My Life Just Got Easier

Have I mentioned that I love my parents? I love them because they're my parents and I really appreciate their love, generosity, and support. One of the best things they can do from long distance is to send me gluten-free stuff, which they have done and they continue to do so as I am expecting packages any day now. I really feel loved when they do that for me because they ease my life here in a substantial way, all the way from the other side of the ocean.

So far, I've gotten GF Bisquick mixes for waffles, GF rolled oats which I use for granola, sorghum flour for baking sweets, brown sugar, dried herbs and spices, Crystal Light, M&Ms for A, etc. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a package is making its way to me, full of sweet rice flour, coconut flour, tapioca starch, potato starch, and xanthan gum (which replaces the gluten as acts as gluten does in baking). My pantry will be very well stocked and complete for all the GF cooking and baking that I need. I only need to grind my own brown rice flour and almond flour, for which I am on a hunt for a coffee bean grinder. Here, you can buy almonds in bulk, which is cheaper than in the States. I can make my own almond milk (great flavor to replace cow's milk with in baked goods), almond butter, and almond flour. Yep.

I found a magazine website called Vegetarian Times, and it has an excellent recipe search engine with several search options such as gluten-free, egg-free, dairy-free, etc. I can search by ingredient (for example, zucchini) and click on "gluten-free" and get plenty of recipes that are pretty simple (not requiring a lot of pre-made stuff from the States which may or may not be available here). My life just got easier! Whew.

I'm slowly learning how to substitute and make from scratch. For example, I have been wanting to learn how to make chickpea vegan burgers since there are chickpeas aplenty here. I also found a chickpea chocolate cake (very simple, no flour) recipe. G accidentally poured an entire kilo bag of dried chickpeas (2.2 lbs) to soak. I didn't think about it either until I realized that we were soaking more chickpeas than we needed. SO, it looks we'll be eating a lot of chickpeas this week! At least, it's healthy. Chickpea burgers, chickpea chocolate cake, and homemade hummus are on the menu this week. I hope we can use it all up.

Back to my original point about my learning to substitute and cook from scratch. Chickpea burgers require eggs and breadcrumbs to bind the burgers together. Since I am still waiting on the package that's somewhere over the Atlantic, I can't make my own breadcrumbs. The big supermarket may or may not have GF bread. So, I did research and found that I can use rolled oats as a binding agent to replace the breadcrumbs. Score! I have GF rolled oats! My life just got easier. 

I don't like to cook but I don't hate it either. I like to eat delicious food so that's what makes me cook. One thing I really hate is to think up what to cook every night. Doing meal planning for the week really saves me of the nightly hassle of staring into the pantry and refrigerator without a single idea of what to cook. Now, I'm trying to save myself even more hassle by planning for the month. It seemed really daunting until I found a tip on a random blog for planning a month of meals -  do themes. For example, salad every Monday, soup every Tuesday, ethnic every Wednesday, and so on. You only need to find 4 recipes/ideas for each theme. My life just got easier.

You can probably see the recurring theme here: my life just got easier. I am celebrating this. I am thankful for my parents who help me by sending packages and for the Internet for tips and recipes. Very thankful...

By the way, I posted on A's blog about her going off to preschool on her first day today. Check it out!