Life is a Process

2 Tbsp coconut oil
2 lb ground beef
3 Tbsp chili powder
1 Tbsp salt
2 Tbsp cumin
1 Tbsp cinnamon
1.5 tsp black pepper
1 green pepper (Sweet)
1 red pepper (sweet)
1 yellow pepper (sweet)
1 onion
1 28-oz can fire-roasted diced/crushed tomatoes
2 c. cooked beans
3 c. chicken bone broth
3 Tbsp tomato paste

Heat up cast iron pot with coconut oil; brown beef. Add chopped onion and sweet peppers. Add spices. Add beans, broth, canned tomatoes, and tomato paste. Mix well. Let simmer for 30 minutes. Serve with guacamole, tortilla chips, salsa, black olives.

We’ve been casein-free for well over a year now (read: dairy-free; no cheese, no milk, no uncultured dairy). I am the kefir queen here, dropping my kefir grains into almost any liquid - coconut milk, berry juice, cow milk. I can’t set aside enough of our local apple cider to try kefir-ing that though.

For a few months, I have been largely gluten-free. I try to maintain a mostly GF house, though the car is another story. I have got to find a GF substitute to those darn animal crackers or fig bars that the toddler adores. Maybe he’ll be happy with apple chips…

Some wonder how we do it. I don’t bake, and now when I do (which is more often than the pre-GFCF days), I use coconut flour or rice flour. Though I like having the book, the excerpts from “Cooking with Coconut Flour” are enough to get a GF-baker well on the way to using coconut flour. We have pancakes more often now than we did pre-child; I found 2 recipes that are acceptable to my crew and I alternate between them (depending on the number of eggs or on the status of our nut butter): Buttermilk Coconut Pancakes, where we use kefir in lieu of buttermilk; and Midas Gold Pancakes, using nut butter instead of nut flour. Cashew butter works really well, phytates be darned.

Over the summer, I experimented with the “diet” from The Garden of Eating. Grain-free, instead of just gluten-free. I’m finding, though, that winter brings a yearning for beans and rice and tortilla chips. I did notice, however, that we have actually reduced our food consumption since dumping the beans and grains, as evidenced by our expensive grocery trips (instead of embarrassingly expensive).

The challenge for me still rests with daycare - a nut-free, vegetarian facility that requires packaged goodies as alternative snacks, if provided by the parent.

GFCF diets seem to be the diet du jour.  People perceive it as hard.  It is really only hard if you regularly eat out or if you live in the packaged-food aisles of the grocery store.  As soon as you realize that GFCF means, really, meat + veggies + fruit + nuts, it becomes quite surmountable.  I won’t be focusing on our GFCF efforts here, but occasionally I’ll sneak in a gem of a recipe (sorry! without pictures as my cooking is not a work of art).