Spring Clean Eats: Day 17, Experimenting

Grain free granola, blueberries, coconut creamSame old breakfast which was totally delicious and filling!

Don’t worry, I’ll be sharing my recipe for the granola and the coconut cream sauce once the challenge is over!

Yesterday was pretty exciting around here, it turned into an impromptu kitchen day full of new stuff and experimenting.

  • Made stock
  • Roasted beets, prepping them for salads
  • Boiled some eggs
  • Cooked up some collards

I didn’t have a full lunch while I was in the kitchen, I snacked.

Califia Farms Almond Coconut Milk

First I tried out a new to me product, it’s almond and coconut milk by Califia Farms.  I’m still debating the dairy in my coffee.  Do I give it up or go strictly grass-fed?  Anyway as I was looking at milk alternatives at the store I spotted this line of almond milks.

One of my biggest hesitations going to back to factory made almond/soy/coconut milks is that they contain a lot of extra ingredients.  Preservatives and thickeners and all kinds of stuff I don’t really want.  This is why milk is more appealing at the moment because it’s just milk.  Period.

I looked the ingredients over on the Califia Farms almond milks and they are amazing.  They contain nothing but almonds and water.  Score! So I bought the almond and coconut milk combo.

smoothie

It’s definitely different tasting but it’s not bad.  I decided to test it out in a smoothie.

  • 2C Almond Coconut Milk
  • 1C Frozen Blueberries
  • 1 Frozen Banana
  • 1 Large handful of spinach

Blend, makes 2 smoothies.

This was really sweet!  I probably could have used more spinach and either just blueberries or just a banana and it would have tasted just fine.  I definitely liked the milk alternative though.  I’m going to give their other flavors a try as well and experiment with it a little more.

Hardboiled eggs in water

I also snacked on a hardboiled egg (sitting in cold water after cooking) and an apple.

After doing all that it was time to start working on dinner.  Scott and I both are missing pizza and seeing commercials for it doesn’t help.   I decided to increase my cooking skills and play around with a grain-free pizza dough.

I found this recipe by The Domestic Man and used that as a base.  I made only a couple of changes (and kept my fingers crossed it would still work).

For the dough the changes I made were:

  • 1/2C milk instead of 1/4C Cream + 1/4C Water
  • 1/4tsp Garlic Powder and 1/4tsp Italian Seasoning instead of 1/4tsp dried oregano
  • 1/4C Tapioca Starch and 1/2C Almond Meal instead of 3/4C grated Parmesan

The recipe split the dough and made two pizzas.  I greased up a baking sheet with some butter and made this into one pizza.

The dough was interesting! I’ve never used tapioca starch before so I had no idea what to expect.  It’s smooth but it doesn’t really stick to your hands and you can manipulate how you like.

This wasn’t a dough I could roll out.  Instead I dumped the dough onto the baking sheet and spread it with my fingers until it filled the sheet. This took some time but it worked.  I made sure to make the dough thin but not have holes.

Grain free pizza

I followed the directions on baking and walked away with a pretty good looking pizza!

Grain Free pizza

You can see that this is a very thin crust.  It had a light chewy texture to it.  I didn’t go crazy with toppings because I had never worked with dough like this before and I didn’t know how it would turn out.  I still wouldn’t load it down with toppings but it could definitely handle more.

I would like to play around with the idea of a grain-free pizza dough, something that has a yeast base and could be rolled out and cooked on a pizza stone.  Can it be done?  I don’t know but I’d like to experiment and see!

Yesterday was a pretty good day!

 

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