My mom has been on the look out for cookbooks for our family, that meet both Jake’s requirements of being allergy free, and my requirement of being gluten free.  I can’t remember where she heard of this little book, but it is written by Jennifer Katzinger who has a bakery in Seattle called Flying Apron bakery.  The cookbook is both gluten-free and vegan, so uses no milk or eggs, and in their place, she uses a lot of sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and yams.  I’ve seen some book reviews mention that some vegans do not consider honey vegan, and honey is used throughout this book, but you could substitute agave nectar for honey if that is a concern.

I really had trouble deciding which of these delicious looking recipes I should start with and the Blueberry Cinnamon Scones recipe ended up winning.  Jeremy and I had gotten in the bad habit of going to Starbucks on Saturday mornings to get coffee cake and coffees before I found out I needed to eat gluten free.  These little trips have been one of our few luxuries over the past year and I was really missing my morning cinnamon treats, so this recipe sounded like a great place to start.  I had never thought of putting blueberry and cinnamon together before, but in the description of the recipe, the author writes that cinnamon and blueberries “should be together as often as possible”.  Boy was she right!  These are delicious.  I’ve made them several times now, and they make 8 scones for the recipe.  Because this is really too many scones for us to eat, I experimented with freezing the dough and now we can make 2 or 3 scones for us and freeze the rest of the batch.  When my in-laws were in town a few weeks ago I made the dough ahead of time and then on Saturday morning just popped the dough in the oven and 25 min later or so, fresh baked scones!

Well we’ve tried a couple of other recipes out of the book now as well and they are all great.  We still have beets in our fridge from the winter CSA and I talked Jeremy into letting me make the Borscht for supper, which was a bit of a hard sell.  Borscht is a Russian beet stew, this one had beets, carrots, cabbage and sweet potatoes, and lots of dill.  She used a cashew cream in place of sour cream, which we thought was surprisingly good.  This is now one of my favorite ways to use beets, and something I had not thought of before and Jeremy actually ended up liking it pretty well.

The third recipe we’ve tried is a Moroccan Bean Salad over Baby Spinach with butternut squash.  We did not have a butternut squash but did have a giant crazy looking blue hubbard squash that we’ve been needing to use.

Jeremy has been calling this squash a “spider squash” and saying that when I cut into it he thought a bunch of little spiders were going to run out because it was so creepy looking.  It is a big squash, probably at least 5 pounds and about the size of 2 butternut squash, and just for the record, when I cut into it, no spiders ran out.  The blue hubbard squash tasted just like a normal winter squash despite it’s strange look.

Back to the recipe, the moroccan bean salad also turned out really well, the white beans and squash were very filling and the spices including cinnamon, turmeric and ginger were different than i was used to but very good.  She calls for it over a bed of spinach, but I actually cooked the spinach and mixed it up with the beans.  I’m not a huge fan of raw spinach, but cooked in the salad it was great.

I would highly recommend this cookbook to anyone wanting to cook vegan and/or gluten free, and especially if you need to cook both (for those just needing to cook vegan, be warned that you will have to purchase some specialty ingredients because of the recipes being gluten free).  This is a great cookbook for our family because it is so hard for me to find recipes that are both gluten free and vegan, and when we do find them, they aren’t always great…. but I can’t wait to try more recipes from this cookbook!  And… if I’m ever in Seattle I am definitely going to the Flying Apron Bakery.

Jeremy and I picked up the latest Michael Pollan book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual this weekend which we intend to pass onto his mom who showed an interest in it after watching Oprah.  We took a quick peak at it the night we bought it, and by quick peak I mean we read the whole book out loud in about an hour while making dinner.  If you haven’t heard already, it expands on the list of rules he originally published in In Defense of Food - eat food, mostly plants, not too much.  There is a brief paragraph or two explanation of each rule following, and a total of 64 rules.

Our favorite rule was rule 57, “Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does.”  And our favorite quote came from rule 8, “Avoid food products that make health claims,”  with the quote, “Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”  We are doing pretty well overall on the rules, the one we are going to try to do more of is rule 43,  “Have a glass of wine with dinner”  (the sacrifices we are willing to make for our health).  Jeremy was particularly smug about the rules relating to eating slowly, because he is probably the world’s slowest eater, and has been teased a lot because of it.  Rule 3 is “Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry,” as one example he lists xantham gum which we currently have an entire bag of in our pantry… I guess we are no ordinary humans.  (We have xantham gum because it is used in gluten free baking often).

If you have read In Defense of Food, there isn’t any new information here, but if you are looking for a concise list of rules he thinks you should follow you’ll find it here.   It is a pretty entertaining read, with some funny old sayings to help you remember what to do, and is also in paperback for $5.00 brand new.