My little lemon trees appear to have made it through the winter. They both dropped a LOT of leaves when the weather got colder, and I worried that they would both kick the bucket.

You can see the general leaflessness of the Eureka lemon, but a couple of weeks ago I noticed that it was starting to bud like crazy. And those buds are now getting ginormous. Within the next week or so, that sucker will be flowering.

The lemons that were growing on the Meyer lemon tree stopped getting any larger for a while, but they seem to be on the grow again. The Meyer is also budding up, but not as violently as the Eureka. It still has probably a dozen lemons in the works, with the largest ones about the size of a small lime. We’ll see if they continue their journey now that they’ve had a little winter nap.

The other night we attended an awesome concert — They Might Be Giants, with Jonathan Coulton as the opening act. Coulton played the electric guitar (as opposed to the acoustic performance two years ago [and I'm amazed that it's been two years since JoCo visited]), and he was accompanied by a bass player and drummer. A small band, but a band nonetheless. His performance was awesome, as always, and he played many a good song, but it was too darned short.

We hadn’t seen TMBG for years; certainly not since we moved to Florida. They gave a great show, and did some fascinating bits with knit puppets. And we got to see what was probably one of the last public performances of “Marty Beller Mask” ever.

Paul and Storm are also visiting our town this coming Friday. I may have to venture downtown to see them.

I changed the strings on my second-best ukulele, and it sounds much brighter. I think I’ve had this thing for three or four years now, so it was about time for a string change. I’ve special ordered strings for my first-best uke, so I can get the low-g string instead of the high-g. Those should come in later this week. Then I’ll put the used first-best strings on my third-best, littlest uke. Yes, I have three ukuleles. And like cats, I’d have more if I was allowed.

Finally, in the category of tasty things, I made some roasted garbanzo beans (or chickpeas, if you prefer to call them that). I started with the Alton Brown base, then fiddled with the recipe. I ended up soaking the dry beans for at least 16 hours (overnight), then roasting at 375° for about 45 minutes (stirring them around every 15). Instead of his oil-vinegar-spice mix, I just used coconut oil and salt.

With the coconut oil, they smell like movie theater popcorn while they’re cooking. When they’re done, they have the texture of corn nuts, but a flavor similar to roasted pumpkin seeds. Me likey!

This was a surprisingly hard recipe to put together, only because there weren’t all that many recipes to reference on the internet. Half of the chocolate chip cookie recipes that mentioned coconut didn’t use actual coconut — they used coconut oil, or coconut flour (I admit, one of them was mine).

Then you get into the gluten-free world, and my permanent frustration with recipes there: the bulk of them are either dairy-free or totally vegan. That doesn’t fly with me — like Paula Deen, I’m big on butter.

So for this one, I had to use mostly recipes involving wheat flour, then use my old friend science to cobble together a recipe.

Fortunately, I have lots of friends in the baking box who can help. I have the baking box because this apartment doesn’t have all that much kitchen shelf space, so those are full of everyday staples. I think I like the baking box better, anyway — one quick glance and I can see what I have and what I don’t. For dry goods, anyway.

Bear in mind, this recipe is NOT low-carb. In fact, for giggles, I used actual sugar. And the sweetened coconut flakes you get at the grocery store, instead of the unsweetened dry stuff from the Whole Foods. I’ll tell you right off the bat (spoiler alert): these came out a tad bit too sweet. At least for me. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to sweet stuff anymore. Anyhoo, onward!

Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar (probably could have skipped this)
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup + 3 Tbsp coconut flour*
1/4 cup tapioca flour (also known as tapioca starch)
1/4 cup almond meal (also known as almond flour)
1/2 cup sweetened coconut flakes
3/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips**

* I added the extra 3 Tbsp coconut flour at the end, since the batter still seemed a bit wet. This may be due to the Florida humidity. Your mileage may vary.

** I started with a heaping 1/2 cup, then threw a few more in. It’s chocolate, go nuts.

Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs. Add the vanilla, salt, and baking soda. Add the flours one at a time, mixing thoroughly each time.

Bake at 375° for 14-18 minutes.

I could have used my Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-Free Baking Mix on this one, but I felt like cobbling. The coconut flour is one of my favorite foundations, but use too much and it sucks up all the liquid. The tapioca flour adds a springy stretchiness that non-wheat flours lack (it’s used to make the amazing cheesy rolls they serve at the Brazilian steakhouse). And almond meal is always welcome for flavor and texture.

Besides being a little too sweet for me (but probably just right for normal people), these are pretty darned good. The coconut adds a chewiness, and coconut flavor is always welcome in my mouth. Unless it’s mixed with pineapple in a pina colada, but that’s neither here nor there.

Overall, I’ll give them an 8 out of 10. Good texture, good flavor, and next time I think I’ll just cut out the regular sugar.

Now that I have this sweetened coconut, it may be time to make some macaroons. Once these cookies are gone, that is. Which should be soon.

Last time at the grocery store, they didn’t have the Ancient Harvest gluten-free pasta. I checked both Target and Publix, and all either place had was this same purple bag of elbows from Tinkyáda. Usually, the 8-ounce box from Ancient Harvest runs about $3 or $3.50. But this 16-ounce bag of Tinkyáda was a mere $3.99.

Plus, they made a HUGE deal about the good texture. Not mushy. Al dente. Okay, Tinkyáda. We get it.

I was a little leery about the cooking time, for starters. I mean, the Ancient Harvest stuff was just right after 8 minutes in boiling water. But this stuff?

Seriously, 16-17 minutes? Not only does that seem like a really specific amount of time, but it seems like a really long time. And in case you’re wondering, the “Easy and energy-saving method” (which is clearly Easy with a capital E) is printed on the front of the bag. Bring water to a boil, insert pasta, cover and turn off the heat. Wait 20 minutes, then drain. Not so much with a time savings.

Oh, and if you think this packaging reads like Engrish, check out the Tinkyáda website. It’s not quite Dr. Bronner-grade weird, but it’s certainly unusual. The design takes me back to the late ’90s, and the writing doesn’t seem to be from a native English speaker. Though the stuff is made in Ontario, Canada, which I always thought was less French than Quebec. Hm, je ne sais quoi.

Anyway, with vows of such non-mushitude …

Promised by two happy bunnies holding a … gigantic grain of rice?

I had to try it out. I weighed out a 2-ounce serving, got water heating up in my little single-serve saucepan, and got my Tinkyáda on.

Once the elbows hit the water, I had 16 minutes to figure out how to dress the stuff. But really, when presented with elbows, there’s only one logical choice.

That’s right, neon orange. Sorry, marinara and alfredo. Maybe some other time.

(Side note: did you grow up calling it “macaroni and cheese” or “Kraft dinner”? I’d never heard “Kraft dinner” until the Barenaked Ladies discussed it in a song. Maybe that’s a Canadian thing. For some reason, it also makes me think of the battle of “Lik-M-Aid” vs. “Fun Dip”.)

(Oh, and that oven mitt in the background? The groovy orangey yellowy one with even groovier blue innards? I made that.)

Onward. I tested the pasta at 10 minutes and again at 12, and I actually pulled it and strained it at 12. I do like mine with a little bite, and I think the 12-14 zone will be just right. Melted some butter, threw in some cream (yeah, I know you’re supposed to use milk, but I don’t have milk in the house). Then I added the neon orange cheese powder. What I don’t get is how the container encourages me to shake and sprinkle the cheese on stuff, then says the serving size is 2 teaspoons. That would take a LOT of shaking. Anyhoo, I just screwed the cap off and shoved my teaspoon down in there. And I went with 3 teaspoons, because that’s how I roll.

This is really why I should invest in a non-clear bowl for food display purposes. It feels like the mac-n-cheese is hovering over a dish towel. I mean, I guess I could have put the food on one of my white plates, but only a monster would eat mac-n-cheese out of anything other than a bowl (or the pot it was cooked in).

So, how did it taste? CHEEEZY GOOD. And none of the vague rice flavor like the De Boles rice pasta had when I tried it. The pasta itself was mostly flavorless, which for me is a good thing.

As for the texture, it was indeed al dente and not mushy. Maybe one or two more minutes would be even better — I’ll have to play around with the cook time. So good on flavor, texture, and price — 50¢ per serving is a price that the other guys can only match when they’re on sale. I give the Tinkyáda brown rice elbows a solid 9 out of 10 and will certainly use the rest in a variety of tasty ways.

Unless I end up making 8 servings of neon orange.

We just took our first ever cruise.

And it was awesome!

I put 84 pictures up on the Flickr, which is a few too many to put in a blog post. But let it be said, I ate a lot of:

And we did a lot of:

And even partook of some:

And it was totally and completely:

I stayed gluten-free the entire time, and despite stuffing my face with all sorts of deliciousness (and ice cream after almost every meal), I gained less than half a pound. It was only a 4-day cruise, and here it is the next day and I still feel like the world is gently rolling. Hey, vertigo! Cut that crap out! At least while on the boat itself, I didn’t have any problems with motion sickness.

Here’s a link to the Flickr gallery — most pictures by me, but a few by Scott and some by my dad. (You’ll see him and my mom in a few shots, but my mom hates her picture, so I went easy on her.)

Even though our last day’s excursion to Norwegian’s private island was cancelled due to heavy wind and waves, we still had a great time. I read three books, and got some much-needed relaxation done. And now that we know we can handle cruising and we like it, we’ll be keeping our eye out for future voyages. We’re also thinking about JoCo Cruise Crazy in 2013.

That’s right, I’ve made this recipe three times, in three different formats. Each time just tweaking the spice mixture until it was to my satisfaction. Just different cooking times in different cooking vessels.

(Here’s the cookie version from today.)

1 15-oz can of pumpkin puree (pure pumpkin, please — none of that “pie filling” stuff)
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, melted
1/4 cup sweetener*
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp cinnamon
2 tsp allspice
1 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup almond flour

* Normally I use Splenda. This time I used about 3/4 xylitol and 1/4 Splenda. I’m moving over to xylitol for sweetening things, since it would appear that Splenda is even worse for you than originally thought. Xylitol is a sugar alcohol, but less gastrointestinally upsetting than most.

My coconut flour and almond flour are both from Bob’s Red Mill. Love that stuff.

Mix everything together, then either make 20 2-inch cookies, 12 muffins (please use paper muffin cups), or put it in a parchment paper-lined loaf pan for a flat, cuttable loaf (not so much a bread as brownie-like bars).

Bake at 350° for 20 minutes (cookies), 30-35 minutes (muffins), or 60-70 minutes (loaf).

For the cookies, nutritionally:

(per cookie, batch of 20 cookies)
60 calories
4.5g fat
4.25g carbohydrate
- 2g dietary fiber
1.5g protein

This is a recipe that’s forgiving to overcooking — the pumpkin keeps everything moist even if you go a little too long in the oven. I like to put everything in the fridge when done; something about that pumpkin flavor feels like it should be served cold, to me. Plus, moist can be an understatement — even though they’re fully cooked, all of these can have an almost custardy, puddinglike consistency. Refrigeration firms them up a bit.

I also shoved some white chocolate chips into a few of the cookies. They add a nice contrast, but it’s upping the carb count.

We had a discussion about banana bread at work the other day. Mainly it centered on the concept that you can replace the eggs in a banana bread recipe with applesauce. My point was that you’re taking the ONE ingredient in the whole thing that isn’t sugar, and replacing it with more sugar. Bleah.

But since then, I was jonesing for banana bread. So this is what I came up with.

2 ripe bananas, mashed
1/2 stick butter (1/4 cup), softened
1/2 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup almond flour
1/3 cup Splenda
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp xanthan gum
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs

Mix the bejeezus out of it all, then put it into cupcake papers. This made 8 muffins; you could double the recipe for either 16 muffins or a loaf. Bake at 350° for 35 minutes (muffins) or 1 hour (loaf) or until a toothpick comes out clean.

These came out great. I described them to Scott as “like so much Aperture Science cake — delicious and moist.”

They’re not low-carb (How could they be, with bananas?) but they’re moderate carb:

Per muffin (8)
calories: 150
fat: 10g
carb: 13g
– fiber: 4g
protein: 4g

Now I’m trying to come up with other fruit/vegetable matter that could be a good muffin base, since these had the squishy moistness that’s missing in so many gluten-free baked goods. Scott suggested avocado, which … hmm. Seems a bit weird. Certainly canned pumpkin with some pumpkin pie spice might work. What other lower-carb fruits or veggies could be made into muffin or loaf form?

I’m still working on perfecting a recipe. It’s getting better all the time! Chewiness is hard to achieve with gluten-free baking, but these cookies came pretty close.

These aren’t low-carb cookies per se, but they’re lower carb than normal cookies. I’d say roughly half the carbs of a standard wheat-flour-and-white-sugar cookie.

1/2 cup (1 stick) softened butter
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup Splenda
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup + 1 Tbsp coconut flour*
1/4 cup almond flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1 cup chocolate chips (I prefer semi-sweet morsels)

Bake for 10 minutes at 400° F. makes approximately 20 two-inch cookies.

Usually, my coconut flour cookies are more fluffy and cake-like, and not so much chewy. These, while they did puff up a bit, actually did have some chewiness to them. I took them to work and asked my coworkers for feedback. Comments ranged from the simple “Awesome!” to “They’re really moist and chewy” to “These are bake-sale-worthy.”

I think the tapioca flour helps with the chewiness. After all, it can be used to make the fantastic Pao de Queijo — the gummy cheesy little rolls served at Brazilian steakhouses.

This makes a smallish batch — the chocolate chip cookie recipe on the side of the Toll House bag requires two sticks of butter, so I’d call this a half-batch, easily doubled.

I prowled around the internets for a gluten-free cupcake recipe, so I could celebrate my birthday with a little baked good or two. Let me tell you, friends and foes, it’s very hard to find a gluten-free cupcake recipe that’s not also vegan. Unacceptable, I say! I demand butter in everything. And egg makes any baking better. So I cobbled together what I could.

My first attempt was a small batch, just to see what happened. Here’s what I mixed:

1/3 cup coconut flour
1/3 cup gluten-free baking mix (I used Bob’s Red Mill)
1/2 cup Splenda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp xanthan gum (helps with gluten-free cohesion)

1/3 stick softened butter
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup milk (actually, I used 1/4 cup water and 1/4 cup half-and-half, just because that’s what I had on hand)

It came out really thick, more of a dough than a batter. Still, I tossed it in some cupcake liners in my muffin pan (and I also tried one with no paper, just buttering the pan).

Bake at 350° F for 20 minutes.

They came out really jagged and rough looking. As you can see, they’re the ones in the back:

So I popped them out of the pan, put them on a rack to cool, and mixed up a second batch of batter. It’s pretty similar to the first, actually:

1/2 cup gluten-free baking mix (Bob again)
1/3 cup Splenda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp xanthan gum

1/3 stick softened butter
1 egg
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup half-and-half (straight this time, not cut with water)

It made a much runnier batter. It cuts down on the dry goods (1/2 cup instead of the 2/3 cup total) and cut out the much thirstier coconut flour. Which also makes this a higher-carb cupcake. They baked the same: 350° F for 20 minutes. You can see from the picture above that batch two, the bottom ones, are smoother and puffier.

I frosted both batches with regular old buttercream. You know, the one that’s always printed on the side of the confectioner’s sugar box. Powdered sugar, butter, vanilla, milk (or half-and-half, if that’s what you have — as long as it’s not that awful fat free half-and-half).

Neither one had the texture of a wheat-based cake. But they were both pretty good. Funny thing is, both Scott and I liked the jagged first batch a little better. For me, it was almost the same texture as an old-fashioned donut — firm on the outside, really soft and squooshy on the inside. So with some tinkering (and a low-carb glaze recipe), I might be able to come up with a gluten-free, relatively low-carb donut recipe.

Still, they were all pretty tasty. And the batches were so small (5 cupcakes each), I don’t run the risk of eating a dozen at a time.

I have my meatballs totally dialed in. They’re not only delicious, but they’re also super tender. And gluten-free to boot!

Start with the non-meat ingredients:

1/2 cup potato flakes
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/3 cup water (or beef stock)
3 Tbsp dry parsley
3 Tbsp chopped garlic
1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp thyme
1/4 tsp basil
2 eggs

Mix all that together so you get a spicy, gummy paste.

Then add 1 pound of ground beef and 1 pound of ground mild Italian sausage. You could go with the spicier sausage if you want, but I’m not that adventurous.

Smoosh it all together with your hands. I wear my always-useful powder-free disposable vinyl gloves for such things. Buying a big box of them was the best cooking/cleaning/hair-coloring move I ever made.

Roll into meatballs. Depending on size, you’ll get 30-45 of them. I like them about this big:

Where one can nest perfectly inside a tablespoon. That gets me around 40 meatballs. Again, I’m baking them on a wire rack above a foil-lined cookie sheet. I guess you don’t need the foil, if you don’t mind cleaning meat drips from your cookie sheet. Me, I’m a fan of easier cleanup. Since I still have to scrub the wire rack.

Bake at 400° for 15 minutes. Middle-ish rack in the oven.

After they came out of the oven, I tossed a few into some defrosted and reheated meat sauce and let them bubble while I cooked up a single serving of noodles.

I found the Ancient Harvest quinoa pasta on sale at the Whole Foods, at 2 boxes for $4. I used the ol’ food scale to measure out 2 ounces of dry pasta, which as always, doesn’t look like that much.

I then counted — turns out 2 ounces is just about 50 “garden pagodas”. Just like the De Boles “spaghetti style” pasta, I wonder if there’s some non-wheat reason why they can’t call this stuff radiatori. And it shows you how much wheaty pasta I used to eat, that I know the name of this shape.

Anyhoo, while the pasta is gluten-free (made from quinoa flour, corn flour, dried bell pepper and dried spinach [for the colors]), it’s certainly not a low-carb food. That 2-ounce serving packs 205 calories, 46 grams of carbohydrate, and only 4 grams of fiber. Still, eating it didn’t bloat me up afterward, and no next-day weight gain from water retention, so all is well. It boils for 6-9 minutes (I went the whole 9, after my De Boles experiments) with the strict warning DO NOT OVERCOOK. I wonder how gummy and/or gross these things get if you let them boil for too long. There’s also a warning that the water will turn yellow from the corn starches, which indeed it did.

At 9 minutes, the texture was just right. A very authentic pasta feel, with the slightest al dente bite. The plain white noodles really didn’t have a flavor of their own, which is a nice contrast from the distinctive rice flavor of the De Boles. The colorful noodles also tasted like standard red-pepper or spinach wheat noodles. Since it’s been a number of years, I’d clearly forgotten that I’m not the biggest fan of those pasta flavors. Next time I’d get this stuff, but in an all-plain variety. Looks like Ancient Harvest also makes spaghetti, linguine, elbows, shells, and rotelle (which they can say, but they can’t say radiatori?!) among others.

Delicious! I’m giving the plain noodles a 9 out of 10.

This plate is so full, by the way, because we got rid of most of our large (10″) plates and now almost exclusively use the Corelle luncheon plate (8-1/2″) for everything. You can get them at Wal*Mart for a couple of bucks apiece, if you don’t have a nearby Corning/Revere factory store. Which we don’t. Seriously, Orlando is the home of outlet malls, and there’s no Corningware to be had. Absurd! Anyhoo, we mixed-and-matched geometric patterns.

I packed away the rest of the meatballs, putting some in the fridge and some in the freezer. They microwave beautifully from both places.

Second attempt, with some recipe adjustments. I made the balls a little smaller, and put them up on a wire rack over a foil-lined cookie sheet so they wouldn’t be swimming in their own released fat. I also used less fatty beef, but that’s primarily because it’s what was on sale this week. And I added another egg.

2 lbs. ground beef (93/7)
1/2 cup potato flakes
1/3 cup water
2 eggs
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
3 Tbsp chopped garlic
3 Tbsp parsley
1 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp oregano
1/8 tsp thyme

This time, I did things in a different order as well. First, I threw the potato flakes in my big bowl, and put the water on top to hydrate the potatoes. Mixed that up, then added everything else but the beef. I stirred it all together so it was one big sludgy mix of seasoning. Then I tossed the ground beef on top, and worked everything together with my hands. I think making the sludge (I really should write restaurant menu copy, right?) helped in letting me see when everything was fully combined.

Rolled out 40 of the little guys, roughly an inch and a half across.

Baked the same as last time: 400° F for 15 minutes.

This was a much improved batch. Still tender and juicy, but I didn’t have to dig them out of the pools of fat. The wire rack was easy as pie to clean off. But even though I increased all of the seasonings, we both still thought they could use MORE flavor. Even though I tossed in almost everything but the kitchen sink this time.

Maybe more salt. Certainly more garlic, in both varieties. Probably more chili powder and pepper. But these are totally edible. I portioned them out in sets of eight, and threw some in the fridge and some in the freezer. We’ll see how they re-heat.