Making Tea

More information on brewing your own tea, both regular tea and herbal tea (herbal infusion).

(source)

Dairy Substitutions

When my family can't eat a certain ingredient, my tendency now is to simply drop it, pick different recipes than I had before, and move on. But sometimes, you have a nostalgic moment and you want a substitution for an ingredient you had before. Or you have a recipe idea and you need to figure out what ingredients can serve the same purpose as the ingredient you can no long eat.

When that happens, it's nice to know substitutions.

Dairy Free Cream of Mushroom Soup

For safer food: apples

At this point, I would be very careful about eating apples that you don't grow yourself.

1. Once again, apples are the #1 produce item on the 'dirty dozen' list of produce containing pesticide residue. In other words, they have the most pesticide residue of everything tested. Good to at least go organic. The dirty dozen list.

2. Some of them may have antibiotics used on them, including organic varieties:
Antibiotic use on apples and pears.

Considering the state of antibiotic resistance that the World Health Organization has just weighed in on after an international study, this is NOT something we want to encourage.

3. And in the USA, on average, apples are stored for 14 months before you ever get to see them. Which is likely why Europe may not allow them to be imported from the USA - too much residue used to keep them looking okay from such long storage.


I'm looking into getting my own apple tree, and if I DO buy apples, I get ones from local farmers now that I can interview, and only in season. :-/

Sweet Potato Cakes

I finally got these suckers to work!  I saw that the gluten free girl used yogurt to make an egg-free sweet potato latke, and that finally pinged a connection with the cashew cream I've been using, and this is the result. Inspired by her recipe.

Yummy!

Socca part II

I have found a much easier way to make Socca (original recipe here), or at least something that resembles it. Good enough for Gov't work and all that.

This is a VERY cheap and easy way to make this, for those who are gluten free but don't want to break the bank by buying lots of chickpea flour, and don't have a grinder to make it themselves.

Socca with hummus, cucumbers, and dill

Cauliflower Rice

This stuff was AWESOME! Pictures coming when I can get the camera and computer talking to each other again.

Cauliflower Rice

Yummy!

Cooking in someone else's shoes

Fried kinda-green tomatoes...which I can no longer have. Waah.

I go through phases in my cooking. I get stuck in a rut - a huge rut where we have the same items for lunch and dinner, in different forms, for a week because I can't make my brain think of anything else. And then I get sick of that and start trying out some new foods, some of which actually work. After that, what else can I do but go look at other people's recipes and food blogs in a quest for more delicious new foods? I'm inspired and excited for a few days to a couple weeks.

And then?