It's been over a year since I last posted!!

I knew some time has passed since I last posted, but didn't realize it's been a whole year!!

What's new with me? I've read more material about eating grain/gluten free, so that hasn't changed. However, authors don't always agree to what's best when one has diabetes and celiac. Well, for celiac, most people do agree: DON'T EAT ANY GRAINS! I don't so that's a non-issue with me. The biggest issue has to do with my blood sugar. Questions about fructose and various sweeteners abound for me. I use some sugar in some recipes--I usually reduce the amount from what the recipe calls for. However, I've been avoiding the artificial sweeteners and the alternative ones in favor of using honey and maple syrup. But, some people say to avoid those and use raw stevia. I haven't tried that yet. I'll have to do more research to find out how to substitute it in recipes I've already altered.

I still use blanched almond flour, almond butter, and/or almond paste in my baking. They work great and have a more neutral flavor than coconut products have. Last week I bought some So Delicious Coconut Milk Egg Nog. It tasted pretty good, but one does taste the coconut.

I'm thinking about trying to be even more serious about eliminating sweeteners, but at this point I'm just thinking about it and not doing anything about it.

One thing that concerns me was that gout attack I experienced a few weeks ago. My left wrist and hand were involved, and the pain was awful. The doctor said that purines in foods like cauliflower, asparagus, mushrooms, spinach, all fish and meats, and beer can be the culprits. He also said that fructose is suspected as being a culprit. Just before I had gout I'd been eating a lot of cauliflower, mushrooms,spinach, and liver. I don't drink beer any longer because it's brewed from grains. Now I'm being careful with the vegetables that are rich in purines.

Sometimes it becomes rather daunting trying to figure out how to eat to be healthy!!

Grain-free Thanksgiving!

This year I prepared my Thanksgiving dinner over the course of several days. I wasn't home to eat it on Thanksgiving day, but I wanted all my favorite dishes, and experimented with a new one. My Thanksgiving feast included a free-range, organic roast turkey, Brussel sprouts in cheese sauce, Danish red cabbage, Guy Fieri's whiskey glazed sweet potato and apple casserole, and a crustless pumpkin pie. I also had Trader Joe's cranberry-orange relish, which I buy every year.

I made the Danish red cabbage on Monday after school as well as the pumpkin pie without a crust. After school on Tuesday I baked the turkey and made the Brussel sprouts with cheese sauce. On Wednesday morning I made Guy Fieri's recipe for the bourbon glazed sweet potato and apple casserole. Each individual dish came out perfectly! On Thanksgiving I had a feast at a friend's house and didn't eat any of the food I'd prepared. Today I ate a complete meal, and the plate was very colorful!

This morning I cooked the carcass of the turkey and made a nice soup, adding carrots, onions and celery to the broth once it was made. I enjoyed that for lunch.

I don't recall what I made last year for Thanksgiving, but I had just started going grain-free at the time and a lot of it was a struggle. Now, I have many favorite foods which are grain-free, so it's not very much of a struggle. Visiting family or friends for Thanksgiving dinner can be a bit of a challenge since there are a number of traditional dishes that I cannot eat. However, as I have said to many of my friends over the year, I haven't starved yet! There's always food I can eat.

Making/Using Blanched Almond Flour

Several months ago I blanched a lot of whole almonds and put them into the freezer. Today I turned them into flour. It took very little time, in fact, it took less time than it did to turn the blanched almond slices I bought at Trader Joe's into flour. It is counter-intuitive! I fully expected that it would take longer (more seconds) to turn the whole almonds into flour than the almond slices. Wrong!

Now I have more blanched almond flour to use in making delicious banana-nut muffins and other goodies.

An interesting discovery in all of this is that muffins and other baked goods made with blanched almond flour heat up perfectly in the microwave. The texture doesn't change and isn't ruined the way baked goods made from wheat flour is.

I did order a whole case of almond paste from the American Almond Products company. I didn't trust myself to make it correctly, and I have many recipes that call for almond paste. I made a batch of "kransekage" cookies the other day. These are amongst my favorite treats. I want to make a almond paste chocolate torte again for the holidays. I tried it last year and it was delicious. There are also recipes for frangipane that requires almond paste.

The adventure continues!

Catch up time!

So, I just published my latest recipe fine, but now I want to share what's been going on lately. First of all, I saw my doctor last week, and she's still very pleased with how I'm doing. My bloodwork is OK, my blood pressure is perfect, and so is my weight. She's going to keep me at the lower dose of the diabetes medication, which is good.

My A1c was up a bit from what it was in May, but I told her I've been enjoying a lot of the summer fruits--peaches, nectarines, grapes, strawberries, and the like--as well as some fruit juices, so she attributes that small increase to that.

My iron count has improved a bit, but was still low. I confessed that I hadn't been taking the iron pills like I was supposed to all the time (hardly ever, if truth be known), so now I'm to take two pills a day for three months... I hope it works!

In terms of cooking and eating, I keep figuring out new things to do and have found a new place to eat.

In May my doctor wanted to try out the grain free spice cake I make, and last week she told me how delicious it was and thanked me for the recipe.

In August a friend introduced me to a wonderful tri-tip salad that a local barbecue place makes. It's addictive, and I've been back several times since!

I've been mixing cottage cheese with a couple eggs and scrambling that for breakfast. That mixture along with a grain-free banana nut muffin will keep me filled for hours!

I've also been making what I call a meat pizza. I make a mixture of ground beef (grass fed and finished), with chopped onions, bell peppers, oregano, basil, thyme, tomato paste etc., pat that into a pyrex pie plate, sprinkle smoky grated cheeses on top, and bake it at 350 for 35 minutes or so. It tastes great along with a salad or veggie of your choice, and it's totally grain-free.

Besides fruit for dessert, or spice cake or grain-free chocolate chip cookies, I have found that Trader Joe's has some good grain free ice cream. (Imagine ice cream having to be labeled gluten or grain free!) Santa Cruz Organics makes a fabulous chocolate-mint sauce that's grain/gluten free. Many gelatos are grain-free, as are many sorbets, but be careful to check the labels.

That's it for today!

Holy Cow, it's been more than a month since my last post!

I've just finished making grain-free cheese crackers. They are delicious, and I'll make them again and again!

I used the smoky cheese blend of grated cheeses from Trader Joe's rather than just shredded cheddar cheese. I love the flavor of the smoky cheeses. The one thing I didn't do correctly was roll the dough thin enough. The recipe said to roll it until it was 1/16 of an inch thin, but I didn't manage that except on the edges. Next time I'll be sure to do that because it's necessary.

One thing I did add to the recipe was a light sprinkle of salt on the crackers before they were baked. It makes them a little more Cheez-Its like.

In order to correct my mistake of not rolling the dough thin enough, after I cut the crackers apart, I baked them again for ten minutes at 310 F in order to crisp them up. (The parts that were thin enough baked up nice and crisp to begin with.)

Here's the recipe:

2 1/2 C blanched almond flour
1 C grated smoky cheeses (cheddar or a cheddar blend)
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
2 eggs
3 tbsp. grapeseed oil

Preheat oven to 350 F

Whisk together eggs and grapeseed oil, then pour that into the already combined dry ingredients. Work it to make a nice dough. (It's not sticky.)

Take out two baking sheets. Then cut three pieces of parchment paper the same size as the baking sheets.

Divide the dough in half.

Roll out one piece of the dough between two pieces of parchment paper. Roll it until it is only 1/16 of an inch thin.Remove top piece of parchment paper. Score the dough into the size crackers you want (1"x1", or 2" x 2"), then slide the parchment paper onto a baking sheet and bake the crackers until golden in color. (12-15 minutes or so)

Repeat with second piece of dough.

You can lightly sprinkle the dough with salt before baking if you like.

Not exactly reinventing the wheel...

Last night I decided I wanted to recreate an almond tartlet kind of thing that I used to buy at Deluxe Foods. It was sort of like a muffin, but not exactly. It had almond paste in it, but of course it was made of flour.

I have two different recipes that I thought of combining to make what I wanted, but then I wondered what I would find if I entered the words: "moist", "dense" "almond" and "tartlet" on google. What came up were lots of different recipes for moist, dense tartlets, most made with lemon or chocolate. Then I saw one for an almond cake. I checked the recipe and thought, "Aha! I can alter this recipe and perhaps it'll come out the way I want it."

This morning I made the experiment. I changed the recipe from using regular flour to almond flour, and from using sugar to using agave nectar. Instead of baking it as a cake in a springform pan I baked them in a muffin pan. Instead of sprinkling the tops with sliced almonds and sugar, I just used sliced almonds. I also cut down the baking time.

I like the results. They are nice and moist, and the flavor is good. Here's the recipe:
Ruth's Almond Tartlets
Preheat oven to 350 F
In one bowl combine
3/4 C melted butter
3/4 C agave nectar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 tsp almond extract
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 C blanched almond flour

Depending upon the size of the muffin cups, fill 10 of them with the batter, then sprinkle the tops with sliced almonds.
Bake for about 30 minutes until golden brown.
Let cool in muffin pan for about ten minutes, then turn out onto cooling rack to completely cool.

I may continue to experiment. This is the one for today!

Making Blanched Almond Flour

Blanched almond flour is my flour of choice for making chocolate chip cookies, spice cakes, banana muffins, breading chicken etc.

Several months ago I bought 5 pounds of it from American Almond Products in New York, but I've also bought the blanched sliced almonds from Trader Joe's and the 3 pound bags of whole almonds from Costco with the intention of making my own blanched almond flour.

Somewhere I read that the only blender good enough to make ones own almond flour was the Vita Mix, so I bought the top of the line set. However, after buying it, I couldn't find the reference for making blanched almond flour with it, so I went online and hunted for directions. The only good directions said to use a clean coffee grinder and to only put in enough blanched almonds to just cover the blades.

Yesterday morning I checked the Vita Mix booklets and found where it gave directions on how to grind ones own coffee in the "Dry Container". Ah ha! I'll follow those directions for the blanched sliced almonds in the freezer. (Somewhere I read that it's better to grind frozen almonds because the oil doesn't get in the way.) Several articles warned about not over processing the almonds because they can quickly turn into almond butter.

I just barely covered the blades with blanched sliced almonds from one package of Trader Joe's sliced blanched almonds. I turned on the Vita Mix and turned the speed up to a 10 for less than a minute and had perfect almond flour!!!! It took three times to "do" the little package of sliced blanched almonds from Trader Joe's, but the result was perfect, and it didn't take much time. I ended up using all three bags of those almonds that I'd had in the freezer.

After doing that, I decided to attack one of the 3 pound bags of almonds from Costco. Blanching almonds is something I've never done myself. Once or twice I helped my mother when I was a child, and I remember how the blanched almonds will pop/fly out of their skins once they've been emerged in boiling water and how the water smells sort of like black tea.

I'd found two sets of directions on how to blanch almonds. The first one I tried was to pour boiling water over the almonds and let them sit for a minute, drain them, let them cool, and then start popping them out of their skins. I think that method works, but I had poured all 3 pounds of almonds into a bowl at once, and that was too many to do. So I tried the second method: boil water in a medium sized pot, add almonds, bring back to a boil for a minute, remove almonds, rinse and cool almonds, and then pop the skins off; then dry them on a large towel.

It took a long time to process the three pounds of almonds. I don't think I'll ever do that many at once again. I did use the same water for each batch, and I removed the almonds from the water with my Chinese strainer with the bamboo handle. It just took a long time.

Once the blanched almonds were cool and dry, I placed them in a ziploc bag and into the freezer.

Today I'm going to do a lot of baking. I don't think I'll need to use the blanched almonds I did yesterday, but if I do, they're in the freezer ready to go!