Pass the nutmeg

My mom is a wonderful cook. All growing up, she always had a fabulous homemade dinner on the table when we came home from school. I'm still constantly calling her from the grocery store asking her about some ingredient or asking her how to making something.

One of my favorite dishes she makes is pork chops in a creamy mushroom sauce. Basically, it's pork chops slow cooked with cream of mushroom soup. But of course, I can no longer eat cream of mushroom soup since 1. it has cream in it, and 2. soups are thickened with either flour or cornstarch, neither of which I can have. So I decided to make my own cream of mushroom soup.

I found this recipe on food.com and it sounded simple enough.

• 8 ounces fresh mushrooms
• 2 tablespoons onions, chopped
• 1 -2 garlic clove, minced
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 -3 tablespoons flour (separated)
• 2 cups chicken broth
• 1 cup light cream or 1 cup evaporated milk
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon pepper
• ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

1. Cut the mushrooms into slices.
2. Melt butter in large frying pan. Add in onions, garlic, and mushrooms. Cook until onions are soft.
3. Blend in 2 T. flour and stir.
4. Add in the chicken broth and heat until slightly thickened while stirring frequently.
5. Stir cream with additional 1 T. flour and seasonings. Add in cream to soup. Heat to thicken while stirring frequently.

I switched out the flour for almond flour, which seemed to work just fine. I also used some of my homemade yogurt in place of the light cream. I boiled it down probably just a little further than you're supposed to to thicken it up a little.

I have to say, it came out pretty good. I don't feel that the yogurt changed the taste much at all. And the nutmeg really set it off! That's the taste that I've really  noticed each time I've tasted it.

So I seasoned my pork chops with a little thyme and rosemary, seared them, and covered them in soup to simmer. You're supposed to let it simmer for about 3 hours to get them really tender, but I didn't have that kind of time and only let them go about and hour and a half. They were good, but would've been even better with that extra time.

Overall, big success as an SCD dish. I just had leftovers for lunch and it was just as good. I almost wanted to lick the leftover soup off the plate. Even if I wasn't on this diet, I would probably use this recipe in the future.

Yummy in my Tummy

It's been a difficult couple of weeks on this new diet, trying to figure out what I can eat and making sure I have all of the ingredients that I need and making sure that foods settle well with my stomach. At first it was hard to get a variety of food because it's best to introduce new things slowly, that way you don't overwhelm your body and you also can keep better tabs on how different foods affect you.

However, a major concern for me has been making sure that I get enough calories. I've already lost a little weight in the past few months and this diet has made it a little difficult to gain it back. I started by making my yogurt out of whole milk and even half-and-half. I also added in almond flour. It may have been a little early for me to start eating this, but at the moment, my concerns for getting enough calories outweigh that.

I made some banana muffins last week which came out pretty good. I also tried making some cinnamon cookies. They came out alright, but I overlooked them a little and they're a little crunchier than I normally like my cookies.

So today, I decided to make another batch of muffins. I found a recipe on Amy McKenna's blog for lemon poppyseed muffins. I followed her recipe and added a honey/lemon glaze on top. And they are oh so good!! I'm having to exert a large amount of self-control to not eat the entire dozen. I try to keep my nut flour intake to about 2 muffins a day plus maybe a cookie at night. Plus, I need things like these to eat throughout the week. I've already eaten 2 this morning and I really want to go get another one. I may have to hide them from Jarrod!

SCD Lemon Poppyseed Muffins (from roboranch.com) with a Honey and Lemon Glaze

Muffins
3 eggs
1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 Tbsp grated lemon rind
1 Tbsp poppyseeds
3 cups almond flour

Glaze
3 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp butter, melted
1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
A few drops of lemon juice

Preheat oven to 325.
Line a muffin pan with paper liners.
In a large mixing bowl, use an electric beater to thoroughly combine eggs, honey, butter, baking soda, salt, and lemon juice.
Stir in lemon rind and poppyseeds.
Stir in almond flour, a cup at a time, to make a fairly thick batter.
Spoon batter into muffin cups.
Bake for 25-30 minutes, until golden brown, springy to the touch, and a toothpick comes out clean.

Combine glaze ingredients. I just squeezed a few drops of lemon juice from the other half of my lemon.
Mix until thick.
Spread over cooled muffins.

And I am in heaven...

Mama Lindsey's Biscuits

This past weekend I made a trek out to historic New Bern to see my lovely grandmother Mama C. She's one of the sweetest ladies you'll ever meet. She's 4 foot 10 and makes me feel like a giant! (I"m so used to being the shortest one in a room unless the other person is under the age of 10 that it's an odd feeling being so tall). I had never made the trip out to New Bern by myself, but looking back , after my grandfather, Big Daddy (yes, I realize that's a sorta funny name for a grandfather, especially since he was only 6 foot 2 and that's not like THAT tall, but when you're 3 years old, he's HUGE!) passed away nearly 5 years ago, I started wishing I'd spent more time with him. So I've really enjoyed the past years of getting to know both of my remaining grandmothers better. 


Mama C and I had a lovely time. She was this beautiful home where the upstairs is a condo and the downstairs is a street-front shop called "Art of the Wild." She and my grandfather opened it to sell his wood carvings of birds, which, by the way, are incredible! This man probably had more patience that just about anybody to be so attentive to all of those minute details. Here's a bird that he carved for my parents. A good story here: it's so life-like, our cat took a bite out of the tail!

I learned a fun story while I was there, too. Mama C told me that Big Daddy started carving on his way home from the war (that's WW2 for the historically uninclined). He took an old apple crate or something and carved a duck out of it with a knife. He had a good relationship with his sergeant who loved the carving and asked to keep it. Mama C told me that years later, the 2 of them met up with that sergeant and she got to see the original carving, which she says was not very good, hah! Especially compared to how great he got over the years. 


So Mama C and I minded the store for a bit, then took an extended lunch break to eat chili and make Mama Lindsey's Biscuits! I must confess, I told Mama C before I came that I HAD to learn how to make them while I was there. I've been wanting to learn for years. This is a recipe passed down from Big Daddy's mother. I'm not sure if it goes back beyond that, but it's one of our few family recipes that are still family favorites. I've never been a huge fluffy biscuit fan, but these are different. They're smaller and flatter than something like a Bojangles biscuit. (I should've taken a picture when I made them!) These are one of the very few items that I will continue to eat until they're gone... despite how full I may be. 


It was so fun getting the chance to bake with Mama C. She'd already set everything out in little cups and bowls before we started, it was cute. We put together one batch while I was there and they came out so great! Well, they tasted great, the form could've used a little work, but she gave me some tips for better looking biscuits. She boxed the rest of the batter up for me to take home and try again. I made some for Jarrod and me the next day and this time they came out perfectly! They were exactly as I remember Mama C making them all those years growing up and my whole family sitting at the table devouring them! Those are some of my most wonderful memories growing up and I'm so excited that someday I'll be able to make Mama Lindsey's biscuits for my children and pass along the family recipe. 

Someone's in the Kitchen with...

I love to cook! I may be obsessed. One of my favorite things to do is find new recipes online and I have a very long list of ones that I want to try. It's especially fun now that I have all of this new stuff for my kitchen, some of which I still haven't gotten a chance to use. However, at this point in my life, I'm not a particularly good cook. Don't get me wrong, I can follow a recipe with the best of 'em and come up with something really yummy, but I'm not good at coming up with stuff myself and putting a bunch of ingredients together and coming up with a great new recipe. But I really want to be one of those people who can do that. I'd really love to someday when I have the time (you know, since life tends to get LESS busy as you go) to take a couple cooking classes and really get into the swing of things.

I like to get involved in moderately complicated recipes that require a lot of ingredients, but I rarely have the opportunity to get into that. For now, I'm somewhat stuck with my real quick, real easy dinners. I know that I could always make a big dinner if I wanted, but since I don't get to have Jarrod, or anyone for that matter, join me, I just can't find the motivation. Spending a lot of time in the kitchen isn't particularly fun by itself, but the reward of having a great meal to share with someone makes it worth it. Making it for myself and leaving left overs for Jarrod just doesn't do it for me. So Friday's tend to be my big cooking days. I get a little rest in the afternoon, since I'll have been up since about 3am, and put something together for when Jarrod comes home that evening. Our weekends have been so busy that Saturday evenings we tend to eat out or with someone else. At least there's usually never time to spend actually cooking. And Sundays are our "do nothing" day of the week, especially since it's a short day for me and I have to be in bed so early. So I'm hoping for the day to come where I can cook meals any day of the week and have someone there to share it with. I'd love so much to be able to have dinner dates during the week! It's amazing the little things in life that you miss once you can't do them.

So last month I set the goal of making something out of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Well I had no idea what I was getting myself into! Most of the recipes really aren't that bad at first glance, but once you start going through them, you realize that several times throughout the recipe, it refers you to another recipe on another page, so suddenly your one simple recipe has turned into about 4 much more complicated recipes. They're really the type of thing that you need a lot of time (and ingredients... and specific cooking accessories) to accomplish, and as I've explained, cooking time is just not in the cards for me right now. But nevertheless, I accomplished this goal (albeit a day late, but who's paying that close attention?) last week by making the Chocolate Almond cake and it is AH-SO-GOOD! I even put my own little twists in it by substituting a couple of ingredients and putting things together a little differently. I figure that's the point of a recipe anyways. It's "more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules" (a great movie reference included!).

But this cake is so rich! I don't think there's anyway that we'll be able to eat the whole thing, because as a normal cake is 8 slices, this one is more like 30 since you have to cut them so small! But I felt very domestic making it. I melted my own chocolate, pulverized my own almonds, and beat together my own icing (over ice!). Plus, I finally got to use the beautiful cake platter I received from the wedding! I look forward to someday having the opportunity to put together great meals for my family. My mom always had great home cooked meals for us everyday after school. I hope I'm in a place someday where I can actually do that. But for now, I'll have to put my desire for dinner parties and cooking clubs aside and look forward to the day where I can slave away in the kitchen with the best of 'em. Ahh the finer things of life...

Yummy!