Sweet potato raisin muffins (Paleo, no added sugar)

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.

Polvorones

Happy New Year! For what’s still the holiday season, I bring you polvorones. We were recently in the Canary Islands on holiday (in quieter parts of Tenerife where we actually didn’t see any lobster-red beach sardines or drunken English louts) and I wanted to make some Spanish food for Christmas. Polvorones are a traditional Christmas treat and I thought they sounded easy enough to make in a limited holiday rental kitchen. However, the oven turned out to be malfunctioning so I ended up doing fruit and ice cream for Christmas dessert instead. Back home, however, there was nothing stopping me, so I made polvorones for New Year’s instead of Christmas.

Gluten-free lime curd tarts

I was originally going to make lime curd tarts for St. Patrick’s Day, on the reasoning they’re (kind of) green. I didn’t end up getting around to it by St. Paddy’s Day but it didn’t matter, since it was really just an excuse to make lime curd.

I’d never even heard of lime or lemon curd until I moved to England last summer. Since then, I’ve seen lemon curd in all sorts of places – in jars on supermarket shelves beside the jam and peanut butter, in cakes, even in the form of lemon curd yogurt. This last is the only one I’ve actually tried. The cakes are always full of gluten and I wasn’t sure I wanted to commit to a whole jar of lemon curd spread, especially since the commercial ones looked pretty full of chemicals. But my tiny tastes of lemon curd yogurt (only tiny tastes since I’m lactose intolerant) made me want more. More! MORE!!