Who doesn’t love pancakes?!?! When done right, they are fluffy, slightly sweet, and go perfectly with some maple syrup and a delicious fruit compote.

This is my go-to pancake recipe. It pairs well with any type of fruit compote, or just plain maple syrup!

This recipe was another happy accident of mine. One Easter, I needed to make a vegan pasta dish for dinner. I thought that changing the cooking liquid for pasta would bring it more flavor. I had no idea that using non-dairy milk would create a thick sauce that reminded me of an Alfredo.

The great part of this recipe is that it is completely customize-able. You can use any non-dairy milk available, and any vegetables that you have on hand. I’ve made this with fresh spring peas and cashew milk, with broccoli and coconut milk, and almond milk with asparagus and leeks.

The combinations are truly endless!

 

There is something inherently comforting about beans. I don’t quite know what it is, but making beans (especially from dried), is a labor of love and patience.

There are also SO MANY varieties of beans, and SO MANY USES. Almost infinite. Beans can be used in soups, stews, dips, and event desserts!

This particular recipe features beans, however, at their best – on their own, subtly spiced, featuring the texture we all know and love. That, and it is incredibly easy to put together. Add meat if you wish to make this a omnivorous meal!

Feel free to make beans from dried – soak in salted water overnight, drain and rinse thoroughly, and cook in InstantPot with onion and spices using “beans/chili” setting.

This is a great recipe to make in bulk for meal prepping as well!

 

This is one of the easiest pastas that one could make! It’s great in bulk, and keeps well in the refrigerator too. This was one of my “Meal Prep” Recipes I originally shared on Instagram, but I wanted to share it here as well.

You can easily use canned ingredients in lieu of fresh, if canned is not available. The amount of each ingredient can also be tweaked to suit your own needs/tastes. Which, makes it a great recipe for those seeking to learn more about flavors in the kitchen!

I also added one of my favorite seasonings, called Artemnesia: THE Italian, from The Fig and the Knife. This incredibly talented chef ships her amazing spice blends all over the nation, and the spice blends that she makes truly enhance any dish. You can find her stuff here.

 

Once again, here’s a recipe that I started with one vision, and that vision accidentally became something else.

I originally intended this to be a creamy mushroom chowder. But, in the end, I didn’t want to add the cream and change the flavors, because it was THAT GOOD.

It was also super easy to make, and a 1-pot meal (which is great for clean up!))

For this recipe, I used a medley of mushrooms, including oyster mushrooms and king trumpets (they look cool for the photos – I did it for the ‘Gram). Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what type of mushrooms you use here, they’ll all be good!

If you are making your own stock, might I suggest the following recipe:

1 piece of kombu
2 carrots, cut into chunks
1 onion (halved, with skin)
15 dried mushrooms (I used shiitake and porcini)
3-4 parsley sprigs
1 gallon water

Simmer ingredients in a stock pot, until reduces by 1/3^rd. Season to taste.

The kombu gives a delightful oceanic aroma to the broth, which reinforces the whole “chowder” vibe (which, this isn’t a chowder, technically, but it is inspired by one), and adds an additional layer of umami.

If you want to use boxed mushroom stock, that works just as well!

I’ve done keto. While it wasn’t particularly the most pleasant experience for me, it did force me to be a little more creative in my cooking, and I wanted to pass along some tricks to you. 

So, I put together this “chicken tenders and fries” recipe because no one should be without something crunchy and textured, even eating according to the ketogenic diet.

Shredded coconut makes a great crunchy coating for chicken. The trick is getting the coconut to stick without using flour, eggs, or dairy.

Enter coconut milk. Coating the chicken in coconut milk serves not only as a dairy/egg-free way to ensure that the coconut evenly coats the chicken, but it also keeps the chicken moist, and gives the chicken a sweetness that balances out the spice and smokiness of the peppers. 

All in all, this chicken is a great way to get some crunch in while packing a delicious flavor punch. Enjoy!

I’m still over here, clinging onto soup season, even though the weather is getting warmer.

I love soup so much – it has so much versatility, you can build so much flavor into it, and you can add a metric ton of veggies to your meal without making the meal unbalanced. It’s a beautiful sorcery.

But, the weather is getting warmer, and sometimes curling up with a bowl of hot soup when it’s warm outside isn’t the most pleasant experience.

Gazpacho is a traditional Spanish soup that is served cold, and it is thickened with day-old bread. I love the idea of gazpacho, because it is full of flavor, but I have a confession to make: the concept of wet bread makes me nauseous. There are certain things/textures that just set me off – this is one of them. 

That also being said, since it’s “paleo week,” using bread is off the table (yes, I pay attention to that stuff. I like cohesion). There is a variant of a gazpacho soup called a white gazpacho soup that is made from white grapes and uses almonds to thicken instead of bread, which is what inspired me to look at different nut thickeners as a means to make this recipe paleo. Arizona is known for its pecans, so that was a natural choice. From there, it was just a matter of finding flavors to compliment those pecans.

The result was AMAZING!

Let me be clear, this is not a gazpacho recipe. This is a cold soup recipe that is inspired by a gazpacho. I, in fact, used different flavor profiles to give this soup a more “Southwest” vibe. Also, in an effort to make this recipe easy and effortless, I didn’t peel any of the vegetables, and I only soaked the pecans for about an hour – so, the soup doesn’t have that velvety texture of a gazpacho, either. I actually like it much better that way – it gives the dish more texture.

This cold soup is paired with a warm cauliflower rice (purple, because, that’s what I got in my CSA box) that is full of fresh herbs, which provides a nice temperature and texture contrast. And, honestly, I got bored of chicken, so we got some shrimp from our local fish market, and boom, we had a dish!

This dish can be ready in under an hour, and requires very little cooking. Perfect as the days get warmer and we all want to be outside more!

A note on some of the specialty ingredients: The two ingredients that you might have difficulty finding outside of Arizona are wolfberry jam, mesquite flour, and pichuberries. All of these I get from our local farmers market, and the jam is sweetened with honey (and therefore is paleo). If you can’t find wolfberry jam, tomato jam will work (although it most likely won’t be paleo). Want to skip the jam all together? Add honey to your soup, to taste. For the pichuberries, you can substitute mango (or forego them altogether). The mesquite flour is available on Amazon, though if you aren’t going to use it all the time, it may not be a worthwhile investment. If that is the case, you can substitute 1 teaspoon brown sugar.

I hope you enjoy!

If there’s one thing that is 100% my comfort food, it is a salad.

When I am feeling awful for whatever reason, a good salad always makes me feel better.

I love this recipe because, for the most part, it utilizes the whole plant – everything from the greens in the pesto to the traditional vegetable in the salad.

The dressing by itself is very acidic, so it really needs the pesto to balance it. 

There is a local purveyor of weld-foraged foods who supplied the lemongrass syrup for this recipe, and ingredients for many of my other recipes (Sonoran Scavengers). If you don’t have lemongrass syrup at your disposal, substitute 1T honey and the juice of 1 more lemon (2T).

You don’t HAVE to cook your beets beforehand. Though, note that raw beets are slightly bitter, so if you are not a fan of bitter foods, I recommend that you peel, chop, and roast the beets in the oven at 350 until they are tender, and cool completely before adding to the salad.

This is such a fun recipe because it is herby, earthy, bright, and light all at the same time. It’s so much fun to eat! I love that the pesto uses both the carrot tops and the beet greens, so that none of the plant is wasted. And, bonus, it’s not super hard to make either.

Anyone remember that moment in Return of the King where Aragorn looks into the Palantir and says, “Long have you sought me. Long have I eluded you…”

?

Just me? I mean, I’m not the only one who has totally memorized that movie, right?

Oh.

Well, that’s me and anything that uses GF flour and is boiled.

I have the same issue with pasta, gnocchi, and pretty much anything that is submerged in water – it comes out, well, mushy. There’s no gluten to bind it, and xantham gum just doesn’t do it here.

That being said, I have always had this weird obsession with making chicken and dumplings soup – even though I’ve never actually had it. I have no idea why, perhaps it’s that everyone around me raves about this or that chicken and dumpling soup recipe, and whenever I have tried to make anything resembling a boiled amount of flour, I have failed miserably. We always want what we can’t have, right?

So, after much experimentation, and many, many failures, I am happy to report that I figured it out! I actually came across a different recipe that said cooking the dumplings in boiling water is actually what makes them break apart – so, I simmered them (separately, since I wanted the broth for this recipe to be clear) for way longer than I thought was necessary. They ended up taking about 20 minutes to cook through, but, NO MUSH! Well, there’s mush, but the right amount.

I also added finely ground cornmeal to the AP flour to give it some crunch. With the umami-heavy broth and the cabbage, the end result was that the soup tasted like a TAMALE. Not intentional, but OMG SO GOOD (what can I say, I live in the Southwest…).

Don’t be afraid of the amount of Asian ingredients in the broth – the broth is versatile enough to be used for a variety of different flavor profiles. Dried shiitake mushrooms are incredibly affordable as well and will last for a long time on your shelf (though I tend to go through them very quickly). If you are not a fan of miso, you can definitely leave it out, though the broth isn’t very miso-y at the end.

I would definitely recommend roasting the vegetables in this recipe – it brings an extra dimension of flavor to the broth. Wait to adjust the seasoning (salt) until you have reduced the broth as much as you wanted – you don’t want a super salty broth.

If you want to skip making the broth altogether, a good vegetable broth can be used.

For the recipe in the picture, I used Lion’s Mane mushrooms (yes, you can cook with them), since I have an incredible mushroom maker (?) in my network. You can use any kind of mushrooms that you have handy!

Enjoy this hearty and comforting soup!

Want a SUPER easy/fast supper that tastes amazing and is interesting to eat and affordable?

Thai Curry. 

PS – there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with buying pre-made curry paste – curry paste is fantastic. It keeps for a really long time, and makes preparing curries efficient and easy.

This particular curry I threw together in about 20-30 minutes, with leftover ingredients from my weekly CSA box. You need 2 saucepans and a sheet pan for the oven – that’s it!

If you don’t like super acidic foods, you can always leave the pickled cabbage out, and add a squeeze of lime into your curry just before serving.

In terms of cabbage, I used napa cabbage, but really any type of cabbage will do – the cooking time will increase with thicker cabbage, however.

Serve this curry with your favorite protein!