You Down with AIP? (Yeah You Know Me) (Mexican Chocolate Macaroons)

Angie and I, pre-Celiac diagnosis (and pre-breast reduction, wowza!)

Hello “Swans Eat Everything” fans! My name is Angie Alt & I’m a friend of Mary Rose’s from the way back . . . at least a decade or so. (We used to work the graveyard shift at a trucking co. together. Those were the days . . . ‘er nights.)  I’m also the blogger behind “Alt-ternative Universe.”  Mary Rose & I share a love
of blogging. We also both love food. I have a very interesting relationship with food though. In fact, my interesting relationship is what sparked this guest-blog switcheroo today.

So, a little back story for you. In February of 2012, after an intensely ill period, filled with all manner of scary symptoms, I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease.  Finally, I had a name for the thing that I had been making me sick for over a decade.  Celiac is a genetic disorder that causes the body to mount an autoimmune attack on the small intestine due to gluten exposure. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley & rye. And these days we put gluten in EVERYTHING.

The only way to combat the disease & its debilitating effects is to adopt a gluten-free diet immediately. The trouble with that, was that I didn’t get better. In a person with an autoimmune disease, sometimes things can go really haywire. After a few more months of struggling, I discovered the Paleo diet (I really hesitate to use that word, it is more of a lifestyle) & quickly after that I discovered a version of Paleo that is meant for people just like me. A haywire system requires the AutoimmuneProtocol.

Enter my very interesting relationship with food . . . for the last nine months I did not ever consume the following food groups:

-Grains
-Legumes
-Dairy
-Eggs
-Nuts/Seeds
-Nightshade Vegetables (Tomatoes, White Potatoes, Eggplants & Sweet & Hot
Peppers, which means most spices)

I know what you are thinking. “How the hell does she eat at all? And furthermore, how can she & Mary Rose share a common love of food? You have to eat to love food.” She & I share a common thread though . . . good food, made from scratch."

I actually have an amazing diet now & I eat tons of awesome, fresh, delicious, healthful foods. And I am finally on the road to recovery. Happy, healthy me is returning.

Mary Rose & I thought we’d do a blog trade and I’d introduce all of you to an Autoimmune Protocol dessert. Yep, I still eat dessert!

Mexican Chocolate Macaroons

To make this Autoimmune Protocol, you need to omit the chili pepper and you need to make sure the baking cocoa does not include any dairy or soy. Here’s some step by step for you:

All the ingredients assembled.  The raw honey is produced locally by Amish beekeepers.  Score!

Lots of peeps are confused about coconut oil at first.  It is solid at room temp and is a lot like Crisco.  There is no need to melt it before making these cookies.

Here’s the wet & dry ingredients ready to go.

I mix by hand, since this “dough” is very thick.  Don’t worry my hands were well washed.

Ready to go in the oven.  I actually give them 10 minutes in the fridge before putting them in the oven.

 All done & lovely!  I drizzled a dairy/soy/gluten free chocolate over the top to make them look extra fancy.  

There you have it.  Mary Rose & I are heating up the kitchen from two different perspectives, but we still share that common thread.  Good food, made from scratch.  Someday Mary Rose & I are going to sit down with some nice red wine, a few of these macaroons & I’m going to tell her the story of how she came to be one of my best cheerleaders during one of the toughest parts of my life.  Everyone with a serious autoimmune disorder should be so lucky.  

If you are interested in trying Paleo or Autoimmune Protocol or you want to know more about Celiac Disease, check out my blog.  I promise you can still eat fantastic food! 

Busy Bee (Slow Cooker French Dips, Homemade Hoagies, and Salad Savoy Chips)

Wow, this entry in history is my first TRIPLE HEADER!  Three recipes all in one post?!  That defies all logic, all reason, all knowledge of my self proclaimed laziness!  Well, I have done even more cooking than the triple header title implies.  I made the equivalent of apple pie in oatmeal form for the kids yesterday, which was also breakfast today, and both kids asked for second-servings of day-old oatmeal.  I feel like a culinary queen today!

I made Salad Savoy Chips!  The veg is a combo of kale and cauliflower, and the roasted chips are ADDICTIVE.  If being healthy is as easy as eating roasted savoy chips I think I could become the healthiest person ever.  The roasted flavor is delicious.

(No Picture Available, due to scarfing)

I made Buffalo Chicken Wing Sauce to go on my enormous football drumsticks! I made the buffalo sauce with Frank's and butter.  Or "buttah".  Whatever dialect you choose, when you bring those two things to a boil together magic happens.  I won't be buying pre-made sauce ever again.

I made Hoagie Rolls yesterday (these directions are funky, and I put wet ingredients in first, then dry, then yeast to make it bread machine friendly), I got 16 rolls out of 2 batches of dough in the bread machine, and I'm so thankful I did, because my bro-bro John came for dinner Sunday, along with my sister Currey.  The last time I made dinner and didn't make my own rolls for French Dips he gave me a louse 67% on effort.  I still love him, but he's my toughest critic.

And the piece de resistance: Slow Cooker French Dips!  This French Dip recipe might rock your socks off, and if you need socks to keep from getting blisters you should consider yourself forewarned. It is so ridiculously easy, just soy sauce, a touch of beef bouillon (I use beef base, I hate waiting for cubes to disolve), garcic powder, thyme, rosemary, peppercorns and bay leaves.  The au jus that this recipe makes is so good I want to have it transfused into my body, replacing my blood with the rich juiciness.

Originally this post was also supposed to include some oven-caramlized onions that I have been in love with since finding on Mama Loves Food, but they met an untimely end when the cookie sheet was not removed from the oven appropriately and the caramelized onions were more like carcinogen onions.  They do go amazing with the French Dips, and their absence meant my overall John grade was more like a 73%. 

There were no pictures of the finished product, blame it on 4 extra adults over for dinner, 3 extra kids, and 4 growlers of beer that my pal Darin brought over for the playoffs.  I am finding that I am really good at getting pictures of the "during cooking" or the "end product", but so far I haven't been very successful at getting both sets of pictures of one recipe (minus the Savoy Chips, because it was literally two steps to complete).  Something to work on!

Tomorrow I have a guest blog coming up, so check back after 8:00 AM EST and see the deliciousness of my first guest recipe!

Spark of Inspiration (Cranberry Wild Rice Pull Apart Bread)

Happy Wednesday!  Wow, this week has been amazingly long for just being 3 days in, here's hoping the rest of the week just speeds right by.  Things are looking up, I got myself some new boots for Christmas (hooker boots, not cowboy boots) that arrived today, there is a homemade veggie lasagna currently warming in the ol' "housewife's hot box" (the oven), and both kids are too distracted by learning games to demand much of my time at this very minute.  We shall see how long that lasts.

So this last weekend I was so enamored by the Cranberry Wild Rice bread for the French Toast (recipe for the dough HERE) that I told that I was going to make another batch the same day, and he suggested that we try an experiment.  I threw all the ingredients into the bread machine and set the dough cycle and let it work it's magic, and the dough that came out was identical (even better, I would say) than the dough I made with my KitchenAid for the original batch.  Probably got a lot more kneading in the bread machine, which I'm learning is a very important part of the bread making process.

 This bread has risen.....

Once the bread dough was all ready to go Thad completed phase two of the experiment.  Remember the Pull Apart Ranch Bread that I posted a few posts ago?  Thad wondered if we could apply the same technique to the Cranberry Wild Rice dough, rolling it flat, drizzling it with melted butter and a combo of brown sugar and cinnamon, then slicing and stacking into a bread pan before letting the dough rise one more time.

Fully baked, like Amanda Bynes

Wowza!  That about sums up the awesomeness that this bread was.  The slices can be toasted, you can make them into sandwiches if you're a little more meticulous about making the slices as similar in size as possible.

Well, the silent moment for quiet blogging has passed, Elora is throwing a fit of not knowing the letter "u" while spelling out sight words, and if she tells me I'm being mean one more time tonight I'm going to have to fight back a hulk-like desire to show her how much meaner mommy can be.  Calling me mean is like a challenge, and boy, that is a gauntlet I find very difficult not to pick up.

Brunch Date (Cranberry Wild Rice French Toast)

This last weekend was very low-key in Casa Swan.  Lots of laundry was washed and dried, but I didn't put any of it away, so now that I'm home with Colter on a rare "sick day" I will end up folding towels and trying to clean out laundry baskets, all while watching Law & Order: Criminal Intent on Netflix.  I love L&O:CI, everything about it makes me happy, from Vincent D'Onofrio's genius Detective Goren to the plot synopsis of each crime and it's conclusion.  I can't wait to get to work on folding when I have Detective Goren to keep me company.

Yesterday I invited some pals over for brunch, a couple folks that I haven't seen in a while but enjoy spending time with, so brunch seemed the best way to lure them to my house for a visit.  Thank you, Tanya and Matthew, for your willingness to be my culinary guinea pigs!

I was feeling inspired, and decided to put the inspiration to good use by making something I saw on Drive-ins, Diners and Dives a long time ago, Cranberry Wild Rice French Toast.  There is a little cafe in Minnesota that makes their bread special for this French Toast, using native Minnesotian wild rice and cranberries, and it looked super good.  I'm happy to report, it is just as delicious as it looks above (the top is flat from brushing melted butter on the loaf before baking, an unnecessary step I don't plan to repeat).

The bread dough was incredibly simple to make.  So simple, in fact, that I threw a second batch of the ingredients into the bread machine after brunch and made something doubly delicious with the second batch of bread dough as well.  The longest part of the bread dough prep process: getting wild rice ready.  Fifty minutes to cook, but if you cook quite a bit you can make enough for 2-3 batches of this bread at once.

Once the bread was baked and ready to go you slice it up and then dip the slices in your French Toast ingredients and then let the slices set on a rack to wick away some of the additional egg/milk mixture.  This is where I feel I have been failing on my attempts at French Toast.  You really have to let the slices dry a smidge, otherwise you get really soggy results.  I ended up having a little egg nog in the fridge from the holidays that was still good, so I used this for the egg/milk mixture, and you totally could tell there was a little extra "something" from the spices in the egg nog.  Totally delish.

Brioche

I made a loaf of French Brioche bread dough in the bread machine as well, and this loaf was GORGEOUS, and the first few slices were like heaven, but the inside was just a little doughy at the very top, so it didn't end up making very much French Toast.  But I have made French Toast before with this brioche bread, and I 100% recommend trying it.  Super easy to make, and the results are like a loaf of croissant: light, flaky and rich as hell.  Or like Kim Kardashian (HEY-OH!).

I served this French Toast with baked bacon and turkey bacon I baked in the leftover real bacon grease, which removed all the health properties of turkey bacon.  I will share with you the next use for the Cranberry Wild Rice bread in my next post.... you will LOVE it!

Spice Up Your Life

Yes, the post title for today could be a reference to the queens of pop; Posh, Sporty, Baby, Scary and Ginger.  But it isn't.  It is a reference to the beginning of the spice rack reckoning.

For a while I  have felt that my spice rack had become unmanageable. It consisted of a hanging basket in my pantry that bowed under the weight of the numerous bottles that filled it.  It was high up to deter little fingers, but the height meant looking at bottles from below while hunting for what you needed, or taking the whole thing down to search.  I just couldn't take it anymore!

I had a drawer that wasn't getting much play in my kitchen, filled with random crap like fish food for a series for dead fish and tea bags.  I pulled all that crap out and decided to cultivate it into an "herb garden".

I am THRILLED with the results (above).  The only thing left in the pantry is the larger stuff that won't fit (staples like cinnamon, chili powder, a giant container of ranch dressing powder), and I even have enough drawer depth for a second layer of stuff, but I am going to try to keep it from getting cluttered and just keep it maintained.

I loves spices and herbs, so I love that they are close at hand and easy to find now.  A good friends told me tonight that she made a bomb-ass dish for dinner and that dill held the secret to it's awesomeness.  Spices are magical,  a dash of parsley or a sprinkle of tarragon can change a whole culinary landscape and shape into a thing of beauty (and occasionally a horrifying mess), so don't be afraid to go a little spice-crazy.

Pitch Perfect Sunday (Potato Soup & Pull Apart Ranch Bread)

As the title of the post indicates today has been filled with both Pitch Perfect and some delicious nonsense.  I managed to squeeze in 3 viewings in 24 hours, a record I haven't tried to beat since Newsies!  I'm such a complete nerd for the singing of songs while dancing.

I managed to get 10 hours of additional work in this week and plan to have the same kind of week again this week, so I will have to be smart about my menu planning so I can keep us all "relatively" decently fed while making it to yoga once this week.  I would shoot for twice, but that just seems ambitious.

So today I ended up making a big pot of PW's Perfect Potato Soup, and a big loaf of FWF's Ranch Bake-In Slices Bread.  Let me just tell you, this combo was dynamite, the bread helped you eat the soup, the soup made you crave more bread, it was quite sybiotic.

Ranch bread, pre-baking

This bread was ridiculously easy to make, I used a basic recipe for sandwich bread dough as called for (this one right here), and started the water/sugar/yeast combo livening up.  I tossed in the salt, flour and butter and hand kneaded the dough until I got the consistency the recipe called for.  I CAN'T WAIT TO GET THE DOUGH HOOK FOR MY KITCHEN AID.  My little arms were worn out after hand kneading.

So anyways, after the dough has risen you punch it down and roll it out into a large flat rectangle.  Melt your butter and pour it all over the dough, then sprinkle with the ranch/dill mixture and this creates almost a ranch paste.  The slices should be roughly the size of a playing card, then you stack them in a propped-up bread pan until that bad boy is filled up, then let it rise until it is puffy and gorgeous, like a pre-menstrual beauty queen.

Purty!

After rising and baking you are left with a loaf of bread that requires no slicing, the slices come apart and each is beautifully seasoned.  Pair this bread with a soup or stew and you will not regret the small amount of work.

Try this out next weekend and you will become a junkie, I am not kidding, this bread is that good.  Elora dubbed it "The Best Bread Ever".  I prefer Kraken Bread, since it is unleashing a delicious beast bent on destruction of your waistline.

Tell me what you think in the comments!  New post coming midweek!

Kicking Off the New Year (Oatmeal Style)

Well howdy!  My name is Mary Rose, and if you have stumbled across this blog while surfing the vast world wide interwebs I hope that you enjoy my little venture into the world of food blogging.

If you didn't come across this blog by accident, and are here because you have seen me talking about this theoretical food blog on Facebook, I'd like you to note that we have gone from theoretical to full-blown REALITY.  See the title up at the top of this page?  I named this blog on a whim while sitting at my desk yesterday, stressing myself out about how I promised myself I would start the food blog I've toyed with for months.  Let me explain...

I'm a procrastinator.  I get things done, but in reality it can take me an extraordinarily long amount of time to actually DO THEM.  Now, I've gone and really done it by doing what I said I was going to do, because now I have to FOLLOW THROUGH.  Planning is easy.  Execution of a plan is exhausting. 

It would be rather funny to start a food blog without featuring any recipes from the word go.  But that is more "sad humor" than actual humor, so I'm going to start with a recipe I fell in love with a couple months ago and I've been making nearly weekly ever since.  You can find the original recipe HERE, the blog I found it on is one of my personal favorites.  The blogger inspired me to make my own vanilla, which I did in early December and then gave the finished products to dear friends as a Christmas gift. 

The thing I love about this recipe is its FLEXIBILITY.  I can double it (which I did this morning) and then eat oatmeal all week long at work.  And this oatmeal is almost better as leftovers, I shit you not (hey, I curse, be prepared for torrential swearing in posts to come).  I have fallen in love with adding chopped fresh apples and omitting the nutmeg in lieu of a HUGE tablespoon of cinnamon.  I love cinnamon.  I can't get enough.  The version below has no apples, it is a good old fashioned Maple & Brown Sugar edition.

Baked Oatmeal (a variation of Maple Baked Oatmeal from Foodie with Family)

• 1/4 cup (1/2 a stick) of butter
• 3 cups old-fashioned rolled oats (do not substitute quick or instant or steel cut oats)
• 1/2-3/4 cup raw or maple sugar preferably (You can substitute granulated or brown sugar if necessary.)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 cup whole milk
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tablespoons maple syrup (you can substitute Golden Syrup if you prefer it.)
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract (or 3/4 teaspoon ground vanilla) 

Preheat the oven to 350°F. While the oven is preheating, unwrap the butter and place it in an 8-inch x 8-inch or 9-inch x 9-inch baking pan. 

Place the pan on the center rack of the oven and let the butter melt as the oven heats. (As soon as the butter is melted remove the pan from the oven or the butter may scorch.)

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. 

Whisk together the milk, eggs and vanilla extract (note: the bottle above is the vanilla that I made for Christmas, and it is DELIGHTFUL) in a separate bowl, pour over the dry ingredients and mix together with a sturdy spoon until everything is evenly combined and wet. Scrape into the pan with the melted butter and stir until most of the butter is incorporated, but there are little pockets of melted butter still visible at the corners.

 Before baking

 After baking

Bake for 30 minutes or until golden brown around the edges. Serve hot with a splash or a good glug of heavy cream.  

Both these kids go ape-shit for baked oatmeal, apples or no apples.  The texture is more cake than porridge.  My whole family had this for Christmas morning breakfast, and my dad (who is a perpetual grump and never very impressed with most things) even said he liked it.  This is Wade-approved, which means you should make a batch of this, like, yesterday.

Coming up on future posts: guest recipes, my new favorite make-ahead item, and a delicious soup my whole family enjoys.  Stay tuned!!!