Broken oven!

I know I haven't posted here for a while, but I had some good reasons.

One of the reasons was because we took a very short vacation. This is significant because we haven't actually had a vacation in seven years!

But, of course, drama must ensue.

The week before we left, our oven broke. The stovetop still worked, but the heating element in the oven was completely broken. Not only that, maintenance had to order the part. So I was stuck having to cook food for a trip with no oven.

What's an SCD girl to do?

Well, Pecanbread came to the rescue! I couldn't make my son's favorite almond butter brownies, so instead I used the nut butter pancake recipe found here.

I'll post it below for the peeps too lazy to click the link:

PLAIN NUT BUTTER PANCAKES
by Caroline

1 tablespoon nut butter
1 whole egg
2 egg yolks
dash of baking soda

Of course, I had to adapt this into traveling food proportions.

So I used a 16 oz jar of almond butter and 20 eggs, along with a teaspoon or so of baking soda and a teaspoon or so of salt. And then I cooked a stack of flapjacks like you have never seen!

All went well with the recipe, but they turned out kinda bland. Still, though, I will definitely tinker with this further in the future, and served with honey, they were pretty good. I will definitely make these again.

Other than that, well, I live in Los Angeles, so I fired up the grill and cooked six pounds of hamburgers to take with us. I also had three or four pounds of leftover chicken in the refrigerator, so I made a chicken salad with olive oil, vinegar, and SCD legal spices.

I brought the normal veggies and grape juice jello to round it all out. So the trip was saved.

I was very much hoping to post my almond butter biscotti recipe, but I need to make it again. In fact, I was going to make them to take with us on our trip, but because of the oven fiasco, that wasn't possible.

Thanks for hanging in there, my darling readers! :)

Carrot pancakes and more

Clark had a great time at his birthday celebration, and was a BIG FAN of the almond butter brownies. I am going to add vanilla next time. They just seem wrong without it. I will post pictures once they are off the camera.

A few days ago I boiled up a bunch of organic baby carrots. I think I boiled about two pounds of them. Naturally, this made it difficult for me to drain them, since I do have arthritis in my hands. And then after I drained them and let them sit to cool, there were so many I couldn't really tip the strainer and dump them into a giant baggie.

It was late, and I was tired and I was complaining and giggling with my darling husband.

"Help meeeeeee," I whined.

Jeffrey looked at me, amused. "You're not going to be able to dump them in a bag."

"I know," I pouted. I started picking up handfuls of carrots and placing them into the baggie. I said, "This is ridiculous. It's like...the 19th century."

Jeffrey laughed. "Yes, the 19th century where they had ziplock bags and baby carrots."

I whispered to him conspiratorially. "You know what baby carrots are, don't you?"



"They're...OOMPA LOOMPA FINGERS."



And in the kitchen, we laughed and laughed until my sides ached, and finished putting the carrots away.

Tonight, we will have carrot pancakes from my recipe -- Clark's favorite.

CARROT PANCAKES

1 1/2 cups well cooked baby carrots (water squeezed out, seriously)
4 eggs
1 tsp SCD legal vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
4 tsp honey (optional)
1/4 tsp sea salt

Mash up the carrots with the other ingredients until it's as smooth as you'd like, or you can puree it. Fry in a skillet with a small amount of oil.

Makes about 9 pancakes.