Brief recommendations for things

[rax]

A few recommendations for things while I procrastinate!

LJ/DW ICONS: A friend of mine, armaina , is doing a Free Icon Day, where you can get a free black and white icon of you[r character] drawn for the 100x100 LJ/DW format. If you tip, the icon's in color! If enough people play, then everyone's icon is in color even if you didn't tip! It's like a kickstarter, except free if you want it to be, and instead of getting mailed a video game in two years in theory you get a little picture of yourself in like two weeks in actuality. Feed your vanity! Feed armaina ! Click the link. :P

PESTO SAUCE: Oh my god y'all there's a company in SoCal called BasilTops that makes vegan organic hydroponic pesto sauce, and you can order from them online and they ship you a bunch of pesto and all of their flavors are awesome. Well, all of their vegan flavors that aren't the spicy one at least, since those are the only ones I have tried. :) Of the three varieties I've had from them online, my favorite is the hempseed --- there's something really nice about the flavor and texture of it --- but they're all delicious. Krinn found a vegan Chia Seed variety locally once, which was really good, but you can't get it online and also I haven't been able to find it again in Tucson? Perhaps it was just an illusion designed to whisk me away into a world of PESTO ON EVERYTHING. (seriously I have tried pesto on a lot of things you should not try pesto on okay)

ALMOND MEAL: Okay so I'm trying this be gluten-free for two weeks thing at the advice of my doctor and one week in I am pretty sure that being gluten-free is not getting me anything? But I've been baking anyway, and my god is almond meal awesome. The pie crusts I've been making aren't as structural as I would like, though I'm trying xanthan gum next, but if you're making a strudel or crumble topping or whatever the heck you call it when you mix flour and nuts and sugar and spices and lipids and put it on top of a baked good and it's awesome? I think I like almond meal better than flour. Also the fact that I can take ground nuts and turn them into a pie crust and it even 90% works is so cool, food is awesome. PS almond meal is surprisingly cheap at TJs check it out yo

Comments

[ranyart]

I found some hazelnut meal at the store once and had a LOT of fun playing around with that! I made some hazelnut butter cupcakes and put some of it in for a super-hazelnutty experience. I should give almond meal a try as well.

[rax]

Whoah, that sounds awesome. I will have to try it. :)

[chagrined]

hmmmm one of my friends once gave me a recipe for a raw vegan cheesecake using a bunch of ground up nuts for various parts of it including the crust, heh. i should try to see if i still have that recipe written down somewhere. XD

[rax]

If you do run into it, I'd love to see it! :D

[pyrrhocorax]

xanthum gum is so amazing, it turns gluten free """bread""" into actual real tasting and textured bread.

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

Oooh. I've got basil growing in my window but it's taking forever, and I'm nowhere near having enough for pesto yet (which was the sole purpose of growing it). Thanks for the rec.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Almond meal is fantastic! Xanthan gum will likely help shore up the structural problems with pie crust with it, but it actually makes for a great 1:1 replacement for graham cracker crumb crust pies recipes without further modification. If you do end up going back on gluten, you can also replace a portion of regular flour with almond flour without impacting texture too much and adding in flavor. If you have a decent egg replacement, apparently you can make vegan/gluten free macarons, which are traditionally all almond flour anyway and also tasty as all heck.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I have a couple of decent egg replacers, so that sounds like a thing worth trying at some point. I expect to be going back on gluten mid-month unless something really surprising happens, but I will definitely be continuing to use almond flour in things like this. :D

[sovay]

But I've been baking anyway, and my god is almond meal awesome.

My mother makes a cake with pistachio flour. It requires folding in egg whites, so I don't have a vegan translation for it off the top of my head unless flaxseed, but I can recommend pistachio flour on general principle. Also, everything you make with it comes out green.

[sairaali.livejournal.com]

> Also, everything you make with it comes out green.

That is awesome. I might have to grind some pistachios for my next baking adventure.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that does sound exciting to play with!

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I could trust a doctor who recommended a gluten free diet unless I had come to him with the unsubtle symptoms of Coeliac. You should be extra careful living in the same city as Andrew Weil. The quality of medical advice you receive could be suspect. Most health fads not supported by science, like the current gluten scare, are more or less harmless, but sometimes that stuff does damage. If your doctor doesn't feel obliged to learn if something is medicine, or public paranoia before he recommends it I don't know if he should be trusted.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Elimination diets are pretty legit, yo. She didn't recommend I give up gluten permanently, she recommended I try not eating it for two weeks so as to see if it changed anything about my digestion/comportment. I guess that could be dangerous for a hypochondriac, but it's how I figured out the nightshades thing, so I think it's legit.

The doctor I had in Boston was falling into quackery, though, and it sucked. She wanted to try to treat a sinus infection with lasers. :(

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

I know someone who wanted their sinuses cleared with a laser, but I think he was hoping for megawatt pulsed excimer, not milliwatt red dot diode. Dude had ROUGH allergies.

[davidglasser.livejournal.com]

A friend recently made a pesto-infused vodka, which was surprisingly tasty! (As part of a box of 20 infusions paired with a d20, ranging from "cucumber pear" to "twinkie" to "miracle fruit" to ... "squid".)

[rax.livejournal.com]

That is weird, but fascinating. It certainly sounds like a better idea than some of those others, augh.