Are you ready for the holiday season, where the turkey isn’t the only thing that gets stuffed?    I have a confession to make:  I have a serious sweet tooth. I adore ice cream.  Pretty sure a bowl a day is literally in my genes.  Pumpkin pie, Christmas cookies, and oh! Grandma’s apple pie make me weak in the knees (and weak in dietary discipline!).  I really like being able to say, “This dessert is healthy…almost.”

White sugar aside (although I know that’s a nasty culprit for disease), some desserts really can be “almost healthy” if they have the right ingredients. Whole wheat pastry flour pie crust made with lard, butter or coconut oil, pumpkin and pastured eggs?  Health food.  Do you have a dessert recipe to link up with healthy fats?

• Healthy Fruit Pizza
• Walnut-oat Pie Crust

Fat Makes you Full, not Fat

The medical community would like you to eat dry toast, salads with fat-free dressing (or no dressing) and steamed veggies with nothing on them but a little pepper.  I say, bring on the fats!  It’s a Fat Full Fall, after all.

This is from RealAge.com, not a super academic site, but I have seen the info corroborated elsewhere:

Eating a small amount of healthy unsaturated fat — think olive oil, nuts, avocado, and fish — before a meal triggers a chain reaction in your digestive system that slows the rate at which your stomach empties, which means you feel fuller faster. It also helps keep your blood sugar levels from spiking after your meal and makes it easier for your body to absorb fat-soluble nutrients, such as vitamins A, D, E, and K, as well as lycopene and lutein.

It doesn’t take much: Just 70 calories worth will do the trick. That’s about 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil, 6 walnuts, 10 almonds, 1/4 of a medium avocado, or 2 ounces of smoked salmon.

So make your appetizers or salads fatty!  I’m willing to venture that saturated fat has the same effect, but it’s not PC to say that.  I haven’t been PC since I was an infant, so I’ll say it!  Eat fat before your meal.  Mmmm.  I make my own dressings with extra virgin olive oil, a healthy fat.  It’s just one way I make my salads count.  It’s always great to see avocados on sale, and I’ve been able to serve Homemade Guacamole before the meal recently.  A handful of nuts while I’m preparing dinner sounds just great, too.  Maybe you have a recipe to link up that can be eaten before the meal?

Fat That’s IN Stuff

So many bread-based recipes have a good deal of fat in them.  If you’ve got one with healthy fats, link up!  Here are some of mine, mostly using coconut oil, butter or lard:

• Banana Flax Muffins
• Homemade Granola and Granola bars
• Almond Power Bars
• Homemade Biscuits
• Whole Grain Cornbread
• Homemade Tortillas

What to do About Dairy?

We switched to full fat dairy last December, and we haven’t gained a pound (except for the ones who are still growing vertically as well!).  God made the milk as a complete package, and I’m not separating it anymore.  See this post on Full Fat Diary and the accompanying Monday Mission for more.

My recipe this week is my favorite soup ever, a Cream of Potato/Vegetable Soup, made even better now by the inclusion of whole milk and real butter.

What is a Healthy Fat?

Your recipes should include/feature:

• coconut oil
• butter
• ghee
• lard
• tallow
• eggs
• cream
• whole milk/dairy
• olive oil
• avocado
• peanut butter
• flax

Unhealthy fats include:  vegetable oil, Crisco/shortening, corn oil, margarine, soybean oil, any hydrogenated oil, any fat less than 100 years old

Guidelines for Participating

If you’re reading this in an email or reader, be sure to click over to the actual website.  That’s the only way you can benefit from ALL the great recipes from other bloggers (even though some will show up in your email).

If you’re not a blogger, but you have a great recipe, feel free to share it in the comments section. Thank you in advance for contributing to what I hope will be a great resource for all of us!

• Do link back to the carnival so your readers can benefit from the wealth of recipes.  Here is an easy-to-cut-and-paste line for you if you’d like to use it:
  Visit Kitchen Stewardship for more Healthy Fat Recipes as part of the October Fest Carnival of Super Foods.
  
• If it’s more frugal to make your recipe at home than to purchase it (and it usually is!), point it out.  People love cost comparisons, like:  “I save at least $200 a year making my own yogurt.”
• You may click on and save the image above to display in your post (but you’re certainly not required to).
• Feel free to link up old posts – who am I to exclude the best super food recipe in the world just because you posted it last year?
• If you have an old post to share, the carnival can be an easy “new” post for the day – just write a post linking to the carnival and to your old post, and you have “something new” to say that day.  See how I did this with my homemade chicken stock for two new carnivals here.  (I don’t expect this; it’s just an added bonus option.)
• You’re welcome to share more than one post!
• Take the time to click on other recipes, leave comments, Stumble/Digg/Tweet about the carnival.  More traffic for the carnival is more traffic for you!

Previous Carnivals: I’ve been so impressed with the past weeks’ entries.  If you’ve missed any, catch up now:

• October 1:  Bean (legume) Recipes
• October 8:  Broth Recipes (Soups plus some alternate uses for broth!)
• October 15:  Super Foods Recipes
• October 22:  Un-Processed Foods
  

“All Done” Carnivals

This is the final October Fest Carnival of Super Foods.  *sniff*  I’ve been overwhelmed (in a good, warm fuzzy sort of way) with all the contributions.  We started with over 60 bean recipes, and I can’t wait to see what happens tonight.  My apologies for how LONG it takes me to get to visit everyone (and some bean folks I have never gotten to, so sad).  Here are some ideas for a weekly carnival that I’d LOVE feedback on:

1. Monday Mission Accomplished: a Monday linky for posts about any previous Monday Mission and how it played out in your household.
2. Tuesday Traditions: Anything related to traditional food, traditions of the Church, family traditions.
3. Mid-Week Research Notes: Link up on Wednesday any post that includes research (doesn’t have to be about food).
4. Thursday Stewards of our Resources: Any post about being a good steward of the four pillars of KS:  nutrition, environment, time and budget.

Humor me with a comment on these ideas, please.  I appreciate the help!  The carnival would not begin until January, whatever the final decision ends up being.

• Bloggers, which would you be most likely to participate in?
• Readers, which would you find most interesting to see week after week?

Win Coconut Oil!

By entering a recipe in the carnival or including one in the comments, you get an extra entry for a 32 oz. jar of Tropical Traditions Gold Label Organic Virgin Coconut Oil, a $27.50 value.  Click HERE to go to the giveaway, and more info on the benefits of coconut oil by Saturday morning at the latest (hubby’s out at a hockey game Friday night, so I can write!).

Kelly the Kitchen Kop is giving away even more fat than me – 5 gallons of beef tallow (I can taste the french fries now!).

Link Your Healthy Fats Recipes HERE!

Enter your recipe and link(s) in the form below (see example).  My husband created this very cool plug-in so you can leave an anecdotal description of your recipe to tempt folks to click over to you.  *Thanks, honey!*  Your name @ website will link to your mainpage, and the title of your recipe links to the permalink for that recipe.  NOTE: If you refresh the page to see new entries, DON’T click “resend” for your information or your recipe will show up twice.  Thanks!

If you make a mistake, just do it again correctly and I can delete the incorrect version.  By the way, I can also blow away any links to recipes that don’t fit the theme or don’t fit the mission of Kitchen Stewardship (i.e., nutritious).

Thanks so much for participating!

Have you enjoyed October Fest?  More good stuff where that came from -  Sign up for an email subscription or grab my reader feed.

If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.

Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money.  If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.

TIME TO CLOSE OUT THE LINKY WHEN I GET MORE SPAM THAN RECIPES.    YOU CAN STILL ADD RECIPES IN THE COMMENTS SECTION!

[kslinky id="6" closed="true"]