My daughter called me yesterday. She said she had a request for me. She knows how seriously I have been taking the massive change in the way I eat. My diet has nothing to do with vanity or fads. I went grain free to save my life. It wasn't a cure for my autoimmune disease. I wish it was, but I faced facts long ago that there is no actual "cure." What it did was make it possible for me to have the strongest base possible from which to live a quality life with autoimmune disease(s). My daughter also knows that if food doesn't taste good, I won't eat it. I would rather eat small amounts of fantastic foods than large quantities of mediocre feed. We know there must be other people out there in the same situation that I'm in. At least thirteen times in this blog, I've given descriptions of recipes I've either created or altered for my own needs. I have several unique dishes in my repertoire that I've held back. I've often said that my mango chicken recipe would be my money maker, and I was saving it for something special. Now daughter #1 says it's time (to paraphrase a more vulgar saying) to cook or get off the pot. She wants me to put together a cookbook for digital release, and together we narrowed its scope to grain free comfort food recipes that can be made with ingredients easily obtained in most grocery stores. I'm not going for the people who are cooking paleo because it's trendy. If I write this, I'm going to go for my people, the ones who can't always afford to spend a fortune on the specialty ingredients they have to drive all over town to find. Yes, my grain free flours are a little more expensive, and at least one still has to be ordered online. (Seriously, I have been looking for cassava flour in grocery stores for years, with no joy.) But most of what I cook with is found everywhere.
She asked me to have at least five recipes ready to go by the end of the weekend. This is a pretty big request. I don't cook with specific measurements. Most of the time, I don't use any sort of measuring spoons or cups at all. I use a knife and a spoon, and I keep adding until the proportions look right. I don't always use the same herbs and spices. I season everything by running spice jars under my nose and imagine eating the dish with or without each flavor. For most of the Annie's Test Kitchen posts in the blog, I tried to quantify what I used to make each dish. But I'll let you in on a little secret, they were really guesses. I'm going to have to do a lot of cooking this weekend. The good news is, thanks to a successful experiment I had last week, part of my weekend will involve pie. I think I finally perfected crust. All I have to do now is repeat it.
One of my girlfriends suggested we do something fun tomorrow. My immediate suggestion was that we have dinner over here. If I'm going to need to work up recipes, what better way than cooking for a friend for the first time ever? There's an extra layer of complexity here also. She's a woman roughly my own age, and she finally got braces that she has needed for years to alleviate pain. So she needs foods that won't require excessive chewing, or end up threaded through the new wires in her mouth. I was planning on chicken, and now I need to think of something yummy to do with it to make it soft and possibly shredded. Oh, and no peppers, she says. Okay, new recipe coming in five...four...three...
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