These breakfast cookies go to my Wholegrain Baking Event – Oats hosted by me.

I’m back with another healthy breakfast recipe from The Sneaky Chef. Kids love cookies and won’t they be thrilled if we serve it for breakfast? Then bake these breakfast cookies, made with fiber one cereal, a brilliant flour blend, dried cranberries and walnuts. Sometimes healthy stuff is not tasty, like whole wheat bread, bagel or pita for example. Even though these cookies are made of whole wheat pastry flour and wheat germ, they tasted very good to my surprise.

I was skeptical about using wheat flour because I have baked with it earlier and sometimes the baked goodies does not smell/taste right. This is the first time I have had success using whole wheat pastry flour. I did not get the raw smell of wheat. I did not miss white flour at all in the cookies. You can
take my word on that. The cereal gave a nice crunch to the otherwise chewy cookies. I would suggest adding dried cranberries and walnuts (this was not mentioned in the original recipe) because it enhances the taste, gives a very good texture to the cookies, also it has nutritional benefits. We adults can also munch on these healthy cookies without any guilt.

My son ate the first cookie so fast, telling me that it was very nice, etc, but then as usual he stopped liking it from the next day. Try your luck with your kids! But touch wood, the blueberry milk, strawberry milk and cherry chocolate milk are still his favorites.

These breakfast cookies go to Egg Replacement Event – Pureed Fruit hosted by me.

A couple of months back I googled flavored milk and the results I got was stirring Kool Aid (similar to Rasna in India) in milk or making a syrup out of the Kool Aid and lot of sugar and adding the syrup to the milk. I wanted something with natural ingredients, something made of fresh fruits. Fortunately months later I have found the book The Sneaky Chef. I think I have written enough about this book in my previous post about Blueberry flavored milk.

I have been trying out recipes from the book and I’m so glad that my son is eating at least some fruits without any fuss. I tried the blueberry juice and cherry juice earlier, which was a huge success. At first my son did not like the blueberry milk, but now he keeps asking for it. He doesn’t even know that his chocolate milk has cherry juice in it. He is happily drinking it. So I got some strawberries (two 16 oz packs) last weekend and tried the same technique. Will you believe me if I tell that he drank it completely in the last 3 days? I could have never made him eat so much strawberries just like that. I can’t wait to try other recipes from that book. Not only that, it also makes it interesting for me because, now I’m thinking what else can I sneak in his food, it’s sort of challenging your creativity.

The Strawberry Milk is surely very tasty enough to entice any picky eater.

I’m a mother of a preschooler and like many others of his age he is also picky when it comes to food. Earlier I didn’t have any problem at all with him during mealtime. He used to eat a lot of veggies, rice, chapathis and fruits etc. But not anymore. So these days I’m hunting for healthy and tasty recipes which appeal kids. While browsing the “Vegetarian Times – Fast and Easy” book I found many such recipes.

The crispy breakfast bar recipe, especially caught my attention because these were “no bake” bars which can be prepared in a jiffy and are healthy too. These are crunchy chewy bars. They get fiber and iron from whole-grain puffed cereal and protein from almond butter and almonds. The original recipe does not have almonds, but I added it to give the extra crunchiness and protein boost.

Following the basic method, one can come up with a couple of variations, like using peanut butter and peanuts, chocolate chips, etc to mention a few. A variety of whole-grain puffed cereals are available in the grocery stores these days. I saw puffed millet and other puffed cereals too.

The prep time is only 15 minutes, which includes the time to take out the stuff you need from your pantry and you have to freeze the mixture for 30 minutes. So in 45 minutes you have a healthy treat ready, without any elbow grease.

So how does it taste? As I have mentioned earlier, my son “the picky eater” loved it so much, he ate 2 pieces as soon as he got home from school. We adults also liked it very much. Actually it’s a fancy “Pori Urundai” (puffed rice balls) with almond butter, raisins and honey instead of the jaggery syrup we Indians use.

This is my entry for:
1. Suganya’s Vegan Ventures.
2. DK’s AWED – Amercian.
3. Pallavi’s Sunday Snacks – Fix It.

Sometime back I purchased readymade brown rice which cooks just in 5 minutes in the microwave. I made Chinese fried rice and it tasted very good. It had a nice chewy texture and was also very filling. So I wanted to try the regular brown rice and got it from the grocery store last week. While at the store I compared both brown rice and white rice and found that both have same calories, carbohydrates, fat and protein. This really made me wonder what’s the difference then. I bought it anyway thinking that I’ll do the research later.

I found some interesting facts about brown rice. Below is the synopsis:

Now let me proceed to the Dosai recipe. The original recipe is from a Tamil magazine. I’ve changed it a little bit. These dosas/adai can be prepared immediately after grinding the batter. Fermentation is not necessary.

This is my entry to the following food blog events:
1. Aparna’s WBB – Grains in my breakfast. WBB created by Nandita.
2. Suganya’s JFI – Whole Grains. JFI created by Indira.
3. Siri’s Herb Mania – Coriander. Herb Mania created by Dee.
4. Sunshine Mom’s FIC – Green.

When I saw Broken Wheat Idlis in Anjali’s blog, I had to try it immediately because we all like cracked wheat very much.

These dosas are very easy to prepare. Just soak 1/2 cup of urad daal and grind it. At the end add 2 cups of cracked wheat also and grind it to combine well with the urad daal batter. The first time I made it, I also soaked the cracked wheat, just like soaking idli rava while preparing regular idlis. But it
became so sticky and stringy and I had tough time mixing it with the urad daal batter. But finally it all came together. At first I greased just one idli plate and poured the batter in the 4 moulds and steamed it a little longer than the rice idlis. Even though it was flat, the taste was very good. I think I should have prepared a nice thick batter.

So I ended up preparing the Broken Wheat Dosas she has mentioned, using the same batter and my vote is definitely for the dosas. I used the reddish/brownish color cracked wheat and the dosas had an amazing golden color. The speciality of this batter is, you can make nice crispy dosas as well as soft sponge like dosas. The cracked wheat we get here is not fine like regular rava (sooji), so I had to run it in the blender for a couple of minutes, to get a fine texture.

The second time I prepared the batter without soaking the cracked wheat, incorporated it to the urad daal batter directly and ran the wet grinder for a couple of minutes. This time also we loved the dosas. This is way healthy than our regular rice dosas and good for diabetics also.

Anjali, Your Recipe Rocks and this recipe is definitely a keeper.

Inspired by Priya’s Rava Idli and Cham’s Cracked Wheat Idli, I came up with this idea of using grits to make instant idlis. Yet another time grits has proved to be versatile. The idlis came out very well and especially it tasted so good with sambar for side dish.

When Jayasree posted Cornmeal Kozhukattais, I had to try it out because I always like the idea of using American ingredients in our Indian cooking. (Example: Zucchini Daal, Grits Pongal, Grits Adai).  I had bought cornmeal to prepare bread, but somehow did not even get close to finding an eggless cornmeal bread recipe. 

I tried the recipe with 1 cup of yellow cornmeal, which is available in the baking aisle in the US.  I got 12 dumplings for this measurement.  Next time I’ll be sure to use another cup of cornmeal, because it was so tasty.  Thank you very much for the recipe Jayasree, your recipe rocks!

Dear JZ of Tasty Treats had passed me the Friendship Award a couple of days back.   Somehow I lost track of it.  I’m very sorry JZ.  Thank you for passing me the award.  I extend my frienship to all my food blogging buddies.

Last week I tried Cham’s Wheat Idlis and it came out very well.  Thank you very much for such an easy and healthy recipe Cham.  Your recipe rocks!  Needless to say this is going to be a regular in our house hereafter.