Lately, several people close to me have been experiencing some digestion…let’s call them “inconveniences.” Bill, my boss got some kind of 24-48 hour stomach bug that was “really uncomfortable.” Kayla, Terrell, Sandy, and Glenn all came down with food poisoning after eating at one of their favorite restaurants. Dixie “The Pug” had to lend her body heat and moral support in order to help Glenn and Sandy recover. Kayla’s pregnant (Yeah!!!!), but that means some foods just don’t sound/smell/taste right. And even Maverick, Kayla and Terrell’s border collie, decided he wanted in on the fun and decided to eat himself some pecans with the shells still on them, which then led to an unfortunate drooling session, no appetite, and a very high vet bill (Kevin and I got the funniest/saddest email from Terrell narrating the whole unfortunate tale; we hope he gets to feeling better).Now, I personally must puke once a year. It’s a tradition. I’ve given up fighting it. However, I haven’t come down sick yet. So, while I await the inevitable, I wanted to look back on some of my alternative food experiments gone wrong. Most of my cooking experiments have not ended in some sort of digestive disaster. But for the one that did, I will just describe the ingredients and not the graphic events that unfolded. Some of you who know me might have heard these stories already, but I thought they were worth mentioning again for posterity sake.
Chewy PancakesBack when I was dating Kevin, we discovered flour made from Tapioca. We thought, “what a cool thing!” A flour that’s not made from wheat or other grain is exactly what I needed at the time. So we ended up with several bags of the stuff and started thinking about what food we’d like to replicate. I love pancakes. I missed pancakes. So we tried to make pancakes with tapioca flour and our current knowledge about regular pancake recipes.
Let’s think about this for a second. What consistency does tapioca pudding have? It’s kind of a Jello or gel like substance, right? So we ended up making something that looked very similar to a pancake, smelled like a pancake, tasted like a pancake, but the consistency was quite “off.” The best tapioca pancake that we came up with was something akin to a round, flat pancake-flavored gummy bear. Would you eat a round, flat pancake flavored gummy bear for breakfast some Saturday morning? Enough said. After some experience with the flour, it’s best left in pudding and, sparingly, in soups and gravy to thicken them up a bit.
Whipped Goats Milk
Kevin and I recently discovered goat milk about a year ago. We’ve been able to find it at Wal-mart and most grocery stores that have any kind of an alternative food section. It’s a little bit stronger than cow milk, but I haven’t had the real thing in so long that it tastes the same to me. We also noticed that you can buy canned evaporated goat milk as well. Since we had such great success at making ice cream by substituting goat milk for cow milk (can’t taste the difference according to Kevin), we thought we’d try our hand at whipped cream.
So we invited our friend from graduate school, Lonie, over and made ice cream out of the refrigerated goat milk and whipped cream out of the evaporated milk. Let’s just say that the canned goat milk has a definite funk to it. I’d equate the taste of this stuff to that grass/dander smell that often hovers around horses, goats, cows and other livestock. Not a pretty picture. If you want to make whipped cream from goat milk, I’d suggest finding the fresh milk with a much higher fat content instead of going the canned route. Just an FYI.
Rapidly Multiplying Cookie Recipe
If you have a cookie recipe that calls for potato flour and you’ve run out of another ingredient required in your recipe, don’t add more potato flour. It’ll turn into burnt mashed potatoes on a pan. You’ll have to add so many more ingredients to compensate, that you’ll make 5 dozen cookies by the time you’re done. That’s what happened to me. They were good but we had them around FOREVER.
Coconut Pizza
About a year after the gooey pancake incident, Kevin and I found a new flour made from coconuts. This stuff smells wonderful and even tastes good by itself if you happen to get some on your hands while baking. We found a great recipe book online where you can make all sorts of dishes from chicken fried steak, to cake. However, before we got the recipe book and before we educated ourselves with the almighty Google, I decided to make a coconut flour pizza crust. I took a really simple no-yeast recipe that calls for water, flour, oil, salt, and baking powder and substituted the wheat flour for coconut. Easy? Yes. It tasted pretty good too (a lot sweeter crust, but still good).
The night that I made the pizza and the next day, I spent a lot of time in the bathroom with what I thought was just a random digestion problem. No big deal. It happens. But it just wasn’t going away. Kevin mentioned that maybe we should look at the nutritional information on the package of flour. Lo and behold, we found our answer! The serving size for coconut flour, according to the back of the back of the bag, is 2 tablespoons. In two tablespoons, you can get 23% of your daily diet of fiber. But, and here's the kicker, we used 2 and 2/3 cups of coconut flour for the pizza crust. I had 3 pieces of pizza (approx. 3/8 of the total pizza). Kevin did the math. With those three pieces of pizza, I ended up with approximately 225% of my daily fiber needs in one meal. If someone didn't know me better, they might think I was trying to kill myself with fiber. Too bad I didn't know about the fiber content until after I had another slice of pizza the next day and decided to experiment with coconut flour in a cookie recipe (I had ten small cookies the next day).
Instead of a Recipe
Above are just a few of the problems we’ve run into while trying to come up with new and tasty recipes. Cooking is a science: its chemistry. So it’s no wonder we’ve had our share of setbacks. If you’ve made a few alternative food recipes yourself, I’d love to hear about them. I’ve enabled the comment section so that you don’t have to have a blog in order to comment on my blog.Instead of providing a recipe for this week, I thought I’d list out some of the alternative foods that I have *successfully* used in replacement of common ingredients. There are many other substitutions out there; this is just the list of ingredients that don’t seem to give me any reaction.
- Allergen: Oils/Butter/Margarine
Substitute: Corn, Coconut, Grapeseed, Sunflower, Nut Oils (i.e. Walnut), Sesame (strong flavor) - Allergen: Wheat Flour
Substitute: Coconut, Gluten-Free All-Purpose, Soy, Potato, Tapioca, Pinto Bean, Chickpea - Allergen: Cereals
Substitute: Corn Flakes (i.e. Frosted Flakes or GV), Buckwheat, Oatmeal - Allergen: Noodles/Pasta/Carbohydrates
Substitute: Corn Spaghetti Short-Grain Sweet Rice, Potatoes - Allergen: Cow Milk
Substitute: Coconut, Goat's Milk, Almond/Soy - Allergen: Artificial Sweeteners
Substitute: Sugar, Splenda, Honey, Agave Nectar, Beet Sugar - Allergen: Chicken Eggs
Substitute: Egg Substitute (preferable), Egg (in limited amounts) - Allergen: Flour Tortilla
Substitute: Corn tortilla, Tapioca Sheets - Allergen: Vinegar
Substitute: Wine Vinegar
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