Good Food!

Is a pressure cooker worth owning?  I would say YES!  You can fully cook black, pinto, cranberry, kidney, lima and red beans in 15-18 minutes including the cool down time after the pressure cooker gets turned off.  This is in contrast to 1-2 hours to fully cook hard beans.  In addition, pressure cooked beans come out consistently tender and evenly cooked.

The time saved cooking rice isn’t quite so extreme but like beans the result is almost always perfectly done rice without being mushy or underdone.  Short grain brown rice takes approximately 30 minutes.

This probably isn’t even the case anymore but I grew up hearing about pressure cookers exploding and make horrific messes and maybe even hurting people.  Pressure cookers are completely safe now.  There’s usually several built in pressure release valves so that if one fails there’s other ways to release built up steam.

We have a T-Fal Sensor 2 which we’ve had for 10 years and it still looks and works like new.

No one would ever guess the cupcakes in this amazing Vegan cupcake cookbook are Vegan.  Feed this to a strict Carnivore and they’ll be asking for the recipe.  Seriously.  OK I know noone expects dead animals in their cupcakes but dairy and eggs they might well expect and they might look down their noses if you mentioned your cupcakes had none of these.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero prove unequivocably that there is no need for any dairy at all for the moistest, most lip-smackingly amazing cupcake treat.  To tell the truth before I started making these, some cupcakes would sound good but then I would inevitably be disappointed by how dry and uninteresting they ended up being.

These cupcakes jive with my cupcake fantasies!  My current favorites are the chocolate cupcakes with German chocolate icing.

I got this cookbook for Christmas and everything I’ve tried is good.  This is no small feat.  Baked goods tend to suffer when they don’t get their gluten.  The recipes in this book prove they don’t have to.  The rice flour foccaccia loaded down with plump olives was crunchy on the outside, moist with juicy olive bites.  Yum!

Sometimes it’s hard to jump the hurdle on Ayurvedic diet texts. They somehow sound like they weren’t written for western culture and often they weren’t. This book is cutting edge and crystal clear. There are a whole variety of cuisines represented in the recipes which are clear and easy to follow with beautiful illustrations. There are clear explanations to help the reader find and understand their Ayurvedic types.

I was on a wheat-free, sugar-free, dairy-free diet for health reasons and I found an abundance of recipes in this book that not only could I eat but they all looked and tasted delicious!

Trader Joe’s Pancake and Waffle mix is wheat, peanuts, nut, milk and diary, soy and corn free! Since this list contains many of the allergy culprits this mix bodes well for any person avoiding these foods or allergic to them.  Also sugar free!

Most importantly the waffles are delicious and lose nothing from the lack of wheat.  The main flour is rice flour with some tapioca and arrowroot flour as well.

Light with a spongy textures inside, crisp, crunchy outside. We made ours with dairy free Sweet Cream and warmed up dark Morello Cherries – also from TJoe’s for a satisfying and delicous Sunday brunch.