This is a super quick and easy way to make your own barbeque sauce. Homemade barbeque sauce is a great way to control your sodium, sugar, and preservative intake. A lot of packaged barbeque sauces contain MSG and high fructose corn syrup, for example. Plus, homemade just tastes fresher. And you can experiment.

The sauce is shown here as White Barbeque Beans, (which are great for packed lunches, by the way) but you can use this sauce for poultry, ribs, as a French fry dip, etc. If you want to use this sauce with white beans, add 3 cans of white beans to your shopping list. And, if you really want to jazz it up, use a couple swoops of bourbon in lieu of the vinegar. Peach Bourbon Barbeque Sauce. Yummy!

Ingredients:

1 can tomato sauce
¼ cup peach preserves (*Note: You can also use fresh peaches, skins removed, and mashed.)
2 tbsp. red onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
3 tbsp. molasses
2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar (or bourbon, if you choose to go that route)
1 tbsp. cumin
1 tbsp. smoked paprika
1 tbsp. brown sugar
1 tsp. fresh thyme, chopped (optional)
olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste

Guidelines:

Chop all of your ingredients.

Sauté the red onion and garlic in a bit of olive oil for a few minutes, just to release their flavors.

Add the remaining ingredients and let simmer for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Serve with whatever suits your fancy.

I haven’t posted a “Brown Bag” lunch recipe in a while, but in attempt to bring the series back, I’m offering you Sundried Tomato Hummus. Hummus is a dip which originated in the Middle East. Its main ingredients are chickpeas (also known as garbanzo beans), tahini (sesame paste), lemon juice, olive oil, and garlic. In this version, I omit the tahini and use smoked sundried tomatoes. I also roast most of the garlic cloves, which gives it a milder, sweeter flavor.

If you’re like me and don’t care for chickpeas, try hummus anyway. The chalky texture of the chickpeas, when combined with the other ingredients, disappears, and you’re left with a dish that’s refreshing yet filling. Plus, it’s healthy! If you’re not a big garlic fan, the roasted garlic is less… offensive. There’s less of a chance that you’ll return from lunch and stink up your workplace.

This dip is great served with flatbread (such as pita), and/or fresh veggies. For the brown bag lunch, place several large spoonfuls in a Tupperware container, and send along a baggie with whatever you choose to dip in it. My suggestions: whole wheat pita cut into triangles, baby carrots, cucumber, red and/or green peppers, and olives.

Ingredients:

3 cans garbanzo beans
3 oz. smoked sundried tomatoes (I find these in a bag in the produce aisle near the fresh tomatoes.)
6 cloves roasted garlic (see method below)
2 cloves raw garlic (optional)
handful of fresh parsley, chopped (3-4 tbsp.)
6 tbsp. olive oil
8 tbsp. lemon juice
salt
½ - 1 cup water, for thinning

How to make Roasted Garlic:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the unpeeled garlic cloves in a small baking dish. (Ramekins work perfect.) Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover with foil. Bake for 35- 40 minutes, or until a fork slides easily through the cloves. Let cool, then squeeze the garlic out.

Sundried Tomato Hummus Guidelines:

Rinse and drain the garbanzo beans.

If your sundried tomatoes are whole, coarsely chop. If they are already sliced, you’re good to go.

In a food processor, combine all of the ingredients, starting with the ½ cup water and adding more as needed, and process until smooth. The mixture should be grainy, but not chunky. If your food processor is small, you will have to blend the ingredients in batches. It’s more time consuming, but it works fine, I promise!

Cover and refrigerate. Mix before serving.

My friend Chris recently asked me if making granola was hard. I told her no, and to prove it, I’m posting a recipe here for her to try.

But first, let me ask you all this: have you ever looked at the nutritional label on a box of standard granola? Loaded with fat and sugar, right? No wonder you feel like a lead weight after eating a bowl of it. I make mine a bit different. While most recipes I’ve seen call for butter and brown sugar, I use olive oil and honey. The key to these two ingredients is quality. You don’t want to use a bitter or rancid tasting olive oil. Most standard supermarket brands are, in my opinion, inadvisable, but maybe you have one that you can recommend to me. Personally, I buy my olive oil from Trader Joes. I like their Extra Virgin Kalamata, as well as the Extra Virgin Santini’s. Both have a very clean, fresh flavor. I’m not an expert on olive oil by any means, but I do know that it’s heart healthy, and extra virgin is the best. Extra virgin is like the green tea of olive oil, which means that it undergoes very little processing. Also, you used to always hear that Italian olive oil was the way to go. That’s not so true now. Many fine olive oils are being produced all over the world, including Spain, Greece, and California. Don’t rule them out.

Now, for a short bit about honey. More and more, honey is being touted for its health benefits. Again, I like to use my ingredients in their purest form, which in this case is raw honey. I’m not sure if you can buy raw honey at your supermarket, but a health food store or a farmer’s market might carry it. If not, and you don’t know of a specialty store, or a beekeeper in your area, the usual pasteurized will do.

So, what about those health benefits? Honey is loaded with antioxidants. What does that mean? Antioxidants protect your cells from damage by free radicals. Free radicals are created when molecules split—during normal metabolic processes, or precipitated from environmental pollutants–leaving an unpaired electron. That odd electron goes searching for another electron to gain stability. This process leads to cell damage, which plays a role in diseases like cancer, and aging. Antioxidants lend those free radials an electron, so they don’t steal one from elsewhere in your body. I’m not a doctor, so don’t quote me on that, but that’s my understanding anyway. Pretty cool, huh? In this capacity, honey has been shown to possess cancer-preventing and anti-tumor properties.

Honey has also been shown to lower cholesterol, help in the absorption of calcium, and nourish the skin and hair. And that’s just to get started. But this is becoming long, so if you’re interested, I encourage you to do some research on your own.

I’ve read that honey is sweeter than sugar, and to use less, about half, what you would sugar. I find this untrue. To me, honey tastes less sweet than sugar, which is part of what I like about it. Or maybe it’s just a different sweetness? In any event, I substitute straight across–one for one. But, obviously, do what you like.

And now for that recipe!

Dried Fruit and Almond Granola

Ingredients:
3 cups old-fashioned oats
½ cup sliced raw almonds
½ cup raw sunflower seeds
¾ cup unsweetened shredded coconut
1 tsp. allspice
1 tsp. cinnamon
¼ cup raisins
¼ cup dried cranberries
¼ cup dried apricots, diced
1/3 cup honey
¼ cup olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

2. Mix first 6 ingredients in a large bowl. Toss well.

3. In a small saucepan, warm olive oil and honey until liquid. Pour over ingredients in bowl, and toss to coat.

4. Spread mixture on a cookie sheet and bake 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

5. Add dried fruit to mixture on cookie sheet, mix well, then bake for another 10 minutes or until golden brown. Watch carefully and stir often during this last process.

6. Remove from oven. Let cool thoroughly. Store in airtight container for up to 2 weeks.

My husband takes this in his lunch every day and puts it in his yogurt. You could, of course, eat it as cereal, or straight out of the container. Another idea? Try it on salads! It adds a nice crunch and a slight sweetness. Experiment with different fruit and nut combinations, too. Option: dried blueberries, cherries and cashews.

Now tell me, how easy is that?

Sack lunches always have to have a main element, don’t they? Peanut butter and jelly. Turkey on wheat. Instant noodles. Soup. Leftovers that no one wanted to eat. In this house, we’ve been through them all. I don’t recall when or how I came up with the concept of burritos, but they are easy to make, and you can prepare large batches, freeze them, and have instant lunch for several weeks. Even if you don’t have a microwave at work or school, there are some burritos, or wraps as you may want to call them, that are good cold. Just be sure to thoroughly thaw any that you won’t be heating!

What I like about burritos, or wraps, is the fact that the tortilla is so versatile. More so than bread? I think so. You can put sandwich type items, like ham and swiss, inside a tortilla, but try and put ground beef and beans between two slices, and you’re instantly screwed. You can wrap a tortilla in a nice, tight bundle. Bread is just bread—two floppy slices of grain. Yes, the tortilla trumps all. Wahahahaha.

I can envision countless possibilities for the lunch burrito. Unfortunately, my husband is stuck on two—the taco burrito and barbeque chicken and cheddar. He’s been eating these for a year plus now and hasn’t tired of them. Ah, well. I must be thankful for that, even if it doesn’t allow me to branch out much.

Here is a full list of the burritos I’ve made, however. Maybe one or two, or all!, will spark your interest. I’m also including the recipe for the taco burrito and the barbeque chicken and cheddar, as they are the easiest and will please almost anyone. All right, here we go.

Can you name all the sweets you’ve bought for you, or your kid’s, lunch? Cookies are the good ole stand-by. Chips O’hoy, Mother’s Iced Oatmeal, Oreo. Remember E.L. Fudge? Those elf shaped treats with creamy chocolate filling? Or Grasshoppers? What else? Help me out here…

Venturing out of cookiedom, what about Little Debbie treats? Oatmeal Crème Pies, Star Crunch Cosmic Snacks, Swiss Cake Rolls, or, my personal favorite, Nutty Bars. In middle school, a friend and I went through a phase of buying school lunches because they’d added a salad bar. We’d combine our two dollars, buy one heaping plate of salad to share, then buy two Nutty Bars afterwards. Those little wafers with peanut butter filling and a chocolate coating remained my favorite treat for years. And years. I ate them for snacks in college, holed up in the library between classes, studying furiously because I worked thirty + hours a week on top of a full-time course load. Ah, yes, Nutty Bars and apples sustained me in that broke, sleep deprived, fifteen hundred miles away from home, and running on empty way. But that’s another story…

And who could forget the world of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and HoHos, among the other Hostess snacks? This is a line I never got into. I’m sure I’ve eaten a Twinkie. Who hasn’t right? But I couldn’t tell you what a Ding Dong or HoHo tastes, or even looks, like. Did they have these in Colorado in the 80s? I’d say I feel deprived, except I don’t. I’ve never been a good sweets eater. In fact, my favorite “cookie” is the Fig Newton. No joke. My husband only likes them because they are filling, but me? Give me whole wheat raspberry or the original, and I’m good to go.

But eschew all of those! The point of these brown bag lunch explorations is to not buy processed foods. So this week, instead of all the above mentioned snacks, try this out:

Ah, that old paper sack. Growing up it was a badge of honor, a symbol that said: My parents make my lunch for me, so I don’t have to eat the slimy cafeteria crap. And then came high school, the fast food phase. Then college, the starve yourself because you have to buy books, and beer, phase. You never imagined that once you were out in the working world you’d come to rely on that old brown bag again, did you? Let’s face it, eating out every day is, for most of us, financially irresponsible, and it’s not always possible to run home for lunch, especially in places where commuting is a way of life. So, yes, we sack our lunches like six-year-olds. And eat about as well as we did back then. Cookies, chips, two pieces of bread with meat in between, fruit we only sometimes eat. And while that may be better for you than a double cheeseburger, we can certainly do better, can’t we? In terms of health, and taste, and, if nothing else, variety. So whether you’re a forty-year-old construction worker, or a mother making lunch for her kids, here is the first in a series of ideas on how to eat healthier during the day, and add some variety to your otherwise mundane lunch.