Ice Cream! Dairy Free and GAPS friendly.

I have desperately missed ice cream. 

Sorbet doesn't do it for me. 

I have enjoyed Coconut Bliss for several years now, but their flavors are a bit limited, and now that I'm on the GAPS diet, I am not supposed to have agave as a sweetener. My boyfriend found a sugar free and lactose free ice cream, but alas, it doesn't say anything about being casein free, and casein is also a problem for many of us with serious GAPS gut issues. I became determined to make my own ice cream, and fantasized about purchasing an ice cream maker for months before finally breaking down and getting one.

These are my first experiments with my ice cream maker. The base ingredients I am using are as follows:


Base ingredients:
1 can light coconut milk
1 can 100% coconut cream (from Trader Joe's)
[you can probably use to cans of normal coconut milk instead of those two above]
1/4-1/2 cup honey
3-5 servings of stevia
1/2 teaspoon sea salt


I've made three different flavors so far:

1. Chai (Banana)
I adapted this recipe from one I found online. It called for cashew butter, which I did not have, so I used bananas. The bananas do impart a moderate flavor, but the chai is so strong that is still a lovely banana-chai recipe.

Additional ingredients:
1/2 cup cashew butter or 1-2 bananas

4 bags of chai tea, or 4 teaspoons of loose chai tea
some fresh ginger
teaspoon vanilla


Instructions:

1. Pour the can of coconut milk into a small sauce pan and heat on medium. Add the chai tea and ginger. Simmer for  a few minutes, whisking frequently.
2. Strain the tea out of the coconut milk, and throw out the tea.
3. Add all remaining ingredients to a blender; mix until creamy. 
4. Place in fridge for 1-2 hours (or overnight) to cool. 
5. Mix in ice cream maker for 20-30 minutes. 
6. Eat immediately or store in freezer.

2. Lemon Basil 

We had some Meyer lemons from my mom's tree and some basil we got for free at the farmer's market.

Additional ingredients:
Juice of 3-6 lemons
Zest of 1-3 lemons
Handful of basil

Instructions:

1. Add a little bit of the lemon juice, lemon zest, and basil at a time. I added the maximum amount listed and it was pretty intense, but good. Some might prefer a more subtle flavor. 
2. Blend everything together. 
3. Place in fridge for 1-2 hours (or overnight) to cool. 
4. Mix in ice cream maker for 20-30 minutes. 
5. Eat immediately or store in freezer.

3. Fruit and Mint

You really can't go wrong with fresh mint and just about any kind of fruit. I had some apricots and strawberries that were on the edge, so I threw them in together. Tastes like a summer day!

Instructions:

1. Combine fruit and mint to taste with base ingredients. 
2. Blend everything together. 
3. Place in fridge for 1-2 hours (or overnight) to cool.  
4. Mix in ice cream maker for 20-30 minutes. 
5. Eat immediately or store in freezer.

I want to make more tea flavors: matcha, earl grey and many more. Different nuts and/or fruits can be used. It's hard to mess it up. The coconut also has a fairly strong flavor, so ingredients that go well with coconut are probably best though. Just add ingredients a little bit at a time in the blender, and get it to the right taste and a nice creamy consistency.  The banana did give the Chai one a better consistency, so I am going to try to think of more banana friendly flavors and also try different flavors with cashew butter, which is more subtle than other nut butters. I also want try it using almond milk with coconut cream, just to mute the coconut a little, but then, it might get weird if there are too many flavors.  Another thing to try - fermented coconut or almond milk. If it's got probiotics, it won't feel so indulgent!

Buen provecho! 

Surviving Stage 1 of the GAPS Diet

I did it! 

Five days of only broth, soup, boiled meat and squashes and veggies (only non or low starchy ones) and Sauer Kraut juice. Those are the stage 1 allowed food. For a full list of the foods allowed at the 6 different stages of the GAPS introduction diet, see a nice page put together by Health, Home and Happiness.

Alright,  I might have eaten a few other things not on that list. This diet is so challenging,  and hard to stick to and yet there are very few sources of support for how to deal with this. However,  my only cheats were foods that are allowed on the full GAPS diet (stage 7): fruit, honey and the kombucha drink. Those things don't sound too bad right?  

The reason the Full GAPS diet allows fruit and honey because they mostly have monsugars. Refined sugar, or table sugar, is a di-sugar, which actually takes work for the body to digest. Monosugars are absorbed easily by the body. To learn more about this, read my blog on sugars.

My kombucha cheat may have been a bad idea, since kombucha is fed refined sugar there may still be sugar in the kombucha drink unless the drink was cultured for long enough that the culture consumed all the sugar. With store-bought kombucha, you can't be sure. If you brew it at home, make sure to brew it for longer, say about 30 days. 

Besides avoiding the disaccharides, and grains do break down to disaccharides, it is very important to avoid starch on the GAPS diet. One of the most common mistakes in the GAPS diet is to remove all grains but not remove starches. For other common mistakes see the post by The Healthy Home Economist.  My previous comfort food when I tried the Paleo diet was sweet potatoes, but alas, no more. I love kabocha squash (Japanese pumpkin) with coconut oil and himalayan sea salt. It is my new favorite thing to eat! I've been a little bit too worried that it's higher in starch than other squashes, but from a brief web search, it seems like it is in the same category as other winter squashes which are allowed on GAPS. 

A nutrotionist told me to deal with GAPS cravings by mixing honey with butter or coconut oil. She also recommended ginger tea with honey,  between meals as all sweet things should be taken.  The website Home Health and Happiness recommends some juice and a nap to deal with carb withdrawals. However commercial juice is not recommended for many reasons.

One thing I feel there is not a lot of support on, is how to deal with the emotional experience of the GAPS diet. Since the GAPS diet is to heal the gut, and the gut-brain connection, its no surprise that it might also be a moody experience. As all these toxins are released and bacteria die off, it's triggering my depression and anxiety. The rest of this blog is focused on ways to ease the emotional stress: 

Another recommendation to help with the detox is to take baths, with Epsom salts or other detoxifiers. Living in my tiny San Francisco apartment, I don't have a bath tub. So I've been doing a foot bath every night. I made a nice mix:

1 cup Epsom salt

1 Tablespoon Almond oil

80 drops mixed essential
(I used Rose, Rose Geranium, Jasmine, and Ylang Ylang) 

The foot bath is very relaxing, and I do it before bed. It actually helps me sleep better than a full bath. I think a full bath might be too intense for me, as well as dehydrating. With a foot bath, I get some detox support and a lot of relaxation. For city girl who walks around a lot, not always in comfortable shoes, I think these foot baths are going to become a regular part of my life! 

I'm doing this diet because I have years of gut issues, depression and anxiety. One thing that I've learned over the years is how to use music to support my emotional needs. While I love dancing, poppy music, I don't have the energy for it right now while in the beginning of the introduction diet. But I need uplifting music. So, mellow yet upbeat music is what I am looking for and I found this in Yo La Tengo's new album "Fade" (2013). Sometimes bands that have been around for awhile disappoint. Not this album. It's got all the best features of Yo La Tengo's lengendary past, and yet it's also refreshingly unique. I can't get enough of it! Highly recommended for the GAPS intro diet, or for a happy, mellow Sunday afternoon. 

Making an Herbal Tea Blend and How I Used Math to Do It

I'm trying to make as many Christmas presents as I can and as I have a great love of herbal medicine and teas, I thought I'd make some tea for Xmas. I'd share the actual recipe but, some people who might read this might be receiving some. So as not to give away the surprise, I'll just give the proportions.

Did I just use a math term? PROPORTIONS. I love math. And I used it while shopping for the herbs. I'll explain below.

I found a recipe that I was really excited about. It called for:
1/2 cup of herb #1
3/4 cup of herb #2
1/4 cup of herb #3
1 cup of herb #4
1/4 cup of herb #5

When I got to the health food store, I realized they didn't have cups to measure the portion of bulk herbs one wanted to buy. They did have scales. So, volume and weight are exactly the same thing. But, in the case of these herbs, they were all leafy, none of them were heavy roots or bulky like cloves. I figured they were close enough to being the same weight per volume. So, I decided to use the scale to get my proportions.

But did I need to know how much weight would get me 1/2 a cup? No, a recipe is just a proportional relationship between the ingredients. We have all heard of doubling recipes. You can half a recipe, make a third of one, or make 7 fifths of a recipe. As long as you keep the correct proportions it should turn out good.

For herb #1, I scooped what I thought was about 1/2 cup into a bag. On the scale, it weighed 0.05 pounds. How was I going to figure out how much of the other herbs to get?

Well, the recipe called for 1/2=0.5 cups of herb #1, for which I had measured out 0.05 pounds. 0.05 is just one tenth of 0.5. So the ratio I was looking for was 1:10.
So I also got:
0.075 pounds (3/4=0.75 cups) of herb #2
0.025 pounds (1/4=0.25 cups) of herb #3
0.1 pounds (1 cup) of herb #4
0.25 (1/4=0.25 cups) of herb #5

The weight in pounds I got for each herb was 1/10 the volume in cups. Yay for math! I can't wait for everyone to try it. I'll post the actual herbs after Christmas. ;)