Brownies For Breakfast

Today I'm talking with Lynne Bowman, author of Brownies For Breakfast. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00

You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Good morning, Ms. Lynn Bowman. How are you?  Well, like you.  I'm ready to roll, but  prepared for all kinds of crazy stuff today. How about you, Mary? It's already been crazy stuff. Lynn and I have been trying to get Zoom to work for last 10 minutes. We are not technically broken.

00:29

but you would think we didn't know anything about technology.  Well,  to me, it's always the fault of the UX engineers. Always. It's not my fault. We'll blame it on them.  Okay. So  today I am talking with Lynn Bowman  and she is the author of Brownies for Breakfast. And the reason I wanted to talk to Lynn  is because my kids used to get brownies for breakfast two days after their birthdays. I made them brownies for their birthdays.

00:59

A swell way to celebrate.  my brownies are as brownie as brownie gets.  Difference is, Mary, they are made with no sugar.  They are made with pumpkin,  nut butter, cocoa,  let's see,  baking soda, eggs or egg substitute if you don't eat eggs,  and know, salt, couple other little things, cinnamon.

01:27

But it's all whole food, good food, real food.  And I guarantee when you set them down in front of people, they will look exactly like a quote, real brownie because they are real.  Then what happens is somebody eats them and they go, oh my gosh, that's the best brownie I ever ate. is a,  just don't ever tell them there's no sugar in them.  Because when you do that, they go, oh, no thanks.  Right?

01:58

Yeah.  But there is  something called Alulose in them. Terrible name, terrible name,  wonderful product. It's real food. It's one ingredient.  Uh, it doesn't give you tummy ache. It doesn't leave a funny aftertaste.  And that's what I want everybody to know about. There is a way you can quit sugar because yes, you need to, you know, you need to.

02:25

You can quit sugar  if you  have a couple of tools like one, Alulose. You will never miss sugar if you have it.  have to look this Alulose up because I listened to your interview with Amy Fagan on Grown It in Maine and you mentioned it on her podcast too.  I meant to look up Alulose yesterday. I got busy and didn't do it. So shame on me. Shame on you. You did not do your homework, girl. I didn't.

02:53

It was terrible. I'm sorry.  But you know what?  And I know I sound a little crazy granny here because yes, I am.  having  spent most of my life,  nearly all of my adult life trying to stay healthy and on my feet and may I say succeeding,  I know some stuff about how to eat  really well if you're diabetic, if you're trying to avoid chronic disease.

03:22

If you don't want to carry around extra weight, all the things, if you don't want to have heart disease, if you do have heart disease, all the things are really not complicated to deal with if you know a few things about how to eat. Really easy. You probably already know, but are you doing them? Real food, whole food, mostly plants. You can eat some other stuff, but mostly plants. Okay? Work together. Oh yeah.

03:52

I love a good salad. I do. And  I absolutely love like steamed broccoli and steamed green beans and steamed  whatever green veggie there is.  okay, but what I'm talking about too is sneaky vegetables. You know, vegetables that don't come onto the table screaming, Hi, I'm a vegetable. I'm good for you.  I like things that come onto the table like my brownies going, there's some vegetables in here, but don't worry about it.

04:20

Oh, like, like covert veggies. Kind of. Yeah. And if you've got children, the way of course to get kids to eat veggies is to have the kids  raise the veggies. If you have any dirt, if you have pots, they love growing vegetables. Two,  having the kids cook  themselves,  you know, with their own little darling hands,  starting very, very young. If they cook it, they'll eat it.  But

04:48

The recipes in my book, a lot of them  are,  they're vegetable forward recipes, but they're not  salads, particularly, you they're not like a bunch of raw vegetables with some stuff on it.  They're,  mean, here's  soups. Let's talk for a minute about soups.  Um, Americans don't eat soup. Do you eat soup? Oh, I make, I make soup, let alone eat. Yeah. Good. Okay. That's great. Because it's a super way to.

05:18

Eat up what you have to use what's in the fridge to not waste food and to take what you have and make it something fabulous and then turn it into something a little different every day without a big deal. mean, my superpower, if I have one, was making dinner in 15 minutes. know, I'd come, like moms do now, you'd come screaming home with people yelling and dogs barking and the phone ringing and everything. And you needed to have something on the table.

05:47

Although now, now  so many parents  and people, other people  are driving through, right? So that's your dinner. You have a bag of stuff. Okay. So, but back in the day I would drive home and in 15 minutes I had to have a meal on the table. So  that's where I'm coming from is  simple,  easy, fast, cheap, but healthy. Yep. Absolutely.

06:17

And I know that you've done a whole lot of talking on a whole lot of podcasts about this whole topic. So what I really wanted to ask you about, and I want to preface this with the fact that I am not a doctor of medicine, and I'm assuming you are not a doctor of medicine.

06:34

I am a grandma.  exactly.  So I just want the listeners to know that neither one of us are doctors of medicine, but we're both grandmas. think Lynn has more experience with it than I do, but that's okay. What I want to talk about really is food is wonderful, but food can also be really difficult for people. And you're one of them. The reason you wrote the book is because you have type two diabetes. Is that right? Right. That's right. Yeah.

07:02

And you said that you had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes.  And they told you that you had a high likelihood of,  there's a word developing, developing diabetes as a, you know, later in life.  And I looked that up this morning and yeah, 50 % of women who get gestational diabetes  are prone to diabetes in later life. I didn't know that. And I want to tell the story real quick. And then I have things  I want to ask you about. My, my, one of my sons,

07:32

was nine pounds, 12 ounces effort. And I brought him in for his checkup and I was good, he was good. We were both really healthy. Went in the elevator to leave the hospital and another OB-GYN walked in. The elevator took one look at my son and said, I don't know you and I don't wanna be rude, but I have a question. And I was like, what? And he said,

07:59

Did you have gestational diabetes with this one? And I'm like, I've never had gestational diabetes. We're all good. He said, how can he be so big? I said, well, I lived on veggies  and meat the entire pregnancy. And he was like,  no. I said, yeah, craved vegetables  every morning, noon and night. He said, I have never heard of that. And I was like, okay, well, no, I didn't have it.

08:29

So point being, I just want to share that,  food can be really hard. It can be really hard because you have diabetes. You have to really watch what you eat so you're not passing out or dying. People use food as a  way to cope with stress or depression. People use food to put on weight to use as armor because they were abused as younger people and that's how they protect themselves.

08:59

So what do you say about to that, any of that?  What I say  is, of course,  it's also pretty well known that in this country, we have a bad relationship with food.  It went awry in the 50s and 60s.  And  big food took over. And our moms were so thrilled that they did not have to spend their lives in the kitchen with an apron on.

09:26

that they could open a box and throw something out there and again, then they could go have a Pell Mel and a bourbon with their friends.  Um,  which I don't mean in a disparaging way. I mean, that's, that's what they did. That's what my mom did.  Um,  and,  um, so we,  we in this country sort of went off the rails with food,  um,  somehow along the way there.  And that's a whole other show. That's,  uh, another topic,  but what

09:56

What I'd like to say to anyone who feels that they are having difficulty with food  is I want you to enjoy it  more. I want you to eat more joyfully, more happily. I want you to eat without  limitations.  And the way to do that  is to eat whole food,  real food,  et cetera, et cetera.

10:24

Because when you start eating real food my brownies for example, mm-hmm What happens is  one you fill up? It's nutrient dense food  that hits your body and goes into all the right places and you get the signal. Okay good I've eaten yes,  if you  have a food problem I can almost guarantee it's not a carrot problem not a lettuce problem not a

10:54

whole meat problem, your food problem probably has to do with processed food. Because processed food is by intention and design addictive.  And I don't mean that in a metaphorical way. It is as addictive and there are studies to show it's more addictive than heroin.  yes, absolutely.  So when we say quitting sugar,  it you know,  yes, it's simple.

11:23

You drop it like a hot rock, but your body does kind of go, wait a minute. What,  what's going on here?  And it takes about three weeks, according to what I've learned,  um,  to come off of it. And then your saliva has changed. You chemically change  so that your taste buds are buds are different.  the things taste different to you. And.

11:52

And all this time your body's trying to deal, you know, and if you've been under nourishing and overfeeding your body for some time, you know, it takes a minute to get over that, but that's what you've been doing. And when you start nourishing your body with what it really needs and wants,  you have a different relationship with food. You become happier with you, you know, it's, don't feel.

12:21

Deprived you should not I don't want you to feel deprived. I'm a grandma. I want you to be happy  And and you will not feel  Deprived if you're eating  good  high quality food The only problem with that is you can't get it driving through honey, you know And you can't even really get it from most restaurants because you don't know what's in that food, right?

12:48

Restaurants are in the business of getting people to eat their food happily and greedily and so on. And so it's got stuff in it that you wouldn't do at home. I mean, you know, a little more sugar, a little more oil, a little more butter, little, you know, stuff. Um, because I am type two diabetic and I still say that in the present tense, whether I'm testing in that territory or not, because I do watch myself carefully and

13:18

Um,  I am  older than dirt, so it becomes even more important.  But, um,  your, your relationship with food needs to get better and not worse. mean,  I want you to love everybody you eat. I want you to be happy. You've eaten.  I don't want you to be hungry. And that's what this book is about. The book has lots of soup recipes, lots of sort of comfort food recipes.

13:46

the kind of thing that you don't want to live without,  pancakes, donuts,  cookies,  all the things, but they're made with real nourishing food. I need to get a coffee. I need to go buy a coffee when I get done talking to you. Thank you. I want everybody to have it. I wish I could just throw them out there.  And by the way, this is not  a,  shall we say,  lucrative

14:14

thing for me to do. I lose money on this book. It cost me a fortune to produce it because it's full of pictures and you can see them, Mary, but your readers, your listeners can't, but it's a picture book too. It's beautiful. Because thank you. But to me, what I wanted was for, and my dishes, aren't they lovely? They are. I want people to know that I took these on my iPhone

14:44

myself and  no stylists were harmed or yelled at in the process of doing this because I wanted the food in the book to  when you make it,  I want your food to look like my food. I don't want you to be disappointed because it's the wrong color or shape or whatever.  So these are very ordinary recipes except maybe simpler  and  they don't take a lot of time or effort.

15:13

and I want them to turn out like the pictures in the book. Well, I'm going to have to get the book. I'm going to have to make some of the recipes. I'm going to have to take photos and send them to you and also post them on Facebook along with photos that you could send me that are the same recipe. We'll see how they compare. that would be really cool. I love that. I live for that and I have a substack now. So yeah, if you go on my website and everything's there,

15:42

Um, and you can sign up on my list there, but you can, you can find the Substack and it's just Lynn Bowman at Substack.com.  And I send stuff out of a week.  Um, it's, it's just ordinary things. Oh, do this, you know, take these three ingredients and put them together and you'll love it.  Um, I'm, I am an impatient, sloppy cook. And my assumption is that  most people are the same way, right?  Most of us don't want to spend.

16:11

hours and hours in the kitchen. mean, there's exceptions to that.  I've met some people who spend time in the kitchen, love it. It's a hobby, but not me. Yes, my  son, he's 23, informed me a while ago that he  no longer likes roast turkey, like actual turkey in the roaster Thanksgiving style.  And I was like, okay, fine. You don't have to eat it if I make it. Well, I haven't made it since he said it. He went out to the freezer in the barn yesterday.

16:41

And he's like, there's two turkeys in the freezer. He said, do you want to make a turkey? Cause basically it's free food. And I was like, you said you don't like turkey. He said, it's free food. He said, I will eat it. I was like, okay. So I'm going to send his cute little butt out to the barn here in a little while to get a turkey to bring it in. And I am all about free food. Okay. I'll tell you how geeky we are about free food. My husband and I actually watched a documentary the other night.

17:10

about the forgotten vegetables from the Depression.  we are going to watch it again because it was fabulous.  And the Brit, we loved his accent, of course, because he pronounced it, rutabaga. Right? Ruti-baga? Rutabaga.  Instead of rutabaga.  It's rutabaga. And I thought, okay, I will eat a rutabaga.  And it was so fun because

17:37

During the Depression, everybody was eating free food. We've forgotten that we can go out in the dirt and pull out dandelions and eat them, and they're fabulous, and they're free.  And you can plant root vegetables for practically nothing and pull them out of the dirt all year long for free.  Beans, we grow fava beans here on my place,  and they are the most delicious food  you can imagine.

18:08

and you pull them off the plant fresh, cook them in five minutes. I mean, they cook up  so fast  and little lemon, little butter, maybe some chopped parsley on top of them, high in protein fiber, and they are  free, essentially. They cost nothing to grow. Our property has wild black raspberry plants on it.

18:35

And I know that fruits can be a problem because of the natural sugars in the fruits. No, no, no. Okay. Yeah.  If it's  real food, whole food, and you don't get crazy. mean, are you going to eat 10 servings a day?  No, would. Yes. But most people won't.  Well, but eat, eat fruit.  I love my fruit. have pears on the property, apples, berries. Yes. And

19:04

As I said though, if you're eating real food, it's hard to overeat. know, can't, you, how many apples can you eat? You know, at a same. Yeah, exactly. And if you, if you, and we dry them too, and they're wonderful. And I give them as gifts a lot. My friends enjoy that. But if you're eating some nuts, some protein, some other stuff along with your fruit, you're not in trouble. You are not eating.

19:33

processed sugar and  in that bunch I include anything like white flour. It's processed sugar essentially.  Just as long as you're eating great high quality full food  with hopefully one ingredient or two or three.  And most folks now have access as I do  have to drive a little way to the bakery.

20:01

Companion Bakery in Santa Cruz, California is my fave.  And the bread there is made from local flour, not over processed. It's einkorn wheat. Most of  it. Yeah. It's got nuts in it. It's got seeds in it. It's absolutely wonderful food. But if you're unwrapping your bread in cellophane and it has a list of ingredients on it, you're eating the wrong bread.

20:30

Yes, absolutely. Yes, you are. And we eat it anyway. But that's okay because I don't have diabetes and I don't have to worry about it this very second. I'm considering, I'm very much considering looking into everything you're saying because it makes a lot of sense. It does make sense, Ann. And you may not have diabetes today, but any kind of chronic disease that you can name quickly is improved.

21:00

or is  prevented by eating this way.  Yep. I'm gonna have to spend the money  and buy your book because I need to show this to my husband because he's actually the one who drives what we eat  and he needs to read the book, I'm telling you.  And you and I both know if we are  especially  married to someone of the  opposite sex,

21:30

They don't want to go to the doctor.  In fact, they,  they have a million different reasons why they can't go and get their checkup  until they have erectile dysfunction.  Then suddenly they're interested.  And  one of the first indications  of type two diabetes is erectile dysfunction.  Unfortunately, by the time that happens, you're way far along in the process.

22:01

So ladies, if you want to  encourage your sweetheart to go get himself checked and tested, all you have to say is,  know,  by the time you have a rectal dysfunction, it's too late. You might want to go just get tested now, honey. Uh-huh.  Yes. And if they're anything like my husband, they'll be like, there's nothing wrong with me. I'm fine.

22:29

So anyway. answer to that is not yet.  Not yet. Exactly. All right. I don't know how long we've been talking, ma'am, but I only have 40 minutes because I do not pay for Zoom. I can't afford it right now.  Does it say on your screen how long by chance?  Anywhere?  No, it doesn't.  I am not impressed. OK. Well, if we get cut off, it was very nice chatting with you.

22:57

and I appreciate your time. Thank you so much  and your patience for trying to connect with me through all of this, my storms, my power outage, all that.  And  maybe we can do it again. I would love to talk to you  after you have the book and  after you've maybe changed some of the things that you're doing. And I don't know what your situation is, whether you're...

23:25

If you feel like you're too thin or you've got too many pounds on you or whatever.  The last thing I want to be sure we at least mention  is strength training for women. Uh-huh. Because  now that I am this age, of course, I'm very interested in not falling and not hurting myself and in bones being  one of the kind of dumb things that I learned in the process of researching this is  women get injured in falls.

23:54

not because their bones are brittle, but because their muscles are weak. Yep.

24:03

We're always hearing about how our bones get brittle. You know,  so, uh, I am  happily working out four days a week and doing strength training and seeing big changes in my body. Uh, and I haven't been  scanned since,  but I think it's an important thing now that many of us are getting a little older and living longer that, uh, we understand how to stay the heck out of the hospital.

24:34

I agree.  Hospitals are no place to be if you don't have to be in them. They are no place to be.  And  it's going to get worse before it gets better, I'm afraid. yeah, if you are doing what you should be doing to prevent falls and so on,  instead of taking one of those medications that build bone and don't actually build bone,  there is now science that as an older woman,  can

25:04

maintain bone and even possibly build a bit of bone by doing strength training  and with hormones. Yep, absolutely.  So, okay, well,  another show. Yes, absolutely. Let  me try to figure out where I'm going to find the money to buy the ebook because I'm not going to get the book book because I will not use it ever. I will use my phone always.

25:33

I love books, but I have just become so, I don't know, acclimated to using my tablet for recipes that I will just do it that way. It's a great way to do it. And the book is available on Audible too, which a lot of

25:49

people have told me, for one thing, it's read by me.  So  you get a lot of extra Grammy stuff in there along with the written text.  But  people seem to like driving along and hearing the recipes that are only like two things or three things. So they go, oh, I can do that when I get home. Yep, absolutely.  Okay, Lynn, I'm gonna let you go because I don't want to get cut off. I'm afraid it's gonna be like, no, you're done. So

26:15

I really appreciate your time and yes, let me get my hands on the book and like in a couple of months, I will, we'll figure this out better next time. Great. Okay. Okay. And don't actually leave me when I stop recording, please. Okay.  All right. Thanks.