Food Photos

Last year I started trying to avoid grains, as much as possible.  It was hard, but I made do.  But this year I've gotten 2 new cookbooks that have made this grain-free eating a bit easier.  Sort of.  Cooking grain-free requires a lot of new ingredients that we didn't ever have, but now that I'm pretty stocked up on things, it's gotten better.  It also requires a little more time, but we're getting used to it.  Here are some of our favorite things we've made grain-free.

This fried chicken was TO DIE FOR.  You would never know it was grain-free.  So good.  We're having it again tonight.

This was a no-bean pumpkin chili with homemade guacamole, and biscuits with honey butter.  This guacamole is the guacamole that made Zachary change his mind on guacamole - in a good way!  Neither of the kids would eat it before, but Zachary was brave and tried it, and loved it - he had 3 spoonfuls of it on his chili that night!

Orange cranberry muffins - yum!

These cheese crackers...all I can saw is WOW.  The first time I made them, the boys had already gone to bed, and I really had to hold back to keep from eating them all at once.  We made some more on Friday, and it was all I could do to keep the boys from eating them all.  They loved them!

More of the guacamole.  Josh had heard a tip on a podcast about getting avocados perfectly ripe, and wanted to try it.  What do you do with perfectly ripe avocados?  Make guacamole, of course!  Once again, Zachary gobbled it up.  I think the reason he likes this one is because it doesn't have chunky onions or jalapenos in it.  In fact, it doesn't have any onions or jalapenos in it.  It's got lime and orange juice in it, so it's got a citrus flavor - so good!

This pizza is what led to me harassing my coworker about bringing home sausage from the store.  We had planned to make the pizza last weekend, but I found out as I was making the dough that potato starch is not the same thing as potato flour.  I needed potato flour, but had potato starch...So we had to get takeout pizza that night.  I found the potato flour this past week, so we tried the pizza again last night.  This pizza was really good.  The crust was actually crispier and held up better than the old pizza dough we would buy from Publix.  It also had a homemade sauce on it that was thicker than store-bought (and so didn't make the crust soggy), and we even made the sausage too.  Well, we took ground pork and added spices to it to make it Italian sausage.  There was only real, fresh ingredients on this pizza, and it was quite tasty.  I think next time I'll need to cut back a little on the red pepper in the sauce, because Liam complained that it was burning his mouth.  I think he liked it, because he had 3 pieces, but it burned a bit.

This morning's breakfast was strawberry shortcake waffles.  I cannot even believe these were grain-free AND sugar-free.  This was simply amazing - the waffles had a slight strawberry flavor, and the homemade whip cream on top did too.  Whoa...I'm not usually one to get excited about breakfast foods, but this breakfast made me so happy!

I'm excited to try some new things.  I want to try bread again - my first attempt at grain-free bread didn't turn out that good.  But I want to try again, because it would be so much easier to be able to take a sandwich to work for lunch.  I also want to try some other muffin recipes in this totally yummy cookbook.  Hopefully this will just become our routine to make these things that we aren't used to making!