Secret ingredients
Comments Off on Secret ingredientsLast night, I was at Leadership Book Club where we discussed “Lean In – Women, Work and The Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg. Full disclosure – I didn’t read the book, but I didn’t want to miss the fellowship and the food. Besides, I was still able to take part in the lively discussion. And, as with most book clubs, the food and beverages were wonderful. My friend Sandra brought apple crisp with a “secret ingredient”. I could smell cardamom wafting from the kitchen as it heated up. But the ingredient was actually her homemade cranberry sauce (which DID have cardamom in it).
Hey I thought – I have MY homemade cranberry sauce languishing in my refrigerator. So today, I decided to make a gluten-free version of apple crisp. It is a recipe in progress. If you try it, let me know.
Gluten-Free Apple Crisp
Core and thinly slice 5 to 7 apples – I had one BIG Honey Crisp; two Golden Delicious and a bag full of fresh (but small) Cortland apples – I used 2
1 cup Cranberry Sauce (optional) – I would only use homemade
1 425g pkg of Betty Crocker Gluten-Free “Golden” Cake mix
1 tsp cinnamon
3 tbsp of coconut oil (use good quality organic oil)
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Core and slice apples.
Before adding the apples, I sprayed the pan with Coconut Oil and Butter Ghee Cooking Spray. It’s a new product from St Francis Herb Farm that my friend Spencer gave to me to try. It worked well!
Place apples in pan; sprinkle with dry cake mix.
Sprinkle cinnamon over cake mix.
Dollop coconut oil (next time I would definitely melt and drizzle over instead of dolloping here and there)
Bake 30 minutes
Serves 10 – ENJOY
This is definitely “sometimes” food … and I’ve now had apple crisp 2 days in a row! I’ll see if my version freezes well. The dry cake mix has 16 g of sugar per serving. That’s about 4 tsp. And there is some sugar in the homemade cranberry sauce. But spraying the pan with a high quality cooking spray reduced what would normally be ½ cup of butter or coconut oil to 3 tbsp.
Most November issues of magazines are already featuring Christmas Cookies and other goodies. Don’t run away, make a plan. Be sure to eat at least 8 servings of vegetables a day before you treat yourself. If you need help with that, please see my blog from early Oct 2013.
And when it is time for the sometimes foods, keep tweaking family favourites to lower the quantity of sugar. Consider less processed sugars – like maple syrup. Use good fats (never trans fats) but not too much. Keep an eye on serving size.
This way we can have our cake and eat it too.