Lemon-Raspberry Muffins [grain-free, paleo, gluten-free]

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Katherine

Yeah, so I’m not much of a baker. At all. All that pesky measuring and stuff? But I love looking at photos of food on Pinterest. Even the baked goods. However, I refuse to pin stuff that I know I will never make. Pin hoarding is a problem, people. Don’t be a poser… Make what you pin. How do we reconcile these facts of my life? Well we bake the damned muffins, that’s how. This recipe was inspired by Coconut flour chia jam power muffins and grain-free lemon poppyseed muffins. Both currently hanging out on my pinboards waiting for some love.

I brought them into the office and offered them up to my willing colleagues on the condition they give me some feedback about the recipe. We agreed they were fairly dense and could probably be a bit more muffin-like if we knew more about gluten-free baking. It definitely needs more lemon flavour. Next time I would add the juice and zest of two lemons. Our taste buds are so conditioned to that fake lemon flavour that we almost didn’t appreciate the subtle flavours in here. Everyone thought they were fairly moist and the raspberry filling was a hit.

This is the result of my baking experiment.

Lemon-Raspberry Muffins. Makes 12 large muffins.

Ingredients

1 cup coconut flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 eggs
1/3 cup lemon juice (would add the juice and zest of two lemons next time)
1/2 cup unsweetened apple sauce
1 cup of almond milk
1 teaspoon stevia powder (I used two little packets. It could maybe use more if you want them really sweet)

Chia Jam

1 cup of raspberries, pureed. Mine were frozen so I microwaved for a minute then stirred until they were a pulp.
3 tablespoons of chia seeds. Mix into raspberries. Let sit for several hours or overnight.

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Assemble your cast of characters

Combine dry ingredients. Mix well.

Combine wet ingredients. Mix well.

Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Blend with a spatula. Coconut flour absorbs moisture so it is going to seem thick and sticky, yet easily pliable. Spoon half of the batter evenly into your muffin tins. I use silicone liners because they are reusable and they never stick!

Poke a hole in the batter with your finger. Fill with your chia jam.

Spoon the rest of the batter on top and smooth out with a spoon.

Bake for 30-35 minutes. Or until they are done. I’m so not good at this baking stuff.

Recipe Round Up: April 24, 2012

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Katherine

I may be reasonably creative in the kitchen, but I definitely can’t come up with, photograph, and blog about new recipes every single day! I’ve long been emailing recipes to friends and colleagues, or sharing them on Facebook. Thought I would share a few of my favourites to keep you going through the week! These are all gluten-free and grain-free, of course! Who knows, maybe I will make this a regular feature?

Drip Beef from Pioneer Woman

Growing up, we always called this recipe beef dip, and we made it with garlic, soy sauce and some other stuff in the crockpot. Salty, shredded beef piled high onto a hot dog bun and dipped in the sauce. Then, I later found out it was called French Dip. Last year, I discovered Pioneer Woman’s Drip Beef. With pepperoncinis. I love pepperoncinis. I had to try it and it was love at first bite. PW’s post here has two variations of this recipe, but I’ve honestly never tried the second one because the first is so delicious. You could serve it on regular bread if you are into that, or perhaps on a grain-free roll? I just eat it out of a bowl with a fork (that is, if I don’t fill myself eating it right out of the pot…) I make mine in a slow cooker.

Kale and sausage mock lasagna, from Kalyn’s Kitchen

This recipe sounded bizarre to me the first time I read it, but Kalyn’s recipes rarely let me down. It is very easy to put together and it uses two of my favourite ingredients – sausage and kale! How could I go wrong? The last time I made this I put in a layer of drained cottage cheese. This recipe tastes even better the next day, so make it the night before and pack slices for lunch.

Weekend Glow Kale Salad, from Oh She Glows

A vegan recipe on a paleo-ish blog? I know, right? But this one is a winner. Once, my office had an evacuation and we couldn’t go back into the building for the day. I mourned the loss of my delicious salad waiting for me on my desk and nearly teared up when I threw it in the trash the next day. Truth be told, this recipe is even better with some grilled chicken or tuna tossed into it…vegan shmegan . The sesame-tahini dressing is really tasty as well! Do not be impatient, let the dressing marinate as she says. It will be worth the wait!

Italian Sausage Stew

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Katherine

I love sausage. A lot. Italian, bratwurst, Polish, chorizo, garlic, fresh, cured, pepperoni, pepperettes… links, patties blablabla. I loooove sausage. Now, get your minds out of the gutter. I’m talking about the delicious, flavorful meat! My professed and unabashed love for sausage has been the butt of many jokes and many awkward moments.

Looking in my fridge the other day I had half a pound of ground beef, and half a pound of ground pork. I needed a recipe to use it up. Because I’m obsessed with Well Fed, I flipped through it in hopes of inspiration. Bingo. Italian Sausage Seasoning. Well Fed has this uncanny knack for making the simplest ingredients (lonely abandoned ground meat) into a flavour party. Seriously, what are you waiting for? Go buy it or at least read the 30 page free sampler.

Using these delicious sausage flavours, I created a thick stew, almost like a chili. Now, given that we got a dump of snow last night (ugh), it feels like this is an appropriate dish for today! Warm, spicy and stick to your ribs goodness.

Italian Sausage Seasoning from Well Fed

4 teaspoons dried parsley
1 tablespoon dried Italian herbs
2 teaspoons ground black pepper
2 teaspoons coarse (granulated) garlic powder
2 teaspoons paprika
4 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 1/2 teaspoons fennel seed (listed as optional, but in my humble opinion this ingredient is crucial in an Italian sausage! )

Mix these ingredients together and add a few spoons to your meat. I doubled the recipe and it filled a mason jar so I could use it again. Delish. You’ll want to mix it up well, of course.

Italian Sausage Stew

1/2 lb of ground beef
1/2lb of ground pork (you could use all beef or all pork if you wanted)
1/2 a medium onion, chopped
1 c of frozen chopped spinach or kale
one can of diced tomatoes (the large-ish ones)
one small can of tomato paste
vegetable broth, as needed

Add a few big spoons of the seasoning to your pan with the meat. Cook over medium heat until browned.

Add the tomatoes, paste, your frozen spinach (I used kale) and a bit of vegetable broth as needed to get your desired consistency. Simmer until reduced slightly and thickened. Serve with freshly grated parmesan cheese. [I assume] this freezes really well. I ate this with a spoon, but you could also add some plain tomato sauce and use it as a sauce to top some zucchini noodles, butternut squash, or any other type of pasta.

Gluten Free Jamaican… tarts?

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Katherine

I saw this recipe for gluten-free jamaican patties on pinterest, and after reading through decided that all the ingredients sounded good enough to me. I became obsessed with making them. I thought about them constantly for two days until I went and picked up a scotch bonnet pepper and cream cheese so that I could make them.

I won’t write out all the ingredients and recipe, because you can find them on I Breathe… I’m hungry… and I actually did follow the recipe, but with one pretty significant change. That dough was a b@#h! I could not roll it out without it crumbling apart! It was pretty disastrous, actually. I was about to throw it out and just eat the yummy filling when I thought about cramming them into muffin tins to make Jamaican-patty inspired muffin tart things. Ahhh, success.

They aren’t incredibly pretty, but they sure did taste good. Here’s how the process looked.

Spices!

Scotch Bonnet Pepper. Yes, I am wearing rubber gloves, and you should too. If you don’t have them, go out and buy them before you dare cut into that pepper. A Scotch Bonnet is HOT. To quote my good friend Wikipedia, “Most Scotch Bonnets have a heat rating of 100,000–350,000 Scoville Units. For comparison, most jalapeño peppers have a heat rating of 2,500 to 8,000 on the Scoville scale.” If you get that heat in your hands or eyes it will hurt. Ask my mom about the time I cut a habanero pepper without gloves and then touched my face. She walked into me smearing sour cream all over my face to try to neutralize the burn. True story.

Pureeing the onion, pepper and garlic with some water

Adding the mixture to the meat

Spices added!

Making that “dough”. Ugh.

My improvisation

Ready for the oven. You aren’t cooking anything here, so really it’s just to heat it up and make the dough crispy.

I don’t think I will ever make these again, but if anyone does and gets them to look like an actual Jamaican patty, do let me know. The filling was delicious, however. It might be really delicious inside a curry flavoured Pure wrap .

Update: These froze pretty well. They were a bit crumbly, and I ate them with a fork, but no softer/crumbly than they were the first time around. I froze them in packages of two, took it out of the freezer the night before and thawed in my lunch bag overnight, microwaved one minute.

Daily Foodie Eats: 21/04/12

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Katherine

And so ends the one week of Daily Foodie Eats. I can’t possibly blog everything I eat every single day! Nah, I don’t want to bore you. You need to save your energy to read the great recipes! Maybe I’ll turn it into a once a week thing, like What I ate Wednesday.

So to finish off the week here:

Breakfast: Coffee… was a busy morning. Had to bring our feline friends to the vet. In good health but one of them is morbidly obese. Poor kitty! She needs to go on a diet!

Lunch: Eggs and Breakfast sausage (So one of the local grocery stores has in-store made breakfast sausage. I’d never seen it before so we tried it today and it was very lean and tasty!)

Second Lunch/snack: Asian slaw and taste testing of a new recipe coming up (Hint: Caribbean flavours, very very spicy, but this version is gluten-free!)

Snack: Starbucks: Grande sugar free vanilla whole milk extra hot Americano Misto. And more brie cheese than one should probably eat in a day…

Dinner: Raspberry and cream cheese stuffed french toast with sausage and maple syrup… just kidding. Sorta. Yes, I did make this but it was for the husband, not me!

I had a smoothie instead (hemp hearts, spinach, raspberries, banana, almond milk), and a breakfast sausage stolen from the pan… haha.

Snack: Some more nibbling while putzing around in the kitchen, and half a bag of Spicy Plantain chips. It was very much an emotional eating evening. You see, I migrated my blog from wordpress.com over to a self-hosted server, and got a domain name and it was kind of stressful on me. Whine whine. I haven’t done any web work in quite a while and things kept going wrong, but 4 hours later here we are! Full speed ahead. ha!

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Carrot Ginger Soup

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Katherine

Have you ever made a blended soup? No? Why not? So easy. One of my favourite ways to get vegetables into me, freezer friendly, portable and delicious! I tend to just make up the recipe as I go, just as I did today.

Carrot Ginger Soup. Makes one large-ish pot. How many bowls? Depends on how big your bowls are. Ha!

3lb bag of carrots
a large onion
a large chunk of ginger
a big spoon of ground coriander
8c (or so) of broth – chicken or vegetable; homemade or from a box – doesn’t really matter.
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil

Peel your carrots, ginger and onion.

Toss onion and ginger into the food processor to chop.

Put onion and ginger mixture in a pan with olive oil over medium heat to soften.

Grate your carrot with the food processor

Add the carrots and your broth to the pot. Simmer for 30-40 minutes or until it’s all soft

Puree with an immersion blender. (or you could dump it all into the food processor or a real blender, but why?). Add a bit of water or broth to thin the consistency, if required.

And eat. You can top with chopped cilantro, a drizzle of sour cream, some salt and pepper. This soup has a real zing to it because of the enormous amount of ginger. It’s simple and delicious flavours at their best. Good food does not need to be complicated and difficult. I froze most of this soup for busy weeknight dinners once my next semester begins (I work full time and go to grad school full time….)

I also packaged a few servings of soup into mason jars for lunches to take to work. Mason jars make awesome packed lunch containers. Take off the lid, drape a paper towel or napkin over it to prevent splatter, and microwave. Glass won’t leach crap into your food, nor will it break down from the heat.

Daily Foodie Eats: 20/04/12

Posted on April 21, 2012 by Katherine

Breakfast: Coffee and a stuffed mushroom cap

Lunch: Gyros meatballs on a salad of tomato, red onion and spinach with some chopped veggies on the side

Snack: a mason jar of carrot-ginger soup (recipe coming!).. then I ate a nice big chunk of brie cheese when I arrived home. I was having a bad day. I needed to eat my feelings, ok?

Dinner: Now this is what I call “Paleo junk food”… A giant chicken shawarma salad. Man, it was good. Crispy charred chicken bits, salad, garlic sauce. Sure it’s probably full of nasty canola oils, but a better choice than pizza, no?