lately in the kitchen...

Making rejuvelac! It's so cute, it's started to bubble just like tibicos! I'm making it as step one to...

Making nut-based cheese! Julia lent me this book when she last came over; I was so fascinated I started soaking my rice right then and there. A product that combined sprouting, fermentation, cheese-like products and cruelty-free alternatives? Yes please!

My brother got me a little GF recipe book for Christmas, and despite its reliance on xanthan and guar gum (which, as I've mentioned here before, I boycott), it has some nice recipes. Banana, date & walnut bread is a favourite; with all the banana in it, the bread holds nicely, not like other GF breads, which tend toward crumbliness.

I'm still really into waffles. These were made with white rice flour and flax seeds and coconut oil (we ran out of butter). I really want to switch to using only brown rice flour, but it's so hard to find! I should check Aubut... Maybe it can be ordered.

Presently in the oven: cabbage "noodles"; sliced wedges with leftover canned tomatoes (the juice was mostly used for braising meatballs last night), salt, pepper, powdered garlic, parsley and oregano, with bacon fat (you could use olive oil as well obviously). I am not sure what protein I'll use, I might ask Tony to pick up some chicken. We ordered a half pig from Rheintal about a month ago, so we're very porky lately. We only eat other meat when our parents cook it for us, basically. We love pork but it is a bit... repetetive. Maybe when we're really wealthy and have six kids we can get a second freezer and buy a half cow and half pig AT THE SAME TIME! Oh, the luxury of variety! Anyway so I feel a little bit bad about contemplating getting non-pastured meat, but I guess I figure... it's all a work in progress.

I don't have pictures for these, but we've been buying milk from Les Fermes Groleau, a dairy company that pastures the cows during the summer, and let me tell you, the milk is incomparable to what you buy at most stores, organic or not. It is really a taste sensation. I have been buying it from A Votre Sante, which is far-ish for us, so we get a few at a time, pour them into mason jars and freeze them (though as I write this, it occurs to me that I may be enoying a phantom memory of Groleau products at Au Branche d'Olivier, which is much, much closer - I'll have to check!). Because it's pricier I've been more mindful of my consumption, trying to use a lot less, but we still go through it FAST because Ambrose is drinking milk like never before - it's that good!

The other tidbit is that my sugar bag is quite low, and we've continued to cut down on high glycemic index items. I keep kicking around draft lists of occasions that justify sugar and enjoying the fantasy of really just not eating sugar regularly. Fancy that! It's terribly radical! During Lent we just had sugar on Sundays, and kept with that for a good while, and have started phasing even that out, though I don't keep it strictly to Sundays. We've gotten used to it. I only remember how radical it is when we visit family. EVERYTHING has sugar! Golly, they get that you don't want dessert, but there's sugar in the yogurt, in the ketchup, in the meat, in the crackers, in the soup, seriously in all packaged products ever, it seems. And gluten-free prepackaged stuff is certainly not exempt, so aside from having the funny gums and starch "flours" up the wazoo there's usually loads of sugar in there, too. It's very kind of relatives to buy these things for us, but quite unecessary. (Mary's crackers, I should say, have no sugar, hooray!) Anyway... we are getting low on sugar... and I am thinking I'll just buy small amounts on an as-need basis. Radical!!