Melon sorbet...again

This week at the farmer's market I picked up something called a Galia melon, which is a Cantaloupe-honeydew cross, created in 1970. According to the All Powerful Internetz, the scent is how you tell this is ripe, as opposed to the melon becoming soft.

On the outside, it looks like this:

Looks like a Cantaloupe, right?

Lavender Lemonade

Lavender Lemonade, from UseRealButter.com 

Our lavender, hiding among the allyssum

Figuring out protein

Chickpeas - protein of awesome

 If you have food limitations that include grains, beans, nuts, eggs, dairy, or soy, this can affect your protein intake, especially if you don't have a wide variety of meats you can eat.

A typical daily meal plan

This would be a typical day's meal plan for me in the early summer. Gluten Free, Grain free, sulfite free, dairy free, and soy free. It changes depending on the seasons.

Beverages - water, water with a little fresh squeezed citrus, tea made from herbs in the garden, some homemade pecan milk. Stevia leaves to sweeten or drink unsweetened. Kids can sometimes use agave syrup or honey.

Breakfast at my house

Roasted Chickpeas - Gluten free

Another recipes from my buffalo blog.

Great on-the-go snack

After realizing that there was such a thing as roasted chickpeas, I had to hunt down how people made this. The result is this recipe. I messed around with different techniques based on a few different recipes and found what worked for me (thanks go to choosingvoluntarysimplicity.com for the idea of cooking them before roasting). I also pared the ingredients down to the bone until they matched what we could eat.

Another recipe yoinked from my buffalo blog.

Roasted Bell-Pepper Sauce

Simple sauce, relatively cheap, and easy to make. Also involves food items that are frequently in season at the same time, so that’s a plus!  This sauce is GF, CF…a lot of F’s, really. It’s not nightshade free, however, and a lot of sulfite sensitive folks can't tolerate garlic, so leave that out if it's a problem. Still tastes great!

Beet Hummus

Buffalo recipe!
I'm shifting around some of my blogs a bit, so that I can keep all my recipes here. As a result, I'm moving the recipes I have from my other buffalo blog over.


Beet Hummus from 9/20/11 (no, really, take a look)

How to succeed in your diet

When our reactions are life-threatening, it's very motivating to stay on the diet. But what about reactions that aren't life threatening? The ones where you feel like crap, but only for a day or two. Or those reactions that build up over a week or two, where your RA gets worse, your FM gets worse, you get more tired and feel terrible until you finally go back to eating like your should.

In the beginning, those can be much harder to stick to, especially when we're tossed in the deep end of allergen-free cooking and it's drowning us. We have to rely on our support and our own will, and sometimes that's just barely enough. 

Or it isn't enough. I still drown periodically, eating something I shouldn't, getting sick, and smacking myself in the head that I let myself be such an idiot. But, when I'm completely on track, here's some of the things that have helped me stay on track.

Honeydew Melon Sorbet

So, we tried yet another sorbet - they had honedew at the Farmer's market this week, woo hoo!

I looked at a lot of recipes for this on-line, and the most common addition for honeydew seems to be lime or lemon, so we went that route.

Groceries - week 5

I'm posting this early because I'm done shopping for the week, I've done the math, and it's been a bitter pill to swallow. But at least it's done. 

Let's just say, it's a good thing I planted an almond tree

Plantains with black beans

These were great, and turned out so wonderfully I hope we can have them again. They'd work great as snacks or as an appetizer. They have a kind of Cuban feel to them, so they'd probably go well with Mojitos, if you can drink those.

Plantains, guacamole, refried beans, and roasted bell peppers

Cooking without Tasting

If you come to visit my house, something you will hear almost daily is "Here, taste this. How is it? What does it need?"

More chiles? Of course it needs more chiles!

Now, this could be seen as some attempt at creating child chef prodigies, but in reality, it's because I can't eat many of the foods that my family can. If the meal has meats from the regular store, beans if I'm close to my sulfite load, veggies and fruits from the store, eggs, garlic - there is a whole host of foods I can't eat that one or both of my kids can. There's even more that my hubby can, not having gluten issues like the rest of us.

Falafel

I love falafel. It's a Middle Eastern, chickpea(garbanzo bean)-based, fried, crispy little pseudo-hush-puppy. These are awesome. I even managed non-onion versions, for those who can't tolerate high-sulfur foods.

If you can tolerate beans, though, these should be fine for you, I believe. But if beans are an issue, or only to be eaten when you have a low sulfite load for the day, this should be eaten with caution. Falafel is typically eaten with more Greek or Mediterranean sides, like hummus, but I've varied the herbs on numerous combinations to go with a variety of different cuisines - or in other words, I was desperate and bored and fiddled until I found something that worked.

A Mexican version of my falafel, with tomato and green chile

Groceries - Week 4

Some of the Farmer's Market Produce

Week 4

Took me a couple extra days to get this out, but at least it was simple this week:

Homemade bouillon

There are a lot of foods that I can't eat, obviously, but I come across so MANY awesome looking recipes that I hate to just leave them to languish in the depths of my bookmark folders. Who knows, maybe someday I could even eat these!

So I'm going to start listing some here, for my potential later use, and for the use of anyone who may be able to enjoy these today.

First off, homemade bouillon, from 101cookbooks.

Rice-milk frozen deserts

So after making rice milk for my son, and the one day every couple weeks that my daughter can have it, my children almost immediately decided that they didn't want to drink it ever again. Or at least not until it went bad and I'd have to make it again. So I've been trying to think of ways I can use this, and we came up with two a couple days ago: frozen strawberry rice-milk and Cantaloupe rice-milk smoothies, yeaaaa!

Strawberry pastel prettiness

Food success and failure, all in one

Today I decided to try to make veggie burgers for the first time.

I've been making Pecan Milk for my son, where you soak pecans for a day or two in about 4 times as much water, then blend it until smooth in a blender.

Soaking pecans look rather nasty, don't they?

Watermelon-mint sorbet

Yes, I serve my sorbet on plants. Doesn't everyone?

This turned out just awesome. It was sweet, a teeny bit tart, and with an extra cool punch lingering just after you swallow a bite. I enjoyed the heck out of it. Could have eaten it all myself!

Easy Refried Beans

If you've never made refried beans before, no worries. They are so easy, you'll wonder why you never made them before.

Groceries - week 3

Groceries for this week, where I think I got it all, but honestly? The family came down with the flu by the end and so this is going to be a kind of 'eh, hopefully?' kind of week on the budget front. And I do realize how lucky I am that I can HAVE a lazy budget front sometimes. I can't stop cooking every day - which takes on a sort of half-stoned feel with the flu -but at least I can relax a little about the money sometimes.

Garden doom

I'm pretty bummed today. Came back from our trip to visit hubby and a packrat had destroyed my squash and sunflowers. I mean, totally destroyed. It ate all but one squash in the entire garden patch down to the ground.

All this dirt used to be squash. :-(