I know I said bye, but I just want to say I am still checking back here, so if anybody wants to drop a comment, I'll get it. I'm doing SCD still, collecting recipes that make me happy, full, and free to go to work and study.

Bye For Now

I'm sitting here, drinking a glass of Spiced Hazelnut Milk while waiting for my (or Sheila's, as it is) Tea Biscuits to come out of the oven.

One Step at the Time

I have now eased into stage three of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, and it's still working out for me.

Pizza Cuisine

When I was a kid, I thought it was incredibly clever that one of my friends was able and allowed to make her own pizza in her parents kitchen. We made it from scratch - well, "scratch" being a pre-mixed pizza-base flour, but still, I thought it was pretty fancy.

Food Makes You Feel Like a Person

Banot? Carrona?

Inspired by Jess over at Healthy Exposures who makes carrot cake breakfast-concoctions with banana slices and grated carrot, I have taken my first baby step back into cooking by inventing a carrot banana smoothie - completely compatible with doing level 1 of the specific carbohydrate diet.

Slight risk of TMI...

Now this has TRULY become picture it raw, rather than eat it raw. I've had to roll back my food all the way to boiled chicken and cooked, pureed vegetables: I just started gaining and exercising when my middle died on me again.

Raw Food Tested

I finally tested a "real" recipe from The Raw 50 by Carol Alt - the raw burger. I am not too strict about the degrees, so they didn't turn out stricly raw, though.

Also, I would like to share my favorite food gripe.

Over-cooked!

I am happy to say that I think I have perfected my first no-bake, gluten free, scd-friendly müesli recipe.

Borrowed Books and Gooseberries

In an effort to not spend all my money on cook books I went and took out two raw cook books from the library. "The Complete Book of Raw Food", edited by Julie Rodwell, and "The Raw 50" by Carol Alt. I am not eating all raw, but I am always looking for new ideas on how to use raw vegetables and inspiration for dressings, snacks and desserts.

Breakfast Shortcuts and Almost Carrot Cake

I have been lazy about making nutmilks lately, so I have been enjoying a tip from Healthy Exposures, where Jess put coconut water in her overnight oats. I just pour the coconut water on a grated apple or pear an my homemade müesli, and drizzle some coconut oil - the cold liquid makes the oil thicken into little greasy fragments, mmm.

SCD

Over the last couple of weeks I've found out that the only thing that allows me to feel okay, and feel like there's some progress in my energy and tummy-wellbeing, is following the specific carbohydrate diet, or SCD. I tried it with some scepticism - I guess it doesn't sound that well founded to me, scientifically, but I was ancious to get results, by voodoo, if necessary.

Peel an Apple find a Cake

A healthy snack has eluded me for years. I thought it was a little bare-looking and ascetic when i first saw it on a blog somewhere, but because of my mysterious tummy-troubles I have been eating a lot of boiled eggs, boiled chicken and a lot of cooked apple sauce, and in an attempt to get some freshness and crispness and generally non-boiled-ness back into my diet I gave raw apple slices with cinnamon a try. It has been hitting the snacking spot for me again and again these days - peeling the apple first makes all the difference for a sore tummy and strangely I have been slathering the slices in more and more cinnamon without issue.

Sugar Doll

Seeing as it is that Averie has bestowed the Sugar Doll Award upon all of us - callling for ten random facts - I am taking that opportunity to blog a little without recipes.

Still Cookin'

I'm still cooking my food due to tummy-issues. This is quite weird for me - gluten free plus dairy free is one thing, but I really start feeling deprived when I can't have a big, daily dose of fresh fruit and vegetables. Well, so be it.

It doesn't mean no treats, though! So here are two new "tried" things to eat if you're grain, soy and dairy free.

A Sweet Prize

Eating for the last week to ten days has been a real challenge. I don't know why, but I'm hoping to find out. It leaves me with nothing positive to say about food and no new experiments to report - aside from the mayo, which is what I have been using to get steamed veggies and boiled chicken down the hatch. What better way to wait for better days than by entering a prize draw for a raw dessert book?

At from nelly...with love... there is an amazing prize draw. Nelly is giving away "Sweet Gratitude - a new world of raw desserts", which is definitely a book that I've seen mentioned many times around the blogosphere. It's no surprise that it looks like competition for this prize will be fierce! Just look at the picture Nelly has posted of one of the desserts that she has done herself. The deadline for entering is Friday July 23.

My Mayo

Mayonnaise has never featured in my meals - seriously, I don't remember ever eating it - but I remember the taste, so there must have been a dab of mayo on a tuna or an egg sandwich back there sometime. I never thought of it as anything I really like or dislike, it's just there, and I've never bought it.

Simple Yoghurt

Yoghurt is really good tummy-food, and if you love it, well, like me, you'll miss it when going dairy free because there's really nothing else like it - unless you can handle soy yoghurt, I guess. I found a simple way of making something delicious that I'll call yoghurt from now on. But I would like to just air a couple of thoughts first.

Drizzle and Crunch

There are all of four things in this post: something thought-up (was going to say invented, but that seems a bit rich), something tried, something copied and something failed. To get the "fail" off my chest first I tried winging a coconut ice cream that didn't go so well. I was inspired by an ice cream purchase for the bf, three flavours of ice cream made with organic cream: banana chocolate, ricca mocca, and the one that inspired failure, coconut cocoa.

Soft is Served.

Mmm. MMMmmmm!

I am right now eating my first ever softserve. It is a post-yoga snack-turned-quite-a-meal, and it is bang-smack-wow delish. I made a double batch and if it wasn't so filling I'd be pulling the next half from the freezer right away: I dumped 1 pack of silken tofu, three tbsp rice protein, 1 small tbsp maca powder and about 2,5 bananas frozen in chunks into the blender and gave it the "ice crushing" programme - essentially top speed in short intervals - which left plenty of big, gooey banana chunks. I have never been one of the many fans of softice or melted ice cream, but the texture is definitely the only thing keeping me from becoming big time addicted to this.

Jam and Parmesan

While running today I did something as devoid of dignity as trip in my own shoelaces. Nothing happened though, except I donated some skin off my hands and elbow.

Cookies Times Two... and Mylk.

For some time I've been wanting to bake some cookies for the bf - good cookies are so expensive I think, and really I'm thinking they should be easy to bake.

More Raw

I bought my second raw food cookbook. It's Raw Food Real World, and I'm loving it. I have it decked out with little post-its at all the recipes I want to make. First. Then later I have no doubt I'll make all.

Green Cookies. Tofu Muffins. Improv Ice Cream.

When I started baking muffins, apparently I was opening up a big ol' Pandora's Box of Baking. I've baked green cookies, and tofu muffins - and I improvised some ice cream which I realise has nothing to do with baking.

After resting lazily on the laurels of my self-awarded food prize I bottomed out a bit today.

Earning My Wings

Coming up on my fiftieth post I want to award myself a pair of initial foodie-wings for winging it successfully through two of my staples: granola and crackers.

The Cinnamonster.

In school or at work, my problem is often finding a snack that packs light, goes straight from the fridge and into the bag and which is satisfying and - preferably - reasonably tasty.

B & C

I have to bow down again to the altar of whatever person it was that first invented blueberries combined with cardamom.

Second Green Recipe!

Hm, okay, so I fell right off the grid there for a couple of days. There was something important I had to write and I kept dragging it out and postponing - refusing to blog before I had it finished or I would just have let blogging be my excuse.

Perfect ten!

It's been such a long time since I've baked anything that I'd completely forgotten how it feels when the oven starts smelling good and you open and there's something hot and freshly baked...

Okay, what I tried to draw was a dried date filled with my new seed butter fave, black tahini, but I realised in the process that it's quite difficult to make it come out looking like food

Two more recipes tried and tested: I made another ice cream, and crackers.

Getting Over Gluten

I'm recycling a couple of old pics that I found. Like I said here, I got glutened the other day and I just want to mention the little bit that I have so far found out about "getting glutened". I have no first hand knowledge of how celiacs react to gluten in general, since the only celiac I know is *me* - and I have no medical knowledge, I'm just the regular avid googler.

Mighty Raw Cupcake!

Continued from this post: Ellen is in Raw Cupcake Heaven! Okay, in all fairness I only (un)baked one raw cupcake, but since I have the chance to draw as many as I like I doubled the amount - also, I don't have fancy polka-dotted cups for the cakes, I invented those too. I didn't use icing this time - was inspired by Hayden's cupcake and went for a Larabar base with raw cashew ice cream om top. For more pics of raw goodies check out Shannon Marie's birthday post.

Something in The Middle of Something

I was making a post about some raw chocolate chip cookies and chocolate ice cream (double chocolate, yeah!) when I realised I forgot to note where I got the recipe for the cookies and wasn't able to backtrack to the place again...I know where I got the ice cream recipe, but that's my first and only raw food recipe book, so I can't even post that - guess the purpose of that post kind of petered out. I'm all fired up about the ice cream though, so there's definitely a post-worthy topic for later...

stEVI(L)a, one splurge and two (three) granolas.

Of course I could have made the connection stevia/evil when I bought it...but a lot of bloggers out there use it as a sweetener and I am always up for trying new things. I bought some from Funkyraw, where I order all things that I can buy and have shipped over from the UK while still paying about half of what it costs here (sigh - why is that?). By the way, the huge benefit of Funkyraw as opposed to a lot of other UK webshops is that they actually charge a shipment fee according to the weight of what's in your parcel - a lot of places charge a flat rate of maybe 18£ for just sending anything at all. Eighteen! But regarding The Evils of Stevia...

Cupcake II

The above is of course a cupcake, produced by yours truly! - since I wasn't happy with the first one I consider this my very first raw cupcake, ahhh. I decided to cheat, though...got the idea from this post at Shannon Marie's blog - which is of course also where I got myself an e-book of raw cupcake recipes.

No tea, no cuppycakes...

I tried baking a raw cupcake to contribute to Shannon Marie's quest to bring her cupcakes to the attention Ellen Degeneres (plus, these cakes look sooo delish I just have to able to make them so I can EAT them), and I miserably failed. Absolutely nothing to do with the inventive and instructive recipes in Shannon Marie's e-book - I was simply a little over-confident and got a little too bold and...botched it.

Bread & Crackers

After musing over the beauty of Danish, wholegrain rye bread and stating that these days, I would much rather be baking and enjoying some raw bread and crackers with the help of all the grrreat recipes out there, I think I ought to mention a couple of those recipes I am making most often right now.

One foot... and then the other.

Ooooh, I went for a run today. In all fairness, a "run" is a bit of a euphemism there, I jogged at a leasurely pace for fifteen minutes...but considering that for the last year or thereabouts I have done only yoga and no cardio what so ever, just tying my running shoes was a bit of a leap for me. Don't get me wrong I see absolutely no problem in doing "just" yoga: even though I am a novice I have progressed far enough to know that practicing yoga can be constantly challenging and physically hard - and that's why I love it. I am not about to give up on ever folding myself into a gracefully balancing crane.

Oats, Dark Rye Bread...and something new!

When I lose my drive to keep cooking up new things and keep eating a variety of things I start eating lazy, shabby things. I lose my energy, and what happens is I fall back on trying to emulate the things I was eating before I knew I had celiac disease, and I invariably fail. That's when I know I need new inspiration to get to that place where I don't see all the restrictions, but all the possibilities.

Real oats and heavy, dark rye bread full of grains are about the two only things that can still spark some serious food envy in me when I look at what the "normies" are eating. Probably it's no use trying to convince non-Danes who didn't grow up with the rye bread phenomenon that it's any good, but hey, Oprah was here and it's said out there on the web that she was converted and brought some back to the states. Sorry, tried to google for some links on that, but I just fell in to a long and useless joyride through different versions of rye bread recipes...

Green MONSTER!

Please try and make the recipe from this post over at Vegan Strong if you need a little extra protein and are fairly open-minded about food textures and about mixing at-first-glance-weird-sounding ingredients or if you need a quick filling breakfast option or indeed all of the above. I realise that protein is probably not something that any of us actually lack and I have never obsessed about it, but I like to add it sometimes for a nice filling feeling. I am not a vegan, but the debate about protein-intake and a vegan diet seems to be ongoing as witnessed by this post, with lots of links to articles and resources, at Love Veggies and Yoga. I am easily convinced of the logic that we don't need animal protein to grow muscle. It's probably true that most monkeys = super strong = plant eaters?

Something else I have to mention about this recipe and I don't know which was there first - I'm guessing the term "green monster" is not exactly patentable - but this recipe should not be confused with the Green Monster Movement started by Angela from Oh She Glows to promote green smoothies. These are green monster breakfast cookies.

Oooh! Where can I get these?

I have just been reading this post over at Rawdorable and I went straight from being fine and happy with the health food choices around here to feeling downright deprived!

We haven't HALF the variety of Larabars where I live. I'm pining for info if anyone has it: do these interesting varieties (and the pack with the minis!!!) ship from anywhere in Europe, maybe some UK internet shop? Or is it US only? As if it didn't enduce enough shopping envy when Averie posts her "wall of..." pics, like the wall of nutbutters in this post. Sigh. I guess I'll manage ;-).

Double Chocolate Delight

I have not been able to eat regular types of chocolate since going glutenfree, but chocolate remains a girl's next-best friend (I mean, if you are having trouble getting your hands on some diamonds) so I have of course been experimenting with raw cacao, raw chocolate bars and cacao nibs. All are delicious! But I get quite the sugar rush from eating them, to me they're as addictive as coffee and - like coffee - give me a headache when I stop eating them. Problem. Ok, not exactly a vital one, but still.

Averie over at love veggies and yoga is having a Cuisinart Food Processor give-away and one of her conditions for entering the contest prompted me to look at an "old" post of hers about recipes with oats. I can't eat oats, not even the GF ones, but I spent a couple of minutes drooling over the recipes anyway - after all, recipes are born to be tweaked. I noticed that Averie uses a leftover chocolate bar instead of cacao nibs or -chips in one of her recipes and I remembered having seen a chocolate bar with 99% cacao content somewhere. It's an ordinary, fairly inexpensive "Lindt" chocolate bar from Magasin (for those resident in Denmark curious about where to get it) and I bought one today. I admit it's a taste experience that takes getting used to (on the bar it says that they recommend working your way "up" through the 60, 75, and 85% bars, "refining your palate" before you daringly attempt the 99%) but it's an instant hit with me and I detected hardly any sugar rush at all - maybe it's the cacao butter content? I'm not sure. Could be something I'm imagining ;-). But it is definitely time to try some new recipes with this yummy, new (for me) ingredient.

Coconut Cookies & Coconut Granola

IS there such a thing as too much vanilla? I've been (un)baking - well, it includes my old oven and it sure smells good so I guess it's okay to say I'm baking - some Lemon Coconut Cookies and Coconut Vanilla Granola today. I bought two mature coconuts and they've been sitting around just waiting for me to decide on a recipe. I ended up using only one for the two recipes, and I tossed in some of the water to replace some of the sweetener in the granola. Pure, tropical bliss in the kitchen. I did not have any vanilla essence, only a bag of vanilla powder, so I think may have overdosed more than a little. I'm wondering if vanilla has any nutritional significance, good or bad? I've read that nutmeg is unhealthy in large doses, and I'm a huge fan of turmeric not least because Meghan says it is super-healthy, but I have no clue about vanilla.

Here's how I tweaked the two recipes: for the vanilla crunch granola I did NOT use a whole cup of agave syrup, more like just a good long squirt. All the coconut makes it sweet enough for me. I kind of wish I tweaked it by halving the amounts, though, it turned out to be the absolutely hugest amount of homemade granola I've ever seen (how did I not foresee that?). Guess I'll be eating it for a while. And I accidently swapped the measurements for almonds and sunflower seeds, but the taste is still fine, only it's cheaper. For the cookies I halved the recipe - which got me around 15-18 cookies, I think, and I used half cashews/half some almond pulp left over from nut-milking. For both recipes I used fresh, not dried, coconut and I also used a bit of coconut water in both to cut down on the agave.

Nut milks and Raw Food book

Just to round off Meghan's prize draw, she was super-kind enough to reward everybody who participated (incl. moi!) with a download version of her most recent guide, the 5 days healing with everyday superfoods tutorial. It is not really a five-day challenge in the spirit of her low-glycemic or smoothie cleanse challenges, it is more like a guide to superfoods, and how to incorporate them into tasty meals on an everyday basis without breaking the bank.

So, I got all that new info to read, plus I picked up a present I got from a family member - actually what I got was a gift certificate when we celebrated my birthday and I made okay/not so great tasting but very festive looking cupcakes - a book in Danish on Raw Food, called..."Raw Food".

More balls for me, please.

Speaking of smart, strong women like Meghan and Averie: I have another of my favorite ball recipes from this Danish site belonging to Thorbjørg Haffsteinsdottir. If you read Danish, try the "sweet and sugarfree carob balls" - or donut holes, whatever you choose to call them - from the "snacks" section, or if you're not raw, try the glutenfree pizza crust, which is positively the best gluten free pizza solution I've encountered. Thorbjørg has a website too - where there's an "English" option but it doesn't have as much info as the Danish version - and a blog with health and nutrition news in Danish. I mean to try her recipe for "Delicious Liquorice-Chai Tea" next :-)