Food, cooking, eating, and me

I was out ambulating, as I am wont to do. This takes a bit of time, given to thought. I got the urge to do something with some of that cheap brie I sometimes buy at the Asian grocery I walk by.

I bought some Danish blue cheese and some brie. I split the brie wedge, mixed blue cheese with butter, and spread it between like a sandwich. Serve with grapes and crackers or bread.

Today I cooked up a batch of brown rice (1 cup dry rice) in the rice cooker, chopped up some leftover Italian sausage (2 sausages), and fried up some chopped onions, red pepper, and jalapeños together in the sausage dripping. Yum.

It made 3 hearty servings.

I’m not on a low fat diet.

Leftovers day for gluten-free breakfast!

The asparagus and rice were leftover and just needed to be reheated. The beef cutlet was eye of the round pounded to less than 1/4″ thick, floured with rice flour, salt, pepper, and cayenne. It was pan-fried in half butter, half olive oil.

As part of my continuing series about what a gluten-free person can eat for breakfast…

I just felt like making cashew milk last night and having cereal with those ripe bananas this morning. It feels so good in my tummy.

I was never much of a milk-drinker nor a cereal-eater, but sometimes you just get a craving.

Yes, that’s a ceramic bowl that looks like half a cantaloupe. Food tastes better when you present it attractively.

Since a lot of people seem to be finding my blog after searching for terms like “gluten-free breakfast” and “what do gluten-free people eat for breakfast?”, I thought I would write an occasional series on what I eat for breakfast.

I normally sleep late and eat late these days. I eat “breakfast” at lunch-time, sometimes breakfasty foods, and sometimes not. I have always cooked breakfast, and I have always been open to eating different foods.

If you have decided to go gluten-free, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you move on from the past and open your mind to the foods that are available to you. Food substitutes and analogs are a poor imitation of the foods you can no longer eat. Let them go and find new foods and new ways to prepare the ingredients you can eat.

What you see in this photo is this morning’s breakfast. I had home fries, thinly sliced beef sauteed in butter, an omelet with red pepper sauce, and fresh strawberries with a little cream poured on them.

So you say you still need biscuits, and bread things to go with your breakfast? You can have it both ways. The best are made fresh at home.

Back in February I told about how, after a few sleepless nights with heartburn (common to those with gluten intolerance), I swore off eating at night altogether. Added to my habit of not eating until noon (I often sleep late), this meant I only eat between the hours of noon and 6:00 or 7:00 PM.

The heartburn went away immediately. I have never been able to stick to a diet to lose weight, but getting rid of the heartburn was a powerful incentive.

The update is that with essentially no dieting, I have lost 20 pounds in the past 3 months. I have done very little to restrict my diet outside of the eating hours thing. If I’m hungry, I tell myself that I can eat as much as I want for the next meal. And I do.

I had one of those old cheap spring bathroom scales, the kind that looks sort of official but gives a different reading each time. It was impossible to get anything more than a general idea of my weight in comparison with other days, and no way to be sure it was anywhere near correct. So I finally broke down and bought a new bathroom scale.

This baby is cool, it is easy, and the readings are reproducible. It calibrates itself. There is no need to adjust, not even any need to turn it on. If you step on it 10 times, it reads exactly the same all 10 times.

The numbers are really big and the display lights up nicely.

Okay, so the old scale was off by a lot. But I still think it’s a pretty good estimate that I have lost 20 pounds.

It would be okay with me if I continued to lose weight at this rate. I’ve gotten my waist back now with no effort. What more could I ask?

Reader Pound Cake Recipe had a question:

Hi, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a ton of spam? If so how do you control it, any plugin or something you can suggest? I get so much it’s driving me insane so any help is much appreciated.

Ah, spam. Fewer than 1% of comments even has the potential to be genuine. The rest are just bots crawling the net, looking for comment forms to fill with their spammy comments and vandalize unmoderated blogs.

What’s spam? Spam is now more sophisticated than it used to be. It used to be bots would drop in pages of links about online drugs, porn, insurance, and tons of other stuff, just in case 1 in 1 billion readers aka suckers actually would sort through their scam/malware links and click through, thus receiving in all likelihood a good dose of malware while paying for fake drugs or porn which would actually be free somewhere else.

Nowadays spam bots usually submit generic-sounding posts, like “Great article!”, “Loved it!”, “You have made some very insightful suggestions here”. They post comments about the blog theme and its colors. Or coding mistakes in their own blog. Sometimes they post comments that are clearly off-topic, though they would be appropriate on someone else’s blog – but certainly not on a “Breakfast potatoes” post.

Sometimes they post off-topic questions to me, as though they expect me to respond in the comment thread.

Rarest of all is the true comment or question. I do enjoy them, but unfortunately they often get missed in the flood of spam.

The fact is that most spam comments are posted by usernames that indicate what the underlying spam link is about. Reader Cheap vicodin links to a url that clearly intends to sell you cheap vicodin, even though the comment may read “Great job, bookmarked it!”

So what do I do? First of all, I use a number of anti-spam plugins, like Akismet, Bad Behavior, and Spambam. I do read through my spam before emptying the folder. Sometimes it is hard to tell what is and is not. Almost always I edit comments to strip off questionable links.

Of course, if you’re a spambot, you won’t be reading this. But if you’re a human and you want to ask me an off-topic or semi-off-topic question, there’s an email link to get in touch with me. Too many times I have responded, only to find the same off-topic comment attached to other blogs I manage.

Only on-topic comments get posted, so if you’re a human being spreading spam, don’t bother.

Spam control is a wonderful thing.

Okay, this would only have helped you if you had a Shaw’s Supermarket handy and you were able to get there during the sale, while they had Envirokids breakfast cereal on sale for $3.50 a box, which is like $1.50 off. I totally stocked up.

I guess this is an excuse to give you my favorite recipe for nut milk.
Cashew Milk

• 4 ounces (weight) of whole raw cashews
• 4 cups of water
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Put the cashews in the blender. Blend them into fine granules. Add water to cover, and then add more water as you blend, stirring them up from the bottom, until it is thick and smooth. Add more water until it is the consistency of cream. Add the salt. Pour into a pitcher, cover, and refrigerate.

If you blend it very smooth, there will be hardly any gritty residue, unlike almonds, which absolutely have to be filtered. I find it’s good enough for cereal and smoothies. I don’t drink milk. You may want to filter it anyway. Give it a stir after it has been sitting in the refrigerator for a while.

It is great over cereal with bananas or strawberries. Yum.

Many of those of you who are gluten-intolerant or celiac have suffered with heartburn. I know I have. I used to be able to eat anything at any time, and nothing ever bothered me. But more and more, I have been troubled by heartburn for extended periods of time while trying to sleep.

Judging by the number of heartburn remedies I see for sale, I would think that it’s pretty common in the general population, though probably nobody has attempted to follow up on heartburn sufferers to see how many of them have dietary intolerances.

After one sleepless night following an evening of snacking, I just said, “No more!” The solution is so simple.

First of all, I often get up rather late and eat my first meal at noon. I decided to keep doing that, but I also decided to cut out food after 6:00 pm. So I eat at noon, and I also try to eat before 6:00. If I’m really busy and preparation runs late but supper is healthy, I’ll eat some anyway. But no more 8:00 pm or later meals or snacks. The only thing I drink at night is distilled spirits on the rocks or mixed with sparkling water.

I have not had heartburn once since I started this, and I’ve lost some weight, too, which I needed to do. Give it a try. You have nothing to lose but your heartburn.

I’ll keep posting on the weight thing if I keep losing weight.

Somewhere in this blog is a post, maybe two, on using whole dried beans in baking.

I’m still down on bean flours, still trying to use up the ones in my cupboard. But it occurred to me that it might give better results to steam the bean bread rather than baking it, since it would not overcook on the outside before it was done in the middle. And just for you, my readers, I decided to take the plunge and see if it worked, so you didn’t have to.

I don’t have an exact recipe for you. What I did was soak 1 cup of dried white beans, 1 cup of brown rice, and 1 cup of blanched almonds separately. The beans may take several hours to overnight, even in warm water. I discarded the bean liquid and rinsed the beans. The rice and almond soaking liquid I reserved.

First I put the rice in the food processor. Hm. that didn’t grind it up very fine.at.all. I added some liquid, didn’t help. I added the almonds to it and processed it, then finally ended up putting it in the blender, to which I had to add a great deal of liquid in order to get it smooth. Next time I will start with raw brown rice that I will grind as fine as possible, soaking and then blending it, again, separately.

The beans are easy to grind up smooth in the food processor. After they are a gritty mush, add liquid bit by bit until they turn into a smooth, fluffy paste.

I mixed everything together, added a tablespoon of yeast, 1-1/2 teaspoons of salt, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, 1/3 of a cup of sugar, and a teaspoon each of xanthan gum and guar gum. I added 1/4 cup soft butter, 1/2 cup of sweet rice flour and 1 cup of white rice flour and mixed it all up.

What I’m not telling you, since I didn’t measure, is how much liquid I added to blend and process this. Obviously you’ll have to do whatever works for you. But when it comes to adding rice flour at the end, the amount you add should be enough to make it at least firm enough to scoop and pack into a greased nonstick loaf pan.

I steamed a small sample, which seemed okay. So I packed the rest into a large loaf pan, which it almost filled. I let it rise an inch, then put the loaf pan on a rack in a roasting pan with a dome lid. I buttered a piece of foil and set it on top, added an inch of water, turned on the fire, and set the timer for 15 minutes after it came to a boil. At 15 minutes I lowered the heat and tightened up the foil so it wouldn’t expose the surface to more steam than necessary.

I wasn’t sure how long it would take. I figured with a loaf pan that big, it would probably take more than an hour to bake in the oven. I ended up steaming it for 2 hours.

Surprise! it was brown on the surface, including the top, but with a softer crust that makes slicing easy. It has no beany flavor or texture. It is quite bread-like, in the “old-fashioned moist farmhouse bread” style I like so much.

I made a sausage and egg sandwich for breakfast. Oh, my!