It's official

Biopsy results are in... Celiac it is. It's good to have a final answer and know that this diet isn't for nothing. Kind of a bummer to know that eating out will never be easy though.

So in celebration of good recipes to make from home... here is my Dad's famous teriyaki sauce. Use GF soy sauce, of course, my gluten-free friends.

We got this good looking hunk o beef this month from our CSA. Yummmm. There was so much food we had to call in backup. Thanks for sharing with us, Dave!! And I still had enough for 2 days worth of leftovers!! YUM!! It made a great lunch. Especially with the leftover sweet potatoes.
















Uh huh, that looks good. Best to chop the meat up into hunks and marinade for a few hours at least. I let it go 24 hours, but a few hours will do.
















Teriyaki sauce ready to go. Didn't notice a difference in flavor at all with the GF soy sauce.





























































1.5 cups low sodium (GLUTEN FREE, if your diet calls for it) soy sauce
3/4 cups Olive oil
2 or 3 Green Onions
Couple of cloves of garlic, minced
Juice of one lemon or 2 limes * (Dad's trick: heat the lemon in the microwave for 20 seconds
before juicing and they will release more juice. Works like a charm)
Heaping tablespoon honey or brown sugar
1/2 cup Ketchup, if you are making this for beef. Skip if you are using this for overnight.

Pour the soy sauce into a bowl and add the minced garlic, chopped scallions, lemon juice, brown sugar or honey and, if making beef, the ketchup. Mix the ingredients.

Add the olive oil in a slow trickle while whisking the mixture (or stir vigorously while adding the oil if you don't have a wire whisk). This will help the oil to incorporate with the other ingredients.

This was enough for the ~3lbs of meat we had. You can easily cut the recipe in half for more normal portions :)

Meat is back on the menu!

So, I am planning on posting more "real" food recipes. But before I start that, I wanted to write a little bit about meat.

Up until the fall of 2008, I hadn't eaten any red meat for 8 years. When I was younger, hamburgers were probably my favorite meal. But during my first semester of freshman year in college, I read "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. That book changed the way I thought about meat. From what I understood of the book (keep in mind this was a long time ago, my memory is a little foggy and my then-freshman brain was programmed to read the assignment as fast as possible), meatpacking plants had become sloppy and dangerous places to work. The priority had become quantity, not quality. Poor conditions and unskilled workers compounded the problem, and the result was tainted meat. The book boiled it down to one particular line which made my stomach churn and caused me to go cold-turkey on beef: "There is shit in the meat."

Being the germ-o-phobe that I am, I stuck with my conviction and didn't eat a drop of beef for years. I wasn't even tempted. However, my friend Grace recently told me about local farmers who raise their own animals on their own farms, and then sell the meat to their supporters. The animals are raised to be all-natural, grass-fed, happy creatures. Grace found one farm in particular, Chestnut Farm, which seemed great. Besides the fact that the grass-fed animals are a million times healthier for you than hormone-injected/corn-fed ones (read this about how grassfed beef has only a tiny bit more fat than commercial chicken!), the meatpacking process seems a lot more controlled and healthy. I'll take it! I signed right up and have been getting 10 pounds of meat a month since the fall. We get a mix of beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, and ham/pork depending on the month. Let me tell you that first bite of beef was hard... and I started slow... but now I am loving it. Sometimes we get a weird cut that I don't know what to do with, like a tiny pack of ribs, but I figure one of these days we'll just throw it all in the crockpot.

I made two small legs of lamb over the weekend, post coming soon!