Recipes for a Cheery Life: Gluten Free Brunch

So I know some of you have heard me talk about my Freedom Journal that John Lee Dumas wrote on 100 days to Accomplish Your Goal… and there’s a Facebook Group that comes with it and Trista was in my group and we had a very similar goal! I think she is the first one to reach her goal. Which was to publish a book!

And she has published a cookbook called Recipes for A Cheery Life, a Gluten Free Brunch!

Sunday is Mother’s Day May 8th, today is May 5th when we’re recording. So I will try to get this up for you if you want to make a gluten free brunch, or even if you just want to make brunch I know these recipes are delicious anyway for Mother’s Day!

Tell us a little about yourself.

I’m here in Oregon. I’m a wife and a mom, I have a 7 year old boy who’s  in 2nd grade.

I’m a food blogger, recipe creator, and I just wrote the cookbook. My business is The Cheery Chef. I’ve been doing this for a little over a year! 

Before that I had  a couple of baking businesses at Farmer’s Markets. So I love to use all the local produce there.

Now you’re in Oregon we said it was the western part that is over by Portland… You were saying you were gonna have some homemade gifts…

• cutting boards
• fancy aprons
• some reclaimed wood items

Yes, my dad, makes these beautiful cutting boards that are butcher block style… some other Oregon woods, black walnut in my online shop…

My mom makes some really fancy aprons and then some reclaimed wood from local artisans… lots of neat local different items for the kitchen!

I was saying that before Mike and I got married…I think you just get attached to those things… and always a nice cutting board is the perfect thing to have… and aprons are pretty handy…

Tell me about your first gardening experience?

Well, my parents lived on a lot of acreage, out in the country, we had a huge front yard garden, I remember using the seed wheel to plant things…

I also love to eat the rhubarb stalks raw, I love to plant the seeds and watch them grow… and also freeze and can and dry …
I can totally picture you out there eating them just raw… no sugar or anything?

Nobody told me about the sugar part,  I still really like really tart things… I don’t really eat it raw anymore… but I did!

I remember my grandson out here a couple of years ago playing with the rhubarb leaves like they were giant elephant ears!

How did you learn how to garden organically?

Definitely, they grew as many things as they possibly could to eat throughout the year, not by any standards

every few years, we have snowpocolapse,

its like a joke to anyone else…

What’ s your temp like out there?

Every once in a while it’s like “snowpocolapse”… it does freeze but like severe winter weather is pretty rare…

Tell us about something that grew well this year.

We’ll my mom grew some seeds from artichoke plants, she gave me last year, I tried to grow them they were just sort of small plants, I didn’t do anything with them in the fall, I just left them in the garden…

This spring they are coming up strong… I have a couple of artichokes… that were

Mike brought me in this plant the other day… and he said what is this? And I was like why are you asking me? And he said you know what this is it was out by the apple tree? And I was like “Goji berry?” I bought it at the farmer’s market last year and thought it totally died, and it’s doing great! Marci Hines was my guest last year and so I’m gonna have to get back in taught with her….

I’m super shocked about my artichokes, I actually planted them last year, I’m terrible about doing anything in the fall, I just let stuff be, they came back, my mom planted them from seed, and they

they came up in the spring…..

I think it was the cold winter on the plants…

I usually steam them with some lemon juice something really simple… I love the flavor

it’s a lot of plant for one artichoke…

At the Farmer’s Market when I bought them, it’s cooler,

they like some cold

Mine is pretty simple, I just steam them with lemon on them

i like the pure flavor

a grilling recipe in the s

The plants are huge

they’re at least a foot tall with a ton of leaves and the

Is there something you would do different next year or want to try/new?

I want to really get good at composting, I learned a lot from your recent guest … I think I just have to make it a habit, because it I think I make it maybe more complicated… I just have to get it in my daily box.

I was telling you earlier, we keep a compost bucket with coffee grounds and egg shells and stuff, the greens etc seem to go in another bucket to the chickens these day… I just go out when it’s full… and dump it and that’s when I turn it, maybe when I’m mowing the lawn and putting the grass in there… it seems like to me, if you’re collecting the scraps…

It’s like a big holder, like a giant green ball, had to put it together with all these plastic parts and its on this stand, so you can just roll it around. It’s just like a ball you roll around on the stand, and you pull it along.

Is it heavy?

That’s the thing,  I think it’s better if you’re continually using it because, once it gets full it’s hard to turn very much, it’s pretty heavy. Need to have a pitchfork in it…

We just leave our pitchfork in it all year long so it’s just out there. 

Yes, convenience.

Maybe if you make it a habit it will get convenient?

….

I got put on hold and went back to Trista’s Facebook page where I found:

So, I’m looking at your Rose Petal Rhubarb Upside Down Cake!

Still had some frozen from last year so it’s kind of frozen and thawed so that’s why it looks partially cooked…

I kind of made it used some coconut sugar, coconut flower, almond meal, and I kind of made some sponge cake with some egg whites, the cake part I really enjoyed cause it was nice and light!

• coconut sugar
• coconut flower
• almond meal
• egg whites…

I’m gonna try it one more time to get the recipe right!

That sounds so fun! I never heard of coconut sugar? What’s that?

It’s like the sap of the coconut palm, they just kind of … it’s like evaporated cane juice, the process is just drying it out… like brown sugar in recipes to substitute

a little, it’s still good!

Everybody’s all about the coconut oil… 

Yeah!

So we were talking about what didn’t work so well this season!

It was the peas seeds, that the squirrels just kept digging them up. They were rascals out there. One time when I planted peanuts they stole all those too!

When you planted what? Like peanuts? Like a peanut plant?

My mom sent away fro them one year.

I tried the thing where I put down plastic and make it really hot, but the squirrels like them more! We’ve both had the dream of peanuts, but so far it has not worked… I don’t think it’s warm enough here unless we do something crazy.

It might have to be in a greenhouse. How does that grow? I can’t even imagine a plant with peanuts hanging on it…

the nut part is underground, and it has a shoot, above, kind of like potatoes that you dig up… that’s all I know because they didn’t grow too well.

Which activity is your least favorite activity to do in the garden.

The composting I need to get in a better habit of doing…

I think the key is convenience. So what do you do with your scraps?

That’s why I said composting, I just don’t make a good habit of it, it’s not like I hate it, I just have to get myself out there on a regular basis, it’s just one of those things… Yeah, I’ve got plenty of materials.

Ours is just down on the ground… it’s got like these slats in front that are removable so you can kind of raise and lower the height but we pretty much just keep the top two always off. It’s pretty convenient because the pitchfork’s always there…

What is your favorite activity to do in the garden?

I like to trim off anything dead on a plant:

• dead heading
• dead canes
• dead leaves

when I see in my roses, I don’t really fuss to much…

I like to cut off dead stuff… it’s really satisfying so the plant has more energy

That’s something I need to make a habit of… Lisa Ziegler told me I need to dead head… and in the Facebook Group somebody asked if you could deadhead sunflowers and I was like, I don’t think so, and sure enough someone posted an article about how you could and they grow back with more blooms on the stem although a little bit shorter… 

And more seeds I know they use those for the chickens so that’s a good thing to get as many as you can…

What is the best gardening advice you have ever received?

Take good care of your soil

without a doubt the biggest thing everybody has said on my show is soil health is the key to being successful… that’s what I’m thinking about writing a book about is soil health… that seems to be the biggest secret to success…

A favorite tool that you like to use? If you had to move and could only take one tool with you what would it be.

It has to do with taking the dead stuff off, we have these funny crooked scissors  called trauma shears…. they’re not actually a garden tool, a friend who used to work in the ER, they use to cut pant legs with but they’re like super tough, you can cut flowers with them… 

Gluten Free Brunch Carrot-Top Pesto

A favorite recipe you like to cook from the garden?

Well, this is kind of cool, it’s carrot top pesto!! IT’s so great. especially in the food magazines, they talk about reducing waste and that sort of thing! When I was gonna make a carrot cake, I got these great carrots and I thought what could I make with these?

I found this recipe to go with polenta triangles! And best of all it’s gluten free, dairy free, vegan!

The Recipe

you need two cups of the green carrot tops, mostly the leafy parts, not too much

• 2 cups green carrot tops
• 1/4 cup olive oil, plus 2-3 extra tablespoons
• 1/4 cup of almonds… not the  roasted ones just plain ones
• a peeled garlic clove
• tsp smoked sea salt
• some freshly ground pepper

put in a food processor

pulse like a paste

make it more like a sauce, great on other veggies on a topper to lots of things.

Yumm I love that!

I love the smoked flavor, all my recipes are dairy free wanted to add this element that’s kind of like cheese in pesto.

Where’s it getting the smoked flavor from?

It’s something I had in my pantry, I got as gift of I just picked it up one time and thought this might be good?

I’m gonna make oregano pesto because I have oregano everywhere….

Im going to have to… I have oregano all over my garden, cause it just won’t quit growing… I hate taking it out unless I have to have… that is a great idea.

I totally thought I was going to last summer… I’m going to ….I make a lot of salad dressings, and then I just mix vegetables togethers .. sounds awesome… Let’s talk about your book some more? Why Gluten Free?

Well, ok, that’s an interesting story …. back when my mom, sister and I had a baking business for the farmers market, we used to bak on Fridays and sell on Saturdays. And we kept having a lot of people come by who were gluten free or had dietary restrictions and they would tell us about what they could and couldn’t have… We really wanting to serve them seeming they could have…

so we started investigating it and they started educating us on how to have separate ingredients and areas and we learned a lot about that and we started developing some recipes. Later on I met several friends and a