The Difficult Task of Food

No apologies this time. I've been gone and part of it has been because I have been having a personal crisis with food. And I do believe it qualifies for the word crisis.

Since discovering that I do have a dairy allergy it has become one of the biggest battles for me. I love cheese and there has yet to come across my taste buds a worthy alternative (though I'm currently beginning experiments with nutritional yeast). So I am easily tempted. Especially when it comes with bread. Seems like a pretty common weakness.

But it's driven me to gain back almost all of the weight I had lost between the Reboots and exercise. So that in turn makes me depressed, which of course makes me crave comfort foods... I think you can see the pattern starting here. Now add in some insomnia, a increasingly common sort of restless leg feeling, and fatigue and you have a monster of an issue. I can make excuses all day long about how I can't do this or that, but that's all they are.

So I have done a little branching out in the last few weeks, in the attempt to curb this nasty food habit that is creeping back up on me - and I've made the decision to go ahead and try another (much shorter) Reboot in a few weeks.

I can tell you one thing Maangchi is a life saver! We have recently made a new batch of Kimchi (and by we, I mean I. It was so much fun!) and tried out two new recipes. Though I was disappointed when I found out that the rice cakes I bought contained wheat.

First and foremost I kept promising pictures of the Kimchiguk and I finally have one for you! I may have more pictures but they are on Logician's phone and I don't think waking him for it is very polite.

It's not exactly a pretty picture but it shows the soup quite well. I usually make a double batch of Maangchi's recipe (Kimchiguk) and being the people we are we added in extra pork belly this last time. Though the next time I think we might try it with some fresh chicken (from our local farmer). Our newest batch of Kimchi is the best yet and it's already quite spicy even though it's been keeping in the fridge. I think it's going to make a really tasty soup!

The thing I love the most about using the Kimchi in this way is that it allows me to make more! I have way too much fun cutting up the cabbage, salting it, and making it into delicious fermented joy.


I bought two new items just for making Kimchi this time also. I bought a large plastic bowl (with cute teddy bears on it) and a large strainer. This made things SO much easier! I used the Easy Kimchi version of the recipe, though I have been wanting to make whole cabbage Kimchi also. I am going to try to get my hands on one of the clay pots here in the next few months. But it was so much easier to salt the cabbage, strain it, and rinse it with my two new kitchen helpers!

 The left picture is the cabbage soaking in it's cold water bath prior to being salted. The right hand picture shows the cabbage shortly after being salted. I like how the green stands against the pretty red of the strainer!

I tried to stay as close to the recipe as I could this time (finding 10 lbs of cabbage without a scale or patience is somewhat challenging) but I think I only ended up using about 6lbs of cabbage and I only had a cup and a half of pepper flakes left! I had to buy more for the next recipe I made that same day, but it was too late for the Kimchi.

That night I decided to keep going with the spicy theme and made Ddeokbokki. Which is a snack recipe on her website but was easily transformed into a meal with the addition of pork belly and lots of delicious vegetables. I could not bring myself to buy an entire bag of dried anchovies (which is about $20 here) as it's such a large bag and I wasn't sure if I could bring myself to use them. So instead I used five dried shitake mushrooms and the kombu. It was delicious. So much so I thought Logician might gobble it all up in one go! It's definitely something we will make again, likely in a vegetarian version (and maybe if we're lucky we can find/make rice cakes without gluten).

The last recipe I tried of hers (which will certainly not be the last ever) was for fried chicken. I choose to make this on a day we were both definitely needing comfort food, because I knew I could make it gluten free and dairy free. It turned out amazing (way better than expected) and even though it was fried it didn't taste like it at all! The recipe is called Yangnyeom-tongdak and it's a sort of sweet and spicy coated fried chicken. We ate it with kimchi and vegetables and it was perfect! I used only drumsticks (for ease) and for the gluten free flour replacement I used Bob's Red Mill Biscuit and Pie Crust mix (as we will never cook with it otherwise). I tried following Maangchi's method for breading the chicken and it didn't go well for me (think scramble egg and a bit of mushy flour) so I pressed what I could on the chicken, added another beaten egg and coated the chicken with the gluten free flour mix. It was so good. I want to make it right now and I'm not even hungry!

You'll notice some cupcakes hanging out there in the background - it was a new product we tested out. Betty Crocker has come out with boxed GF cake mixes and this one was on sale (likely on it's way out). The cupcakes are Devil's Food Chocolate Cupcakes with Funfetti icing (because there needed to be some badness involved). All in all it was a tasty comfort food dinner that allowed us to cheat a bit (with all the not so pleasant ingredients in the icing) and yet have a GFDF dinner and dessert.

The cakes were good, though a little dry and Logician reported that had I not told him they were GF he might not have known they were anything other than slightly dry cupcakes.

His birthday is in a few weeks (it will actually be right after my intended Reboot) and I am going to use Cybele Pascale's Red Velvet cake recipe to make Blue Velvet Cupcakes (which, interesting note I have found that Trader Joe's GF Flour mix is actually a very nice substitute for the blend she uses and it's much cheaper even if the end result is a hair grittier than it would be otherwise). I will likely also try my hand as some sort of dairy free mock cream cheese style icing for said cupcakes.

With the chicken being such a big hit I may make it again or I may try my hand at making a sort of veggie tempura coated with this same batter. I'll have to see how I'm feeling at the time!

Either way I will have some more kitchen adventures for you soon, including a daily update of my Reboot (I am planning on starting on the 20th of July as I have a long weekend (It will be a five day Reboot, with me only working on day 1). I intend to do just straight juice and protein shakes (we've been using a Raw GF/DF/SF powder mix) and we will see what happens! Hopefully if nothing else it breaks this vicious cycle of cheese craving!

Eat well!

Amazing Food Everywhere!

So while I have been slacking off in posting, I have not been slacking off in the kitchen. We have been cooking up a storm of gluten and dairy free amazingness that I am going to try to explain to you. The sad thing is I keep forgetting to take pictures!

So first up - GF/DF Fudge

We needed a sweet treat that was going to satisfy my intense need for chocolate. Something I sadly had been having to do without because almost all chocolate you buy in the store has dairy in it, unless it's for baking. Enter Trader Joe's (Thank goodness!) who sell dairy free chocolate chips and delicious dark chocolate bars that are both cheap and dairy free. So inspired by this I again consulted Pinterest (which seems to house a lot of inspiration).

I found this pin from the Once a Month Mom that was for fudge. As always I didn't have exactly what was needed (really the only thing I didn't have was a conventional sifter and an 8 x 8 pan) so I made it in an eight inch round cake pan. We used this tea strainer we have as a sifter, which takes longer but worked just as well. I have since purchased a nifty three cup sifter which I will be using today to make another batch of fudge. I used carton coconut milk and found it to work surprisingly well. This fudge was amazing. We kept it in the fridge and it lasted a long time because one or two pieces is dark and rich enough to satisfy even the strongest craving.

I am still on a mission to find a more natural replacement for powdered sugar. I killed our blender attempting to make coconut powdered sugar for a cake several months ago and haven't tried a second attempt since then. I'm sure a good hour on the internet will solve that problem!

I also made another Allergy Free Red Velvet Cake using Cybele Pascale's recipe. I used a "rice beverage" as opposed to Rice Milk and I'm not sure it didn't negatively effect the cake (Logician says it was the best yet, so there is that). I also only have one eight inch round pan so I ended up using two springform pans. Which resulted in a thicker layer that caved in a bit while it settled. Since I had a new surprising indent I put some Trader Joe's Monticello Cherries in the middle, which was quite tasty. Again this is another recipe where I would love to substitute the powdered sugar with something else, but the coconut 'powdered' sugar gave the icing a strong molasses flavor that the vanilla extract then made too strong. So adaptation in progress!

That same night we also tried out a new Korean Dish - Kimchi Soup (Kimchiguk) made by Maangchi. Who by the way - if you haven't tried her food. Do it. It's incredible! We've only had one recipe Logician and I didn't agree on and we had to use different ingredients (I'll explain a bit further down!).

We started making her Easy Kimchi sometime last summer. The first batch we made was okay but we increased the spiciness and added more vegetables and such the second time and it's so much better! Logician first discovered Maangchi on YouTube watching one of her BBQ Pork videos, which got me hooked. So we turned to her when we made the kimchi. We had finished off almost all the old kimchi but had bought a new container specifically for making kimchi (plastic, not the beautiful clay pots. That comes next) so we made a new batch. So sitting lonely in the back of the fridge was this older, more sour kimchi. So I decided to make Kimchi Soup after seeing one of her newer videos (Recipe and Video here).

It was delicious! I picked up a new type of tofu which turned out to be really weird to me (Logician found that it grew on him) and it was my first experience cooking with pork belly on my own. But the soup was incredible. We had company so I made a double recipe which allowed me to use all the remaining older kimchi and some of the newer batch. It was so good we decided to make it again this week.

However, as we were on our way to the more Chinese based market to pick up what we needed, Logician became inspired by a different recipe for Braised Saury. I knew we had seen this canned fish somewhere before so we set off to find it in the market. As it turns out that particular market does not stock Saury so we opted to try Jack Mackerel instead. The recipe looked and smelled beautiful but was way too fishy for me! I couldn't eat it. I went to the Korean/Japanese influenced market this morning and found the exact brand she used in the video. So I am thinking in the next two weeks or so, we'll try it again.

Maangchi has so many recipes I want to try, but I am absolutely addicted to her Kimchi recipes! I want to get a clay pot (I saw a smaller one today for about $20.00) and make whole cabbage kimchi. But only time will tell if I get to!

One thing we have discovered is that the more Asian influenced food we cook, the less likely we are to run into Dairy and Wheat, our two biggest foes. However this does leave some room for GMO soy, MSG, and other nasty chemical things. However, it seems like the more we read labels the more we find out that there are less of these chemical bad guys in the things that are imported! Seriously! It seems awfully odd to me, but it does make me very happy.

I promise to take some step by step pictures of the Kimchi Guk tonight and a finished picture. It's going to be awesome. I will likely make a one and one half time recipe of it, since I have such awesome looking pork I want to have stewed in the broth and I also bought some Enoki mushrooms to place into the pot! I'm looking forward to dinner so much I'm hungry now!

Happy Eating!