Coconut Flour Muffins

So, last night was baking night number 1 for SCD. Made these lovely muffins but popped in some crispy bacon and some lovely sage as our herbs. Very nice!
We shared one straight out of the oven after dinner with a cup of tea, and took one to work for lunch, as a replacement of the usual sandwich.
Don't let coconut flour fool you! Only a very small amount is needed.

So long pizza!

Went to all you can eat pizza pasta gelato night at my local last night. Ate 22 slices of thin crust pizza and a couple of desserts. It was my farewell to pizza as I embark on the SCD diet. This morning has been a bit tough as I went for a hard 2 hour ride, straight into work. Had a couple of bananas, dates and dried figs for breakfast but feeling pretty flat. My nut meals are being delivered today. Should be able to buy some muffin tins tomorrow night and be able to bake some higher carb breakfast and riding snacks.
My stomach is not stoked I ate so much pizza. But, just like an alcohol hangover, no pity as it's self induced. :-D

Coincidence?

Wow, it's a long time since anyone posted here... oops... I guess life has somehow gotten busy, and gotten away from us. So, when we started this blog, we jokingly called it "Food in Mouth Disease" because we are both obsessed by food and eating, and recipe books, and restaurants, and growing our own food, and farmer's markets, and watching cooking shows while we eat our dinner, and food holidays and a balanced nourishing diet... and we thought that our food obsession bordered on a disease. How were we to know that there would then come a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis in the family? And that suddenly, there would be a relationship between food and a real disease? So, UC has now been living in our house for around 2 years (maybe more - it's hard to tell really when it started), and being managed on meds, with flare ups and so on. Well, no-one wants meds to be a long term solution if it can be helped, so after much research, we're about to embark on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, and see what happens. We are hopeful that it will induce a change for the better, and that gut health will be returned to something somewhere near normal, but at the very least, we're hopeful it will mean a reduction in meds to manage this disease. Full remission would be fantastic, but we are realistic! This week, we're waiting on the arrival of Elaine's book, saying farewell to some favourite illegal foods, and starting to identify where we can get enough carbohydrates into our diet, based on the 310g RDI for Australian (male) adults, given that all the easy sources of complex carbs are now going to be off limits. As there are only two in the house, we'll both be doing the SCD so that it's easier to stick to, and easier to cook and plan for. And given some of the beautiful recipes we've found so far, it's not a diet you want to miss out on!

Melbourne, I'm going to go nom nom nom...

...and if you get in my way, it's your own fault!

I can't believe how long it is since we last posted! That's not to say we haven't been busy cooking and eating; in fact, it's because we've been soooo busy cooking and eating that we haven't posted. I'll have to find time to do a re-cap of our gastronomic adventures over the past 12 months when I can, because at the moment our attention is focussed on something very important - a gluttons weekend in Melbourne.

No, dear readers, this is not something that you can call your travel agency and get them to book you a seat for. This is something that we've dreamed up for ourselves. We've done our research, read the reviews, asked our friends, remembered favourite cookbook authors, and tried to think of some of the stuff that we wouldn't ordinarily treat ourselves to at home. We've created ourselves a very dedicated schedule of food. Not coincidentally, this weekend is also the "Taste of Melbourne" festival.

For those interested, here's a run down of our eating schedule for the next few days:

		Restaurant	Cuisine
Thursday	Dinner	MoMo	Middle Eastern
Friday	Breakfast	Glicks	Kosher
	Lunch	Taste Festival	Everything?
	Dinner	Scopri
Saturday	Breakfast	Sweethearts	Modern Australian
	Lunch	Oriental Tea House	Yum Cha & Tea House
	Dinner	Aux Batifolles	French Bistro
Sunday	Breakfast	Balzari	Italian/European
	Lunch	MoVida	Spanish Tapas
	Dinner	Quanjude	Asian

There are probably a bunch of other, better restaurants out there in the world of Melbourne food, but we'll be sure to let you know what we think of these ones...

How does you garden grow?

Had a very nice day in the garden today. It was well overdue! The snow peas were suffering from the extremes of weather that we've been experiencing - first the searing, drying westerly winds, then a few days of rain, and their continued battle against the slugs meant that they had really come to the end of their time.

So, I picked the last few peas, and pulled the plants. And it didn't stop there... I picked our spinach, parsley and rocket, and hunted all the grubs off the cabbages. I built up around the leeks again - I'm so looking forward to using our leeks! - and planted out some holy basil and some sweet genovese basil. I put some fertiliser on the sweet peas (I thought they should have been flowering already, but it doesn't seem so!), and planted a beefheart tomato.

We got these great little implements for watering our plants. They're a plastic spike with a few little holes in them. You fill the spike with sand, then using an old soft drink bottle, put that into the mouth end of the spike. It seems to work a treat, and for those of us with busy lifestlyes, you can't really go wrong with anything that will look after itself when it comes to water!

So, we had a glut of spinach and parsley today, so I made a few magic recipes that invented out of my imagination. As usual, quantities are only approximate, because I go by feel...

You can see the big pile of spinach that I used here:


After washing and chopping finely (almost shredding) I did the following:

3 eggs, whites whisked to frothy peaks, yolks beaten with about 1 cup of milk and/or cream, then all folded in together gently.

I also added some garlic that I had simmered and then pounded into a paste. I boiled them so that they would n't be too strong and they seemed to have worked out fine.

I then tossed the damp spinach with:
3/4 cup of type "00" flour, with 1 1/2 tsp baking powder (making a rudimetary Self Raising Flour)

Then I chopped up some boiled spuds (ideally, you can use cold leftovers, but I had to use mine that were still warm) into round slices, and in a lined, well-greased spring-form pan, I formed these into a layer, reminiscent of a tart tartin. I then put my spinach and flour mix on top of this, then poured my combined wet mix over the top. Bunged it into a medium oven for about 30 minutes, et voila, this delicious concoction appeared!
I am a big fan of eating these types of things doused in a rather nice tasting balsamic vinegar.

As you can see, the potatoes achieved a nice golden colour, thanks to the butter I used when greasing my pan.

Also, you might notice that I said to put the potatoes in the pan first - that's how they ended up on top...using a spring-form pan for these types of dishes really make life so much easier...

I also made some dip/spread from the parsley (though there are really buckets of it left so will ahve to think of some more things to do with it before I resort to chopping and freezing!).

250g of fetta, 3 schallots, handful of almonds, parsley to the hearts desire...

Blend everything, without the fetta, until coarsely chopped, then add a thin stream of olive oil for moisture. Then, add the fetta (chopped first is the best approach) until you reach the desired consistency, from a coarse pesto through to a smooth paste.

I think you could also do this with things like garlic, parmesan, pine nuts, maybe a bit of chilli for fun.

World Vision Family Challenge

We decided to sponsor a kiddie last night. That TV stuff really does work.

I'd been thinking about doing it for a very long time, but guess what, as usual I hadn't done anything to make it happen. And as I was watching the TV last night, and Tim Costello was suggesting that World Vision hadn't even reached halfway in it's target to get 5000 kids sponsored in a month, I thought, well, I'm not going to be the one that's responsible for him not getting his 5000! Luckily Marty agreed!

So, ever so easily, we went over the world vision website, and were confronted with sooooo many children in need of help. We really weren't sure how to choose a child to help, as there are so many, and they are just so lovely. So, we decided to sponsor a kiddie in memory of Granny, so we narrowed the thousands down to 10 littlies. Then we had to decide who to sponsor out of that. There was a wide range of ages, from 4 to 10, and both boys and girls. How did we decide in the end? We thought it would be the best idea to choose the eldest simply because older kids are least likely to get sponsored (not as cute, maybe?) and because it's possible (or even likely) that older children will have younger siblings. So they can benefit too. And the clincher for me was that the child we settled on loved to play with dolls. I think Granny would have liked that especially...

Surprise...

So, the surprise chicory dish was a real surprise after all. It wasn't very inventive, coz I didn't feel much like cooking tonight, but I did anyway. To make things easy, it became an omelette! So I got my two eggs, 2 tbspns grated parmesan and some milk...just a little bit too much milk, because the omelettes didn't stay together so well when it was time to fold them.
just cooked the chickory with some onion and garlic, and Marty threw together a tommy salad.

Lucky there are easy things like omelettes, which I swear were invented on a Monday!