Experiments

I stayed in Germany for a year when I was younger, lived there with a family as an exchange student. My host mother taught me a lot about cooking and inspired me to continue improve in the art. My own mother has a way of making food (vegetables especially) fun for the kids to eat.... carving faces into carrot and potato slices, etc That combined with being trained as a salad and desert artist at a local restaurant when I first started working has fired a passion for food that looks and tastes good. Food is meant to be enjoyed, both by its design and it's function. I first figured out I had food allergies when I was about 14 years old. At the time, the only goat's cheese we could buy was snowgoat from Europe which is brown and did nothing to alleviate my addiction to cow's milk cheeses. I was also limited in the different types of flour I could get. Rice flour on it's own I found out made a crumbly mess and chickpea flour made disgusting cookies. My earlier attempts left something to be desired and created a fear of experimenting with other flour. I gave up trying to avoid Wheat and Dairy products because it seemed too difficult and in the process I gained an extra 70 lbs. A couple of years ago I discovered Spelt flour which seemed easy enough to replace wheat, and it helped that I had a friend along side that could point me in the right direction when things didn't work the way I wanted them to. Watching her in her kitchen and talking to her about what was going on gave me the inspiration to continue to experiment to find what would work for me. Last year a trip to the Naturopath Doctor revealed that I was also allergic to Spelt flour. This revelation sent me back to the drawing board and down the road of experimenting with gluten free flours which at the time seemed a tedious and mysterious road I had done my best to avoid thus far. What I saw in cookbooks were recipes that called for far more ingredients than I was used to, and many different types of flour which were expensive and needed to be stored in the fridge. First off, I have 6 kids. I don't have time for more ingredients!!! I barely have time to bake let alone if it is going to take me twice as long to navigate through a complicated recipe!! Secondly, I have a budget!! More money for ingredients that I'm not sure I will like or use is just out of the question!!! Thirdly, there is NO EXTRA SPACE in my fridge!! Now, over time I have made room in my freezer for raw nuts and seeds and there are some bags of flour in my second fridge.... but by and large, I use my flour blend to replace All purpose flour in most recipes and I don't have to worry too much about having a lot of different types of flour available to use. I purchase a lot of basic groceries... fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, rice and rice pasta, flour and baking supplies, milk and yogurt. I have cut out all of the prepackaged snacks, almost all the cereal, and all the prepackaged meals that were costing me too much money anyways. We no longer order pizza, or any kind of takeout so we have saved a lot of money that way. When we need a quick meal, I will buy a whole roasted chicken from the grocery store and a bag of prechopped salad or we will make hamburgers and fries. In the beginning, the grocery bill was a bit out of hand as I was grappling to figure out how to feed everyone, but as time has worn on, things are getting easier to handle and the grocery budget is starting to line up again. I just wanted to encourage those of you who have just started out and are overwhelmed with the enormity of the job. It is worth it to keep working through it and it does get easier.... I hope that you will find the information on this blog useful. I would also love to know that you have been here so feel free to leave comments or click on the sidebar to follow this blog, that way you can be updated with the newest posts.