Paleo Chocolate Coconut Cookies

I knew my sweet tooth was acting up. I had been craving a sweet treat and because of that this weeks experimental recipe is a dessert. I was looking at scone recipes and found several on line and tweaked them a bit to come up with this.

It turned out great and the texture and taste were both awesome. While these cookies are shaped like a scone I have to say that is the only resemblance they have to a scone. So if you are looking for that buttery crispness of a scone, this is not the recipe.

However, these make great cookies, which is exactly what I will shape them into next time. They reminded me of, a chocolate coconut chewy cookie. Think almond joy cookie.

They are delicious and I will be making them again because they are a great little sweet treat that’s not too hard on the waistline but the ingredients are a bit expensive, so I’m really glad it tasted good.

What is the Paleo diet? The paleo diet runs on the same foods our hunter-gather ancestors supposedly ate: fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood, and nuts. Anything that comes in a box, jar, or bag should be avoided on the paleo diet—as should anything that just wasn’t consumed back then. That means no grains, dairy, added salt, or legumes.

The Z Man and I do not follow the Paleo diet, but I would have to say that our style of eating does lean a bit in that direction.

I was looking for a sweet treat that was low in carbohydrates and sugar and I found it….

Paleo Chocolate Coconut Cookies

2 cups almond flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup enjoy life chocolate chips
1/4 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
1 egg
2 Tbsp pure maple syrup

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees
In a large bowl, combine almond flour, salt, baking soda, chocolate chips, and coconut
In a smaller bowl, mix the egg and pure maple syrup until well blended
Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix well
Knead the mixture with your hands if necessary to ensure an even distribution of ingredients
Form mixture into a circle approximately 1/2 inch thick
Cut the circle like a pizza into 6 or 8 slices depending on the size you want or using a cookie scoop, form balls and flatten into round cookies
Transfer to a parchment lined baking sheet
Bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown and cooked through

You can very easily change the flavors of these cookies by using your favorite flavors such as dried fruits or a different chocolate. The good life chocolate chips are paleo and a bit higher in price than regular chocolate chips, but again you could use regular chocolate easily if you don’t “need” to follow a paleo diet.

Try them, I think you’ll like them.

Till next time,

Lori

Weekend Frugal Homestead Happenings

I have declared this week an eat the freezer week. I’ve done this for two reasons.

I can not stuff another dang thing in my kitchen freezer and stuff is falling out on me when I open the door. The struggle is real people!
I have used almost all of my storage containers and I WILL NOT buy more. I mean really, how stupid would that be?

You think I’m kidding… look at this!

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I have plenty of single servings of chili and soups for lunches and larger containers of full meal options, it really should NOT be a problem. I’ll consider it a little challenge for this week.

The Z Man continues to work his butt off stocking the wood supply. I do LOVE that Man!

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That is two different huge stacks of wood he has labored over this week. I think our next major purchase needs to be a hydraulic powered log splitter, instead of the Z Man splitting all this with a maul and ax. The cost of the splitter would pay for itself within a year because of the savings of heating with wood instead of electricity or oil. Not to mention saving the Z Man’s back.

The weather was rainy this weekend so I wasn’t able to sand and resurface my island butcher block like I wanted to. I want to do it outside to keep the dust out of the house. This needs to be done, but it’s also an experiment for me to see if I can do good enough work to take on sanding and refinishing the kitchen cabinets. Yea, I know… so much for dust in the house on that task.

On Saturday I spent almost 2 hours on the phone with Direct TV because our discounts ran out last month and my bill doubled in cost. Oh, and heads up… the representative told me that as of yesterday 1/22/17 Direct TV is going to have an across the board price increase so be sure to check your bill if you do business with them.

Anyway, I’ve always considered Direct TV as a nice little perk for us because we don’t go out to dinners and we don’t go out to movies, we are pretty much, no, I take that back, we are absolutely home bodies. We love football and of course the Z Man likes to watch hunting shows and I like to watch the cooking show channels. I had gotten our bill down to $54 a month, and I figured ok, it’s our entertainment. We do have Amazon prime and can use that if we want to watch a movie. That was a mistake too, but we are stuck with it for another 11 months.

But, HELLO! I DO NOT want to pay $109 a month, and I won’t. After some discussion the nice representative offered me $75 a month. Nope, I still don’t want to pay that. I called back on Sunday and asked again what could be done to lower the cost. Ultimately we compromised and got rid of a few channels which lowered the bill to $56 a month. That is a $2 increase from what we were paying. Fine.

I did do some experimental Paleo baking with almond flour and happy life chocolate chips. I made coconut chocolate chip scones.

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They turned out awesome! They are nothing like a scone and are more like a chewy coconut chocolate chip cookie (think almond joy). I got the base recipe from the Paleo Caveman website then tweaked it a bit. I’ll post the recipe later this week. It’s definitely a keeper for those times you need a sweet treat.

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That’s about it for our weekend except for watching some football. Our Steelers lost, booh!

How about you, did you have a fun frugal weekend?

Till next time,

Lori

Weekly Meal Plan and Groceries

I hope y’all had a great weekend. Ours was pretty uneventful which is just fine. I hope everyone is safe after that awful ice storm. Our snow has all melted away thanks to some warmer temperatures, but it has cooled back down now to normal winter temps.

I was late getting my weekly meal plan done this week, but I finally got it done.

Having a weekly meal plan really takes away the stress of what’s for dinner and for me it also keeps my grocery budget in check. I make a grocery list based on my meal plan and go to the store once a week. We started a facebook group for this very purpose. Z Life What’s Cooking Group. It’s also fun to see what other people are eating and to get meal ides and recipes from others which helps with the dinner rotation rut.

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I picked up the needed groceries too.

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The cara cara oranges weren’t on my grocery list, but when I saw them it made me think of a friend so I splurged and bought a bag. Hopefully it will also curb the sweet tooth cravings I’m having and keep me out of the doughnut shop! 😉

I track my grocery expense with the Dave Ramsey “Every Dollar Budget” program. It’s free at his website. To date my grocery expense for January is $75.00 I round up to the next dollar because all change goes into the change jug.

My grocery budget is $300 a month which includes food for us and the dogs, health and beauty, cleaning supplies, everything but alcohol.

Admittedly I am purposefully trying to keep my grocery expenses low by staying out of the stores which in turn keeps impulse purchases in check. Also, keep in mind that we raise or hunt almost all of our meats with the exception of seafood and the chicken I purchase from Polyface Farms. I buy the chickens in a larder of 15 whole chickens at a time and I usually do this twice a year, so I expect sometime around July I’ll be stocking up again. This usually cost between $250 and $300 depending on the weight of the chickens I get. I do have a $50 off punch card that I’ll use with my next purchase that I need to not forget about.

In full disclosure, this is the first year I’ve used the Dave Ramsey “Every Dollar Budget” system and honestly I had become pretty slack in tracking expenses. This year I wanted to get serious about it and I think the Every Dollar system is going to be the trick. Plus it’s free, my favorite price.

I believe this will be a learning experience for me this year to see the actual hard numbers on all of our expenses, but it will show us areas where we can tighten up on for the future. Retirement is getting closer and this will help us get more prepared.

Hope you and yours have a great week.

Till next time,

Lori

Homemade Chicken Stock

You really should be making your own chicken stock. It’s one of the easiest things in the world to do and it is 1,000,000,000,000 times better than anything you can buy at the store.

This is what I did on Saturday and Sunday.

I started with chicken bones I had been saving in my freezer along with some onion, celery and carrot scraps then I let this pot low simmer on the stove for 29 hours. I added extra water to in once.

This is why I love to make my bone broths in the cooler months, because I can cook it on my wood stove and not have my kitchen stove on for 24 hours.

While my stock was cooking away, I got busy using my electric pressure cooker doing 1 whole chicken at a time from the freezer. I cooked the 3 laying hens that the Z Man and I harvested from our flock earlier this summer and I cooked 3 of my Polyface Farm roaster chickens. I pressure cooked them for 20 minutes each then let them cool and picked the meat from them and put the bones in the stock pot.

After all the chickens were cooked and the meat was in the jars, I filled the jars with chicken stock from my stock pot. Then 7 quarts of chicken meat went into my pressure canner at 10 lbs of pressure for 90 minutes. The chicken stock, 25 minutes and 10lbs of pressure for quart jars.

In total I ended up with 7 quarts of canned chicken and 18 quarts of chicken stock.

The canned chicken will be great in chicken and dumplings, chicken pot pie, chicken soups, buffalo chicken dip…. A great easy quick meal no matter what recipe I use.

This is good for you food at it’s best. There are many healing properties in homemade bone broth.

I mean, just look at that beautiful golden rich stock. Mmmmmmm, I can’t wait for some mashed potatoes and gravy!

Canning is not difficult and it’s not dangerous if you follow the basic safety practices. Yes it takes time and it takes work, but it’s something that I find pleasure in doing.

Even if you don’t have a pressure caner, you can very easily make this stock and freeze it in individual containers and it would still be just as lovely.

And why not get extra goodness out of that roasted chicken by using the bones for stock. That’s a great way to stretch a dollar.

Till next time,

Lori