Four ingredient whole food crackers

My convictions about food have lead me to pursue a whole food diet.  I manage pretty well to make the right choices on a daily basis. It’s harder to convince the rest of the family, especially the children.  I have decided to start with their lunch boxes.  For the sake of convenience I have at times filled their lunch boxes with the easy go-to lunch box fillers.  Some even seemingly healthy.

I am now on a mission to replace these with whole food, home-made alternatives.  The goal is to do this in such a way that my children won’t feel hard done by (like why does our mom give us weird food while the other children are all eating packets of normal looking food).  The result should be that my children develop a taste for what’s good for them, we spend less money on packaged lunch box fillers and we also eliminate the use of plastic in our lunch boxes.

I have given up for the time being on developing a healthy reduced sugar muffin recipe (I was not winning with that one, the children seem to expect a muffin to be sweet like cake and discard all of my attempts).  I will keep at it though.  I turned my attention to a savoury cracker, a perfect finger snack for a lunch box.

It’s actually incredibly simple and there are many variations on how to make home-made crackers, but I am sharing this one as my children gave it the thumbs up and it also contains a vegetable, a fact that I don’t think my children are even aware of.

This will yield a big batch, I would say enough for a week for two lunch boxes and snacking on at home.  With no preservative in them, they are at risk of losing their crispiness sooner than store-bought crackers.  I am aiming to get all of our production done on one day and then store a week’s worth of lunch box snacks at a time.

For storage, let them cool completely and then place them in an airtight container.  You can also place the container in the fridge to extend the shelf life.

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup grated cheddar
1 1/2 cups grated carrot (I have also used grated apple and the result is a slightly sweeter cracker)
2 eggs
1 cup flour (whole wheat is good if you have, you can also substitute a gluten free flour like oat flour)

Method:

If you are moving towards creating whole food recipes at home to replace store bought options, your blender is going to be your best friend.  You need a blender.

So just soften up the grated carrot before you start the blending.  You can do this in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes, or in the microwave.  We don’t have a microwave.  I think the reason is that we wanted to force ourselves to embrace a slower process to food.  Anyway, that’s a side note.

Drain the carrots and get rid of the excess liquid.  Add the carrots, egg and cheese to your blender and blend until smooth.  Add the flour in a little bit at a time until you have your desired consistency (not too sticky and not too dry).

Remove your mixture, roll it out (about 1/2 cm thickness) on a floured surface and cut into any kind of shapes you like.  The kids can help if you have the patience for that.  Pierce each cracker with a fork so that they don’t puff up when you bake them.

Bake for 15 – 20 minutes at 180 degrees.

I hope your kiddies like them, they certainly don’t have the intensity of flavour that store-bought crackers do but I think that my children enjoyed the texture and the shapes and that they are a bite size inoffensive (no real strong flavour, just savoury) snack.