Caveman Lasagna (almost) is a hit.

Posted by Ethne~

I am here to report that this Denham clan is still on the gluten-free "meal plan"(that's what the girls call it).  As in, we're a clan of cavemen.

You'd think so with some of the stuff I've been making.  Hamburger buns made from cashews (tasty, but crumble city).  Almond milk (that's really good and awesome for you).  Banana bread made with coconut and almond flour (good, but the girls have attitude, leaving me to eat it all - Shaun says I shouldn't complain).  Chicken strips breaded with coconut (a no-go, my friends).  Oh, and let's not forget the banana porridge made out of nuts (I thought this was pretty good - the girls DID NOT).  We're going to give ourselves nut allergies for all the suckers I've been cooking with.  I've made breading with Corn Flakes (great) and my own taco and Italian seasonings, too (double-yum).

Last night's paleo lasagna takes the cake, though.  I got the inspiration from my cookbook, Against All Grain.  It's a pretty good book, I'll give her that.  Mostly, her stuff has lots of good flavor.  

In the cookbook, you could see the layers better, but mine didn't fall apart to slop, so I know the layers held up.

We've been able to eat plenty of brown rice pasta - and you can't tell the difference AT ALL if you ask me - but I haven't found brown rice lasagna noodles yet.  So I needed an alternative.  My cookbook said to use her crepes in strips.  Ok.  So I made some of her crepes.  [And instead of oil or butter I used coconut oil, btw.] Anyway, they looked NOTHING like hers (mine are butt ugly) but they don't taste burnt or anything.

They were totally ratty looking.  And I ended up cooking mine on medium-low rather than medium-high.  And all of them stuck...and tore.  And all of them got way browner than her tortilla-looking ones.  And I melted my spatula.

I didn't want to go to the store to buy ricotta cheese (which isn't paleo-approved anyway).  Interestingly, I just happened to have almond pulp sitting right in front of me from making almond milk.  I also had just paged past another recipe for making nut cheese.  You read that right.  WTF.  So I made some.  I did not tell the family it was cheese made out of nuts.  By the time you add the salt, olive oil, lemon juice and herbs, you really can't taste any nuts (they've been soaked, so they're not crunchy).  

I deviated from the recipe - I added an egg to the "ricotta" cheese to make it bind and be fluffy, which is what I do when I make lasagna; I also added mozzarella cheese - this is not paleo.  Oh well, we're rubbish cavemen.

This is me applying the ricotta nut cheese.  I can't quite tell what the camera was focusing on.  Shaun's fault.  And no, I'm not pregnant.  I have horrible posture.

Layer it up.  If you're wondering, I used 10 crepes, 1.5 jars sauce (Classico Spinach & Parm - excellent), 1 lb. ground turkey, 1 bag finely ground mozzarella, about 1.5 cups of nut cheese and a handful of grated parmesan, and about 1.5 T of my homemade Italian seasoning in the gr. turkey.

Honestly, you can tell, a bit, that these are crepes and not pasta noodles.  Duh.  But Shaun and I both agreed that the crepes totally served their purpose in holding all of the layers together.  And they don't have much flavor, so just absorbed the flavor of your sauce.  The girls ate well.  You could not tell the nut cheese apart from ricotta, no joke.  (However, Shaun - not knowing - commented that he's never been a fan of ricotta since it's always tasted a little too "grainy".  I SAID NOTHING.)  And then he put the half-pan leftover in the fridge and said, "let's have the rest for dinner tomorrow night".  TOTALLY.

Here it is again, for the win.

I'd say I may be a crappy cave[wo]man, but I am totally evolved in my food-related con-artistry.  Rock On, [GF] Crouton!

GF Zucchini Bread - a link and some tips

Posted by Ethne~

Hey guys – just thought I’d give you a quick tip on a great recipe I just made.  The girls have been so-so on some of the gluten-free things I’ve purchased and made (though they like the homemade stuff better overall) so I’ve gone for a few that seemed like guaranteed winners.  This one was for sure – with a few tips.

Danielle Walker, from Against All Grain blog, and author of one of my paleo/GF cookbooks – posts new recipes all the time on her blog, besides what you can find in her cookbook.  Here’s the link for her recipe.

I had shredded zucchini in the freezer from the garden.  Perfect.  I had banana in the freezer.  Done.  I had all the other ingredients.  Decision done.

I cooked it just like it said and, taste-wise, it’s really good.  With the amount of variations in banana and zucchini breads anyway, I honestly can’t tell that it’s not made with wheat flour.  Now, here are a few tips that might help you get a better result than I did on the first try.

~Almond flour is really expensive, and Danielle doesn’t personally like Bob’s Red Mill brand, which is all I’ve found so far.  Short of ordering it from Amazon, that’s what I’m using.  She has a recipe for banana bread in her cookbook that uses half almond flour and half coconut flour.  Try doing that here and you might like the texture and savings better.

~I cooked it until my toothpick came out clean, but it still seemed jiggly in the middle.  But, against my better judgment, I took it out anyway, thinking it would firm up as it cooled (she must know, right?).  It didn’t.  The center sank and would’ve been a bust except when it had cooled enough to handle, I sliced it up, put it on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and baked the slices again at 350 until they were properly done this time.  When I made her banana bread, I used my common sense on the jiggly-doneness and it worked out great.

Now for the holiday baking – I’m going to have a really hard time avoiding the Russian Tea Cakes.  I may have to go rogue and experiment.  Wouldn’t be the first time.

UPDATE: Gluten-free week one.

Posted by Ethne~

Hey dudes!  I hope you all had a very nice Thanksgiving!

We are a week into the gluten-free/paleoesque/good-for-you (a/k/a GF for short) diet and I'm here with a report.  It wasn’t a true GF week because I wasn’t 100% strict on Thanksgiving, though I also tried to keep the kiddos from gorging on gluten items too.  Full-time job almost.

Cooking out of my new cookbooks has worked out ok.  One thing I noticed is that the one lady’s paleo crock pot recipes are often 6 hour timing, which is shorter than my work day, so my Asian chicken cooked a little longer than was called for.  It was edible, but I bet it would’ve been better had it been cooked just 6 hours.

Homemade sweet potato fries; bacon-mushroom hamburgers with cashew-flour buns.

KD likes her sweet taters.  I'm using up our Heinz ketchup then will try making my own.  I made a BBQ sauce from scratch for those burgers and it was REALLY good.

Target and Cub have great GF sections.  I’m finding most of what I need between the two stores and Target especially even has boxed-type dinner sides and lunchbox items that are really nice for the work week.  Still, there are a few things I haven’t found that I’m going to have to go to Whole Foods for.  (I didn’t end up getting coconut aminos – huge debacle – but did find GF soy sauce, so I got that instead.  If we were strict paleo, soy wouldn’t work.)

Thanksgiving we tried to keep the girls on track with the holiday snacking (ie, meat, cheese, corn chips, salsa – just no crackers), but then we didn’t go nuts over them having some stuffing and gravy at dinnertime.  I easily scraped the crust off their pumpkin pie and they couldn’t have cared less.

So not perfect, but a good college try for week one.

As to any noticeable changes, I can’t say I’ve seen anything crazy different, though the girls were with Grandma and Grandpa yesterday and they reported an awesome day – having had a completely GF weekend.  So we’ll see how week two comes along.

On a few other notes, for Thanksgiving, I made a beautiful scalloped oyster dish – recipe originally from bff Steph and adopted with love by my dad – but no one loved it here.  It might be one of those that you have to grow up with and/or you have to be an oyster lover (like Dad) to appreciate.

It turned out beautifully

I went Black Friday shopping at 1am on Friday with my sister, Whit.  I didn’t go on Thursday because I find it completely wrong that the stores open on Thanksgiving.  Since they had done so, by the time I was shopping, the stores were a ghost town, which was kinda nice – and I managed to find a lot of what I was looking for.

We also decorated the house for Christmas.  These pictures aren’t very good from my phone, but I wanted to show a few anyway.  I love this season – and we managed to keep family and Jesus’ birthday at the forefront.  We worked Santa in too – he’s the holiday celebration representative for children!

All sorts of fun family ornaments!

Santa and the nativity all together.  I made the little candle mat.  The girls told me they like all the homemade things I make.  Melt my heart!

Have a great day!

Our new meal plan: gluten-free and paleo are being tested.

Posted by Ethne~

Hey everyone – this is going to be abridged because the post I wrote up somehow got deleted. 

What I wanted to tell you is that I’ve put our family on a diet.  Not a ‘lose weight’ type of diet, since we’re all ok in that aspect, but a ‘let’s eat better’ type of meal plan.  Plus, I’ve heard good things about gluten-free and the paleo diets (GF in particular) as they pertain to ADHD and behavior type issues in kids.

After some research, I do not plan on, probably, doing 100% gluten free because I envision that to be nearly impossible.  I also do not plan to be 100% paleo because that seems too far for me (I get the idea – eat like our cave man ‘hunter-gatherer’ ancestors because that’s what our bodies evolved to handle – and therefore since evolution takes longer than the time since then and now, our bodies haven’t caught up with farming and highly-processed foods, hence the problems people are having with their health today).  Both seem more restrictive than my family needs to be.

But, what the people on these GF and paleo diets are doing right, in my opinion, is 1) eating in a way that suits their own needs and 2) they’re eating really thoughtfully, healthily and minimally-processed.  That, I can get.  For my family, #1 and #2 mean breaking the junk food cycle.  I try my very best to keep it out of their lives and the kids would still eat it as their only sustenance if allowed.

So for us, this means eating really minimal gluten.  I’ve tried to take it out of the house entirely but first of all, that cannot happen overnight because it’s everywhere, and second, figuring out what’s got gluten in it is gonna take a while.  We’re going to eat as minimally processed foods as we can though.  That has got to be good for us!  And then I’m going to utilize a couple of good cookbooks (to get me started) Thrifty Nana found at Costco (one thanks to a recent tip from Carmel at Our Fifth House, who does strict GF and paleo):

Against all Grain by Danielle Walker (she write a nice blog too - the book note is on the right) and

The Healthy Gluten-Free Life by Tammy Credicott

Wish us luck…Shaun says he can’t be 100% GF, what with beer having gluten in it.  But he assures me not to worry, seeing as beer is prehistoric too.  Almost.