We have a little routine in our house.  Most nights, after we put Jake to bed, Jeremy and I open a Chocolove chocolate bar.  We started this a couple of years ago, probably not too long after Jake was born.  It has become more frequent because it was a really easy gluten free treat for us to eat, and gives us something to look forward to at night.

Chocolove is a small company that is actually based in Boulder, but their chocolate can be found nationwide.  We started off eating the 65% cocoa dark chocolate bars but the more we’ve eaten dark chocolate the more we like it.  Now we eat mostly the 70% cocoa dark chocolate bars.  We also really enjoy the new dark chocolate, almond and sea salt bars.

We discovered something else this summer too, which makes chocolate even more fun.  A vendor at the Boulder farmer’s market talked us in to trying the herb, chocolate mint, one day.  I had never heard of this before, but chocolate mint is a variety of mint that is supposed to taste particularly good eaten with chocolate.  We tried it and are hooked!  When we happen to run across it, we buy it and eat it with our chocolate at night.  We like it so much I think we’re going to try to grow some next year.

I was going to take a picture of our chocolate mint and chocolate together, but we ate it all before I got around to it! 

I’ve only had real pizza a couple of times since being diagnosed with celiac disease, and I sure do miss it.  Of all the foods that I can no longer eat, pizza has been by far the one I’ve missed the most.  We tried to correct this situation on Saturday and made pizza at home.

My mom left me a Namaste Foods gluten free pizza crust mix which is also dairy and egg free.  I have to be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from it.  But we got out our never used Pampered Chef pizza stone, and made our pizza crust.  We also have a plethora of tomatoes, and Jeremy was nice enough to make some tomato sauce from scratch!

We added our homemade tomato sauce, ground beef sauteed with garlic and onions, basil, sauteed onions, and tomatoes to the pizza.  We didn’t add any cheese, due to Jake’s dairy allergy.  I thought this might make the pizza not seem like a pizza at all, but probably because we eat very little cheese now, I didn’t miss it too much.

This pizza was a huge success, I LOVED the crust, it is a crispy thin crust, which is my favorite kind, and it tasted great.  I really couldn’t tell it was gluten free with all of the toppings on it.  We liked the pizza so much, we are making one again tonight night, and we don’t even have to buy another mix because the Namaste pizza crust is enough for two 15″ pizzas.  I think tonight’s pizza is going to be chicken, bacon, tomato and basil and I predict there will be a lot more pizzas in our future. Thanks for the pizza crust Mom!