Gluten Free Penne Carbonara

Gluten Free Organic Quinoa, Amaranth, Brown Rice Penne. Delicious!

Yesterday was meatless Monday...well we went with 'almost meatless Monday' instead. :)

Gluten Free Penne Carbonara

1 lb GF Penne, cook as directed
1 Tbsp. Oil
1 Onion, diced
3 Cloves Garlic, minced
1 Cup Bacon Bits
1 Tomato, diced
2 Cups Heavy Cream
1 Cup Parmesan Cheese (fresh grated, or powdered)
4 Eggs


Cook pasta as directed (if using gf pasta, do NOT overcook, this can happen quickly so it pays to stay close to the stove for the 6-8 minutes it takes to cook!).
Fry onion in oil until translucent, then add garlic and mix together. Add bacon bits and tomato and fry for 1-2 minutes until tomato softens. Remove from heat until pasta is ready.

Lightly beat eggs in a bowl and add heavy cream and parmesan cheese and mix together.

Strain pasta and put back into pot. Add onion mixture. With pot over low heat, slowly add cream and egg mixture. BE PATIENT! If you try to heat it up too quickly by raising the temperature, you will just end up with cooked eggs on pasta! Stir together and slowly heat through, stirring often.
Serve hot.

This was wonderful! I think next time I would add some spinach in at the end too, just to add some colour, but it was great just the way it was too!

I know it has bacon so it's technically not 'meatless', but I think this will make it into our meatless monday rotation on a regular basis!!

Organic Milk Selection

I have been on the hunt for a better place to buy organic milk then Safeway (nothing against Safeway it's just really out of my way!), and discovered that Superstore, Walmart and Save On Foods all carry it! Save On Foods and Walmart actually carry 4L jugs too, and have skim, 1%, 2% and homogenized . Yay!!
The prices are pretty close, but Save On Foods actually has the cheapest price (they have 2 brands, I cant remember what the names were), followed closely by Walmart and then Superstore and bringing up the most expensive end is Safeway. Don't get me wrong, it's still not 'cheap', but it's cheaper.
Save On Foods has 4L for $8.49 (ouch!), BUT they have a sale on right now that if you cash in 1,000 points you get it for $5.99. Not bad when a regular 4L jug of homogenized milk is around $4.50. Their 2L's are $4.99. They also have a WONDERFUL selection of organic yogurt! Still not super convenient for me, but I do pass a Save On Foods more often then a Safeway.
Walmart had plain organic yogurt and they do have a pretty good selection of milk as well and I go there more often, so it's looking like Walmart may be the winner in this one just to avoid an extra stop just for dairy.
Superstore has 2L jugs of 1%, 2% and homogenized, but I didn't see any yogurt.
Safeway does have plain yogurt (which is on sale this week!) but not flavours.

I have been drinking so much more milk since finding out how much better organic tastes! I find myself sitting down at lunch and supper with a glass of it because I enjoy it so much. I've never been a milk lover, and usually if I have milk in the evening I feel quite sick. Not with organic!! Because I've been drinking more I've decided to go cold turkey and bought Skim (0%) milk for myself. It's not bad, and because it's got that great flavour it's easier to handle the no fat! Although I may cut it with the kids homogenized just a little until I get fully used to it!

I noticed that Save On Foods carries Hemp milk...anyone tried that? I'm also waiting for So Nice to bring their Coconut milk to Canada! I like the tinned stuff for smoothies, but a drinkable one would be nice. Friends of ours only use Almond milk, and I got to try that recently and it's actually pretty tasty. And to think I've spent all these years thinking 'milk is milk'. There's a whole world of milk out there!!

Published with Blogger-droid v1.7.4

Organic Milk

What I would really love to try is raw milk, but since it's pretty much unobtainable the next best thing was organic milk. After some searching I found that Saxby's Creamery here in Edmonton sells organic milk to Earth's General Store. They also brand it for Safeway to sell. I finally made it into a Safeway and sure enough, there it was! I choked when I saw the price. $2.99 for 1 litre, $5.99 for 2 litres. Ouch. I convinced myself it was worth a try and got a 1 litre. I bought homogenized because it had the longest expiry date and I had just bought a bunch of milk a couple days before. My husband and I did a taste test last night. Non Organic Homogenized vs. Organic Homogenized. The best way to sum it up is my hubby's reaction: "The organic milk is more.....milky". It's true. There is a HUGE taste difference! We both really liked it. It seemed less sweet as well. I'm trying to brainstorm how to convince myself to spend that much on milk. I think in the next little while I'm going to try to do all my baking/cooking with rice milk or powdered milk and maybe buy organic just to drink. I know this would cut back since I do go through a lot of milk. (Rice pudding itself takes 3.5 cups every time I make it!) It isn't just the cost either, there isn't a Safeway around here, and neither of our grocery stores sell organic dairy products. So it means an out of the way trip every week or two just for milk. And yogurt! I found Safeway also has organic plain yogurt for pretty much the same price as non organic. I didn't get any to try because I had just bought some, but next time!
Does anyone know of cheaper places to buy organic milk, or organic dairy products? I would really like to make the switch, but $6 for 2 litres of milk seems like a lot to make room for in the grocery budget :(

New Pantry Items!

I got to escape the house this afternoon without my two kids since my mother in law is here, and I got to go into stores and actually *gasp* take my time looking at things! Bulk Barn is one of my new favourite stores. Not because it's always cheaper, because it's not (although sometimes they are!), but because you can try so many new things without committing to spending a fortune and ending up with a huge bag that you will never use.
My experimental purchases of the day:
Organic Coconut Sugar It has an interesting less sweet then sugar taste and is less bad for you. It actually contains some good for you things :)
Arrowroot Powder To try as a substitute for corn starch
Steel Cut Oats To grind in my new grain grinder Kitchen Aid attachment that I'm geeking out about and dying to try out!
Hard Wheat For the same reason as above!
Chickpeas Because I'm going to try out a new recipe I found :)

Then I went to Earth's General Store. If you remember I bought a LivingSocial spend $10 get $20 for  a store gift certificate. It was great, I didn't have to print it out or anything. I have a smartphone, and I have the LivingSocial App, and I just pulled up the certificate on it and she put the info into the computer and that was it!! The store has moved and it is quite a bit larger now. They have everything from bulk shampoo (but you have to bring your own container so I didn't get any of that), to a small produce section and pretty much everything inbetween. I spent quite awhile in there. I had to spend all $20 at once, but I didn't want to spend a ton over so I just got a few things.

Xylitol I need to do more reading so I just got a bit, but it can replace sugar, has fewer calories and actually has health benefits!! We tasted it and it has a hard to place taste. The best description is that it tastes 'cold'. It's very different!
Xantham Gum I'm going to experiment with my granola bar recipe!
Amazing Dad's Original BBQ Sauce I'm going to go by the ingredients (since I can actually understand what they all are!) and try to make my own, this one is a little sweet for our tastes.
Organic Vinegar For a starter for my homemade vinegar project that I want to start!
Daiya 'Cheese' This one is for my mother in law. She can't eat a lot of fat for health reasons, and can't buy fat free cheese in Canada. She lives near the US border and gets it from there, but when she comes to visit she never gets to have anything with cheese! This is a very low fat cheese alternative. Great for people who can't have dairy. And it actually doesn't taste all that weird, which totally surprised me! It has a 'different' taste to it, but not bad. We haven't tried to melt any yet, but apparently it actually melts and strings like cheese.

I'm ready to start experimenting with my recipes and see what happens! Hopefully I'll have some results to post about in the next couple of days :)

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8

Earth's General Store

Living Social's Edmonton offering for today is spend $10 get a $20 gift certificate for Earth's General Store! If you are into organic foods, products etc. this is a wonderful store! It does have to be used all in one visit, and before September 5, 2011. I figure it's a good chance for me to check out their store. I was on their website and they have a whole assortment of food now, including coffee! They also have laundry soap, body products, cloth diapers etc.