This was breakfast this morning. It’s by far my kids’ favourite breakfast. It’s easy to make and I can eat it without guilt because it’s not only gluten-free, it’s grain-free, dairy-free (if you use coconut oil rather than ghee) and free of refined sugar. Personally, I eat them with almond butter rather than maple syrup, though my kids (of course) go for the maple syrup. Either way, they’re delicious. Continue reading
I’m almost afraid to admit this because it seems like such a trendy thing, but for many reasons I’ve been moving towards a more paleo/primal diet. Cutting down on grains has been a gradual process but for the last two and a half weeks I’ve been strictly following a grain-free, dairy-free, legume-free diet. I’m not sure if I always will be this strict – I’m doing this as an elimination diet and plan to later experiment with adding in various foods to determine what really does bother my gut – but for now I can report that I’ve been feeling better than I have in years.
I have, however, been craving a treat. For my elimination diet I’ve decided to give up all added sugar, even things like honey and maple syrup (which paleo people eat), so I thought I’d try to use naturally sweet ingredients to make muffins. That’s how I came up with these sweet potato muffins, which are studded with raisins and subtly spiced for a taste and smell somewhere between pumpkin pie and oatmeal raisin cookies.
I love banana muffins and banana bread but today I was feeling a bit bored of my regular nutty ones. It’s February and I was feeling like a taste of the tropics, so I decided to break with tradition and make banana muffins with coconut and mango. (Mango is high-FODMAP but I find I can stand a little bit. It can easily be replaced with papaya if you’re more sensitive to it.) I also wanted to make muffins with little or no added sugar. Loosely using my own sweet potato coconut muffins as a guide, I added a little bit of this and a little bit of that, fully expecting this initial attempt not to turn out very well. To see what disaster I’d come up with, I made a single small test muffin. Much to my surprise, it turned out perfect.*
It’s pancake day here in the UK, which means my kids got a pancake lunch, a pancake supper, and pancake dessert. If that sounds like a lot of work, it really wasn’t. Not only was I too lazy to make a pancake breakfast, the truth is, I only actually made pancakes once. To be more accurate, I made galettes bretonnes once and we ate them three different ways using three very easy variations.
Galettes bretonnes, or buckwheat crepes, are traditionally made with buckwheat flour only, making them naturally gluten-free. If you want to have them in a restaurant, however, be careful, since some cooks mix the buckwheat flour with wheat flour. Perhaps they fear that the buckwheat will be strong-tasting – and in some recipes it can be – but honestly, here it isn’t. No, it doesn’t taste exactly like a wheat flour crepe, but it has a mild and pleasant taste and texture. Honestly, it’s nothing too challenging.
I’ve been wanting to make gravlax (AKA gravad lax) for some time now. Salmon is one of my favourite foods, especially when raw or semi-raw, and the idea that I might be able to cure my own salmon without buying a smoker or paying extortionate prices for sashimi-grade salmon strongly attracted me. However, for a long time I was nervous because the recipes I’ve seen vary dramatically. Some call for as much as a full cup of salt while others call for as little as a couple of teaspoons. Some call for much more salt than sugar; others call for much more sugar than salt. Some recipes I’ve seen also make the process seem incredibly complex, involving weights, precisely timed curing, even the use of thin slices of lime that can’t actually touch the fish.
After consulting a ton of recipes, I became convinced that a fairly minimalist approach would work, but although I wanted to simplify the process (and avoid ending up with a fish-flavoured lollipop or salt lick), I also wanted to experiment with a variety of flavours. So I ended up making four different kinds. Continue reading
A friend of mine recently shared a recipe for flourless banana pancakes and I was so excited, I immediately tried it out. The recipe called only for one mashed banana and two eggs, mixed together and fried like a pancake. It did work, rather to my amazement, and my kids loved them, but the resulting “pancakes” were very light, difficult to flip, and not really pancakey enough for me.
I wanted to improve on the recipe without adding, well, flour. Even gluten-free flour makes a mess and I wanted to pancakes that were easy and quick enough to make on a weekday morning, with minimal clean-up. I also wanted to make something satisfying but healthy that my kids would still like. That’s how I came to add oatmeal and flaxseed. Continue reading
I love cornbread muffins but a lot of them are too crumbly for my taste. I get that cornmeal is crumbly by nature but it gets to be too much when it’s difficult to eat. These gluten-free savoury cornbread muffins are moist and not crumbly at all. With the addition of cheese, corn kernels, chives, and smoked paprika, I got a tasty, easily packable breakfast or lunch food that reheats well. Plus they’re refined-sugar-free!
Until this weekend, I didn’t know what boxty was. When I learned how many different variations there were of what used to be an Irish peasant food but which can now, depending on how you dress it up, turn gourmet, I couldn’t decide what I most wanted to make. So I made three different versions: boxty pancakes, boxty blinis, and boiled boxty. I liked them all but this one, with the addition of non-traditional Parmesan and chives, might be my personal favourite. We had it for Sunday lunch and I can hardly imagine a more perfect lunch/brunch food, though I would happily eat it for supper too. Continue reading
Gluten Free International 