Nothing quite welcomes the fall like a hot pumpkin scone drizzled with frosting.  But who has the time?  Or the four bucks you’d have to shell out at a café?   This recipe gives you loads of taste along with the convenience of being able to mix them up and freeze them for later baking.

Honestly, I’ve made this recipe ahead of time and also baked it right away, and I actually think the freezing improves the quality of the taste.  The pre-frozen version turns out moister and with a nice melding of pumpkin and spice flavors.

If you’d like a fresh baked scone or two on a daily basis, simply use your toaster oven to save energy and bake a smaller batch.  You can even cut them into mini-scones to give your children for breakfast.  I usually skip the frosting, but you new moms may need those extra calories for the hard work of motherhood!

Another note: If you mix up the dry ingredients for these scones and scoop them into a decorative jar or Zip-Lock bag, you can give the mix as a hostess gift.  Simply print out the recipe and include it.  You might even place it in a basket with a can of organic pumpkin and decorate it with some orange ribbons and fall leaves!

Starbucks Pumpkin Scones

Ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 7 Tablespoons sugar
• 1 Tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 6 Tablespoons cold butter
• 1/2 cup canned pumpkin
• 3 Tablespoons half-and-half
• 1 large egg

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Lightly oil a baking sheet or line with parchment paper. (Skip this step if you’re planning on freezing them)
2. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and spices in a large bowl. Mix cold butter into the dry ingredients until mixture is crumbly and no large chunks of butter are obvious. Set aside.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together pumpkin, half and half, and egg. Mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients. Form the dough into a ball.
4. Pat out dough onto a lightly floured surface and form it into a 1-inch thick circle.  Use a large knife or a pizza cutter to slice the dough into six scones. Place on prepared baking sheet and freeze them. Once they’re frozen solid, store them in a freezer bag.
5. When you’re ready for a hot scone, place the frozen triangle on a lightly greased cookie sheet and allow to thaw for just as long as it takes to preheat the oven to 425 degrees.  When the oven is ready, let them bake for about 13-15 minutes.
6. Optional: Frost with sugar glaze or spiced glaze.

Powderered Sugar Glaze

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 Tablespoon powdered sugar
• 2 Tablespoons whole milk

Spiced Glaze

• 1 cup plus 3 Tablespoons powdered sugar
• 2 Tablespoons whole milk
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 pinch ginger
• 1 pinch ground cloves

I recently made a double batch of these before my in-laws arrived.  The next morning I popped them into the oven and served them fresh scones without a care.  My son also fell in love with them and now he has a few dozen mini scones in the freezer for me to pull out now and then for a hot breakfast treat.  I hope you enjoy these as much as we do!

I would like to interrupt our regularly-scheduled updates on cloth diapers and organic buntings to make a very important announcement to our Portland readers: Café Yumm is now open downtown! (Don’t live anywhere near Portland, Oregon? Keep reading. . . .)

Joy, over in our Eugene office, wrote a Café Yumm post last year in which she describes how she duplicates the café’s famous “Yumm bowls” in her own kitchen, thus satisfying her voracious husband and son with nutritious and cheap beans and rice. She later reveals the secret to making beans and rice even more delicious: Yumm Sauce. Here’s how to Make Yumm Sauce at home. (Incidentally, this is one of the Green Baby Guide’s most popular posts ever!)

So check out the Café Yumm website—or visit them in person at 1806 SW 6th Avenue in Portland. Look here for a list of all of their locations.

Waffle cravings on a gluten-free diet? No problem. With more and more pregnant and breastfeeding mothers swearing off gluten, we felt obligated to come to the rescue with this recipe from the Gluten-free Gourmand. Sure, you could buy a gluten-free waffle mix, but what makes all of the concoctions from this blogger special is the way she plays with flour combinations to get each recipe perfect. Once you have an array of gluten-free flours at your disposal, you’ll be able to whip up just about anything without wheat. Try it and let us know what you think!

Image from the Gluten-free Gourmand

Easy Gluten-free Dairy-free Waffles

Mix in a medium bowl:

1 cup white rice flour
2 Tbsp sorghum flour
1 Tbsp tapioca flour
1 Tbsp potato flour
2 Tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder

Heat your waffle iron.
In another medium bowl, beat thoroughly:

2 eggs

Add:

1 1/2 cup coconut milk
2 Tbsp canola oil
1/2 tsp vanilla

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.  When the waffle iron is hot, lightly spray it with oil and spoon or pour a serving of batter onto the iron and cook until the waffle starts releasing less steam.  Serve hot.

For more waffle recipes from the Gluten-free Gourmand (including a gluten-free buckwheat waffle and a gluten-free corn waffle recipe), look here.

Have pureed yams forever ruined your baby’s pinstriped pajamas? No worries! With a little persistence, ingenuity, (and possibly vinegar) the garment might just be restored to its original brilliance.

Of course with all of the below stains, the best option is to quickly wet and pre-treat the item so that the stain doesn’t have a chance to dry. If it is dried without your knowing, you can still give the following remedies a try!

Try these simple tricks for specific stains:

• Berries: Boil water, stretch the garment tight over a pan, exposing the stain. Then pour the very hot water down over the stain. If that doesn’t work try mixing vinegar and toothpaste to remove the stain.
• Blood: First soak the clothing in cold salt water and then rub with detergent. If that doesn’t work try applying dish soap, letting it sit for a bit, rinsing thoroughly and letting it dry in the sun.
• Feces: Wash and then let the stain be naturally bleached out by sunlight. If that doesn’t do the trick, try Nature’s Miracle Stain Remover.  There’s no need to use bleach with cloth diapers!
• Grass: First work in some rubbing alcohol and then allow it to dry. Afterwards treat it with detergent and rinse with cold water. If none of those things work, try Bac-Out or Nature’s Miracle Stain Remover.
• Mustard: Mix rubbing alcohol with dish soap and rub into the stain.
• Tomato Sauce: Rub dish soap or dishwasher detergent into the stain and then run cold ice over the stain. Repeat multiple times until the stain works itself out. (I have to share that I managed to cover myself in spaghetti sauce at a lovely restaurant while dining without my children. After many applications of dish soap and ice, the stains came out completely even though they were dried into my clothes.)

What are your favorite stain removal tricks? Do you have any recipes for a homemade stain pre-treatment? Are there stain removal victories you’d like to share?

Here’s a tip that’s literally green: Drink green iced tea this summer! Piggybacking on Joy’s recent postpartum weight loss posts, I thought I’d share my latest health secret. Studies [that I am too lazy to cite at the moment] have shown that drinking five glasses of green tea a day can help you lose weight. Not only does green tea pack in more antioxidants than black tea, it acts as an appetite suppressant.

For me, drinking five glasses of green tea a day is no problem. I simply switched from black iced tea (which I raved about last summer) to green. Iced tea is cheaper than Coke, not to mention better for you. If you make it yourself, you won’t have bottles and cans to recycle afterward.

You can make sun tea or steep six teaspoons loose tea (five bags or so) in a couple cups of boiling water, then dilute with about 1.5 liters of cold water.

As for the miracle weight loss, I will have to report back at the end of the summer.

Perhaps you’ve already read our new book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide: Down-to-Earth Ways for Parents to Save Money and the Planet.   Maybe you’ve discovered the homemade baby food recipes included in the book and have spend hours whirling up delicious concoctions.  With minimal effort you’ve saved money, packaging, and carbon emissions by preparing healthy purees for your little one.  Now you deserve some brownies!

Steal a few frozen cubes of whirled up nutrition and slip them into this yummy recipe!  I’ve tried this on family and friends always with great results.  No one realizes that these are healthier than your standard brownie because the coffee and cocoa make them just as decadent.

Baby Food Brownies

Ingredients

• 1/4 Cup melted butter or margarine
• 2/3  Cup baking cocoa
• 1/2  Cup whole wheat flour
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2  Cup sugar
• 1/4 Cup brown sugar
• 2/3 cup baby food puree (pumpkin, sweet potato, squash, or yam)
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 tsp instant coffee powder

Directions

Melt butter and cool. Then simply mix all ingredients together thoroughly. Spread mixture into a greased eight inch square pan.  Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes or until brownies are slightly firm.  Enjoy!

Have you been asking yourself lately, “What do Joy and Rebecca have to say about celebrating an eco-friendly Valentine’s Day?”?  Well, you’re in luck because today’s post highlights some of our fascinating thoughts on this very subject.

First, there’s Joy’s Valentine’s brownie recipe. Not only will it woo the health-conscious chocolate lover in your life, these treats are guaranteed to cost less than a foil-covered box of chocolates.

Would you like to celebrate without shelling out hundreds of dollars for tickets, dinners, and diamonds? Readers weigh in with cheap, green date ideas.

Finally we have a few ideas for homemade Valentines. Potato print valentines are perfect if you need to mass-produce some cards for a child’s class. In our last-minute eco-friendly valentines post, we discuss how to make Valentines out of organic materials . . . such as rocks. Or perhaps you would like to know how to make a paper heart valentine—we reveal our paper-cutting secrets. (Strange fact: That post happens to be our most popular post of all time!)

Here’s to a happy Valentine’s Day!

One of the first natural baby food cookbooks to hit the mainstream, Super Baby Food, is still enjoying relative fame.  I was thrilled to find the first edition in its purple cover in a pile of garage sale books and happily paid a quarter to make it mine.

I eagerly rushed home and began reading, but found myself disappointed.  The book is loosely organized, full of anecdotes and often difficult to follow.  Although it’s over 500 pages long, there are really only about thirty critically important pages of information to read.

To be fair, I do love those thirty pages. Ruth Yaron challenges our ideas of traditional baby food by offering up other ingredients for home-blended meals.  She explains how to whirl up vegetables and fruits in your blender and then dump it into ice cube trays to freeze and store.  As baby gets older, she has tips for including egg yolk, beans, kale, and a variety of other healthy foods into a “super porridge” that can be inexpensively prepared.

Yager also has some fun recipes for toddler foods including tofu McNuggets, nutty millet pancakes and peanut butter pudding.   The creativity in food presentation and delivery are pretty remarkable as well.  For example, she recommends spreading a slice of bread with peanut butter and then wrapping it around a whole banana as a creative vegan hot dog.

It’s also fascinating that Yager’s children have been quite healthy based on their rich diet of whole grains, greens, and hearty proteins.  She insists that while most children are sick between six to twelve times a year, her family faces illness once or twice at most.

As a working mom with limited time, I found the book to be heavily layered with irrelevant details and tough to weed through. For example, in the middle of the arts and crafts section she goes into great detail about using zip lock bags, adult sized socks and duct tape to avoid purchasing snow boots.  On the same page she gives directions for shining patent leather shoes with petroleum jelly. I’m not sure either of those things even needs to be in a baby food book.  To be fair, I haven’t read the second edition which may have edited some of the cumbersome tidbits out.

Is it worth buying?  If you’re interested in making your own baby food for economic, health and environmental reasons it’s a good resource, but I would recommend checking it out from the library or picking it up secondhand.  I’ll be sending my copy out to a lucky reader who will be able to read the book for herself and develop her own opinion.  Simply comment by February 12th to be entered in our giveaway!

Have you read Super Baby Food?  Did you find it be a valuable resource?  Do you make your own food at home?

Now some of you have children who will willingly eat the family meal, spinach and all.  Well done!  I would love to know how you did it.  My three year old won’t be receiving specialized cuisine for the rest of his life but for now it makes mealtime infinitely easier.  Simply listing out a few ideas for breakfasts, lunches and dinners and then posting it has made life so much easier.   It means that we don’t have to think in the morning after a horrid night with the baby and that we can be sure to have items on hand for kid-friendly meals.

Before we tried this simple tip, we spent a lot of time standing before an open fridge trying to think of healthy combinations for our son.  Also, we made the mistake of listing several choices for him each meal as if we were catering to a very demanding customer.  Now we put his meal before him and find that he’s far more willing to try it.

Our son helped us come up with the list and buy some of the items that we needed to have on hand.  It helps him be involved in mealtime beforehand so that he’s less likely to balk when the meal is placed before him.

Breakfast

• Homemade cocoa-oatmeal, peanut butter and banana
• Cereal and milk, soft boiled egg
• Toasted bagel with peanut butter and raisins, frozen blueberries
• Cottage cheese, apple slices and peanut butter

Lunch

• Peanut butter and honey sandwich, carrot sticks, raisins
• Tortilla roll up with cream cheese and ham, cut into slices, edamame
• Cheese slices, crackers, garbanzo beans with dipping sauce
• Cheese sandwich, dried mango slices, dried seaweed (nori)

Dinner

• English muffin cheese pizza, frozen peas, blueberry smoothie
• Whole wheat pasta with tomato sauce, garbanzo beans
• Yumm bowl, apple slices
• Cheese quesadilla, lima beans, dipping sauce

I know this isn’t gourmet fare, but it’s nice to have a list of a few meal ideas to get us going. Do you have other favorite meal choices that your child loves?  Please share!

My days of ruining a perfectly good avocado to create a vegan, raw “pudding” are far behind me. From now on, it’s back to the basics: nice old-fashioned chocolate pudding. Why are we talking about nice old fashioned chocolate pudding here on the Green Baby Guide? Well, kids do like pudding, and it’s a fairly healthful dessert if you’re of the mindset that milk and eggs are good for you (as I am!). Also, when you make pudding from scratch instead of using a mix or buying it from in little plastic tubs, you’re avoiding chemical additives and excess packaging.

So, without further ado, here is my pudding recipe, adapted from the Betty Crocker cookbook:

Homemade Chocolate Pudding

1/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 cups milk
2 large egg yolks, slightly beaten
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. Mix sugar, cornstarch, salt, and cocoa in a saucepan. Stir in milk. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. Boil and stir one minute.
2. Gradually add half of the hot mixture into the egg yolks, then stir that back into the saucepan. Boil and stir one minute, then remove from heat. Add vanilla.
3. Pour pudding into four dessert dishes and refrigerate.

Joy makes pudding in the microwave, which would use less energy than the stovetop method. Just cook and stir until thickened!

If you have leftovers, or if your pudding turns out runnier than you’d like, you can just freeze it in popsicle molds and you have homemade pudding pops. Enjoy!