I slipped away from the natives for about an hour or so last Saturday and went over to the library to pick up a few books that I had on hold. Long story short, I ended up picking up a few more books than I’d intended. (Note that this picture does NOT include the books I went to pick up. They were all books for the kids.These books are all mine.)

I have NO idea what I was thinking. The moral of this story is never send a book addict to a place filled with free books.

If you take a book lover to the library, she’ll think she’s in heaven, and she’ll want to check out all the books in sight.

You should see the pile I come home with when the kids go with me. But, I’m sure you all have similar piles at your own homes, so enough rambling.

Actually, this post is not about my addiction to books, or how many I foolishly checked out. It is about a little gem that I discovered.  It’s called The Whole Foods Allergy Cookbook by Cybele Pascal. Now, as far as I know, we don’t have any food allergies (except for whatever happened to Mark not long ago – but that was kind of a fluke and I have no idea what caused it) around here, but I was looking for whole foods cookbooks and couldn’t find any so I decided to take what I could find…and I’m so glad I did. It’s a wonderful little cookbook.

Now, please don’t dismiss this cookbook simply because you don’t have any allergies. The recipes are great and easy – no fermenting, or putting things together over night, or sprouting grains, not that those things are bad, but sometimes fast and easy is nice too -and most of these recipes are fast and easy. The only difference between these recipes and the recipes you normally use is that they are made without any major allergy causing ingredients – dairy, eggs, soy, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, and shellfish.

The nice thing about these recipes is that they can also be made with whatever you have on hand. For example, if the recipe calls for an egg replacer, you can use a real egg, or if the recipe calls for spelt flour, you can use whatever type of flour you want, same for milk. If you’ve been thinking about trying other flours, such as oat, barley, buckwheat, etc. you can do so easily with this cookbook because Pascal uses a lot of different flours and gives measurements for alternate flours. Yesterday, I made eggless oatmeal cookies with wheat flour (the recipe called for spelt) and they were delicious.  All the recipes are dairy free as well, and use natural sugars like molasses and maple syrup.

One final word, I checked out her blogspot aptly called The Whole Foods Allergy Cookbook and although I didn’t read through everything, it looked like she had a lot of GF/CF recipes if that is of interest to you. And if you don’t trust me, maybe you will trust Martha (or maybe not) Pascal was a guest on her show…you can watch it here on YouTube.

blessings,

dani                                                                                 

“Every good and perfect gift comes from the Father…” (James 1:17)