases your cold away.” It’s almost like my friend is sharing a cup of tea with me at my kitchen table. I swear it intensifies that medicinal power of the tea.

You could let your kids help you write the tags for relatives and friends who would love to hear from them – and you – but live at a distance. What grandmother wouldn’t love a cup of tea with her grandson’s red heart and an “I love Grandma” on the tag hanging over her cup?

If you’re not into tea and sympathy this holiday season, how about letting the kids decorate a plain white cloth bag for earth-friendly shopping? Or get some cheap stencils and do it yourself with a picture of Mother Earth or a brightly colored bird or a slogan like, “Save The Earth… BYOB” which stands for “Bring Your Own Bag”, of course.

There are so many free or very inexpensive – but really useful – gifts that you can make. There’s no excuse to give the same old tired crafts and knicknacks. Instead of candles, make them some gel air fresheners from jello or gelatin in pretty glasses you’ve found at yard sales or thrift stores. Here’s a recipe I posted last year.

Make a hanging air freshener with some cedar shavings from the local pet store and some essential oil. Put them into small cloth bags so friends and family can hang them up. Or for a gift that’s sure to be appreciated, find out what your friend or relative does that you can give them a gift for so that they don’t have to buy it themselves.

Do they feed the birds? Buy them the kind of bird seed or suet they use. Do they have a hobby that calls for supplies? Find out what they need and get them some. It’s a luxury not to have to buy the everyday things that eat up our budgets, and sometimes people are hesitant to spend money on hobbies or non-essentials this time of year. If you do it for them, there’s no guilt!

The most important part of homemade gifts is using your imagination and time to come up with something that is truly useful and that will be appreciated by the recipient. Homemade gifts have gotten a bad wrap, er, rap because so many times they’re just an excuse not to have to choose or pay for a present.

If you give someone something that was thrown together in haste, with very little thought, only to get out of buying something, your friend or family member might act pleased, but they’ll know it isn’t from the heart. That’s the most important part of gift-giving, whether it’s bought or made by hand. So, while there’s still time, think about what you have on hand or can buy inexpensively and figure out whether that will work for the folks on your list. If it doesn’t, head for the mall and don’t beat yourself up.

Even with global warming breathing its hot breath down our necks, it’s autumn in Maine and that means closing ourselves in for several months. The screens are in the garage, the windows are shut tightly, the doors are weatherstripped so tightly that the house bulges out when we close them – we’re almost hermetically sealed until next spring.

This is when I start realizing that having a Black Lab who sleeps on the furniture isn’t always a good thing. It’s the time of year when we have to let our cats have a cat box, which is another idea I’m not so crazy about. We cook fish and smell it for breakfast the next day and don’t even get me going about the dirty socks in the hamper and that funny smell coming from the basement.

Yes, folks, I’m one of those people who has a sensitive nose. I can’t help it. Smells are much more apparent to me – and to my daughter – than they are to the rest of the crew Chez Hawkins. So around about October, Daughter and I start spicing things up around here.

I usually start with a few drops of vanilla in small glass bowls full of water with a little white vinegar in it. I put several in strategic spots around the house, especially in the bathrooms and bedrooms. As the season progresses, we switch from vanilla to essential oils like lavendar, lemongrass and peppermint to jazz things up and keep us – and the air – from getting stale.

Of course, one of the best ways to spice the air is with a batch or two of cookies or a pan of gingerbread. My favorite is made with pears and the recipe follows this post. Sometimes, we make gel air fresheners out of jello – the only use for it I’ve ever found that didn’t revolt me, by the way. Sometimes, we burn incense, especially pine and eucalyptus to keep colds and germs at bay.

We bring spruce and balsam wreaths in for December and sometimes they last right through the rest of the winter. We plant bulbs in midwinter, so that we’ll have fragrant narcissi and hyacinths. We cut into oranges and lemons and simmer the peels with cloves and ginger and cinnamon and close our eyes, almost convincing ourselves that we can smell “spring in the citrus groves.”

If you live in the northern latitudes, you’ll know what I’m talking about and you’re probably already walking over to the spice cupboard and reaching for the cinnamon sticks to make a little arrangement with a couple of pine cones and a red bow. No matter where you live, here’s that gingerbread recipe to add a little spice to YOUR life.

Gingerbread with Pears on Top

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted

Dry ingredients:

1 1/2 cups white wheat flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. ground ginger

1/4 tsp. salt

Wet ingredients:

1 large egg

1/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup molasses

1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce

1/3 cup yogurt

1/4 cup light olive or canola oil

For bottom of pan:

1/4 cup packed light brown sugar

1/4 cup chopped walnuts

3 pears, peeled, cored and thinly sliced

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 F. Brush an 8-by-8-inch metal or glass baking

pan with the melted butter.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together flour, cinnamon,

baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg, sugar and molasses for 3

minutes with an electric mixer or beat well by hand. Add the

yogurt,applesauce and oil, and blend well. Add dry ingredients and

blend well.

With the back of a spoon, press the brown sugar evenly over the

bottom of the pan, into the melted butter. Sprinkle with the

walnuts. Arrange pear slices evenly over the walnuts. Pour the

batter over the pears.

Bake 35 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in center

comes out clean. Let it cool for five or ten minutes and then loosen the edges of the cake with a knife and

turn it out onto a platter. Serve it with whipped cream or just the way it is.