Category Archives: Recipes

Mmmmm, Donuts.

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So, playing around with my recipe, I decided to splurge on a donut pan, nonstick. This recipe will make 6 donuts AND an 8×8 pan of brownies, or 12 cupcakes. Whatever you feel like.

Assuming you divide the recipe into 12 servings, this ends up having:
Calories: About 200
Fat: About 16 grams
Total carbs: About 24 grams
Fiber: About 4.5 grams
Sugar: just under a gram
Sugar alcohols: Just over 16.5 grams (Erythritol, which bothers my gut not at all, YMMV)
Net carbs: Just over 2.5 grams.
Protein: Almost 7.5 grams
This means you can eat one at any given meal with negligible effect on blood sugar, but if you binge enough, you’ll spike. Most of the net carbs are in the almond flour. I strongly recommend against subbing splenda, which not only usually contains carbohydrate fillers, but throws my entire ability to cope with any other carbs out of whack. The fat, fiber and protein content buffer the small amount of remaining carbohydrates.

ON to the recipe!

  • Blanched, finely ground almond flour, 2.5 cups
  • Dutch Process Cocoa, .5 cup
  • Lakanto Monkfruit Sweetner (the kind with erythritol) 1 cup, but reserve several tablespoons for dusting the pans
  • Double acting baking powder, 1 tablespoon
  • scant half teaspoon salt (or a hearty pinch, not strictly necessary if using salted butter)
  • 2 eggs, separated (I used pretty large, nonstandard eggs, if your eggs are small, use three. If you want a lighter recipe, add an extra white.)
  • 1 cup unsweetened almond milk (vanilla is fine, coconut is fine, any low carb, unsweetened nut milk is going to do well here.)
  • You’re going to need 4 oz or half a Kerrygold brick of butter, total, roughly, but only 6 tablespoons of that go into the mix, melted. The rest gets used to grease the pan, and make topping if you like. Follow the markers on the butter label if using a different brand. Sub coconut oil or a liquid oil if making nondairy. Recipe tested with salted butter, came out only slightly salty but I like that.
  • Ground Flax (I use golden): .25 cup
  • A little extra cocoa for dusting

This is a “lot of bowls but still pretty easy” recipe.

Start by preheating your oven to 400F

Then grease whatever pans you’re going to use. The rest of the recipe assumes 12 standard cuppins. (Are they muffins because they have lots of fiber and are low carb? Or are they cupcakes because they taste like tender brownies? Muffcakes sounds much, much worse.) Use a nonstick pan and PLENTY of butter or cooking spray. You do not want these to stick or you will be spooning them out of the pan, sadly. Liners aren’t great with these unless silicone, but they won’t brown as well on the edge.

Add a little cocoa and a few spoons of that cup of sweetener to a dish and mix them with a fork, then dust them over the greased pans.

Put 2 cups of almond flour in a large mixing bowl. Plan to add up to a half cup more as needed. Add the cocoa, the rest of the sweetener, baking soda and salt, and mix everything with a whisk or sift or push through a screen until the lumps are gone.

Melt your butter in 15 second bursts until just melted through.

While that’s happening, separate your eggs and put the yolks in one bowl and the whites in a bowl large enough to mix. I used an old-fashioned egg beater with a manual crank and it took, ehhhh 2 minutes of not a lot of work to get soft peaks. A whisk takes me closer to 5 minutes and an electric mixer would take about a minute but then you have to clean the thing. I think a stand mixer would take -5 minutes but then add the 20 minutes of getting my husband to get it from the difficult to get it from place and it’s just not worth it. My kid loves our little old fashioned egg beater.

Anyway, get the whites to soft peaks, and set aside while you mix the almond milk, the ground flax and the egg yolks (you want the almond milk and ground flax together before you lump everything in, for better texture. I tried mixing the ground flax with the dry ingredients and let’s just say it benefits from the extra wet time if you mix it with the wet.

Add  the butter to the egg yolk mixture and make sure the whole thing is mixed. A fork will do it, a whisk will do it, this is not a fussy recipe use what you have.

Don’t wait too long to add all that to the dry mix. If it’s too thin, add more almond meal. I think about 2 and 1/3 cups are probably about right, but these things probably vary based on humidity. You want it a nice mud-pie consistency, so that if you, for example, got fancy and used an ice cream scoop to put things into the cupcake tin, they would hold their shape for a bit, but not in the oven.

Give the eggwhites one last beat and then fold them gently in with the rest of the mixture.

If donuts, and a 6 donut tray, put about half the batter into a ziplock bag, cut the corner of the bag off (not too small, an inch opening is not too large) and seal the bag, then pipe the batter into the donut wells.

If muffins, a standard ice cream scoop is pretty convenient except you’ll have to short each one a little to make 12, but they puff up just enough that you won’t mind.

If 8×8 tray, just spread it out, don’t fuss at it to be level, it will mostly level itself. (Later, cut it in the pan and expect that first one to be a cook’s sacrifice until you have enough room to get a spatula under the rest to get them out neatly. They’re pretty tender.)

Bake for at LEAST 20 minutes and probably closer to 25 minutes, or until they test done, or feel reasonably resistant to being poked. Don’t burn your fingers.

Allow to cool.

Top as desired, I just wanted donuts so I didn’t get fancy.

Coffee Cake and Pandemics

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We’ve been inside for way too long, and no end in sight, because of my level of risk factors. I asked my mom for this recipe, because I’m Going To Alter It At Some Point, but in the meantime those who can eat wheat and sugar should have the opportunity to try it. We’ve been making this coffee cake since I was small, and one of my earlier cooking tasks was to roll the little bits of butter in sugar. I ate more than a few of them before the cake ever got into the oven. Mom always called this Mace Cake. It’s adapted from a James Beard cookbook. (I’ve modernized the instructions.)

So, here you go:

  • 1 1/2 cup minus 2 tablespoons flour
  • 2 teaspoons double acting baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon mace
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 beaten egg
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 3 tablespoons melted butter
  • butter and sugar for topping
  • extra cinnamon or mace for the top

Preheat your oven to 400 F

Butter an 8×8 pyrex or corningwear baking pan. Be generous, the butter helps make a really delightful edge piece.

Set a small child or other helper if you’ve got ’em to rolling little bits of butter (they were the size of my pinky fingertip when I was little, so ehhh pencil eraser sized?) in sugar. If they finish first, stick the sugared butter bits in the fridge until you’re done if the kitchen is warm.

Sift the dry ingredients together, make a little well in the middle of the pile

Pour in the wet ingredients into the well, and then beat everything until smooth.

Pour the batter into the greased pan and dot the top with the little butter bits. The number and placement of these is completely subjective, but personally I like them spaced every inch or even more frequently. Ask your kids to calculate the number you need, if there are none at the edges and your pan is 8×8 and they are placed every inch.

Sprinkle a little cinnamon over the top, or more mace.

Bake for 25 minutes, until golden brown and puffy. The top should be pretty crisp from the extra butter and sugar.

Serve warm, with coffee.

 

I’m planning on trying this with almond flour and monkfruit/erythritol sweetener, in well-buttered muffin tins.

 

 

cheater gluten-free spinach lasagna

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Work time about 15 minutes, cook time probably 80 minutes, less if you like chewy noodles

This recipe is free from gluten, egg, nuts, tomatoes and a bunch of other things that no one would ever put in lasagna anyway.

Size is flexible, we had some stuff left over with a 10×10 pyrex, you could probably do a 9×13 pan and be good with the following.

What you will need:
1 box gluten-free brown rice lasagna noodles. Tinkyada or similar. This would probably work okay with other noodles, but you need noodles that will absorb a lot of moisture. Do not pre-cook, or if you MUST, just cook them long enough to be a little flexible, do not cook them all the way. We’re going for easy.
1 quart tetrapack Imagine Portabello Mushroom Soup
2 boxes frozen chopped spinach, thawed to warm enough to squeeze in the microwave, squeezed and drained. Spinach water is not tasty, get rid of it.
1 pint ricotta (we used full fat organic valley)
12-18 oz sliced low-moisture mozzarella (or fresh, IDK and IDC, it would be good either way. A pound would be about right. Get it pre-sliced or this stops being easy.)

Layering order is key. You want the noodles and the cheese to bond and blend and all that nonsense. But you also need them to suck up a bunch of moisture from the soup.  You also don’t want this to stick.

If you like salt and pepper, use them, I’m not the boss of you. I hate pepper and no one likes as much salt as I need, so we have a salt-at-table policy. The soup has a fair amount of sodium already, I think.

SO, I am the boss of you when it comes to order.

Lasagna order of operations:
1. Cook spinach in microwave to warm enough to squeeze excess liquid out
2. Mix squeezed spinach with portabello soup
3. In a Pyrex (or whatever, baking) dish, cover the bottom with a very thin layer of sauce
4. Cover with 1 layer of uncooked lasagna noodles.
5. Pour 1/3 of the remaining soup over the lasagna noodles and spread evenly.
6. Put spoonfuls of ricotta (about half) over all the noodles. Just make little scoops with a regular spoon, and space ’em out a little.
7. Layer of mozz slices
8. Layer of noodles
9. Layer of sauce
10. Ricotta
11. Mozz? If sufficient for another layer after this
12. Noodles
13. Remaining sauce
14. Remaining Mozz

Bake at 350 until noodles are cooked through (fork should spear easily through the middle of the pan, 60-90 minutes. 375 or 400 would be fine too, but then watch for burning.)

You can add parm to the top layer if you really want, or browned, drained sausage, or shredded zucchini if you don’t have enough spinach, whatever, I don’t care, this is supposed to be done quickly and easily with what you have. Hell, you could use actual tomato sauce or alfredo, just make sure there’s enough liquid to cook the noodles.

It’s okay if you have extra sauce or noodles left over if you’re using a smaller pan. This is a forgiving recipe and probably wants to err on longer cooking and resting times. Can be a little too liquid if not cooked long enough, but very tasty regardless. Smells fantastic. If you want more zip, add hot sauce or pesto to individual portions after cooking.

A tightly focused photo of a small piece of fudge sitting on a plane of fudge in a Pyrex baking dish. It is rich, brown chocolate.

Easy Vegan, Allergy-friendly Chocolate Fudge

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I haven’t done fudge in years because it’s a sugar bomb, but it occurred to me that my eldest, who is dairy/soy/egg/peanut/wheat allergic, might never have had actual fudge in 24 years and that’s just wrong.  Fudge is one of the simplest things to make, and with the advent of canned sweetened condensed coconut milk, it’s now possible to make this traditionally dairy-laden dessert completely vegan, without compromise.

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Cheap Cooking Basics: Chicken Dinner

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Super short instructions here. Long explanation below.

You’re going to chop up a bunch of veggies and put them in a pan and put a raw, seasoned chicken on top, breast-side up. That goes in the oven with a bunch of oiled potatoes on the top rack above it, and baked for 45-60 minutes depending on the size of the bird. It takes us about 5 minutes to get this meal in the oven, maybe 10 if we chop celery. The leftovers are going to get used in a variety of tasty meals.

If you don’t know how to cook, you should keep reading. This may seem overwhelming (or too basic) but this is written with an assumption that you don’t really have a lot of experience or background in the kitchen.

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Turkey Day Menu 2017: GF and allergy friendly

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Courtesy of my sister, who is willing to adapt menus for other allergy issues. Comment here if your needs are different. 

First off, we have multiple allergies and food issues. In short:

Me; Militantly gluten free and no strawberries or sulfites due to allergies. Also allergic to crustaceans (lobster, crab, possibly shrimp?), peanuts, hazelnuts, lima beans, oats, banana, and weird issues around standard commercial dairy and eggs, but I do fine with certain local products on eggs and dairy. I also randomly have issues with tomatoes, garlic, onions, some veggies,  peppers, but there are meds I can take that help reduce inflammation to tolerate those. Some forms of garlic are better than others. I avoid most soy, refined sugar and mold-type cheeses due to inflammation issues.

My eldest: Allergic to soy, egg, dairy, peanuts and wheat.

My middle: No citric acid or citrates, reacts to wheat in weird ways, same for natamycin

Hubby has texture/taste issues (goes beyond dislike, not an allergy) with visible egg, set gelatin, and most cheese (except pizza.)

Youngest is Intensely picky.

A turkey dinner is actually one of the easiest meals to adapt.

So, within those parameters, here is our menu, according to Sis, with bullet commentary by me.

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Feel-better Chai Pudding

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An experiment worth repeating….

In a jar:
1/4 cup chia seed
1/8 cup coconut sugar
1/8 cup cocoa powder
1/8 cup maple syrup
1 teaspoon “power tea” (Power Tea is a mixture of organic spices including: Ceylon Cinnamon, Cloves, Ginger, Turmeric, Black Pepper and Cayenne Pepper., very chai-ish, LOTS of anti-inflammatory action.)
1 tablespoon elderberry syrup
1 cup almond milk or coconut water or raw milk or coconut milk or whatever.  I used a blend of almond milk and coconut water.

I actually tripled this recipe though had to short the milk a tiny bit to fit in a quart jar.
Stir well and let sit in the fridge for a couple hours.

It makes a spicy chocolate pudding that unlike refined-sugar-based desserts, actually leaves one feeling better. I’ve been fighting off the flu for a couple days, and I feel almost 100% after a bowl of this.

The cocoa, spices and elderberry all have good evidence for being medicinal. Also very tasty.

Chicken for meal trains

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So I’m taking part in a couple meal trains, and my default meal for such things is a roast chicken with potatoes and veggies.

My recipe for roast chicken is pretty simple…preheat oven to 450, rub spices and salt on bird, put in oven, clean potatoes, rub oil on potatoes, stick in oven above chicken, 60 minutes after the chicken went in everything should be perfect.  Add a salad and voila.

This is super flexible for easy meals. If someone lives close by, I can cook the birds myself and take them over the minute they come out of the oven–they will “rest” in the car on the way over and be perfectly timed to be carved when they get there.

If they live farther away, or need food dropped off well in advance of the meal, it is still simple. I rub the birds and clean the taters and oil them up and put everything in a foil roaster pan… The instructions for the family will be simply “Preheat to 450. Put pan in oven. Set timer for 60 minutes. Take chicken out and allow it to rest for 10 minutes before serving.”

This results in a bird with crisp skin, juicy white meat, crunchy wing tips (my fave) and tender leg and thigh meat. I use antibiotic free chicken from Trader Joe’s, at about $7-8 per bird, organic red potatoes, and whatever greens happen to be convenient. I might toss in some fruit if I’m long on it. Simple, allergy friendly, fast, and less work than going out to fast food.

The secret is the oven temperature… setting the oven even 25 degrees lower results in less crispy skin, longer cooking time, drier white meat.

Salt is VITAL to a crisp skin–it helps dry the skin out.

With cheap chicken like this, it’s not so vital to use every bit of it the way I would with an organic free range roaster, but we often throw the carcass in a pot, boil it, separate the meat, then add leftover veggies, potatoes and spices for a delicious chicken soup.

Homemade Marshmallows, updated for 2012

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People think marshmallows are complex, difficult things to make. “Jet puffed!” implies some magical thing that “marshmallows” sugar and gelatin into fluffy goodness.

Not so. Marshmallows are candy, and they require a strong mixer, but your average stand mixer will do the job just fine.  The only way you could “jet” marshmallows would be to use the engine as a mixer, I suppose. Really, like meringue or whipped cream, marshmallows depend on the incorporation of air into a matrix, in this case sugar and gelatin, beaten at high speed for about 11 minutes. Science is important with candy, and temperature is critical.

Work fast, work smart, and be prepared for things to be very, very sticky. Continue reading→

Cocoa water and cherry juice for coughs

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Basic recipe (the TL:DR version!)

2 heaping tablespoons cocoa
Honey to taste (preferably raw!)
1 cup tart cherry juice (must be pure cherry, should be tart, use black cherry juice if you can’t find tart)
Water, seltzer or almond/rice/coconut milk to taste. NOT dairy milk (and I don’t ever recommend soy for anyone but that’s another post.)

Mix cocoa and honey into a paste.
Add a tiny bit of hot water and stir
Add a little more and stir.
Once it is thin enough to mix well, add the rest of whatever liquids you want. They can be hot liquids if you prefer. The cherry juice is not just for flavor, it helps pain.
Drink up to half right away. Sip the rest as needed.

For more discussion, look behind the cut.

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