As you may have figured out from my lunchboxes in the last month, I have been working with more grain-free baking and have introduced ethically raised duck eggs into my diet. So far, I seem to tolerate duck eggs just fine, so I have been reading more closely through blogs focusing on grain-free baking, such as Naomi’s beautifully written Straight Into Bed CakeFree and Dried . Naomi is also the creator of the monthly blog event Go Ahead Honey, It’s Gluten-Free.
I first found Naomi’s blog when I was working on identifying my food intolerances through an elimination diet, so her beautiful recipes felt rather off-limits to me, seeing as I avoid dairy and eggs as well as gluten. Back then I also avoided duck eggs and had no confidence in my ability to make substitutions in gluten-free baking. That said, even then I was captivated by her engaging tone and subscribed to her blog, reading it for the narratives more than the recipe. Imagine how thrilling it was to discover last year she had linked my blog from her blog!
So I decided to adopt Naomi this month for Adopt a Gluten-Free Blogger, an event created and hosted by Sea of Book of Yum, as I had been eyeing several of Naomi’s grain-free recipes for a while and had not yet gotten around to making them. I had been curious about her pizza recipe, as the only grain-free pizza crust I had made was too crunchy. Naomi’s pizza crust recipe sounded like it might yield a softer result. I read the comments closely to figure out substitutes for the yogurt and Naomi was kind enough to answer my question about what type of almond flour to use, which it turned out was blanched almond flour (I buy this kind since I have also been cooking from Elana’s Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook).
I made the pizza crust recipe recipe as written, but substituted three small duck eggs for the large chicken eggs and 3 tablespoons coconut cream for the yogurt and oil. I figured between all the fat in the duck egg yolks and coconut cream, the chicken eggs, yogurt and oil were all accounted for. The pizza crust/base did take longer to bake (about 12 minutes) but was delicious and remained wonderfully pliable. It was a fantastic vehicle for the Nomato – I adore tomato sauce, so the thought of a less acidic alternative with two of my favorite ingredients (butternut squash and red onion, roasted until soft) completely won be over before I had even printed the recipe. Naomi invented Nomato and the pizza recipe in general to give her son Finn a pizza experience despite his having to be on both a low salycilate diet and the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. I can tolerate tomatoes, but have generally been trying to eat less tomato sauce as it can sometime be too acidic for me, and Nomato hit the spot.
Why I had not tried the Nomato recipe earlier, I do not know. As it was, I ate a small bowful of the roasted butternut squash and red onion before I could get it into the food processor and pureed to top the pizza crust. Because I cannot tolerate any dairy, I used Angela’s Three Minute Parmesan Recipe made with nutritional yeast and sesame seeds. My husband topped his side with goat cheese. We both declared our respective pizzas splendid, though of course my husband had to call it flatbread.
I decided to pair the pizza with Naomi’s carrotslaw, mainly because pizza and carrotslaw are often paired together at Naomi’s, usually for special occasions. Carrotslaw is one of Finn’s favorite foods (if not his favorite) so it only seemed right to make the pizza with the carrotslaw seeing as the pizza was initially invented for Finn. And Finn and Naomi are definitely onto something – the combination of the cold carrotslaw with the warm pizza was fantastic. I used Vegenaise and a bit of lemon juice for the salad and was very pleased with the outcome.
The next day I decided to bake a half batch of Naomi’s Raspberry Tea-Bread after reading her post on summer preceding the tea-bread recipe. I have been missing summer very much and I loved the idea of pretending that summer was just a bag of frozen berries away. I had to make a few substitutions, but since I had followed the Nomato and Carrotslaw recipes exactly, I decided to go ahead with the recipe and all the substitutions to use what I had on hand and what I can eat. I halved the recipe, used a combination of coconut oil and almond butter to replace the butter and nut butter, used blanched almond flour only as I did not have the rest of the nut flours available, substituted coconut nectar for the honey and used only frozen raspberries as that is all I have on hand and I do not eat raisins. Halving the three large eggs was easy as I just used one large duck egg (I am finding that the 2 to 1 ratio of duck eggs to chicken eggs is more like 1.5 to 1 when working with grain-free baking). Despite all the substitutions, I really felt like the tea-bread was Naomi’s recipe – it did indeed tasted like summer. My loaf is not as tall as hers since I made a half batch.
The leftover Nomato and Raspberry Tea-Bread were great for my lunchboxes:
I mixed Nomato with more of my nutritional yeast parmesan cheese and some cooked white beans for a substantial snack in this lunchbox.
Nomato is also a lovely spread on grain-free crackers.
And the tea-bread was a lovely sweet treat to my non-traditional insalata di riso, which many of you seem to like based on the comments. I realize the rice salad is hardly grain-free – my forays into grain-free eating has been a most of the time rather than all the time thing.
Adopting Naomi and making her recipes was heaps of fun. I encourage you all to check out her blog, particularly if you are interested in grain-free recipes. In case there are gluten-free readers who do not know of Naomi’s lovely blog I am also submitting this post to the Gluten-Free Homemaker’s Gluten-Free Wednesday.
Past adoption posts:
Amy of Simply Sugar and Gluten-Free
Maggie of She Let Them Eat Cake
Ricki of Diet, Dessert and Dogs
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What a lovely post Valerie. It's so great to see people making my recipes with all the changes and still enjoying them. x x x