Heart of Cooking

Lucky for all of you egg-free people, I’ve been experimenting more with egg-free baking these days than normal.  So I came up with a very yummy cookie that is egg-free, grain-free, gluten and wheat-free, dairy-free, and sugar free.  Yay!  I didn’t get a good picture of the actual cookies but you can see Elijah was enjoying his!

Cinnamon Walnut Raisin Egg-free Cookie Recipe (wheat, gluten, grain, sugar, and dairy free)

1 1/2 cups nut flour – I tried them with both almond and pecan flour and both are tasty

1/4 cup coconut oil, melted (you can use melted butter too)

1/4 cup honey or other sweetener of choice

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp baking soda (delete for GAPS)

2 heaping tablespoons nut butter

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1 cup chopped walnuts

1/2 cup raisins or currants

1/4 cup or less water – start with less and add until you get a good cookie batter consistency

Steps:

1.  Preheat oven to 350 F.  Mix all ingredients except the water together.  Add the water after you have mixed all the other ingredients, a little at a time until you get a good cookie dough consistency.

2.  Grease 2 cookie sheets with butter or oil.  Make spoonfuls the size of tablespoons and plop them onto the cookie sheet, spacing them out so that you have about 12 to a sheet.  This batch makes about 16 cookies so you’ll need just part of the second cookie sheet.

3.  Bake for 12 minutes or until cooked through and a little crispy on the outside.  Remove from oven, let cool for about five minutes.  Then remove with a spatula and serve.  They remind me of Oatmeal Raisin cookies.  Yum!

I was craving cereal over the weekend (doesn’t help that my husband buys cereal I can’t eat!) so I finally tried out a recipe I had found for Raw Nut Granola.  It is a bit of a process but it was so worth it.  It turned out as raw granola bars that you can break up into granola for cereal.  So you really get two recipes in one!

This recipe does require a dehydrator so if you don’t have one, you may be able to bake the mixture at about 300 degrees F until it is crisp.  You may want to put it on parchment paper or just grease the pan very well.  You’ll also want to make the mixture quite thin on the pan.  This does kill the beneficial enzymes in the nuts and seeds but it is an option if you don’t have a dehydrator.

I did make some adjustments to the recipe, simply due to not having dates, lemon, pumpkin seeds or vanilla.  But here is the original recipe as well as my adjustments.  For me, it made two  full sheets of granola on the Excalibur dehydrating sheets which later fit almost into two quart sized jars (one is already gone…)

Raw Nut Granola (egg-free, dairy-free, grain-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, soy-free)

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Coconut Vanilla Ice Cream - Dairy, Egg and Sugar Free

It’s summer and we all love ice cream, right?  The best dairy-free and sugar-free vanilla ice cream I’ve found is this one.  It is really delicious, both with the lavendar and without.  It is creamy and smooth and freezes well.  However, it is quite a bit of work so I don’t always feel like making it.  It also has eggs in it so for people who can’t eat eggs, it won’t work for them.

So I set out this past week with the goal to come up with a very easy vanilla ice cream.  While it’s not quite a creamy, it is still delicious and very vanilla-y.

GAPS note:  I did use canned coconut milk for this recipe and used Trader Joes’ brand which doesn’t have guar gum in it.  However, I still only use this at the most once a week because of the BPA in the cans.  This is the only canned good I still rely on besides sardines and fish at times.  For those of you who are staying away from all canned goods, you can try making this ice cream with your own homemade coconut milk.  There are a few recipes floating around but here one of mine:

Homemade Coconut Milk

Ingredients:
1     box “Let’s Do Organic” Creamed Coconut (you can find it in the baking section in health food stores in a small green box)
14   oz. filtered water

Steps:
1.  Bring 14 oz. of filtered water to a boil, then turn off heat.  Add the creamed coconut from the bag.  Stir until well combined.  You can use less or more water depending upon the consistency you want.  It will have the coconut meat in it so if you want a smoother coconut milk, put the creamed coconut through a strainer.

So now onto the Coconut Vanilla Ice Cream Recipe!  (Dairy-free, sugar-free and egg-free)

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It’s blueberry season here in Maryland and Elijah, my mom and I ended up going picking this past weekend.  We had a blast picking 8 lbs in less than an hour and Elijah got to eat all he wanted.  The farm we went to was called Frog Eye Farm and they had over 200 blueberry bushes!

I love blueberry muffins – but I don’t always like cleaning muffin tins – so I made a Blueberry Muffin Cake with the berries we picked.  It was yummy and very easy.

Blueberry Muffin Cake with coconut flour (grain-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free)

1/3 cup coconut oil

1/4 – 1/3 cup honey

4 eggs

1/3 cup coconut flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking soda (not GAPS legal -delete for GAPS)

1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.

If the coconut oil isn’t melted, gently melt it in a pan on the stove on low.  Combine the eggs, honey and oil together until smooth (make sure the oil isn’t too hot though).  Add the flour, soda, and salt and beat until well blended and there are no lumps.  You can also put everything into a mixer or food processor.

2. Add the blueberries at the end and fold into the batter.  Grease an 8 x 8 pan with coconut oil or butter.  Pour batter into the pan and spread over the bottom of the pan.  Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until it is firm in the center.  Sorry – I don’t remember exactly how long it took.

Enjoy!

If you are grain-free, this lasagna is just for you!  Or if you’re gluten-free and can’t eat regular rice noodle pasta, this is a great alternative for you to be able to make lasagna again!

I came up with this recipe this past spring and I really love it.  I wanted to try to find something to replace the noodles other than zucchinis to make it taste a bit more like regular lasagna while still being grain-free.  So I ended up using very thin crepes made just from eggs for the noodles.  The result was very good and it was even better the next day after the flavors had melded a bit more.

I did use cheese on the top of the one in the picture.  We are now able to eat a particular brand of raw cow’s cheddar cheese and I am so happy about this!  It’s been so long since we’ve been able to enjoy cheese without reacting to it.  I would say this is mainly due to the healing we have been doing through being on the GAPS diet – hooray!

However, if you can’t eat cheese, I have cashew cheese sauce that works great if you can eat nuts.  It’s in the recipe below.

By the way, if you plan on making this, my tip is to make the egg noodles ahead of time because it gets to be quite a bit to make the noodles, sauce, and veggies all in once sitting…

So, here’s the recipe for you!

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So what is this post really about?

It’s about these lovely little egg crepes that I make that are great for multiple uses…wraps, pancakes and yes, noodles.

My post following this will be about lasagna and how I use these little egg crepes to make delicious tasting gluten-free and grain-free lasagna…stay tuned!

A few tips:

For noodles: The recipe below is specifically for making the noodles for the lasagna.  They are very thin and quite delicate.  But they work great as noodles for this reason in the lasagna.

For wraps: you will want to use more than 1/8 cup egg batter that is recommended in the recipe below.  I would use just less than 1/4 cup for making one wrap. This will make it more durable.  You can use these for grain- free tacos or any other kind of sandwich topping that needs bread or a wrap.

For pancakes: now these aren’t your regular pancakes.  But my son loves to eat these just with honey and butter.  They are extremely easy because there is only one ingredient.  If you want more of a pancake, you may want to use a little bit more than 1/8 cup egg batter per pancake.  If you’re after crepes, then 1/8 cup should work great.  And you will want to delete the garlic powder.

So, here is how to make them…

Egg Wraps or Pancakes or Noodles (grain-free, starch free, gluten-free and dairy-free)

Ingredients:

8       eggs
¾      tsp salt
¾      tsp garlic powder

(Again, this is the amount you will use for the lasagna.  If you’re making pancakes or wraps, start with 3 or 5 eggs).

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I believe that almost anything is possible with a few ingredients:

• creativity and looking outside the box
• a few helpful kitchen tools
• amazing abundance of foods that the earth has given us

With these few ingredients, you can really come up with anything no matter how limited your diet is.  I really believe this.  Maybe it’s because the more limited my diet has become, the more I have discovered just how many ways there are to make pancakes, tortillas, noodles and other common food items.

Yes, I know, they are not the “same.”  But I tend to believe that different is good, no matter how crazy it sounds to make tortillas out of just eggs or noodles out of cabbage.

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Time for dessert!  I was craving coconut macaroons this week so I ended up making some.  I adapted the recipe in Nourishing Traditions and ended up with a yummy starch-free version (the NT recipe calls for arrowroot).

I was also out of vanilla so I used some real vanilla bean that my sister had given to me from her time in Thailand.  I hadn’t used real vanilla bean before she gave me this batch and it is truly a treat!  I had no idea how to use it, but all you need to do is simply cut it in half lengthwise, and the scrape out the little vanilla “balls.”

It looks like dark black caviar but very small.   When I made ice cream with it, I cooked the vanilla bean with the scapings and ice creams ingredients and then discarded it.  For the cookies, I just used the insides of the bean.  You can see the little vanilla specks in the cookies:

These are really delicious!  They are moist, chewy, not too sweet, vanilla-e and hold their shape.  In my opinion, a perfect macaroon.  Here’s the recipe:

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Okay, so if you’re not a cabbage fan, please don’t run off too quickly.  I used to pass this beautiful vegetable by without a glance because I didn’t know how versatile and delicious it is.  Now that my choices are much more limited, I have been forced to eat more veggies and be more creative with them.

…The result – I feel better than I ever had in my life, but that’s another story!

I love the almond flour tortillas that I make for tacos, but they are quite a bit of work, especially if I need to grind my own almond flour.  So lately I have been primarily using cabbage leaves as taco and burrito wraps.  I have one thing to say – easy and delicious.  Plus they are virtually allergen free except for anyone allergic to cabbage.  (not very common)

Here’s the run down:

wheat-free, gluten-free, grain-free, corn-free, egg-free, nut-free, seed-free, sugar-free, yeast-free, dairy-free, casein-free, nightshade-free – you get the idea!

Kid friendly?  My son gobbles these tacos down like there’s no tomorrow.

One thing I want to start doing on my blog is to do more step by step tutorials on how to do certain things in the kitchen.  I am a very visual person as are a lot of people and I know photos help a lot in explaining how something works.  So the last time I made these cabbage tacos, I took pictures every step of the process so that you can see first hand how to make them.

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Here is another necessary summer recipe!  If you love to grill and if you can’t eat gluten, soy or sugar, you may be looking for a great barbecue sauce you can use on your grilled vegetables and meats.  I ended up making this recipe a few days ago when I wanted to make a Barbecue Meatloaf recipe.  I couldn’t find a barbecue sauce that was free of sugar, starch and gluten, so I made my own.

I am now in love with this sauce and found myself putting it on my zucchini noodles in place of pasta sauce last night.

I started with Ali’s Chipotle Barbecue sauce and just changed a few things.  I made it GAPS friendly by changing the maple syrup to honey and I just deleted the black-strap molasses.  I also used regular chili powder instead of chipotle because it is really too spicy for me and my son.  I also added a tsp. of paprika like Ali suggested.  In the end, I added 2 Tbsp mustard.

I too love the strained tomatoes that Ali talks about in her post, made by Bionaturae.  I buy the tomatoes along with their glass-jarred tomato paste to make most of my tomato dishes like spaghetti sauce.  This is because we are trying to avoid the BPA found in most cans of food.  Why the companies use this chemical to line their cans is beyond me!

I used my blending wand to blend it up, which I was surprised to see didn’t quite blend all the onions up.  But I actually like it a little chunky.  If you like your’s very smooth, use a regular blender for this recipe.  Here it is:

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