When my daughter was sick, we started eating gluten-free. It was very overwhelming at first until I found the right flour for us. Now in a lot of recipes, we actually prefer the gluten-free version to the regular recipe! Here are the two flours that I use:

The first one is an all-purpose flour. This I make myself buy mixing one bag of each of the following together:  tapioca flour (also known as tapioca starch), potato starch, white rice flour, and brown rice flour. It is very easy! I just buy all four bags of Bob’s Red Mill brand and mix them together. This is what I substitute into my recipes for all-purpose flour. We use this in cookies, quick breads, crepes, and pancakes. (Yeast breads are harder to just substitute in so I would make sure to get an actual gluten free yeast bread recipe if you wanted to try making your own.)

The other flour I use is just plain white rice flour. This is what I use when I need to put breading on something like fish, chicken or shrimp. All I do is dip the protein into the rice flour, season with a little salt and pepper, and cook it in a little avocado oil. The trick is to leave it alone in the pan to crisp up and get to a golden brown.

​                                                                                Happy Cooking!

St. Patrick's Day is coming so I want to share a fun activity I've been doing with my kids since they were little. We do a gold coin hunt! It's just a little something to celebrate the day. They use these little hats from the dollar store to collect the gold coins in. We use different money amounts with the green coins and gold coins. They are teenagers now and we still do this... it just costs us a lot more! 

​I never read food labels until my daughter got sick. I wasn’t into counting calories and I figured if I bought a lot of the name brand food… I would be eating ok. Well, when she got sick I learned that I needed to start looking at what was in the food we were eating.

The first thing I did was get rid of anything that had “high fructose corn syrup” in it. What is high fructose corn syrup?  It is a sweetener made from cornstarch, some of whose glucose has been converted to fructose, that is used in commercially produced foods and soft drinks as a cheaper alternative to sucrose. Here is a great video to watch to learn why high fructose corn syrup is so bad for you… https://health.clevelandclinic.org/avoid-the-hidden-dangers-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup-video/  I was surprised to find that it was in all kinds of things that we ate from our tomato soup to our bread crumbs.

The next thing I did was start cooking more and eating less ultra-processed foods. What qualifies as ultra-processed food? Look at the label… in processed food chances are that you won't have a clue what some of the ingredients are. That's because many of the ingredients in there aren't actual food... they are artificial chemicals that are added for various purposes. My suggestion is look at the labels on your food and if you know what the ingredients are, then it is something to put in your cart. If not, you probably shouldn’t be eating it.
​
The final thing I try to do is buy Organic. Organic foods typically contain the same amount of nutrients, vitamins and minerals as non-organic foods. ... However, foods that are Organic typically contain fewer pesticides, fewer multi-drug resistant bacteria and no genetically modified organisms or foods. If I can’t afford to buy all Organic then I at least get food that is Non-GMO. GMOs are Genetically modified organisms and I don’t want those in my food. If you want to learn more about GMOs in your food… check out https://livingnongmo.org They have a great FAQ page that can answer all your questions. Note: Organic food will be Non-GMO but Non-GMO is not automatically Organic. Organic food is more expensive and if you don’t have the money to buy all Organic then here is the list of foods that are most likely to have GMOs in them…alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, papaya, potato, soy, sugar beet, and zucchini.