Monthly Archives: February 2010

Sale on Envirokids cereal at Shaw’s and cashew milk

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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.

The Anti-Heartburn Diet

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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.

Steaming your bean bread

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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!

“Gluten-free flours”

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This is mostly a rant. My personal preference is to mix 3 parts white rice flour with 1 part sweet rice flour, which gives the mix a little clinginess. I’m getting back into using gums. I’ve been using 1/2 teaspoon of a mix of guar gum and xanthan gum per cup of flour, which doesn’t seem to bother me. The mix tastes and feels a lot like wheat flour in many ways. Not only that, but it’s cheap.

So what’s the deal with the bean flour blends? Yecch. They don’t taste particularly good, and they feel like, I don’t know, hummus in your mouth. If you don’t overcook whatever it is to death, they taste gross and raw bean-ey. People buy them for me when I visit so I’ll be able to bake while I am there, probably because they cannot imagine not eating baked goods.

I think it’s a conspiracy to get people to spend $3.50 a pound on a specialty item rather than $1 a pound on something that can be bought at any Asian market.

I am trying to use it up now. Recipes soon. And yeah, the whole site is going to get a makeover really soon.