Almost Done Right: Grain Free, Refined Sugar Free Carrot Cake (SIBO Diet Friendly)

The world appears to have a ton of GAPS, SCD, paleo and grain-free baking websites, books, recipes and Pinterest pins that go on for days.

But if you read the comments on these recipes, this is what you hear, over and over.

"Looks great! Can't wait to try it!"

BOO. You suck. Looks great? I can frost a pile of cat shit and it looks great. Those who comment before trying to bake it should be banned.

But then, it gets worse. I cannot find a recipe measured in weights. And as any person who bakes even once in a while knows, you need weights rather than measurements. Save yourself the dishes, and get it perfectly right. 5 grams of salt, thank you very much - not 1 teaspoon.

So I've been a mad baker the last month, and failing miserably. It's taking something I love and turning into something I hate. It's taking something I was very good at and suddenly teaching it in Cyrillic.

But I've made something good today, and the reason it's "almost done right" is that I didn't weigh my ingredients either! I measured, carefully, and with a bit of my mad baker estimation to round up or down on certain things - but tah-dah! A carrot cake of decent quality! It is, to be sure, VERY carrot-ey. It's not a sugary sweet cake, but it feels pretty close to a cake - a texture missing from my life the last six weeks - and has a nice honey-carrot flavor with the crunch of slivered almonds. Here is the original recipe, followed my version. I'm not crediting the recipe because I think if I made it as-is, it would have tasted like a carrot soufflé and been undercooked. My previous experience with these ingredients has me extremely confident of this pre-judgement.

Someone Else's Coconut Flour Carrot Muffins

• 6 eggs

• 1/2 c coconut oil, melted

• 1/2 c honey

• 2 TB vanilla

• 1/2 tsp sea salt

• 1/2 tsp baking soda

• 2 tsp cinnamon 

• 1/2 c coconut flour 

• 2 c carrots, shredded
• 1/2 c raisins or dried cranberries, optional

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
• Line 12 muffin cups with liners, or grease with coconut oil.
• Combine the eggs, coconut oil, honey and vanilla in a large bowl or in the bowl of an electric mixer.
• Add in the salt, baking soda and cinnamon.
• Sprinkle the coconut flour over the mixture and then whisk into the batter.
• Mix well so that there aren’t any clumps. Fold in the shredded carrots and raisins or cranberries.
• Use an ice cream scoop to divide the batter evenly among the prepared muffin cups.
• Bake for 20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. YUM!

Emily's Coconut Flour Carrot Muffins

• 5 eggs (room temp!!)

• 1/2 c butter

• 1/2 c honey

• 1.5 tablespoons vanilla

• 1 tsp sea salt

• 1 tsp baking soda (leave this out for GAPS, and hope for the best)

• 2 tsp pumpkin pie spice blend 

• 1/2 c coconut flour plus 1 tablespoon

• 2 and 1/8 c shredded carrots (measure after shredding, not before)
• 1/2 c slivered raw almonds

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
• Grease a 10 x 6 pan with coconut oil.
• Whip butter with electric hand mixer on high for 3 full minutes, until white and fluffy.
• Whip in slightly-warmed honey for 1 minute on high.
• Add the eggs one a time, mix on medium speed, for 30 seconds each. 
• Mix in vanilla extract on high, for 30 seconds.
• Sprinkle in the salt, baking soda and spice mix; stir in well by hand.
• Sprinkle 1/2 cup of the coconut flour over the mixture and then whisk into the batter with mixer on low-medium for 30 seconds. Let batter rest a 3 full minutes. Then whisk again with mixer for 30 seconds on low-medium and if you feel like it needs the extra tablespoon of flour, whisk it in now. 
• Fold in carrot and almonds gently. Pour into prepared pan. 
• Bake 40 minutes or until firm to the touch in the center, and evenly brown underneath (use a glass pan). YUM!

Two steps forward...

It was, it turns out, too many foods introduced too closely together. And though if I see you in person I will happily share TMI about my digestive tales, should you be interested, I think sharing in writing with the wider internet world is not a wise thing for my future run at the U.S. Senate. Suffice to say I did not feel 100% this week. I took quite a few steps back. 

I'm back on a diet of mostly meat stews, with carrots and celery in them, and a little bit of pureed fruit. There is one problem: I had started grain-free baking. And I probably need to dial that to Zero for a week or two. But among the four or five failure recipes - like the almond flour 'bread' - I've hit on two good ones so far! A banana bread that tasted like banana bread - and not like 'pretty good for almond flour banana bread' and then… ahh, for the Super Bowl party today… peanut butter cookies!

Grain free, refined sugar free. Just peanut butter, butter, almond flour, salt, honey and a pinch of baking soda. I don't know if I am allowed baking soda; I am not asking about it. Head in the sand on that one, I fully admit. But I've baked up a storm for the Super Bowl party and like any good plan it is starts tomorrow. I am going to take all the baked goods out next week to see if I can't start more steps forward again. 

And in related taking-steps-back news, I have never been a hot bath person. This is because I am a clean freak. And almost everywhere I've lived since the age of 21 has been a rental, and no matter how much I clean that tub, it still (emotionally) feels dirty and used to me. (I know. I know. Psychological field day.) 

And so it just became a habit to always shower. Even after a long day or when enduring a sickness, I'll take a nice long hot shower - not bath.

Well, this week broke me. I've taken a bath every night. I just needed to be surrounded, immersed; held.  And you know what? Baths are really nurturing! (Yes, you did know that.) This year's word of the year for me, if you recall, is Nourish. These baths have been quite nourishing to this slowly repairing body and fragile spirit. So that's something. 

Go Sports Team! Happy Super Bowl! An American holiday especially treasured by this fantasy football league winner right here.

(Photos of all the baked goods to come.)

Death on a Triscuit

That's a West Wing line and a good description of how I woke up this morning. And so despite being absolutely vital to the work day - I could not get up. A 102 degree fever, exhaustion, coughing, congestion, weakness - I have been laying around all day. It is harder for me to NOT go to work, than to go, when I am sick. There were a lot of tears this morning.

I added ghee and eggs to the menu today - not just the egg yolks as prescribed. I really felt I needed the whole thing. I increased my tablespoons of fermented juice (aka sauerkraut juice). I tried raw ginger tea. I still can't taste a thing! And I still can't decide if I have the flu or if these are so-called die-off symptoms. Which apparently can look exactly like flu, complete with mucous buildup.

Because let's get real here, people. If you're reading this blog, you know me. And so yes - for sure - a good 47% of me thinks this whole thing is total junk science and absolute bunk. It's like fluoride being a brain poison. It's like a cayenne-lemon detox diet that shockingly helps you lose weight by not eating for 7 to 10 days (duh)!

But then, I have long followed the emerging science on gut bacteria. And I read articles like this one, from no-bullshit Michael Pollan (who also published a pate de choux recipe of ease this week, that torturer!). That is a long article but if you want to come up to speed on the gut biome, it is worth your time. It includes the sentence, and evidence to support:

• Medical science may be on the trail of a Grand Unified Theory of Chronic Disease, at the very heart of which we will find the gut microbiome.

Crazy! So I guess 53% of me, albeit skeptically, is willing to keep pushing through this, and see what can happen. Can one do a hard reset on their gut biome? Can I?

The Next Journey

This blog started five years ago with a long (three month) work trip to Central America.

Most recently, it documented every thought (that I wrote down) while on a short (three week) volunteer trip and spiritual journey to Africa.

And now, dear reader (I think there are about three of you left)… you may want to go on your merry way. For this blog is about to turn inside. Way inside. Like inside my digestive tract. Inside the very walls of my small intestine.

This fall, my health insurance began accepting Naturopathic Doctors as Primary Care Physicians. And my sneaking interest in alternative care then combined with the fact that I have not had a regular doctor since I had a pediatrician, and the end of the equation was = I have a new ND! (There was a false start here worth noting; the first ND I met with made me feel unhealthy and skeptical and mean. The second one was - and is - amazing.)

So as me and my ND made our way through everything about my health, everything I'm concerned about or interested by, everything I've been through and want to achieve, we kept coming back to my digestive health. Which is … not great.

Don't say I didn't warn you; this is the journey, like it or not. Feel free to look away.

And my digestion (which, yeah, ok, is a nice word for bowel movements) has been worse and worse over the last 18 months or so, and been pretty atrocious in the last six. Just never regular. Just never satisfying. Just daily meh. So I took this totally crazy breath test (that turns out not to be crazy at all), and have the classic result of SIBO: small intestine bacterial overgrowth.

At first, I thought SIBO was crazy. I thought it was in the league of non-medically-accepted diagnoses, like adrenal fatigue or vertebral subluxation. This could not be a thing. Could it? Well, it is.

I went to a shiny, high end, solidly Western medicine, practically concierge-care type gastroenterologist - and he not only assured me the test for SIBO is very real, but that my results were indeed classic SIBO. His treatment plan, as a second opinion, was extraordinarily similar to my ND's plan.

And that plan starts tomorrow.

It is no easy plan. It is 10 days of very intense antibiotics, while starting a diet that should last from 3 to 12 (or more) MONTHS.

If you know the GAPS Diet - that's what it is. If you don't know it, all you need to know is what I won't be having, for 3 to 12 (or more) months:

• Flour, wheat, barley, rice, corn, oats, cous cous, quinoa, rye, parsnips, white, red and sweet potatoes and everything made of them: tortillas, pasta, bread, cake, cookies, chips, crackers, chips, risotto, pizza.
• Garbanzo beans, kidney beans, fava beans, black eyed peas, butter beans, cannellini beans. 
• Ham, hot dogs, smoked or preserved or processed meat.
• Ketchup! Chocolate! Cocoa! 
• Maple syrup, molasses, sugar.
• Chèvre, gruyere, feta, cottage cheese, mozzarella. 
• Beer (but I don't care about that).

So when I come to your house, or we go out, what can I eat?

• Beef. Lamb. Chicken. Wild Game.
• Eggs.
• Nuts (raw only).
• Ghee, butter, olive oil, avocados, coconut oil.
• Sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, fermented sour cream and yogurt.

And ok, to be fair, I will be able to eat lots of vegetables and some fruits, too, eventually - and hard cheeses. Eggplant, squashes, onions, garlic, lettuces, carrots, cauliflower, capers, beets, asparagus, pineapple, pears, cherries, and more. But when you look at a list of things you can eat, and things you can't eat - it's hard to stop your imagination. 

So filled with anxiety, and total dread, I've been eating like a madwoman for the last month, since the diagnosis. I've put on another ten pounds. I've been thinking, if I just eat everything I want NOW, I'll be OK on this restrictive diet - which starts out literally with fat, meat and eggs for days before letting other things trickle in (first avocados, then nut butters, then soft lettuces, cucumber, etc, over the weeks that follow).

But I know that's not true. And so tomorrow it all starts. And I ate five pieces of sourdough toast for dinner, and then made a cherry-chocolate cake at 9 PM and ate three big squares. I'm gonna give that bacteria a big ol' feeding frenzy before I boot them out.

3 Points.

On Weight Watchers, you may regularly find yourself, after dinner, with 3 points left. About 10% of your daily total. So then you might find yourself making a list of all the things you can have for 3 points, and deciding which will be enough to turn off the food-thinking, Smitten-Kitchen-skimming, kitchen scrounging for the night... let me suggest a few items on that list...

• 4 ounces of wine
• 1 slice of toast with a teaspoon (teaspoon!) of jam or peanut butter (but not both)
• 1 Thomas' English muffin, plain
• a large mug of strong hot cocoa, made from the powder with water
• a small bowl of oatmeal with berries or frozen unsweetened peaches stirred in
• just-under-one-shot of vodka with soda water
• 40% of a regular sized candy bar, or about 2 sticks of a KitKat
• 8 ounces of orange juice
• 1.5 graham crackers
• 3 cups of popcorn without butter

All this, with an eye on the prize... happy hour after work on Friday night! For that's where all the points go. 

Kindred Spirits

I suspect a whole lot of people out there find Deb, goddess of the Smitten Kitchen, to be their kindred spirit. I don't begrudge them - 'cause heck, I join them - but in one way, Deb speaks to me with the pure clear voice of a prophet. I've known the truth all along, but her persistence in spreading the gospel of both word and action is an inspiration. And that way she speaks about a birthday cake.

Like her, I am shocked and genuinely, deeply upset by the thought of a store-bought birthday cake. A special dessert from your favorite bakery for a holiday, for an anniversary, for a graduation, for a reunion? Go for it! Dream of it for weeks. Spend $38 on a pie from Random Order (or something like that) because they are really, really, really good.

But on your birthday?

Even if you are drafted happily onto Team Pie over Team Cake in debates and at parties, it is your birthday, gosh darn it, and you should have a towering layer cake, made by someone who knows you, likes you (loves you, even) and bakes well. This is a commandment in the House of Emmy, and I've been known to bake cakes for the birthdays of friends of friends - even coworkers of friends that I barely know.

But.

This month.

My month.

I get to make a birthday cake for myself! You might think this is a disappointment, and that I want a cake baked for me (which, OK, in the interest of blog-world full disclosure, yes, I admit, I would not turn my nose up at Deb's Pistachio Petit-Four Cake made by some other hardy soul since I fear the complexity) but the opportunity to make EXACTLY what I want, on EXACLY the timeline I want to make it, and share it with EXACTLY who I want - divine! Just like Deb, I'm on the hunt for the right recipe. I'm thinking about almond, I'm thinking about raspberries, I'm thinking about seven-minute frosting with some other flavor to dress it up.

And candles!! 31 of them...

The most wonderful time of the year...

Is here, but almost complete...

It is the time of year where I eat an average of 1/2 a pound of cherries per day. And while we have a beautiful and stuffed gallon bag of "bullets" in the freezer for wintertime baking (perfectly pitted, whole, round, red frozen Washington cherries), I still bought another three pounds on Tuesday for a second bag o' bullets.

Alas, here we are Saturday morning and three pounds are gone, nary a one frozen. Will I have the discipline to buy and bullet another few pounds? But it's time for peaches! The Sauvie Island Farm Wife blog says peaches were ready as of 7/31, and last only two weeks.

To eat or to freeze, to eat or to freeze... my most wonderful time of year.

Preach to the choir, reap the reward!

When you love to bake, you find other people who love to bake. And then you talk about baking. You IM about baking. You swap recipes and you leave Tupperware containers on each other's porches. And if you preach the great gospel of the Smitten Kitchen, you might get a container of rhubarb snacking cake, smack in the middle of rhubarb season!!

The only problem with this recipe was that the baker and so-called "friend" who left it on my stoop left FOUR giant squares of it. Scoff! Friend! No, not a friend. A temptress. Smitten Kitchen's recipes are not trifles; they prove any and all diet-preachers wrong who claim you can hope to break an addiction to sugar. Smitten Kitchen cackles with laughter at this idea. And to top it off... I, like this "friend", live with a person who inexplicably cares not for rhubarb and didn't eat a single bite!!

So I hope you agree that I consider it Herculean to only ate 60% of what she left for me and save 40% for my brunch guests the next day.

I'm sure you were wondering...

And the answer is yes. Smitten Kitchen's shortbread IS delicious! Especially with both salt and sugar sprinkled on top. Trust me.

CRACK

It's official. Smitten Kitchen's posts are taking over my baking life and I. Need. To. Stop.

Stop baking her recipes, stop reading her charming posts, and stop sharing her gospel with others. It is no exaggeration that THREE people have now described her cocoa brownies (which I have baked for them and forced them to eat) as addicting to the point of being like crack, and so if you know what's good for you, you WON'T click on that link.

The most recent success is the honey cake. Good thing Rosh Hashanah is months away, so I won't have to make it again until September because it is, as described, moist and majestic, and it was, as expected, freaking delicious. (At least I was able to send it all home with guests and not a crumb remains at home.)

Must stop, must stop, must stop. Well, maybe right after I try the Sally Lunn bread... it has been calling to me for weeks... Hey! I'm making it without the honeyed brown butter! That's controlling this problem, right?

Must-Read

If you're not reading, and using, the recipes from Smitten Kitchen - and I am sure you are, because you are cooler than me and more experienced in finding all the cool stuff on the internet - then you should be. Her baking recipes are brilliantly good, and she lists ingredients by weight!! Oh, the accuracy. Oh, the obsessive ability to calculate Weight Watchers points. And oh, oh, oh, the snickerdoodles. Start with these and you'll be a committed fan.

Help!

Who has a gourmet recipe for a tres leches cake, or something like it? I love to make cakes, but since I eat less of them now, I must find reasons to make them. And one of my sisters-in-law has a birthday coming up, and she wants a sweet, moist, dense, delicious, cinnamon-y tres leches cake. I've made one once and it was "meh". Might you have a tried and true recipe for me?

Also: auto-correct would like to call this a tres leeches cake. Real nice.

It's a mystery, x 2.

There is much, much, MUCH to write and many, many, MANY pics to post of the great weekend move. But for now, there are two mysteries to this little corner of NE Dekum...

First, we have an insane neighbor who walks around his yard of weeds and scrap wood, carefully selects a shitty, splintery piece, and uses his circular saw to cut it. ALL DAY. And evening. He also appears to maybe live in a tent in the yard. (I think he will figure greatly in future blogs... and future research into noise/nuisance laws.)

Second, a couple times a day, each day, the whole block is filled with the smell of ice cream cones. I don't how else to describe it... too light to be cookies, and too sweet to be actual waffles. Maybe there is a waffle cone factory nearby? I'm not sure, but it's sort of amazing.

Give us this day our daily bread.

In a world of low-carb, anti-sugar, white-flour-is-the-devil dieters and their diets, I find myself looking askance at rolls, crackers, soft breads, pizza. I think this suspicion seeped in slowly because it startled me yesterday, into realization.

I still work occasionally for the catering company, and at the end of my gig last night, I returned the paperwork to the office, which is on the far side of a whole-city-block industrial kitchen. In the bakery, racks and racks of bread were cooling, probably about ready to be bagged and sold at the retail stores upon their 6 AM opening.

There was a whole corner filled with racks of shiny challah, nutty grain burger buns, a dozen racks of sandwich loaves - not yet sliced - and perfect, round soup rolls. Beyond the wonderful smell, it made me remember what a miracle bread is - what a sustaining food it has always been, a combination of flour and yeast, and what a joy it is to break bread with those we love.

So on that note... goodbye to the old apartment which has treated us so well. We'll sleep here one last night, and tomorrow - a house! Our house! A home in which to break bread.

Recipe Break.

I am trying to post every day for seven days without getting too muse-y or arrogant, so here is the latest culinary late-night adventure.


Two shout outs are involved...

The first is to Bill, whose canned blueberries and peaches (apricots?) have been sitting silently in my fridge for, oh, 18 months. These were the last two jars, begging for something easy and sweet and memorable.

The second is to my mom. A few years ago, an aunt on my paternal side told me she had great memories of my mom jumping up at 7 or 8 at night, and deciding they all needed warm, gooey brownies. "Your mom was a great one to make dessert, I remember her whipping up brownies long after everyone else was done with tasks for the night," said Aunt B.

Well, I do not remember this, but it must be genetic. Some nights, I get a craving that cannot be denied for a homemade dessert, and I'm always on the hunt for the easiest things possible. The mostly eaten blueberry-peach cobbler pictured above IS one of the easiest things possible. (Or buckle, if you like that, or crapple, if you're in my nuclear family - though that only applies to apple crumble, or, apple crapple as I've been calling it since age six.)

Take a half stick or so of butter and melt it in the microwave, in a glass pie plate.

Mix 3/4 cup of flour, 2 tsp of baking powder, 1/2 cup of milk and 1/2 cup of sugar. Drop the mixture in spoonfulish lumps into the butter --- and do not stir it in.

Smear a Bill-sized jar of canned blueberries and one of canned peach slices evenly all on top of the goop. Bake at 350 for about an hour. Tah-dah!

(I think I might add a pinch of salt next time. And I cut the sugar from the original recipe in half, and adjusted the butter, just FYI. You never need as much sugar as they say - another Mom tip.)

But we didn't have ice cream, or another family tradition, heavy cream poured in as a float for the dish. So... oh darn... guess I'll have to make it again.