Nourishing Zen

Nourishing YOU. Adventures to Healthy, Happy, and a Fulfilling Life! Food is our medicine.


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Apricot Butter!


For those that have apricot trees, I’m sure there are so many that you don’t know what to do with them!

We recently acquired some from my future in-laws, and as they were sitting in our fridge, I was trying to figure out what exactly to do with all of these yummy fruits…

Of course, my go-to is butter. Who doesn’t love to spread fresh homemade fruit butter onto your toast, pancakes, muffins, waffles, oatmeal or on top of some ice cream! Yum!

Here is the recipe, it is quite simple!

You’ll need:

40-50 small apricots
1 cup organic raw sugar
1.5 cups coconut sugar
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
1 dash ground cloves
1.5 teaspoon lemon juice or apple cider vinegar

How-to:

1. Rinse apricots!

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2. Cut apricots into halves or thirds, remove pits and place into slow cooker.

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3. Add all sugar, spices and lemon juice and stir it in!

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4. Keep stirring until all sugar is mixed in.

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5. Turn slow cooker on low for 8hrs.

6. Once finished, use an emulsifier to blend contents.

7. Take the top off, turn off slow cooker and let it cool for an hour or until room temperature. This will help thicken the consistency.

8. Can, and enjoy as desired!

🙂

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Millions of Peaches…


We recently acquired quite a few peaches from Tom’s dad’s house. Of course I had a lot of ideas of what I could make but unfortunately time doesn’t allow for that many!

My first thought was a peach sauce or jam. I think I shall call it saucy peaches.

It is one of those, throw it together, set it and forget it kind of recipes! Here’s the deal!

You’ll need:

We had 15-20 small, ripe peaches.
Use 8-10 med-large peaches if you’d like as well.
2T water
1-1.5T cinnamon
1t nutmeg
3T of local honey (you can use more depending on the level of your sweet tooth)
Dash of nutmeg
Dash of cloves
2t Apple Cider Vinegar

1. Rinse then cut into small cubes WITH the skin on. Gotta love that fiber!
2. Add to crock pot.
3. Add all other ingredients to pot.
4. Stir to get those spices soaking into the peaches.
5. Set on low for 8hrs. (I like to do this at night so I can wake up to the wonderful smell in the morning!)
6. With a potato masher, mash peaches to the consistency of your liking. You can also use an emulsifier if you’d like also.
7. If you like it sweeter, add more honey!
8. Nom nom. Can it!

I’ve put this into my oatmeal, yogurt, cereal, on top of ice cream, bread, have used it for baking and added it to sauces.

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Sunday Funday Grill Day


We usually spend our Saturdays cleaning, running errands, and of course cooking , grilling and attempting to lounge. Yesterday we bought a ‘Flat Point Beef Brisket’ from #thistlemeats in Petaluma. The Flat Point Brisket cut is generally more lean than your average brisket. It has a hardly any marbling and a fat layer that goes through the cut. Today we are smoking the brisket with a whole chicken.

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We went to Costco today and bought a no-salt rub. Sometimes you just want to take the easy route and buy an already prepared rub. This rub seemed legitimate as all the ingredients listed were herbs that we commonly use and there weren’t tons of preservatives as well. We added (3/4) teaspoon and (1/2) Tablespoon of brown sugar to (1/4) cup of the rub. We applied it to both the brisket and whole chicken.

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We also added fresh oregano thyme and rosemary to the mix as well. We not only inserted the herbs inside the chicken, but also underneath the skin by cutting tiny slits.

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We turned our #traeger to 185 degrees with hickory wood pellets at 1pm. We imagine it will be done by 6-7pm. I cheated and took a sneak peak to take a photo for ya. The chicken is a nice golden brown right now – just wait until the final product! Dark, crispy skin with a great smoke ring/color in the meat. Stay tuned 🙂

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Homemade, Fermented Ketchup


Love this! I will have to include this in our BBQ sauce recipe 🙂

The Domestic Man

It’s funny, but up until recently I assumed there was already a ketchup recipe on my blog. I didn’t discover its absence until I developed Thursday’s recipe (hint: it rhymes with “beet oaf”), when I couldn’t find my recipe online. At first I was confused, and thought the search function of my blog was definitely broken. So…sorry about that, and here you go.

The history of ketchup is pretty awesome. It all started with garum, an ancient fish sauce first used by the Ancient Greeks and later the Romans. It reached Asia some 2,000 years ago via trade routes, and became a staple in many Asian countries, particularly Vietnam (where they later perfected the sauce using anchovies). Vietnamese fish sauce as we know it today entered China about 500 years ago, and the Chinese (particularly those in the Southeast providence of Fujian) spread it around the rest of Asia…

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