Sunday, November 19, 2006

Grain-Free Gourmet by Jodie Bager and Jenny Lass

I was very excited to find this cookbook at my local library, since grains are pretty much off the menu for me. However, I haven't ended up trying any of the recipes. The cookbook is geared toward something called the "Specific Carbohydrate Diet" which I was not previously familiar with, and seems oddly named given that people on this diet are not really encouraged to eat any carbs at all aside from those found in fruit. The diet excludes grains, starches, sugar, and lactose. While there are many interesting recipes in here, most of them seem to depend on cheese (which is another food I can't eat - and doesn't really make a lot of sense to me in the context of a lactose-free diet, though the authors claim that cheese is "very low in lactose") and almond flour for baking (which is ludicrously expensive - the authors happen to sell it online for $7 a pound).

If I could buy almond flour in very small quantities, I might consider occasionally using some of these recipes on special occasions if I wanted to bake a pie or something, but given there are far cheaper alternatives to almond flour (such as a mixture of garbanzo and tapioca flour, which we used to make a very decent pie crust on my birthday) I don't really see the point.

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