A massage client just brought me a bag of fresh basil out of her garden! It looks and smells AMAZING, and I have no idea what to do with it.
Okay, my trusted league of foodies: I can’t eat beans, nuts, or dairy products, so what should I do with a bag of basil?
GO!
:)
Here in Ellensburg, we have a local ice cream shop called Winegars, and every year they sell buckets of these amazingly delicious Klicker strawberries, which are grown in Walla Walla Washington. I bought a 20 pound bucket, which takes up a not-trivial amount of space in the fridge, but they’re so delicious none of us care.
Last night, in between doing quests to level my druid to 80, I made some brownies. I used gluten-free brownie mix*, which turned out to be very good (honestly, I think I liked it better than regular wheat flour brownies), but the real treat was adding the Klicker strawberries.
I made up the batter, poured it into the dish, smoothed it out to level it, and then packed the top with Klicker strawberries, and baked it for about ten minutes longer than usual, to compensate for the extra liquid. The result was DELICIOUS, and Greg and Jason and Sonja and the kids and I all dove into it with abandon.
This is the first real chocolate I’ve had since I started the elimination diet, and I did get pretty anxious after the largish piece I had. I was expecting that – unfortunately I have to be careful with chocolate for that reason – but I was more interested in whether I’d have any food intolerance symptoms. Nope, none that I could tell. Regardless, I won’t be eating anymore chocolate for awhile.
I wanted to get a picture of the brownies before we devoured them, so I grabbed my iPhone to take a shot, but it looks a little, uh……gruesome……
They look a lot better in person! Anway, I highly reccomend adding strawberries (and other berries!) to your brownies, if you’re a brownie fan. You won’t be sorry!
* Yeah, I know I’ve been adding wheat back in, but I was still curious to try the mix, and I’m noticing that while I don’t seem to have any severe intolerance symptoms to wheat, I just feel better when I don’t eat a lot of it.
Here’s the result from my dehydrator cookie experiment. They’re surprisingly good! I miss the oaty taste that you have with baked cookies, so I might try adding some oats next time. There is a light note of flax flavor (unsurprisingly with 4 tablespoons of ground flax seed), which will take a little bit of getting used to, but the apple flavor is delicious.
I put this bowl on the kitchen table so the kids could try them at their own pace. Beth decided she loved them, Miles didn’t like them – I’m guessing he doesn’t care for the texture of dried fruit, which is definitely an acquired taste.
I’m going to keep working on this. I think some night-time carb-y oat-y maybe-a-little-bit-of-chocolate-y somethings could be a great way to fulfill that evening snack craving without all the flour and sugar of regular baked goods.
I’ve noticed I have this tendency to solve a problem by solving EVERY OTHER PROBLEM AT THE SAME TIME. For instance, if the living room is a mess (thanks to my two little minnows who swim through the house leaving a whirlpool of destruction behind them), a normal person might think, “You know, we need a better place to put toys.”
My over-achieving Martha Stewart-meets-Zen-master brain says, “We can solve this! We can get rid of half our belongings, we can organize every shelf, we can live simply, we can meditate until we no longer need all these things we have, we can make it so that the living room will always be easy to clean!”
I try to have affection for this side of myself, this idealistic, ever-inspired person inside me who wants to change my entire world in one sweeping gesture, solving all problems in a single swipe. She’s got a great spirit. Despite her impulses being a tad on the unrealistic side, when channeled appropriately, she really can get a whole helluva lot done, (and with style, too).
But when it comes to food and losing weight and cooking, my own brain can be overwhelming. Thanks to my TPS reports and keeping a watch on my habits, I’ve noticed that one of my biggest problems comes at night, when I crave sugar and carbs. My Solve It All brain wants to put me on some special diet that will take away all sugar cravings. Yeah, and how realistic might THAT BE? I believe that being in this body means dealing with wanting sugar, and the better I get at coping with that, the better things will be.
SO, tonight I decided that a great way to address this nighttime sugar craving would be with some DEHYDRATOR COOKIES. At one of the raw food fairs I went to years ago, they had dehydrator crackers and cookies, and they were all really delicious. This would be a perfect snack for me; I love prepping stuff for the dehydrator, I love dried fruits and enjoy the texture of things made in a dehydrator, and the results are generally very high in fiber and vitamins.
I traipsed around the interwebs and didn’t find any recipes that I liked. Most of them had coconut, which I don’t like, or almonds, which give me panic attacks. So I decided to make up something on my own.
Here’s what I did:
The result was a bowl of, well, delicious smelling apple mush.
I used a cookie scoop to put globs onto some dehydrator trays, and they looked like this:
I put them in at 105 degrees. Tomorrow I’ll see what they taste like!
After years of not liking almonds, a couple years ago I finally started trying to integrate them into my diet. I began finding that I liked the taste, and it was easy to grind them up and add them to all kinds of things. I don’t like walnuts (besides the taste, they make me feel sick and my mouth peel, which I thought a bit suspicious of a sensitivity or allergy), so I loved the idea of getting some good NUTrition (hahahHAHAHA ohhhhhh I know, it’s bad), via the almonds.
The first thing I used them for were making some thumbprint cookies that Natasha gave me the recipe for. I LOVE these cookies, and used to make them frequently. I did notice that I often had problems with panic attacks after eating them, but I was having attacks all the time, and I was a lot more suspicious of excess sugar than of almonds. Finally, I had to admit that something in the cookies was causing a consistent problem, and I gave them up.
Then, last year I began making another awesome Natasha recipe: Almond Butter Balls, made with (surprise) almond butter. I LOVED them, I couldn’t get enough, I’d lay in bed and just crave these little suckers. They were so amazingly delicious. Almost immediately they seemed to trigger panic attacks. I was so surprised! I ended up removing the chocolate chips and subbing in carob – assuming the caffeine in the chocolate was causing the problem. Still, the attacks came. Fine. Great. Something I loved that I couldn’t eat.
This same story was repeated with a third recipe for a granola-like treat that a vegan chef gave me; massive panic attacks after eating just one or two small pieces (again, I subbed out the chocolate and anything else I thought could possibly be offensive, but the attacks still occurred).
Unfortunately, the baklava I made this weekend had the same effect. I love baklava, and I was hoping so much that this wouldn’t happen, but the evidence at this point is overwhelming. Something in almonds triggers anxiety. Specifically, it triggers a physical symptom of feeling my chest get very tight, and difficulty taking deep breaths. An allergy? I don’t think it’s that severe. It seems severe enough to trigger physical symptoms that cause anxiety, but if I were severely allergic I’d have croaked by now. A sensitivity? I suppose that’s possible.
Either way, it’s a pain in the ass. I love almonds. I hate giving up another food. I’m still in denial of my own lactose intolerance. So much of eating lately feels like a lesson in Let’s Stop Pretending. Let’s stop pretending this food doesn’t make me sick/anxious/bloated/miserable.
Why do we like what makes us feel awful? That’s more rhetorical than anything else. I know that foods we’re sensitive to can be, paradoxically, foods we crave. I just don’t think it’s fair. Life without almond baklava? NOOOOOOOO.