The Perfect Pancake

I have never been a fan of baking mix pancakes.  Although I know plenty of people who swear by Bisquick, and the favorite here in Alaska seems to be Krusteaz, I have always been a pancakes-from-scratch kind of girl.

Sometime after I graduated from college and embarked on the adventure of living sans parents, I started making pancakes from scratch.  I began with a standard recipe from The Joy of Cooking, and perfected it over the years until I had a formula I knew by heart. 

There was a time when I would regularly make a double batch of these perfect pancakes on Sunday, freeze the leftovers, then pop them in the toaster on weekday mornings for a toasty breakfast treat on the way to the office. They were so good, I even recall my mother asking me to make my special pancakes when I was visiting her and my stepfather.

Needless to say, when I learned I couldn't eat gluten, I began a quest for the perfect gluten-free pancake recipe. Well, more accurately, the perfect gluten-free, egg-free, butter-free, milk-free pancake recipe.  And, so far, I have not found it.  (Although I do have a great recipe that I am slowly perfecting, and I will share that with you...soon).

In the meantime, I have found an amazing gluten-free pancake and baking mix that could possibly be better than any made-from-scratch recipe I develop.  So, I wanted to share it with you.  Here it is:

It's called Organic Buckwheat Flax Pancake and Baking Mix and it's from The Pure Pantry.


I discovered this little gem at Natural Pantry in Anchorage, where there is always some new product that looks delicious and intriguing.  Normally, I would bypass any gluten-free mix, but this one spoke to me for some reason, and when I read the ingredients I was surprised to find it free of not only gluten, but also the other major offenders -- soy, dairy, and eggs!  And, for those of you concerned about nuts, it is also nut free!  Yippee!


Anyway, I took it home and followed the directions for 8-10 pancakes.  Only, because I was out of egg-replacer, I tried a little experiment.  I used chia seeds in place of eggs.  I also left out the sweetener.  That's right, I did not add the agave nectar, or any other sweetener for that matter.  And, boy oh boy was the result good!  

I have made these pancakes three more times since that first experiment, and because I loved the chia seed results so well, I have yet to use egg replacer.  I'm telling you, chia seeds soaked in a little warm water are excellent egg replacers (at least for this recipe), and so good for you too!


Here is a terrible photo I took of these delicious pancakes with my iPhone a few weekends ago.  We had an overnight guest, so I'd bought organic blueberries, strawberries, and watermelon, and I also whipped up some rhubarb syrup.  So, here is the finished product with all the fruit and syrup goodness on top.  Yum!

Do you have a favorite gluten-free pancake mix?  Or, how about a from-scratch recipe?  I'm trying to reduce my daily sugar intake (soooo hard to do), so eliminating sweetener from recipes that don't really need it is one approach I'm trying.  I don't really like my pancakes sweet anyway because I ad syrup and fruit, and I'd rather taste the sweetness there.  What about you? Do you like your pancakes unsweetened like I do? 

Comfort Food

One of my favorite snacks used to be something my family calls a "cheese crisp." Spread a thin layer of grated cheese on a large flour tortilla and stick it under your oven's broiler until the tortilla starts to brown and the cheese melts and begins to bubble. (A "Mexican" cheese mix such as monterey jack works well and tastes the best, although we also used cheddar or manchego or whatever other soft cheese we had on hand.) For me, this crispy, cheesy treat has always been the ultimate comfort food.

But, after learning that gluten and casein were making me sick, I figured the cheese crisp was just one of many things that I'd have fond memories of but never eat again.

Then, I discovered Food for Life Brown Rice Tortillas, and invented a kind of comfort food substitute. At the end of a long stressful day, if I was craving carbs, I'd warm up a rice tortilla in the toaster oven -- just until it was warm and soft -- and drizzle it with olive oil. Mmmmm.

Sometimes I'd substitute ghee for the olive oil. And, sometimes, I'd get really crazy and do half flax oil and half olive oil. Maybe not the most nutritious snack, but it sure was delicious.

I love the brown rice tortillas, and even though they don't have the same soft texture as a flour or even a corn tortilla, I really don't miss those. Still, the tortilla was never quite the same without cheese.

After trying several different cheese substitutes, I'd pretty much given up on ever finding anything that I could eat. So many of them contain casein or soy. And the one brand I know about that is soy and casein free contains yeast, which I had always had a strong reaction to -- in any form.

But, now that the yeast levels in my gut are under control and it appears that I am less reactive to a lot of foods (such as carrots and mushrooms), I decided to give Daiya cheese another try. This is a brand of vegan cheese that comes in cheddar, mozzarella, and jalapeno jack varieties. It melts really well, and contains no soy or casein, although it does contain inactive yeast, presumably for flavor.

Here is the result of my first cheese crisp in about 6 years! This is the mozarella variety of cheese, which is excellent in lasagna. The cheddar is actually much better for making cheese crisps. But, as when I was a child, when you want your comfort food, you use whatever you'd got on hand.

What are your favorite comfort foods, and have you found ways to recreate them using substitute ingredients? Have you tried Daiya cheese and do you like it?

Is Gluten-Free Trendy?

I just read a friend's post on Facebook. She said she brought 6 loaves of bread to a potluck and most of the women mentioned that they couldn't eat gluten. Some of her friends commented that gluten seems to be a trend. Are people really going gluten free who don't actually have to?

Four years ago when I was still relatively new to the gluten-free concept, and somewhat resistant to it (this was before I knew that gluten was the reason my body was attacking itself, and before I passed out on an airplane after eating a donut because I thought a little gluten wouldn't really hurt me, and before I had a seizure at work and spent the day at the hospital undergoing tests) I joined some girlfriends at a local restaurant. I chose the restaurant because it's the only one in Anchorage I trusted, and it's the only one I still trust, to serve food that is totally free of gluten and not likely to be contaminated. I mentioned that I didn't eat gluten and one girl responded "Oh, I don't eat wheat." and continued to explain how her naturopath had suggested she cut wheat out of her diet, and she's felt so much better since doing so.

But then we ordered our food. And the girl who said she didn't eat wheat ordered angel hair pasta with lemon pesto.

This was my first experience with someone who says they don't eat wheat or gluten, but who is apparently not fully committed, probably because they don't really have to avoid it. If they understood why some of us don't eat wheat or gluten, they would not take this lightly. If they couldn't sleep at night because their legs were restless. If they woke up every morning and could barely get out of bed because their joints were so swollen. If they had panic attacks. If their stomach bloated like a balloon every time they put food in their mouth. If their life span was expected to be as much as 75% shorter as a result of eating gluten.

My experience is that someone who can't eat gluten for a real medical condition is doing so not because they want to or because it's trendy, but because their life depends on it. Someone who casually says she doesn't eat wheat but then orders a meal comprised almost entirely of wheat and gluten is avoiding wheat only when she thinks it's the trendy thing to do.

Improvising

Someday, I hope to spend a couple of hours each weekend planning my menus, doing all my shopping, and preparing ahead most, if not all, of my meals for the week. What's been happening instead is that I spend the weekend catching up on sleep, doing laundry, playing the piano, squeezing in a too-short hike with the dog and husband, and starting but not finishing some house de-cluttering project. Come Monday morning, we're running low on just about everything, and I find myself scrounging to put together a breakfast with adequate protein (which is very hard to do when you can't eat eggs, are out of turkey sausage, and dislike the taste of your protein powder). By the end of the day, the situation has only gotten worse. I've been in meetings all day, skipped lunch, and since breakfast have only eaten an apple, a few pistachio nuts, and the raw cabbage I grabbed on my way out the door that morning. I'm starving, but also too tired to brave the post-work crowds at the grocery store. So, I head home and see what I can create from the scraps we have left in our cupboards and 'fridge.

Most nights like this I would opt for an old stand-by, like a bean quesadilla, using ingredients we almost always have in stock (commercial salsa, brown rice tortillas, and canned refried beans). But, I knew we had some kale that wasn't going to last much longer, and I was craving pasta (yep, that time of the month), so on a whim I decided to try making pesto with kale.

What I did:

1. Chopped up the kale, and steamed it just until it wilted.
2. Chopped 5 cloves of garlic.
3. Tossed the kale and garlic into a food processor and blended. It looked a little dry, so I added some olive oil and blended until it was the consistency of chunky pesto.
4. Cooked some rice noodles.
5. Stirred the "pesto" into the noodles, drizzled a bit more olive oil on top, added some hemp seed oil and Himalayan sea salt.

Voila! Kale pesto.

How was it? Next time I'll cut way back on the garlic. Then again, I'm a garlic lover, and the garlic was probably what made it taste so good. And there's the added bonus that garlic is a natural anti-fungal, which is good for my gut. So, all in all, I'd say it was an excellent improvisation that I'll make again.

National Celiac Awareness Day

I just realized that September 13, the day of my first post, was “National Celiac Disease Awareness Day.” How perfect!

According to Celiac Central, the website of the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness, “the day was created to honor the doctor who identified a link between celiac disease and diet.” That doctor, Samuel Gee, was born on Sept. 13, 1839.

I’ll be posting more about celiac disease in the future. For now, I just want to say how glad I am that awareness of this condition is increasing, especially among allopathic doctors. We still have a long way to go in terms of educating medical professionals about celiac disease and its symptoms, not to mention gluten sensitivity. It pains me to think how many people are misdiagnosed and misled by well-meaning doctors who simply don’t have the training or knowledge to identify the many health problems that can arise from a person’s inability to break down the gluten protein.

I am grateful for the growing number of individuals and organizations who are helping spread the word about celiac disease and related conditions.

Warm the Fall Chills with Chowder

At this time last year, Steve and I were renting a house in Vermont, just over the border from New Hampshire. Although the fall chill and color arrived later there, it also lasted longer, waiting – at least at lower elevations – until early December before the last leaves turned brown, and the first flakes of snow dusted the ground. The combination of crisp evenings, wood burning stove, spacious kitchen, and a farmer’s market just one mile away, inspired me to develop some delicious new tummy warming recipes for fall.

One of my favorites happened completely by chance. I was searching for wild caught fish, an item that was only occasionally stocked at the small, natural food co-op in Vermont where I did most of my shopping. So, I stopped at a more mainstream grocery. To my delight, one of the clerks was just in the process of putting some containers of “chowder fish” in a freezer next to the fresh fish displays. He explained that these were pieces of fillets, too small to sell on their own, that were cut into chunks. I grabbed two containers – one for dinner that night, and one to freeze for later – and headed home excited to try my first fish chowder.

Because I’d never made any kind of chowder before, I looked on the internet for some sample recipes to get a basic sense of ingredients. Then, I substituted coconut milk for the milk, ghee for the butter, and my own home-made turkey stock for the chicken broth. I had some celery and potatoes that needed to be eaten, and added some frozen peas, too.

Here’s what I came up with.

Salmon Chowder

(free of gluten, dairy, corn, and soy)

2 tablespoons ghee

¾ cup chopped onion

½ cup chopped celery

1 clove garlic, minced

1 cup diced potatoes

2 cups stock (I used turkey, but vegetable or chicken would also work)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 teaspoon dried dill

frozen salmon cut into bite size pieces

1/2 bag frozen peas

1 12 oz can organic coconut milk

Directions:

Melt ghee in a large pot over medium heat. Saute onion, celery, and garlic until onions are tender. Stir in potatoes, broth, salt, pepper, dill, peas, and salmon. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes, or until potatoes and salmon are cooked and tender. Add additional salt and spices to taste. Serve alone or with salad and gluten-free rolls.

It all started in Nepal...sort of

I’ve been thinking about starting this blog for some time now. I’m not sure exactly when the idea first blossomed. But, I knew it would become a reality, and not just an idea, in September of 2008. That's when the name “Bread and Tummy” came to me, in Nepal, about half-way up the steep climb to Namche Bazaar.

I've always loved writing, but when I've thought about starting a blog I've mostly considered topics that would lend themselves well to visual illustration -- things like my puppy, or my outdoor adventures in Alaska, or (if I get around to it someday) my home renovations focusing on eco-friendly and non-toxic solutions and materials.

When I got sick, though, it became clear that I had something more compelling to share, and to write about. What I was learning about my illness and how to manage it, the recipes I was finding in cookbooks and creating from scratch, and my day-to-day challenges and triumphs, were all things that other people might be interested in -- and more importantly, might benefit from.

About a year ago, a trusted friend who also happens to have an autoimmune disease, suggested that I write about my experiences. She had no idea that I was already mulling over this blog idea. A few weeks later, a woman at the grocery store noticed my basket full of gluten-free goods and asked me for advice because she'd just been diagnosed with celiac disease. We talked for almost an hour, and I wrote down some of my favorite gluten-free products and websites where she could find more resources. It felt good to help her, and I found myself wanting to do this for other people, too -- to share with them what I've learned, to offer suggestions, and most of all, to give others hope and support. It was then that I realized I had to start a blog, to give it a shot and see where it goes.

I am not sure where my own journey will take me. I hope that one day I will feel as healthy and strong as I did before this all began.

What I do know is that I am not the only one searching for answers, hoping for a cure, figuring out what I can and can't eat, trying to take life one day at a time, adjusting to a life that I never imagined, and learning unexpected lessons along the way. By writing it all down, I hope that someone out there will read it and benefit in some way. Maybe it will turn out to be just a diary, or a way to keep track of recipes and research.

Either way, I'm excited to be putting it all down in a very public way and finally taking the leap into my very own blog! Thank you for reading.