Tiger Nut Flour Blueberry Muffins

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Getting ready for a big week of VBS, so not much time for the internet. How about a muffin recipe to fill some space and tummies? I double this recipe for 24 muffins. It’s gluten free, no added sugar, but there is milk, so not strictly keto. I’ve done this with water, cream, half and half, or coconut milk in place of the milk. All versions turn out pretty good!

Print Recipe

Tiger Nut Flour Blueberry Muffins

A gluten free, optionally dairy-free breakfast muffin
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time25 minutes
Course: Breakfast, Snack
Cuisine: Keto
Keyword: gluten-free, keto, low carb, sugar-free
Servings: 12

Equipment

  • 1 muffin pan
  • 12` cupcake liners optional, easier to clean

Ingredients

  • 2 cups Tiger nut flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon Baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/3 cup Erythritol/Monkfruit blend sweetener or other sweetener
  • 1/2 cup milk or other liquid (coconut milk, water, etc.)
  • 1/2 cup butter melted
  • 2 teaspoon vanilla extract lemon extract is also good for this recipe!
  • 1 cup frozen blueberries

Instructions

  • Heat oven to 350℉
  • Line muffin pan with cupcake liners or grease each muffin cup with butter or avocado oil.
  • In a large mixing bowl, sift together dry ingredients.
  • Add frozen blueberries to dry ingredients and toss or gently mix to coat.
  • In another mixing bowl, whisk together wet ingredients.
  • Add wet ingredients to the dry, then stir until combined.
  • Scoop by the 1/4 cup into prepared muffin pans.
  • Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until muffins are browned and an inserted toothpick comes out clean (except for blueberry guts).

Notes

Depending on your brand of tiger nut flour, you may need another tablespoon or so of liquid to make it wet enough to make a batter. 
 

Lemme know if you try them!

Friday Links

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I won’t call this feature a Random Mess, like I usually do, lest this blog become known only for messes. Which would be fair, really. 

First link is to my own latest post: Is Homeschooling a Hot Mess? I think it ought to be!

From Postcards from the Age of Reason, my friend Tor thinks (and I’m always happy to think as he does, as he’s much smarter than me) that the AI bubble is the bubbliest of all bubbles. It is a vapor. Don’t give it a dollar.

Little guys are about to take an enforced haircut on this, (above images stolen from this link) and I am very sorry about that. I am really enjoying the linked Substack, called Gold and Geopolitics. Give it a look, if you like that sort of thing.

I’ve always cringed when people call Jesus “Yeshua”. It always felt to me like people who don’t really like Jesus as we’ve known him, and would really like to put a sheen of coolness over His image. I thought they just needed to grow up in the faith a little bit and get more comfortable with Christianity. Newcomers often start throwing elbows at the old guard when they convert. Happens with homeschooling, too. Turns out, it’s probably worse than that in this case, and a deliberate subversion. His name is powerful. Enemies are scared of it:

“Conspiracy” enthusiasts have always had a bee in their (our) bonnets about Nikola Tesla. Here’s an interesting video on his last interview.

Vox has a post quoting what I think is the most interesting part:

…in private letters to Arthur Matthews, Tesla described what he had found beneath Notre-Dame: copper grounding systems embedded directly into the cathedral’s foundation blocks — not modern restorations added during 19th-century repairs, but original construction. Deliberately insulated with natural resins. Geometrically arranged in radial patterns extending outward from the central nave. Still conductive after six centuries.

Tesla called them earth batteries — passive electrical storage systems using the compression of stone, the mineralization of groundwater, and the conductivity of copper to create standing charges that could be drawn upon without fuel, without generation, without metering.

I think I’m going to buy some of those copper pyramids for my asparagus beds now.

And finally, I wish I could remember where I saw this first so I could give credit where it’s due:

We examine how fertility expectations influence financial risk-taking using nationally representative data from three countries. Our results indicate that childless adults who do not expect children are 21-36% more likely to invest in stocks than those who expect children, controlling for personal characteristics. This effect persists also when medical infertility instruments expectations. We find no similar effects for other savings categories, nor differences in self-reported risk tolerance. Households expecting children report shorter financial planning horizons, which may explain their lower risk-taking. These results suggest declining fertility can increase young adults’ stock market participation through childbearing expectations.

No wonder they try to suppress birthrates. Messes with their net worth. And they try to suppress homeschooling because it doesn’t turn out cogs for their machine.

Besides investing their current funds in children during their growing years instead of the stock market, there’s not a hill of beans of difference between the financial behaviors of childless and child-oriented families. As I said before, in defense of our “irresponsible” choice to make people instead of money:

Of the large Christian families that I know personally, some are wealthy, and some are decidedly not. They are all, however, fed, clothed, and lacking nothing essential. Maybe they don’t have anything fancy, or their shoes are a bit scuffed, but they are taken care of. I also know families with two kids, or none, who are in dire financial straits.

I’ve been angry for some time at the idea that my children are everybody else’s retirement plan. While parents put their hard work and money and love into raising their children, the childless put theirs into betting that our children will be worth something. What if they’re not? You’re taking a big chance, Childless, letting everybody else determine what kind of people will be there when you get old. One of the biggest annoyances in my life right now, something I endure on almost a weekly basis, is a Boomer who is always “joking” about how my young people need to get good jobs so he can stay retired.

Enough of that talk, though. As I said before today, what can’t continue, won’t.

Don’t forget to check out my hubby’s book on Amazon. It’s really good.:

Leave your links in the comments, friends, and I’ll link to them next Friday, as long as they’re family-friendly and from real people. No spam, of course. 

 

Is Homeschooling a Hot Mess?

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Who doesn’t love a hot mess?

I recently stumbled across a substack post by someone I assume supports homeschooling called “Homeschooling is a Hot Mess”. Possibly to my detriment, I didn’t read much of it, nor am I conscientious enough go back and find out if my impressions of where it was going are fair or accurate. It probably went far better than I expected it to. No shade on the writer at all, I was just really busy that day, and now I’m on to something different. What that post did, though, was spur this sorry blogger on to consider a presumably different topic I’ve touched on over the years. I thought I’d piggyback on just the title, since it was such a banger.

Is homeschooling a hot mess? Are we failing before we even get started?

Our family held a graduation ceremony and party for our third-born child last weekend. It was a nice to-do (though I wish I’d done better with the brisket), and now I only have five students left. Having three more-or-less mature people to show for my efforts, and having hung out with many other homeschooling families these seventeen years or so, including the newest crop of public school refugees, I guess I’m at least somewhat qualified to talk about homeschooling’s current condition.

In an older post, Permission to Be Ordinary, I made a prediction:

The first generation of homeschoolers was almost certainly an unusual group of people. It seems to me that they required a unique set of characteristics–qualities that usually go hand-in-hand with high intelligence and academic achievement–to be able to boost the homeschooling movement from the gravitational pull  of traditional education. That first generation had, at the very least, enough imagination to dream it up, confidence to follow through, ingenuity to figure out how, resourcefulness to keep it going under pressure, and courage to fight the courts and social stigma.

As homeschooling becomes more mainstream, though, we are going to see some regression to the mean (though I doubt that we could ever regress to the abysmal performance of public schools). Because homeschooling really is a viable and superior alternative, and for reasons that have little to do with math, more and more parents who would never have considered such a thing before are going to jump on the bandwagon.

Those stellar statistics are going to level out, homeschoolers.  At some point, our neighbors are probably going to notice that some of us are pretty awful at math and science, and most of our children are going to trade schools or straight to the workforce instead of to Harvard. For that reason, it would be good if we kept our debating skills sharp, so that we can explain why homeschooling is well within our rights, regardless of our outcomes. If our best defense of home education is that other homeschoolers are really smart, we are sunk, because most of us are going to be graduating children who become ordinary people.

If you hadn’t heard it before, “regression to the mean” is a term (though I’m being flexible in my use of it) meaning that we can expect extraordinary data to smooth out as the thing that made them extraordinary mingles with the ordinary. What can’t last, won’t. Initial measurements contain different and fewer data points than later ones.

Early homeschoolers have less in common with later homeschoolers than later homeschoolers do with the public school population from which they are drawn.  

We will regress to our mean. I stand by that prediction. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening yet. Right now, most homeschoolers are not even homeschoolers. They’re public schoolers brought home. This is not where we’re going to settle. Right now I think what we see is more like a tidal wave sucking the water from a shore before crashing back in, or a pendulum swinging. Whatever metaphor you like best, what we’re seeing right now–everybody trying different things, infighting, chaos inside and out, and some parents doing a very poor job while others are crushing all expectations–is, indeed, a hot mess. It’s a mess caused by a whole bunch of new people jumping in to something they’ve yet to understand. They panicked. That is completely understandable, and now they are completely unprepared.

This was bound to happen, as people began to finally discover that public education is every bit as bad as the first generation of homeschoolers said it was. The pendulum is still swinging, or the tide is going to come back and cause some devastation, or the dust is going to take some time to settle, choking us for a while. Please forgive all my conflicting metaphors. My point is that we can’t really judge the thing right now. People need time to figure things out.

Whatever they do, they cannot do worse in the aggregate–individual results notwithstanding–than the public schools have.

Our nation has done a very bad job with its children for a very long time. There is no way to straighten this mess out without bringing it home first. Just let it be what it is and stop worrying. Homeschooling will have results and methods as widely varied as the families themselves are. We will not turn out a uniform product. We have no assembly line or precise formula. We’re turning out souls, not cogs. As in my previous posts on the subject, I call on homeschoolers to defend, not the process of homeschooling, nor their preferred method, nor their results, but the right and duty of parents to raise their children free of interference by the competing, coercive system of secular education.

God has ordained each parent to do this. We can do this.

 

 

 

Whoops!

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Accidentally posted a draft with post ideas in it. If you saw it, you know what to look forward to now! If not, good. I don’t really want to commit to anything in particular. Just brainstorming.

Gradient

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I wanted to draw your attention to a self-published speculative fiction book by Get Along Husband, Jesse Dyer. I read it, edited a few typos, loved it. Perhaps you will love it, too!

I’m not capable of an objective review, of course. I like the author a little too much for that. Jesse’s stories always stick with me emotionally for a bit. That is not just because I like him, I think. Probably gonna hit a lot of other people the same way.

If you want to try it before you buy it, you can read the first two chapters at his website.

It’s priced at $4.99, and well worth the thought-provoking read. Hope you enjoy it! Please leave a review on Amazon if you do!

I Just Need to Throw Something Out Here

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Grease the chute, so to speak.

Since summer break is here, and I’ve got the school life on easy mode, there will be a little more time for blogging. We’re having our third high school graduation this month! Three down, five to go!

I have topics planned out, and a few posts half-written. Health, food, fitness, homeschooling, headaches, large families, Jesus. All the things! But right now, I just need to publish something to get back into the habit of publishing something.

Do me a favor, friends? Leave me a comment, those few who are faithful enough to still be here after I’ve been so lax! Thank you for bearing with me.

I would love to know what kinds of things you’d like to read about. Any old topics I can resurrect for you? New things you’re learning about? What are your thoughts on just everything? It would be good to restart the conversation in a relevant place, but I don’t know exactly where anybody is right now. Any direction you want to go, I’m ready! Anything you’d like to tell me not to do? Saying so will likely make me do that very thing, but go ahead and let me know anyway.

 

Keto Shortbread Christmas Cookies

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Bumping this older recipe to the top, since I made a double batch to take to church tomorrow. Somebody always wants the recipe:

Print Recipe

Keto Shortbread Cookies

An almond-flour alternative to a high-carb treat
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time15 minutes
Course: Dessert
Keyword: keto, low carb, sugar-free
Servings: 12

Equipment

  • 2 cookie sheets
  • 2 sheets of parchment paper
  • 1 large mixing bowl

Ingredients

  • 1.5 cups granulated sweetener such as a monkfruit/erythritol blend
  • 1 stick (half cup) unsalted butter room temperature
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/2 tsp butter extract optional
  • 4 lg eggs
  • 4 cups almond flour
  • 2/3 tsp cream of tartar optional (makes a fluffier cookie)
  • 1/3 tsp baking soda optional (makes a fluffier cookie)
  • 1 pinch salt

Instructions

  • Heat oven to 350℉
  • Cream together the butter and sweetener. Use either a hand mixer or a rubber spatula. I find a spatula is better for this.
  • Add vanilla, eggs, and extracts, and blend well with a hand mixer.
  • In a separate bowl, sift together the almond flour, baking powder, and salt.
  • Fold the dry mixture into the wet mixture.
  • Using a 2 oz scoop, form a dozen cookies per sheet, flattening the cookies with the palm of the hand (food service gloves are helpful here) or the back of a spoon.
  • If desired, top each cookie with a cherry (omit for keto, obviously), macadamia nut, or anything else you can think of!
  • Bake for 15-18 minutes, until just the edges have begun to brown. The cookies will firm up a bit as they cool. Bake one pan at a time for best results.

Notes

You can use a teaspoon of baking powder instead of the cream of tartar and baking soda. Commercial baking powders tend to use cornstarch. I have found one that uses cassava flour, as well.

I’ve shown you our adorable Advent Calendar before, haven’t I?

It’s become an indispensable tradition in our family. Some people just do a piece of candy or a small gift every day, and I have done that in the distant past. But when you are a low-sugar family, and there are eight children, that way of doing things can get unhealthy or expensive in a hurry. So I usually do activities. There is a food thing here and there, and today it was cookies!

I was going to attempt to make these traditional St. Nicholas Speculaas Cookies with a gluten-free flour, but when I mentioned that to the children, they didn’t like the idea. I think it’s OK to deviate from the plan from time to time. I’ve seen so many people stress out about putting food in their mouth that wasn’t perfect. I don’t want to see my kids with that kind of relationship with food. I just want them to know they always have a choice, and that every choice they make leads to the next one. They’ve come to understand that some foods don’t make them feel as good, even if they do provide a very satisfying experience in the mouth.

Kids want to do the best thing for themselves, if you just teach them how to think about it!

So we went to our go-to keto shortbread cookie. It really is every bit as tasty as a sugar and wheat cookie, and without the blood sugar spike and crash later on. Adding the nutmeg and cinnamon would be a very good idea, but I didn’t think to do that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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We’ve got a few minutes between the (lower carb) pumpkin pies coming out of the oven and the big dinner stuff going in, so I wanted to say happy Thanksgiving to my friends on GAH. I am grateful to the Lord for each one of you who stop by and give my words a place to land. I hope that I might be of some use or entertainment to every one of you! May the Lord bless your day, your family gatherings, and your “harvest” this year, even if you don’t technically have a farm. We’re all gathering and reaping something, after all, aren’t we?

What’s a Carnivore Thanksgiving like? Well, many years, I just have the turkey and carnbread stuffing, maybe a little bit of cheese, and a low-carb cranberry sauce. (Recipe coming soon!) This year, I’m probably going to also have some pie. I am at a point in my health that can spend a few HP at holidays and recover pretty quickly. I’ll lose any water weight gain within a few days, and I don’t have any food addiction to combat.

If you do have food addictions, I really, strongly urge you to make it through the day without going face down into a pecan pie. Find low-carb goodies, even if you don’t stick to just meat. Enjoy the family and friends (if you can), and don’t get caught up in wishing you could have things you can’t. Be grateful for what you can have! I don’t want to do the “starving kids in Africa” routine, but do you know how many people would like to have all that ham and turkey, and all they can get is bread or rice or starches? And Lord, have mercy, have you seen what vegans are trying to eat today?

The meat is the food! Have a great time with it!

Our spread is going to be a little bit smaller this year, as the family have been too sick to invite guests or go to anybody else’s house. We’ve got a turkey, of course, and lots of charcuterie, a cheeseball, pork rinds and steak crisps. I may decide to stay carnivore yet, there are so many good choices here! The sides are not all low-carb (sweet potatoes, after all, require marshmallows on this day), but the desserts are more careful, sweetened with monkfruit instead of sugar. I don’t mind letting the kids have some sweet stuff on holidays, but we don’t have to have sugar comas afterwards, do we?

Anyway, I’m going back to the kitchen now. That turkey isn’t going to spatchcock itself. Have a lovely day, friends! I’m grateful for you!

 

Almond Flour Pie Crust

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Especially good for Lemon Meringue or other cold pies.

We had a birthday recently, and the child asked for pie for her treat. We only do desserts, even keto ones, on special occasions, because I like to keep the food plain for daily purposes. One of my sons said recently “My family are such Spartan eaters!” I guess that’s fair, but we have good reasons for it, and good results from it. We do also have some family in Sparta, NC, so…

Anyway, it’s a good thing the child asked for pie, because I didn’t realize I’d never posted a recipe for a crust until went to find my lemon curd recipe. The recipe for Lemon Meringue can be found here. And now the crust recipe, as promised long ago:

Print Recipe

Almond Flour Pie Crust

A grain-free pie crust
Prep Time5 minutes
Cook Time20 minutes
Course: Dessert
Cuisine: Keto
Keyword: gluten-free, keto, low carb, sugar-free
Servings: 8

Ingredients

  • 3 cups almond flour
  • 1/4 cup monk fruit/erythritol sweetener or other desired sweetener, optional
  • 6 tbsp butter cold
  • 1 egg
  • 1 pinch salt

Instructions

  • Heat oven to 325℉
  • Add dry ingredients to food processor and whiz for a second to mix.
  • Add wet ingredients and blend until a ball of dough forms.
  • Divide dough into two parts, then press evenly into two pie pans.
  • Using a fork, prick holes into the dough to prevent bubbling.
  • Bake for 20 minutes, or until golden brown.
  • Either cool or fill while hot, as required by your pie recipe.

Notes

For two whole Lemon Meringue Pies, I quadrupled the linked recipe. It’s a lot of eggs (24), and as with all keto or carnivore things, you’re going to need a lot smaller amounts to feel full.

This pie hadn’t fully cooled yet. A little drippy. Give it a long time in the fridge!

Run Dump: What took you so long?

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That’s what I’d like to know, too!

Welp. I finished my race, so kindly funded by readers and especially one C.W. who boosted the gofundme right over the top in a big way. Thank you so much, my dears!

I got a very pretty finisher medal, and earned the right to wear my Black Bear shirt:

Wave at the nice bear, everybody!

But that is pretty much the only thing I brought home this time.

What took me so long to finally tell you about it?

Well, partly I wanted there to be more of a take-home than “man, that sucked”. It did! Sucked big time! People always want to hear about the victories, right? I don’t have a single victory to tell about, except that I didn’t quit, even though I sorely wanted to. You don’t really want to hear about that, do you?

But also, the big reason I waited so long to tell about the thing is that I couldn’t figure out why. I wanted to be able to explain it, or at least try to.

Why in the world did it take me a full 12 minutes longer to do this half marathon than the last? I would like to know the answer to that, even if it’s not terribly interesting to anybody else. But without something like an answer, at least an educated guess, I’ve just got nothing useful or interesting to report.

I’ve been trying this whole time to figure out what went wrong for me that day. There were a bunch of factors that could be blamed for holding me back. I had very poor sleep, not enough to eat the day before, travel stress (do not stay at the Days Inn in Hendersonville), and a physical condition common to women that does not make running long distances very convenient. But that’s not honestly different from any other race I’ve run. I’ve always found myself at the starting line under less than optimal conditions. It’s just a fallen world, ain’t it?

Was it a mindset thing? I felt doubtful because of some lackluster runs the previous few weeks, frustrated because of a lot of non-athletic things that were coming up, angry at some folks who had really done our family a disservice, already defeated in a hundred ways before I even got there. But none of that should have held me back any more than any other time I’ve had difficulties. Usually, once I start moving, all of that disappears from my mind, and I just go. I don’t go fast, but I do go. I don’t think it was a mindset thing. When I get mad, I put on my running shoes! Physical activity makes me feel better about even the worst experiences, so I couldn’t bring mindset as an answer.

Was it my training? While I did have a little bit of a cold that kept me from training for three important weeks, it honestly wasn’t any more of a detraining than I underwent last year for much more stressful reasons. I was smart and diligent about what training I could do, and I really can’t think that poor training accounts for the absolute disaster I pulled off this year. I’m a year older, sure, but only one year. Diet didn’t change, sleep habits are good, still in very good shape for an old gal, and I don’t skip leg day. Everything should have been as good as it gets for me. I’m very confident in that.

But for some reason, I simply couldn’t go. When the time came to start running, I felt like my body didn’t even belong to me anymore. It didn’t want to do what it usually does. I couldn’t even work up a sweat! (That was actually the clue I missed. I could have saved myself if I’d realized this in-race.) In 13.1 miles, I barely was able to get my heartrate up. I just couldn’t muster a thing.

Nothing hurt. My mood was fine, except for the bewilderment. I didn’t feel tired. My shoes and socks were great! I just…couldn’t. I was flatter than a flitter.

Now, what happened there? Eighteen days later, I finally think I’ve figured it out.

I did a dumb, guys. I did a real boner. 

We all have a turtle inside. I hope my Turtle will forgive me soon.

I have been in the habit of taking salt–up to a half teaspoon with just a little water–before every workout for all of my keto/carnivore years. I often run with a bottle of pickle juice or electrolytes, as well as some plain water. When you run on fat, you burn through a lot more electrolytes than folks who are going through a lot of carbs first. Having enough salt on board is crucial. It has been for me, anyway. Some people don’t seem to have the same level of need that I do.

If you’ve ever read Waterlogged, by Tim Noakes, or done any other kind of research into hydration and exercise, you’ll know that your body can raise its own blood volume when you get dehydrated by releasing salt from your bones. But (and I don’t think Waterlogged expresses this at all adequately) you have to replenish that salt, or eventually your body will just say “Nope, I’m not giving up any more of my precious mineral just so you can go a minute faster per mile today. You’re staying down here on the ground with the mortals.”

As I said before, I couldn’t sweat, which meant I couldn’t safely raise my body heat. My brain just wouldn’t let me go. It wanted me to live, and I wasn’t salted up.

So, how did I get into this saltless state? I usually have a fairly high salt intake just in my food, plenty to keep me going without having to supplement. But I have always dosed extra salt when I want to stay out longer or go harder. It just saves my body having to find its own salt as I sweat. I always feel better during and after a run if I salt up.

I knew when I couldn’t even raise a sweat within the first couple of miles that this run was going to be abysmal. I’ve had a few sweatless runs like that recently. But for some reason, it has taken me this long to realize that not only had I not salted that morning, not even a little bit on my breakfast of boiled eggs, but I had not been intentionally salting for several weeks. During those weeks, as I think I alluded to in a previous post, I had seen a slight decline in my endurance, but I never even made the connection in my mind. Then when I got to the big day, I think I had just run out of sufficient stores to do what I came to do.

My last several runs at home have been equally umphless, except for the last two. The penultimate one, I had eaten a whole lot of bacon before, so that explains that. I usually go out fasted for an ordinary run, but the bacon looked good that day. Very salty.

And then there was today, a pleasant and suddenly inexplicably easy run, at my intended half-marathon pace of 11:30 for five miles. No sweat. Well, actually, a lot of sweat. But no difficulty at all!

What was different about today? Well, today I was listening to a podcast about metabolism while I was preparing for a run, and somebody said the word “salt”. I thought, “Gosh, I really oughta.” So I did. And my run felt normal again, after more than a month of frustratingly declining performance. So, there you have it. I just forgot the most basic thing I already knew about zero-carb running. I ran the last race with a bottle of pickle juice. That is a need for me. And somehow the part of my brain that took care of that need just went to sleep for a couple of months.

But, you know what? I’m never sorry.

I have asked myself if maybe it was a trip I shouldn’t have taken. If maybe I should give up. Maybe God just doesn’t want me doing this. But then I imagined having stayed home, or deciding halfway through the race to give up, or just not lining up to begin with, and you know what?

Regret is far more painful than failure.

I’m glad I kept going. I’m glad I’ve got another finish under my belt. And while I was closer to the rear of things than I wanted to be, I’m glad had a chance to pray over a gal’s injured hamstring. (She beat me to the finish line!) I got to make people laugh and feel better about their plight, similar to mine, of being several miles from the end of something that turned out to be harder than expected. I wonder if God allowed this because he wanted my prayers and my sense of humor to be there for somebody.

I will race again, friends. Next time I will do it with all the salt, and hopefully a lot better circumstances in other ways. I could be wrong about the reason this was so bad, but I really don’t think I am. It was like a light switch being flipped when I dosed the salt this morning.

I’m thinking of a half or even a whole marathon in the spring, so we’ll have opportunity to at least to test the hypothesis. Until then, thanks again so much for making that learning experience possible, friends, by giving to my gofundme. You are truly a blessing, and I pray that God returns each of your kindnesses many times over!