Plantain(flour) pancakes

I have been meaning to post this and keep forgetting. This is one of our favorites. If you wanted to try something exotic, try plantain flour. Plantain and plantain flour are staples at our house. I normally use the flour for making pancakes. I don't really measure anything when I make plantain pancakes but I'll estimate for the sake of this post.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup plantain flour
1 egg
2 tbsp sunflower oil or any oil you prefer
1 tbsp honey
1/4 tsp aluminum free baking soda
1/4 cup milk or anything non-dairy that you use. I mostly use hemp milk
2 tbsp Enjoy Life chocolate chips

Mix it all until all lumps are gone.  Heat skillet to medium.  Once on medium,  I normally turn it down to less than medium, on my stove it's on a "3."  It doesn't take long to cook so keep an eye on it and flip it to cook the other side.  Serve warm with organic maple syrup.

Buckwheat banana muffins

I bought raw organic buckwheat grouts from Whole Foods, sprouted them and after that I ground it into flour.  I received a manual grain mill for Christmas from my sister and have been putting it to use.  I've mainly used it for buckwheat.

I took some pictures can't find them. I'll post some pictures later.

Ingredients:

1 cup sprouted buckwheat flour.

1 large ripe mashed banana

1/4 cup partially melted Spectrum Palm Shortening

1/4 tsp aluminum-free baking soda

1/4 cup agave nectar (or honey if you can tolerate it)

1/4 cup hemp milk

If you are able to sprout your own flour that would be great, otherwise just use regular buckwheat flour. The point is sprouting is to make it easier to digest.

Mix all the ingredients.  Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes or until done. Please check since every oven is different.

My daughter loves this muffin, she a bunch in one sitting :).  Enjoy!

Paleo Irish Soda Bread

Ever since we went paleo a year and half ago, we haven't had any Irish soda bread.  My husband is of Irish descent and this was one of those things that I made that he truly enjoyed. We used to be just gluten and dairy-free so I would make the soda bread with millet and sorghum flours.   I'm so glad we can have soda bread again! I adapted this from Elana's Pantry's Irish soda bread recipe.

2 and 3/4 cups blanched almond flour
¼ teaspoon celtic sea salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
½ cup raisins
2 eggs
2 tablespoons raw honey
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar(or you can also use lemon)


Mix all the wet ingredients separately in a bowl.  Mix the dry ingredients separately in a bowl as well.  Then mix both.   Form into a dough and put on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.  Please see picture above, it's about 8 inches sideways and about an inch and a half of height.   Score the dough with a sharp knife.  Bake at 350 degrees F for 20 minutes, turn off the stove and let it sit in there for another 10 minutes. Take it out and cool it on a rack for half an hour before serving.  It tastes great by itself but my 4 year old loves it with apricot jam.

 Snickerdoodles

I wanted to make it paleo but I didn't have coconut sugar or date sugar at home. So I just used organic cane sugar, just this time. 

This was based on Jamie Oliver's recipe with a little exception.  I don't like stuff that's overly sweet so I used less sugar.  I also made it dairy-free.

3/4 cup coconut flour
1/2 cup organic cane sugar
1/2 tsp. gluten-free vanilla
a dash of sea salt
4 eggs
1/2 cup Spectrum Shortening

Sugar/cinnamon for rolling the cookies:

1 tbsp sugar
Some cinnamon, I didn't measure

Mix eggs, vanilla, sugar, eggs and Spectrum shortening.  Add the coconut flour and make sure to remove all lumps.  Mix well. Set aside for 5 minutes.  Meanwhile, line a baking sheet with parchment paper.  Make dough into small balls, roll in sugar/cinnamon mixture, and flatten on the baking sheet.  Bake at 375 degrees F for 15 minutes.  Enjoy!  They're so delicious!

Soaked and Sprouted Red lentil soup

This is just a basic red lentil soup that can be an addition to a meal.  I like to soak and sprout lentils but feel free to omit this part.  The soaking/sprouting part took about 3 days!  Just prepare however you prepare your lentils.  Sorry I didn't get a picture of this.

Ingredients:

1 cup red lentils, soaked and sprouted
Black pepper
Thyme
Sea salt
A few slices of bacon(fried) and cut into pieces
Water

In a pot, add the lentils then water just enough to cover it. Bring to a boil. Add the spices except for sea salt.  Boil for a few minutes then cover simmer til lentils are cooked.   Add the salt and bacon pieces after the lentils are cooked.

Comfort Food

I've been the worst blogger. I haven't updated in so long.  The truth is I have tons of new recipes but just haven't had the time to go here and update.   We're not really on strict GAPS anymore. We're more paleo again. We're still doing all the fermented foods and broths but I've added digestive enzymes into my daughter's regime.  I still take digestive enzymes too.

Anyway it's been raining quite a bit here and so I made this comfort food.  I cheated a little and added peas(that I found in the freezer) and potatoes that I bought from a local farmers market.

Ingredients:

A pound of grass-fed beef
1/2 onion
garlic, maybe about 1/2 head
black pepper
1 bay leaf
Sea salt
peas
organic red bell peppers
organic Brussel sprouts
organic potatoes, washed, peeled and diced
water
pork lard

Heat large skillet, add pork lard.  Add garlic and onions.  Saute. Add all other remaining ingredients and cover to boil.

I cook mine til the water dries out a little.  You can add as much water as you like. This would all depend on if you want a dry or a soupy consistency.

Enjoy!

Coconut Waffles

This is quick and easy and paleo!   It's always a hit at my house.  I eyeballed everything so I'm giving you approximate measurements in this post.

1/4 cup coconut flour
2 large duck eggs (you can use chicken eggs too but you may need 3).
1 tsp GF vanilla
2 tbsp coconut milk(I made my own)
a dash of salt
1 tbsp honey
1 tbsp virgin coconut oil

Pre-heat your waffle maker.  Mix everything and make sure to remove all lumps.   Cook! Serve. I served this with honey lemon creme that I purchased from an SCD-legal website.

Grain-free chocolate muffin/cupcake

Nom, nom, nom

My daughter and I have been feasting on these! Very easy to make and it freezes well.  It melts in your mouth. The secret is in the egg whites.  I use 2 free-range eggs and then 2 egg whites. The muffins came out very fluffy inside but not gooey.

Ingredients:

1 cup peanut butter (or any other nut butter)
2 eggs
2 egg whites
1 very ripe banana
2 tbs chocolate powder(I used Hershey's)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp lemon
1/4 cup honey

Preheat oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mix everything together. Add the lemon juice after everything's mixed.  Bake in a lined muffin pan for 20 minutes or til toothpick comes out clean.

What we eat(Rotation Diet)

I've had quite a number of people asking me what we eat everyday, mainly for breakfast.  I'm sorry I'm just posting this now so late.  I'm making some drastic changes though so in a few weeks this may not even apply anymore.   DD and I are going to do GAPS.  See link if interested.

gapsdiet.com

Anyway, here are things we eat for breakfast on rotation: I'm not specifying what days we actually eat them.

Breakfast ideas:
Muffins made from nut butter or nut flours
Pancakes made from nut butter or nut flours
Fruit with malanga butter*
Fruit peanut butter or cashew butter
Chestnut flour muffins *I'm still experimenting with other recipes
Coconut pancakes
Coconut bread
Coconut muffins/cupcakes
Coconut yogurt (homemade)
Turkey bacon
Sunny Side up eggs/scrambled eggs
Poached eggs
Avocado or avocado with eggs or with turkey bacon
Malanga cookies (they're healthy) that I baked
Yam cookies

Occasionally:

Homemade hash browns
Sweet potato hashbrowns

Keep in mind that I mainly bake/cook sugar-free on top of everything else. If I think of something else I'll post :).  I hope this helps some of you.

*I purchased malanga butter, malanga flour and yam flour from Specialty Foods.  They don't have a website, just a phone number you call and they will send you a very detailed catalog of all the tuber flours they sell.  They sell baked goods, imitation nut butters, specialty oils, lipbalms and lotions that can be made according to your allergies.  They are all pricey items but worth it if you have plenty of allergies.

Update on Chestnut Muffins

I usually like to soak the flours I use so last night I soaked the chestnut flour mixture(minus the leavening agent).  I just soaked it with hemp milk and let it sit on my countertop.  In the morning, in typical fashion, the soaked flour was very watery.  In my attempt to salvage it, I just added stuff that I would normally add to make pancakes.  I made one pancake very, very thin, cooked it on medium heat but it still didn't come out as I wanted.

Next I thought I'd salvage the mix even more and make the muffins that I had originally in mind.  I added more chestnut flour, I don't even remember, perhaps about 1/2 cup.  Baked it at 375 degrees.  The same thing happened, it was gooey.  So the whole thing was a disaster pretty much.  I wasted an expensive flour.  I ended up giving my daughter eggs for breakfast which messed up the rotation diet because today's not egg day(for those who follow a rotation diet, you know what I'm talking about).

Sigh, alright, so do you have the same experience when soaking flour(nut flour)?  It always comes out watery. In the past I soaked buckwheat and quinoa and had the same results. I'm not sure what to do.  I really want to soak the flours first to get rid of lectins, phytic acid, etc so they can be easily digested.

Thoughts? For now I guess I won't soak the nut flour.

Chestnut flour muffin with chocolate!

This is the first time I baked with chestnut flour.  It came out great!  There's no dairy, grain, eggs, soy in this recipe.  I normally use honey or agave nectar but it would be too watery so I went ahead and used beet sugar.  I hope you enjoy these muffins! They were so good.  My daughter gobbled one up and wanted more!

1 cup chestnut flour *
1/2 cup beet sugar (or less, it's a little too sweet for me, next time I'll use 1/4)
Equivalent of 1 egg, egg-replacer
1/4 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup hemp milk
4 tbsp Spectrum shortening, softened for 30 seconds in the microwave.
1/2 Tbsp baking powder (make sure it's the gluten-free kind)
1/4 tsp baking soda
A dash of salt
A handful of chocolate chips *I use sugar-free and purchased them from Nutsonline.com

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mix all the dry ingredients together.  Mix all the wet ingredients together til smooth/creamy.   Add wet ingredients to the dry ingredients together.   Mix and then slowly fold in the chocolate chips.  Bake in a cupcake-lined tin for 20 minutes or til toothpick comes out clean.

Enjoy!  They're yummy!
*Bought from Nutsonline.com in case anyone is wondering.

Cashew butter muffin

Cabin fever set in and I was just experimenting.  Desperate times calls for desperate measures.  :)  I'm loving the fact that nut butters can work on their own without any flour. Great news for me because we're grain-free.

I adapted this recipe from the recipe on Joyful abode.com, she uses almond butter but my daughter is reacting to almonds right now so I decided to use cashew butter instead.  This one didn't rise as much as if you would use almond butter.  I suppose you can also make them bigger or even use cupcake liners.

Ingredients:

1 cup cashew butter
1 egg
2 tbsp honey
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tbsp lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mix everything together by hand or with a mixer.  Put spoonfuls in greased muffin pan.  I put apricots on a few of them just for the heck of it.  Bake for 20 mins or til done!  They looked a little funky but they were good!  My daughter liked them!

Paleo Coconut Bread

I forgot to take a picture of this when it first came out of the oven, ooops.  Rather easy to make, just make sure you get rid of the clumps.  Mine was rather clumpy at first, it took a while to get them all out. 

3/4 cup coconut flour
5 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup butter or melted coconut oil
2 tbsp agave nectar
1 tsp baking powder

Mix everything until all lumps are gone.   Grease pan and bake.
Preheat oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit and bake til brown on the sides.

They stayed together and was good with peanut butter!  We enjoyed this!