What's Crackin' ?

One of the problems about living in Honduras is finding convenient and somewhat healthy packaged cracker type snack foods for kids. Especially when one of those kids has a genetic propensity for high cholesterol (Sister). Most of the fats used in the crackers they sell in the stores are made with all the bad fats. Like shortening (aka Manteca here), or Palm oil or some kind of hydrogenated vegetable oil. All of which are bad, bad, bad. Especially to the cholesterol conscious. Even the bread at the grocery stores is made with the bad fats. I had to search and search until I found one that does NOT have some kind of hydrogenated fat listed as an ingredient. If it's palm oil they use in my bread listed as "vegetable oil", at least it's not providing as much fat as the the others I looked at and it also has enough fiber to be worth eating.

No wonder so many Hondurans have big bellies. Oh, if you didn't know that about Hondurans, it's true. It's very common to see. Lots and lots of belly fat. Maybe that's another topic since today I'm doing show and tell of what I made for the kids in an effort to avoid these saturated and trans fats in the snack foods the kids want and enjoy.

Sister is supposed to keep her saturated fats around the 9 gram mark per day. That is not easy to do and it's hard to abide by this when she is the pickiest eater that I know who also loves all the junk foods that kids love. She has a selection of about 5 healthy things she'll eat every day depending on her mood. Thank goodness for Pricemart selling Jennie-O's turkey burger patties.

Crackers for snacks - they usually go over pretty good and they travel great. I've experimented with 3 different kinds of crackers so far, but the overall family favorite were the home made graham crackers. The wheat thins were a no go, except for me. The banana ones were so-so. I still need to try making soda crackers and I'd like to try a different vanilla cracker recipe too.

I'd write out the recipe I used, but I ended up kind of creating my own and did not write down what I did. This is very common for me. I seem to have a complete inability to actually follow a recipe. Usually this is in an attempt to make it lower in fat. For these crackers I know I used skim milk and less butter. Here are some links of recipes I looked at if you'd like to try making these on your own.

I made a log of dough and sliced pieces out and flattened them on the pan.

Here the crackers are all flattened and pricked with a fork ready to go into the oven


Hot out of the oven. Good eats!