Cooking

I love to cook and spending time in the kitchen gives me lots of pleasure. Unlike many people, I prefer the quiet and like to concentrate on the issue at hand. New recipes plus a creative approach provide me with many challenges. I've eliminated white sugar and white flour from my baking; neither has much nutritional value. Many experiments go on in the kitchen. When possible I'm using raw honey to replace the sugar.

Enter the name for this tabbed section: Gluten-free

The gluten-free diet was discontinued on September 16, 2018. No noticeable benefits were observed during all five plus years.

We started on a gluten-free diet on December 4, 2012, in an effort to alleviate my autoimmune problems. It's not much of a sacrifice, but it is difficult to find which products are hiding gluten in their ingredients. There are a number of online sites to help:
Enter the name for this tabbed section: Raw Honey
Land of Milk and Corn Syrup
The honey most of us buy in the grocery store tastes great and is a good sweetener, but it is all pasteurized and most of the beneficial aspects have been negated. If it's clear, it has been heated and cooked. The best honey of all is raw honey since it retains all the healthful properties and tastes even better than the pasteurized version.

Honey in Cooking: You can use honey in cooking instead of sugar. Because it is sweeter than sugar, you need to use less. The first thing to consider when using honey to cook with is that it is judged to be twice (2 X) as sweet as sugar. Therefore, to get the same sweetness as sugar, use one half as much as you would of sugar. Honey is about 18% water. If you round that off to 20% you can easily figure that about 1/5th of the honey you add to your recipe is water. Therefore, you cut back on the moisture in your recipe by 20% (1/5th). Honey is hydroscopic (meaning it attracts water) so it is good for baking cakes as it keeps them moist for longer.

Health Benefits: Honey's unique composition makes it useful as an antimicrobial agent and antioxidant. Honey has long been recognized as a natural remedy and has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. It has antiseptic properties, can be very successfully used in wound management and can be used as a remedy for ailments from sore throats to burns and cuts.
  1. eBeeHoney.com also has a lot of information about raw honey.
  2. The National Honey Board has a wealth of recipes along with even more information.
  3. Really Raw Honey also has a bunch of recipes.
  4. Stakich, a Michigan company, is our favorite source with competitive prices and prompt shipping.
Enter the name for this tabbed section: Cooking Sites
General Information
  • The Cook's Thesaurus is a cooking encyclopedia that covers thousands of ingredients and kitchen tools. Entries include pictures, descriptions, synonyms, pronunciations, and suggested substitutions.
  • KraftFoods.com: Four major categories include the Cookbook, Food and Family, About Kraft and For You.
  • About.com covers just about every aspect of home cooking that you can imagine.
  • Cooking Light: Companion site to the magazine, lots of information.
  • The Paleo Mom is much more than just cooking, it's a complete lifestyle site.
Recipes
  • RefDesk.com Food and Recipes has literally hundreds of cooking-related links.
  • The Recipe Link is home to thousands of recipes and lots of additional information.
  • AllRecipes.com: Thousands of recipes searchable by category.
  • Recipe Archives: 3,678 recipes indexed in over 67 food categories.
  • W H Foods has several hundred recipes with a good filtering system. Their home page is loaded with information.
  • My Recipes is a classy, good-looking site with a wealth of information.
  • RecipeSource is the new home of SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes.