I made a super yummy *grain free* french toast using Eggplant!

I used a large eggplant. Parts of this eggplant contained seeds and some parts were seedless. The seedless turned out much better and had a more “french toast” texture. The “toast pieces” with seeds had more of an eggplant mushy texture.

If I remember correctly small Italian eggplants have less seeds and therefore would be suited better for this recipe.

Grain Free Eggplant French Toast Recipe

1 eggplant (or 3-4 small italian eggplant)
salt
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
stevia to taste
butter

Peel eggplant and cut into slices. Sprinkle a small amount of salt on the eggplant. Turn eggplant pieces over and sprinkle a small amount on the other side. Let eggplant rest for two minutes. Mix eggs, vanilla and stevia in a bowl. Melt butter in frying pan on med. heat.

Put your eggplant in egg mixture and poke holes into it with a knife or fork. This allows the mixture to permeate the eggplant. Cook “french toast” until golden brown. Then flip and do the same on the other side. Top your french toast with cinnamon, nutmeg, cream cheese, cocoa, nut butter or low sugar fruit.

This recipe is inspired and modified from Whole Approach message boards.

Enjoy!

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade.

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I love coconut oil. It is wonderful for many things. It is also one of the healthiest oils to use. It is a stable oil and does not oxidize easily and can be left at room temperature for up to two years. It is has antimicrobial, antifungal, antiviral and antiprotozoal properties. It is also great for fat loss as it stimulates metabolism and suppresses appetite. Another great property of coconut oil is that it can protect against heart disease by raising the HDL (good cholesterol) and improving the total cholesterol ratio.

So how can you incorporate coconut oil into you daily life?

1. Low Carb Coconut bread
2. Coconut in milk
3. Coconut Chicken Curry
4. Coconut Herb Buns
5. Coconut Pancakes (This recipe comes from CHEESESLAVE but I made a savory version of this pancake using my garden zucchinis that I will post soon)
6. Low Carb Breakfast Porridge
7. As a toothpaste
8. As a skin lotion (I use coconut oil with some peppermint essential oil)

Share your thoughts! How do you use coconut oil?

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I created a low carb grain free bread recipe that my kids and I enjoy. The bread toasts really nicely and has a very light texture. Kind of a blend between bread and cake.

Coconut Bread Recipe

1 cup of ground dessicated coconut
1/4 ground golden flax meal
5 pastured organic eggs
1/4 cup of coconut oil
1/4 teaspoon of baking soda
1/4 teaspoon of salt
2 drops of NOW non bitter stevia

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix together coconut, flax, salt and baking soda. Mix well enough so most of the lumps are gone. Add wet ingredients (eggs, stevia, coconut oil). Mix well again. Place batter in a buttered pan. Bake for 30-35 minutes until knife comes out clean.

Note: From what I have read the essential oils in the flax seed do not get destroyed.

This bread is really good. It has a very mild coconut flavour but in a not offensive kind of way. Nut butters go very well with this bread.

My lunch consisted of a cheese sandwich with fresh dill and tomato. You hardly notice the coconutty taste.

Enjoy!

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday hosted by Cheeseslave.

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Did you know that 1 out of 150 children will be diagnosed with Autism? That is a staggering statistic. Jenny McCarthy’s son was one of those children diagnosed with Autism. She wrote a book about their journey to recovery titled Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey In Healing Autism.

I picked this book up because I knew that part of her son’s recovery was through healing gut issues. Specifically Candida Albicans overgrowth.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Actually I could barely put it down. The book starts with how Evan got diagnosed and chronicles his healing. At the beginning Jenny is so traumatized with her son’s seizures that she allows the doctors to make the decisions for her son. She soon realizes that she has to go with her own gut feeling and starts to become more informed by asking the question “Why is this happening?” The doctors continually just wanted to treat the symptoms (ban aid solutions) and not the true cause of the illness.

Today her son is fully recovered from autism. He has gone through behavioural programs, diet changes (gluten free, casein free), as well as healing from Candida Yeast. She touches on Candida near the end of this book. Her son Evan started to regress and have Obsessive Compulsive Behaviour (OCD). His behaviour would get so bad that she would get scared of him. An example of this behaviour: Evan would bang his head on the floor for hours.

Evan had gotten a stool culture that had showed severe yeast overgrowth. Evan`s DAN doctor (Defeat Autism Now) thought that that his OCD behaviour was a result of this yeast. So Evan went on Diflucan (anti fungal medicine) and a sugar free diet (including eliminating fruit). The Candida die-off period was extremely hard on Evan. He had physical die off symptoms as well as behavioural outrage, teeth grinding and in Jenny’s own words “he went full-blown Exorcist on me”.  After two weeks of Candida die-off Evan had a major breakthrough in regards to his Autism.

Evan stopped taking Diflucan after a while and switched to the probiotic Threelac.

I was hoping to get more medical information out of this book. However it is more of a mother’s emotional story and her struggles in parenting an autistic child (and what happens in a marriage when a child is sick). She does have some websites that she refers to in her reference section that I have yet to check out.

It is great to find out that doctors that treat autism are finding the gut/brain connection and are actually treating it!

You can find out what my doctor said about the candida/gut/brain connection at this post.

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I purchase some yummy organic organ meats from a local farmer very close to my house. Unfortunately when the poor animals went to the abattoir they did not individually wrap the organs to sell separately. Instead they just dumped random parts in a plastic bag. I knew I could be getting a wonderful surprise when I purchased them.

I am asking for some help in what to do with this. I desperately do not want to cook it up and feed it to the dogs.

I am currently also making a homemade chicken stock. I am apprehensive of adding this to my crock pot of chicken bones. The ears have hairs on them and I do not want them to fall out in my broth while cooking. I am wondering if this can happen because when they pluck chickens they put the chicken in hot water to loosen the feathers.

Any thoughts?

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade

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Do you ever wonder if your body has an immediate effect after eating a fast food meal? This news clip shows a visual effect of increased triglycerides and shows how much harder your heart has to work to pump blood. Go watch this 2 min news clip and come back to share your thoughts.

In this news video about fast food and its affect on triglycerides they demonize saturated fat. But we know that from this study and many low carb dieters that triglyceride levels go down when restricting carbohydrates.

Here Dr. Briffa writes about a group of McMaster University researchers in Ontario who reviewed all the scientific nutritional evidence linking to heart disease. They found saturated fats to not be on that list.

Some dietary factors were associated with an increased risk of heart disease. These were:

A higher intake of trans-fatty acids
A higher intake of foods of high glycaemic index or high glycaemic load

Please note the absence of saturated fat in this list. In other words, this review shows the totality of the evidence does not support a link between saturated fat and heart disease. By the way, higher intakes of meat and eggs were not associated with an increased risk of heart disease either. And neither was total fat consumption.

Most fast food is detrimental to your health because of rancid vegetable fats like canola, corn and soy. These oils are the omega 6 oils that are highly unstable.

One reason the polyunsaturates cause so many health problems is that they tend to become oxidized or rancid when subjected to heat, oxygen and moisture as in cooking and processing. Rancid oils are characterized by free radicals-that is, single atoms or clusters with an unpaired electron in an outer orbit. These compounds are extremely reactive chemically. They have been characterized as “marauders” in the body for they attack cell membranes and red blood cells and cause damage in DNA/RNA strands, thus triggering mutations in tissue, blood vessels and skin. Free radical damage to the skin causes wrinkles and premature aging; free radical damage to the tissues and organs sets the stage for tumors; free radical damage in the blood vessels initiates the buildup of plaque. Source: The Skinny on Fats By Mary Enig PhD and Sally Fallon

Trans fats have also been used in the fast food industries because they are cheap and make food taste good as well as increasing the shelf life of vegetable oils. Although some cities have banned the use of trans fats for frying deep fried food, restaurants may still serve margarine instead of real butter. Trans fats can also be hidden in pastries, peanut butter, pizza dough and cookies. So unless you are reading labels on your fast food, you can’t be certain that you are eating a trans fat free meal. Trans fats can have a negative effect on heart disease, cancer, diabetes, immunity, reproduction and lactation, and obesity. Source: Mary Enig PhD  Dangers of Trans Fats.

Some healthy choices for restaurant food:

• is baked fish with lemon and herbs
• bunless burgers (check for fillers)
• grilled steaks
• baked chicken
• vegetable stir fry’s minus rice cooked in butter

There must be more healthy options but I can’t think of anything else.

My question for you:

What are your healthy restaurant food options?

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday hosted by Kelly The Kitchen Kop

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It has been months since I have done any Weight Lifting, High Intensity Interval Training or Long Duration Cardio. I still take walks ranging from 30-45min on an almost daily basis.

There are some good reasons for this:

1. It was causing me stress
2. I was doing some of the exercises at night after the kids went to sleep and the physical exertion was disturbing my sleep. (Morning workouts just don’t fit into my schedule)
3. I was not seeing results even though I was lifting weights and running for 45min/day 5-6 times per week.
4. Adrenal fatigue – though the doctor did some tests (not sure what) but said that my thyroid looks fine and adrenal function is linked to thyroid function. The doctor definitely did not do any comprehensive testing but just looked for some “markers” which he did not find. However I do suffer from insomnia, stress, anxiety and other such things.
5. Hard exercise causes a physical stress on the body. When the body is already stressed out this extra stress can actually be harmful instead of helpful.

Here is a good video that Paul Check gives on Adrenal Fatigue

I don’t know why I feel so let down by this. It just seems like I have tried so many exercise programs and I finally found one that I was having fun with and one that I initially saw results with. But the results stopped and the fun faded.

Yoga/stretches and deep breathing are the exercises that I need to work on right now.

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I love experimenting with new foods. Tongue is something that I remember eating as a kid because it was so different. It is a traditional food as our ancestors ate all parts of the animals. I took pictures of my cooking adventure so If you don’t want to know anything about pork tongue then you don’t need to read any further.

I googled how to cook it and am glad that I started out with pork and not cow! Cow tongue happens to be huge and very ugly. Pigs tongue is much smaller and less intimidating.

Here is my chronicles of cooking pork tongue. Unfortunately I did not do anything to make this recipe exciting.

Pork Tongue

Raw Pork Tongue

Boil Pork Tongue for 3-4 hours

Cooked pork tongue

Peel the skin off the tongue and chop into slices.

I just put on some home made garlic and herb butter and salt and pepper. I did not make the garlic and herb butter but I believe there is garlic, parsley and chives in it.

This was a great tasting meat! I happen to really like it. It is soft and has a great ability to become a meat salad that you can flavour in any way you like. You can sauce it up, dress it up, or just eat it plain.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday hosted by CHEESESVE

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