Baby it’s cold outside
Again sorry for the long time away. This winter has felt more brutal than those in years past for some reason. I feel like I’ve just been cold the last two months. I’m attributing it all to the fact that I’m 30 pounds lighter than I was last winter. All of the extra padding must have made a girl a bit warmer. We’ve had two big snow storms in the last three weeks with another forecast for this week. It seems as though the snow partially melts just in time for the next storm to head our way. The one coming this week sounds worse than the last two. Ugh!
We’ve been reading a lot this winter (what else is new), catching up on some Oscar contender movies and also enjoying our warm upstairs. Crafting is especially fun in the winter when our upstairs feels 10 degrees warmer than downstairs. Though I did knit a pair of mittens for dear L for Christmas. It was a fun pattern to knit and went quite quickly with the first mitten being done in the car on the way to Illinois for Thanksgiving.
As we’ve settled into our gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free diet for the last seven months we’ve made some great food. At Christmas, we received the best appliance known to man and woman — a Vitamix! After seeing one at CostCo over a year ago, I began to lust after one. We thought it would be a year before we could buy one but my parents were extremely generous and gave us one for Christmas. It has become the most used appliance in our kitchen, some days being used up to four times in one day. We’ve made our share of smoothies, soup, almond/cashew butter, salsa, marinara sauce and our favorite use – brown rice flour. We just throw three cups of brown rice in the dry container, flip the switch and in less than two minutes we have amazing brown rice flour.
A few weeks ago, we discovered Flying Apron’s Gluten-Free and Vegan Baking Book chock full of vegan and gluten-free recipes, including our new favorite pizza crust. After seven months of experimenting with chickpea flour for a pizza crust to less than thrilling reviews this cookbook has already paid for itself in the satisfaction of being able to make pizza at home again. And we don’t need to buy the brown rice flour.
