Craving

I had been craving a good apple turnover that was not only delicious but also good for me and my family.

Since I don’t have much organic hard red winter wheat berries left to make fresh whole wheat flour I decided to use our organic barley grains instead.  It is more inexpensive (also see the book of Revelation in the Bible) and in ancient times was known as soldier food.

This morning was the morning we got to satisfy that craving while also eating a different type of breakfast for a change.

The Food Making Experiment

We like experiments in our household, especially ones that deal with food.  I have to come up with different random recipes because of the variety of whole grains we use.  I like experimenting with different whole grains and seeing how they taste and react to different cooking methods.

Since our fresh barley flour has been tasting pretty good for most pastry-like recipes (and also mixed with spelt with some yummy olive oil dipping breads), I thought it would be safe to use it for our turnover dough.

Turnovers or “Nonpot Pies”?

At first I started to make apple turnovers and then I was running out of time.  I normally don’t have a lot of time since it takes our current grain mill a long time to grind our grains into flour.  I also run out of blocks of time because I am almost always nursing a baby. 

So I started creating a type of pot pie that’s not cooked in a pot.  It resembles a turnover but it is not turned over.  It sort of resembles a strudel but the crust layers are thick.  I searched online for a good term and decided that the other pies would be coined “Nonpot Pies.”

I called them Apple Cinnamon Nonpot Pies because I had top and bottom layers of crust and a fruit filling (minced apples mixed with a little raw honey and organic ground cinnamon) in the center.

Easy

These were much faster and easier to make, transfer, and bake in order to feed our family along with some other healthy sides.

Ingredients

The dough for the crust was made with the following dry ingredients:

Fresh organic barley flour

Grey sea salt

Aluminum-free baking powder

Organic cinnamon powder

I mixed all my dry ingredients together and then added my wet ingredients.  I knew I wanted the crust somewhat flaky and so I needed a good cooking fat.  We believe in using real butter from whole milk but have to limit our dairy consumption because of sensitivities and cost.

We also use extra virgin coconut oil a lot and buy that in bulk as well but so far my favorite cooking fat for pastry dishes and using barley grain is extra virgin olive oil.

In some of my recent cooking experiments I also noticed that when I add too little cooking oils or about a 1:6 ratio of oil to water then it was easier to get a stiff crust that was less flaky on the exposed crust.  This stiffness happened the other night when I was quickly putting together a surprise for the family and made a type of large pumpkin pie but using a kabocha squash instead.

The wet ingredients for the crust were:

Extra virgin olive oil

Raw honey

Filtered water

The filling was made with a simple combination of fruit and natural flavoring of the following:

Minced apples

Ground organic cinnamon

Raw honey

I stirred my chopped apples until they were well-coated with my spice and wholesome sweetener.  Though honey is mentioned in the Bible as good food and is wonderfully nutritious, we have found that when it comes to sweet foods our family does best when we take things in moderation.  We don’t understand all that there is to know about moderation but we are trying by God’s grace.  He teaches us many things through different phases in our lives. 

Cooking Tools

I mainly used our round pizza stones and other stoneware (bar pan) to bake our turnovers and nonpot pies.

Before placing our breakfast pastries on the stones I lightly coated the stones with some fresh flour.

Baking Time

I baked the breakfast pastries at 425 degrees for 15 minutes.

This gave me ample time for the crust to brown well and for it to give that nice “baked” aroma that you get when your dish is done cooking.

Food Pictures

In my case it is true that a picture is worth more than a thousand words.  It saves me so much time when I can see a picture of how something is done.  We hope that the food pictures below will be a blessing to you.

Here is the fruit filling being made.

Time to make the dough for the Nonpot Pie Crust