This blog is moving (in content, I mean) over to www.tilthforhealth.com/blog. It’s the blog for my new business(!), where I’ll be coaching, consulting, teaching, etc. for/with people who have food restrictions–gluten &/or casein intolerance and food allergies foremost among them. Come check it out!

For those of you in the Southeast who would like some intensive study on cooking and baking with food restrictions, I’m holding a retreat in early November in the North GA mountains. You can see more about that here: www.tilthforhealth.com/retreats

Meanwhile, the 60in60 blog is going to come down in the next few days. So if you’re RSSing this or have it bookmarked, switch over to the new locale!

Okay, so clearly I quit posting here and doing my 60 days of recipes. I discovered that investing myself each day in creating or adapting a new recipe within a day was pretty consuming–which would be okay if it weren’t also pretty lonely in a new town where I don’t know many people yet. (I knew even fewer then.)

It was on my trip with my girlfriends that I started thinking deeply about my need for community and connection with work. (Funny how a few days in a different place can free your mind.) I threw myself into researching various ways to integrate this blog’s type of work–recipe development, help with food restrictions–into a business built on nourishing connections with other people. In the end, I came to a decision that pulls together various things I’d been doing. I’ll be unveiling my website and giving out more information in the next few days.

In the course of the changes, I’m going to be utilizing this blog as my new work blog. If you’re subscribed with an interest in the 60 days, it’s highly likely you’ll want to stick around for what’s coming on here (including more recipes). I’m going to try to move the blog in such a way that I retain feed-based readers, but I’ll also post links at Aprovechar when the time comes.

Excited to share more with you in a few days!

Sorry for no warning about my absence this past week, y’all.  I got a deal on a last-minute ticket to fly up to San Francisco.  There, I met up with my girl Lori (who flew in from Alaska) and a few of her friends to have a grand, silly time . . . and find Lori the perfect wedding dress for her Irish castle wedding.

(This one isn’t it–I’m not giving away a girl’s wedding dress choice on my blog!–but Lori looked great in every dress she tried on, even if my iPhone photos didn’t do her justice.)

Overall, the trip was fantastic girl time, photography time, and food inspiration time. (AND I got to cook on our swank condo’s Viking range.)  In the next week, I’ll be offering

• gluten-free, vegan, cane-sugar-free cupcakes that my husband’s omnivorous, gluten-consuming co-workers gobbled up;
• an easy chicken dish;
• another gluten-free, allergen-free makeover of a popular Chinese food dish;
• a Passover cookie recipe (attending a friend’s Seder tonight!)
• and more.

Plus, I’ll be hosting another giveaway of gluten-free, allergen-free, vegan goodies in a week! So keep popping in to see what’s up–and please report back if/when you try the recipes I post here.

And now for the winnnnnnnner of Ricki Heller’s Sweet Freedom, a sugar-free, vegan, and partly gluten-free cookbook of tasty treats!  I used random.org to draw today from nearly 90 entrants, and the winner is Erin at Edayem! Congratulations, Erin! I’ll be getting in touch with you and Ricki to connect you for the prize.

For those of you who were hoping to win but did not:  word on the street has it that Ricki may be running low on this printing of her cookbook, so if you’re going to buy it and you can squeeze a few bucks out of your budget this month, I’d recommend going ahead and getting it so that you, too, can start experimenting with pear and pecan scones and sugarless chocolate pate.  Mmmm.

See you tomorrow when we’ll pick back up with a recipe post each day!

Quite frankly, sometimes I get tired of social networking sites and ponder quitting them all. I regularly get invitations to join new ones, but I think Flickr-Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn is enough . . . if not too much.  Especially when you add in the daily onslaught of email (which I love reading, but boy, am I often bad about responding) and blogging (where I always wish I got more comments and often wonder who’s reading or caring, even when I can see the number of readers).

But sometimes they are worthwhile.  Sometimes I make a connection or reconnection on one of them, and I think, “Ah, this is why I do this.” That happened recently when Carrie (also known as Ginger Lemon Girl) and I chatted on Twitter about her idea for a savory cookie recipe.  When she created one, she ended up making it not only gluten-free but also dairy-free and egg-free to be sure I would be able to try it after her.  Then she emailed me the recipe to get my thoughts. I was, of course, very flattered, and I made the ‘cookies’ that night–with a few adjustments based on her notes.  I emailed her my notes, and we emailed further about other changes we would make.  It was all quite satisfying–the kind of exchange that answers, for me at least, whether purely online interaction can build community. (What, you haven’t been having that conversation? Hmmm, maybe your particular brand of geekdom hasn’t involved double-majoring in sociology and anthropology.)

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My friend Karen is one of the people I’ve met by happenstance.  She worked for a little while with a friend of mine at a bookstore (a stop-gap measure in employment in both of their lives), and she and her husband came to a party Dan and I were also attending.  Karen and I connected there, but her sweet husband had a migraine and they left early.  When we reconnected at the next party, well, that was kinda it.  We became fast friends with many mutual interests and beliefs–among them, a desire to eat healthfully and to support local agriculture.

Then Dan and I moved across the country  . . . less than a year later.  Karen was one of the people I was saddest to leave behind, and we both got teary talking about it a couple of times before my moving day arrived.  So I committed to myself that I would not lose touch with Karen.  I talk to her on the phone about once a week–which is saying something, because I generally hate talking on the phone.  With Karen, time on the phone just flies by as we dig into this topic and that one.

Another way we’re keeping in touch is by sharing recipe suggestions over email.  We have some food allergens in common, we’re both trying to control the impact of sugar on our lives, and we both enjoy cooking and baking.  The recipe I altered today started with one that Karen wrote up and emailed to me after making it herself.  Karen got the (wheat-based) recipe from the cookbook Vegan Brunch.  I believe her version had bananas and chocolate chips, and I went another route using local blueberries and marmalade.  But I knew the base of the recipe was good, because I trust Karen’s judgment.

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We were visiting my husband’s uncle’s house last weekend when we noticed his lime tree was surrounded by fallen, uber-ripe, yellow limes.  It’s common in Southern California for people with citrus trees to simply let the fruit ripen and rot without utilizing it.  I can’t fathom that mindset–free, local food! while grocery bills climb! while food pantries go wanting!–so we gathered up the fallen limes and brought them home.

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I have missed butterscotch blondies.  I never ate them terribly frequently–they seemed to pop up primarily as Christmas goodies where I grew up–but when I ate them, oh, how I loved them. Sweet, rich, creamy, chewy, a touch grainy–delicious.  There are things you miss when you’re gluten-free, certainly, but when you add in additional restrictions, what you miss multiplies rapidly.  Being gluten-free, soy-free, and dairy-free means I haven’t found a fascimile of butterscotch that’s worth eating. Butterscotch is, after all, primarily made from butter, and it’s the cooking of that butter that creates the delightful taste.

But these ‘butterscotch’ blondie brownies–they are good.  Dan’s non-allergic and sometimes picky family members ate the whole pan in less than 24 hours.

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. . . She rested.

I got glutened last night, big time, at a restaurant–despite going back and forth, back and forth with the kitchen about what I could eat. (All I can guess is some heinous cross-contamination.) That’s the sickest stomach I have had in a long time, and it still feels shaky today, so I’m taking a day off from blogging and nearly everything else.  But I’ll be back tomorrow morning with an official Day 8 post, and it will include a blondie brownie recipe along with a giveaway of a great cookbook!

Till then–I am taking requests still.  Is there a gluten-free or allergen-free food you haven’t been able to figure out how to create? Is there a particular type of cuisine you’d like me to write about? I have about ten suggestions from readers in my queue, but I’m open for more.

And if you’ve made any of these recipes since I posted them, will you report back on the affiliated post about how it’s gone?

Sally

P.S. I know a good number of you are reading (I can see you on my Google Analytics!), and I appreciate that. I also really appreciate those of you who have forwarded the link to this blog; commented on this blog; emailed or FBed me or tweeted me supportive messages (or retweeted for me); or posted my links on sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon.  This blog is about me sharing what I love while also making myself vulnerable as I try to figure out what comes next, and to have that appreciated by others is very rewarding for me. So thanks!

A friend requested on Facebook that I include a cracker recipe as one of my 60in60.  Gluten-free, egg-free, dairy-free crackers are hard to come by in the grocery store, and most of the ones that exist taste like cardboard.  Fortunately, crackers are actually pretty easy to make, and boy howdy, are people impressed when you make them from scratch. When I’ve served homemade crackers at parties, people have inevitably oohed and ahhed over just how very homemade-chic I am to have bothered to make something so basic from scratch.  It’s all rather hilarious.

In part because of flavor, and perhaps in part because of texture, gluten-free crackers tend to be heavy on the nuts.  I’ve done a lot of nut-based postings lately, so I thought I would switch it up and offer a nut-free cracker recipe. I like the flavor of chickpea flour in Indian flatbreads, so I started with chickpea flour and then added what I wanted to taste/feel in them.  I don’t consider this recipe perfected, but the crackers are downright tasty (and my husband says they’re simply great).  I’ve changed up the recipe I’m including here from the one I used to shift the seasonings how I will when I make them next time.  Feel free to change up the seasonings to suit your own cravings.

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I’m generally not good at making 20-minute meals. I tend to opt for dishes that have me working in the kitchen for an hour plus. But today’s recipe—a dairy-free, soy-free Alfredo sauce—made for one quick lunch yesterday.  I put asparagus in the oven to roast, and I put a covered, large pot of salted water on to boil for gluten-free pasta. While I waited on the water to boil, I washed spinach, peeled an orange, sliced an avocado, and made a mustard-citrus dressing for the salad.  When the water was boiling hard, I put the pasta in and stirred it around.  I flipped the roasting asparagus and then put the ingredients for the pasta sauce in the food processor.  When the pasta was cooked, I scooped out the pasta water I wanted for my sauce, I set the food processor running, and I drained and rinsed the pasta.  I tossed the pasta with the sauce, pulled the asparagus out of the oven, put tongs in the salad, and voila! Lunch in less than half an hour.

Oh, and this easy sauce was tasty enough that my non-gluten-free, non-allergic friend who was over for lunch got seconds.

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