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Gluten Free Expo 2011

I'll start off with bread.  Yes bread.  Real tasting gluten and dairy free bread!!!!!  To someone like me who has missed real bread for so long, this practically brought tears to my eyes.  It is a recipe from Mary Capone one of the demonstrators that I had the pleasure of meeting and working for at the gluten free expo in Lisle two weekends ago.  Look how beautiful this looks!

Those of you that can tolerate gluten may not appreciate, that even by the look of it, one can tell it is not like the other gluten free breads we've been resorting to.  This was so lovely to make, came together quickly and even though I got carried away on the phone talking to a friend of mine in California and let it rise a little too long, it is resilient enough to have "held" it's own.  I was planning on serving it for a dinner party and took one of Mary's suggestions and added some savory herbs.  The name of this bread is Our Daily Bread and I can see why!  This will become a staple in my home on a very frequent (if not daily) basis!

It sliced beautifully and had a moist tender crumb making it the first gluten free bread I have ever had, suitable for a proper sandwich!  This bread does not, I repeat, does not, fall apart!  Leave it to an Italian to figure out how to make decent bread!!


Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the expo were three days of heaven!  I worked in the Wyndham Hotel kitchen the entire time!  Loved it, loved it, loved it!  This was my second year and I cannot wait to return next year!  I worked with some of the most amazing people and met so many wonderful new demonstrators from around the country.  Anyone new to the gluten free lifestyles should consider attending next year.


One of the demonstrators I had the pleasure of meeting is the author of one of my very first books on gluten free cooking and baking, The Spunky Coconut Cookbook, Kelly V. Brozyna.  Since meeting her, I have referred to her as Miss Mary Sunshine, which she truly is.  She is delightful!  Mary Sunshine (a.k.a. Kelly), was at the expo promoting her newest book, The Spunky Coconut, Grain-Free Baked Goods and Desserts!

She most generously gave me (gave me!!) a copy!!  I will be doing a formal review of her cookbook in later posts, but for right now I want to share with you two recipes I have already tried and have loved!  This cake was a BIG hit with dinner guests and my family!

I was a little skeptical at first, because the base for this cake is cooked beans.  Yes, cooked beans.  It looked great coming out of the oven, rivaling Mary Capone's bread for the most delicious looking thing out of the oven today.  I did not have time to ice the cake with the frosting from the book, but I quickly improvised combining some leftover icing from two other cakes I had made.  Then, I just had to dig in to make sure it was suitable for guests.

Yes!  It most definitely was!  So I rearranged the pieces to look like a "whole" cake of sorts, used up the rest of the icing and confidently served it to my guests!

This was not only a big hit at the dinner party but with my family as well!  We now have regular requests for the "bean" cake!  Thank you Miss Mary Sunshine!!

Since this cake was such a hit, I made another one similar to it from the same cookbook for breakfast the next day!

That is my daughter Kelsey, trying to be patient while I photograph the cake!  Oh, this sort of thing never happened before I blogged, we just dug right in!   As you can see, there are no photos of slices, we gobbled them up too quickly.  It was that good!


Another incredible chef, author and fellow blogger that I was delighted to meet and work with in the kitchen was Amy Green, the creator of Simply Sugar and Gluten Free.

I am excited and honored to do a review on this beautiful cookbook that she gave me!  Yes gave me!!  How much better does it get!!  She is as cute and as sweet as can be and incredibly talented!  The recipes she demonstrated were fantastic.  I will be making and photographing them soon (next blog) because my husband is scheduled to bring treats for the next vestry meeting and guess what, they will be from Amy Green and Kelly Brozyna (Mary Sunshine).   I like to think of them as my two new friends!


As a side note, I feel I must share a confession I have to make.  This is what I have been consuming the past four days.

This was supposed to be my fourth 7 day juice fast.  This was the end of day four and as I started writing this, the food looked so good on this blog, I could not take it anymore.  Between the food and the unseasonable cold weather we are having, at the conclusion of my fourth day, I felt compelled to abandon my partner and throw in the towel.  I am satisfied now that I ate an avocado, some zucchini and some raw cookies pictured in the last post.


Oh, a second side note.  I may not post in a while as I am leaving early Wednesday AM to travel deep into a Mexican rainforest for my son's Mayan wedding ceremony!  How about that!  Prayers please for my safe journey there and back in light of the recent news regarding travel in and out of Mexico.  You would like to see more posts wouldn't you? 

So Much to Share! All Raw!

I don't even know where to start!  I have been so busy!  Crazy, good busy!  My new larger dehydrator has arrived for one thing!  Yahoo!  The first thing I filled it up with right away were tortilla shells for tacos!

Would you ever guess that these use to be zucchini and red pepper?

While they were in the "oven", I made the rest of the components, the "meat" mixture, the quacamole, the "sour cream" and fresh tomato salsa.  I had two empty trays in the dehydrator so I made some almond butter walnut cookies so as not to waste the energy.  I could not resist dipping them partially in chocolate when they were finished.

I am a huge fan of quinoa, but I have never had it sprouted so I decided to try a sprouted quinoa salad to round out my meal with the tacos.

Lunch!  Just in time for Cinco De Mayo!

Tracy and I also met with a friend of hers who owns a yoga studio in town.  We brought her some raw (living) granola, cookies and granola bars to taste.

Suzanne really enjoyed them and would like to carry them in her yoga studio to sell!  Thank goodness we have an appointment with a graphic designer next week to discuss branding, etc.


I also had time to make some raw raspberry coconut yogurt.  Enjoyed it with the granola and some beautiful blueberries.

Had more tomato sauce than I needed, so I saw this as an opportunity to try out my new spiralizer on some zucchini for some pasta primavera!

Wow, I have to say, the tacos and the "pasta"  have been my favorite things so far.


Can't wait to get everything together to begin my next post!  It will be all about the Gluten Free Expo last weekend that I worked at!  So much work, but soooooo much fun!!

Lasagna and cheesecake!

I think I am having a bit of beginner's luck because I had what I consider another successful week in the kitchen.  I made wonderful raw lasagna that got some pretty good reviews.  I am continuing to stretch myself with balancing savory flavor profiles and while that challenge is more of a struggle the other challenge I have is maximizing on the forgiving formulas in raw cuisine.  I love the resourceful aspect of it.  Being resourceful, is the kind of kitchen challenge that brings everything "home" for me.  So after I ate and shared all this lasagna, 

I still had some almond "base" cheese leftover, so I decided to make a raw cheesecake.

I improvised the entire thing, and while I sort of took notes as I went along, I did not include everything because, it was really a little of this and a little of that.  Now this is really a shame because everyone who tried this cake, to my surprise, loved it!!!  This included my toughest critics, my four kids!  My son even wanted his girlfriend to try it and my daughter wanted her boyfriend to try it!

Here is Kari (my son's girlfriend) trying it ...

And here is Kari really enjoying it!

Now I had leftover cookie dough from last week's ice cream sandwiches (which were NOT a big hit) and some left over cheesecake crust.  What to do?  Make cookies!

Another big hit! 


Now I had to turn my oven on though, to make a dairy free birthday cake for a 7 year old.  All he wanted was a chocolate cake with white icing and balloons and sprinkles.  I think this will do the trick.

No one with any kind of food allergy should be deprived of a yummy birthday cake!


I have granola in the dehydrator, coconut yogurt in the refrigerator, sun-dried tomatoes marinating in the juice from the drained lasagna tomato sauce and a notebook of recipes I need to go over to be ready for the gluten free expo this coming weekend.  Am I excited?  That would be a "yes"!

Busy in my kitchen!

I have finally gotten around to making some raw food.  Not exclusively, but some just the same.  I have also had to make some gluten free goodies.  This is the plate of gluten free goodies I brought to lovely Lori Murphy at Murphy's Health Food Store.

Clockwise from the top, apricot scones, chocolate chip cookies and chocolate walnut brownies.  These may soon be making their debut in her store!!

I continued to clean out my freezer.  Found one lonely gluten free chocolate cake layer in there.  It became a three layer cake that I shared with my sister.

Came across a new recipe that I was curious about trying also.  A gluten free dairy free orange coconut muffin.  (I love coconut!)

A very good base recipe that I will change just a bit.  Loved the flavor, but the texture could be more tender.  Worth keeping though for future work.  (for that B & B dream I have)

And ... yahoo!  Finally got to making some raw food, too!

Kale Chips!  My poor little dehydrator worked so hard this week.  It was on nearly 24/7!  Cannot wait until my new bigger excalibur arrives!  What was I thinking two years ago when I bought such a small one!

Sprouted buckwheat with Brazil nut milk for breakfast.  Such a treat!

Raw tomato soup for lunch!

Broccoli raisin salad for dinner!

Ice cream sandwiches for dessert!

Broccoli Salad "take-out".  Taking this to someone! 

Love and peace to all from my happy busy kitchen!

Highlights of my first week back!

It should come as no surprise that I open this post with a cupcake!  I really had some baking withdrawals that I had to honor upon my return.  We were invited to a small social gathering with wonderful St. Lawrence friends less than a week after I got back and I was just a little nervous about introducing something "raw" so instead I brought something a little more familiar but still a bit of a risk.  I brought a gluten free, dairy free, coconut layer cake.  I only made a six inch cake to bring, so I had plenty of batter leftover to make some cupcakes.  Good thing because I had unexpected company.  Here is one of my little friends, enjoying her second one of the afternoon! 

She loved them.  They are gluten free, dairy free and instead of refined sugar, I used organic evaporated cane juice, so this probably isn't the worst thing she could have, is it?


The cake was four layers, with strawberry jam, buttercream, and organic unsweetened toasted coconut between each layer.

Did not have much time before we had to leave so the only thing I could do to add a bit of color and decoration was to add some organic strawberries to it.

That helped.  I meant to take photos of the sliced cake so that you could see the layers but once the cake was sliced and served it was consumed fairly quickly so the photo never happened.  I was very pleased to see clean plates all around!  


Shared the remaining cupcakes with my friend Tracy when she came for tea the next day!

Yes, we ate them all. 


One of the first things I got to work on with regard to pulling my home back in order after being gone so long was a lot of purging and cleaning out of food items in the pantry, refrigerator and freezer to make some much needed room for some "raw" items that I plan on making ... soon.


I found myself finishing some gluten free, dairy free, sugar free brownies.

The recipe is from The Spunky Coconut Cookbook, by Kelly V. Brozyna.


Also in my freezer waiting for me to bake were some cranberry scones.  This is my own recipe.  Gluten free. 

Some Udi's gluten free toast begged to be eaten, too.

I also could not resist purchasing and trying a new gluten free product for pancakes.  I have a good one already, but so many people ask me for my opinion on gluten free products, I feel compelled to try about as many as I can.

They were delicious!  I am supposed to say here that another young visitor, Jordan Porter, also thought they were incredibly delicious!  This is the plate I had prepared for my breakfast when he walked in the kitchen that I gave to him to eat instead.  Once he gave the two thumbs up, well, I quickly made some more!

Here is the mix and the syrup I used.

The last priority was collecting spring water!  We were completely out!  It was quite a different excursion going myself and in the spring when the ground is soft and muddy but it is all worth it! There is no comparison to any other water!  A constant cool clean stream of beautiful water just 40 minutes north in Kenosha!

In this beautiful setting.

It streams down into this lovely little natural rocky pond of sorts.

Finally all done collecting, after many trips uphill and back.

Time to go.  Definitely had plenty of time for reflection going back and forth up and down the hill carrying water container after container.  Realized how incredibly fortunate I am because, I am making the choice to collect clean water, when so many others must collect water under far worse circumstances because they have to.  The fact that my shoes got so muddy, well, that really isn't such a big thing, is it?

Thank you for sharing my journey with me.  It is good to be home.