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.

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.

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!

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.

1 can Thai curry paste, any flavor (check the label for wheat)
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1 can coconut milk

Dump the ingredients into the blender and process until smooth. Heat and serve over rice, steamed vegetables, meat or poultry, or whatever.

Thai curry paste comes in a lot of different flavors. After you’ve sampled a few, you will start to be able to tell some differences.

Coconut oil has been much maligned. It has since then been shown that research blaming heart disease on coconut oil was faulty. In fact, in countries where coconut oil is a major part of the diet, there is no more heart disease than in countries where it is hardly ever consumed.

The group is still there, though I had to check to see, it’s been so long. It is also pretty busy.

But getting back to the subject at hand, it was on that list that I first saw mention that you could whip coconut milk. I bought a can, chilled it, and whipped, but nothing happened.

There’s a need for a non-dairy whipped topping that isn’t all crap. There’s also a need for a vegan whipped topping, um, that isn’t all crap. Really, the only home recipe I saw for something like this was made by beating silken tofu with sweetening and pouring it over the dessert. The recipe poster admitted it was not as good as whipped cream. The only person who made the recipe gave it 1 star and called it the worst recipe she had ever made and a waste of tofu.

So imitation whipped cream can be bad.

If you’ve ever opened a can of coconut milk in cool weather, you’ve probably noticed that it looks like a big lump of fat with some liquid. I always assumed that it was mostly fat. But finally this week I was opening a can of coconut milk and noticed the nutrition facts. I asked myself how that compared to dairy cream.

Was I surprised! Canned coconut milk has only half the fat of dairy cream, about the same as coffee cream. No wonder it doesn’t whip. But the question is, could it whip if it was more concentrated?

So I took a can of coconut milk, warmed it up to make sure all the fat was melted, added 1/2 cup of dried coconut milk powder and 1/2 cup of sugar. After stirring for a while and leaving at room temperature to cool, I put it in the refrigerator, stirring every half hour until it was cold. I whipped it for a long time to get soft peaks, but it definitely was whipped. And grainy, in a cold coconut oil graininess kind of way. So it wasn’t great, but it was at least as good as a lot of non-dairy fakes. And it was natural.

Flash forward. The next time I added an entire cup of coconut milk powder.

I poured it in bowl of my electric mixer to chill, put that in the refrigerator, and put the beaters in the freezer. As the mixture cooled, it thickened like heavy cream, and was white like cream, rather than translucent like skim milk. I continued to whip it a few strokes every 15 minutes or so, until it was chilled. Then I put it onto the mixer, and WOW! In about 45 seconds I had perfectly stiff peaks of yummy coconutty whipped creamy goodnes. The texture and mouth feel are exactly like whipped heavy cream. Okay, it’s pretty coconutty, so it will probably go better with tropical fruit than temperate types. In fact, I would server this with pineapple, mangos, etc. to my friends who aren’t dairy-challenged. It is really that good.

It wasn’t as smooth as I would like, undoubtedly due to the fact that I was too tired to stay up and finish it. I’m going to try again before I post the complete recipe. I’m thinking a little more dilution might help. And then I’ll put up a photo, too, instead of just eating it all.

With the new format, I should be able to put new recipes in the index much more easily. Eventually all the recipes that are mixed into blog entries should end up there, even as I keep making new ones.

Happy gluten-free eating!

Seriously, the site gets a fair number of hits from people searching for gluten-free and/or dairy-free breakfast options. It seems like what used to be a “balanced” or “square” meal in the old days – eggs, meat, potatoes, juice, bread – has become an artifact preserved only in those museums of culinary archival, restaurants. Nowadays few people eat anything for breakfast besides cold cereal or baked goods.

This morning I had breakfast fried rice. I fried a jumbo breakfast sausage, removed it from the pan and sliced it. In the pan I put some more butter, leftover brown rice, and a cup of chopped green onions. After the rice was hot I added back the sausage and an egg. I stirred until done, seasoning with black pepper and crushed red pepper. No salt was needed as both the rice and sausage were previously seasoned. I served it with a small bowl of fresh pineapple. Yum.

Heres a link to the breakfast fried rice recipe, if you’re a recipe sort of person. There are also bacon, ham, and vegan fried rice variations.