Category: About

Gluten-Free French Toast

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I love breakfast. Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation perfectly described my feelings on the matter by stating, “why would anybody ever eat anything besides breakfast food?”

Truly, breakfast is the best meal of the day that sadly not all of us eat. I know I’ve personally made up for this fact by making pancakes at midnight or whipping up an egg scramble for dinner. But one of the things I’ve deprived myself of is French Toast. This mostly stems from my sheer laziness in making a paleo-friendly bread. However, my dad recently came to visit me and took me grocery shopping where he insisted I pick-up some gluten-free bread. I try and stay away from grains in general, but I couldn’t say no to having a loaf of (gluten-free) bread in my apartment.

And with gluten-free bread in my apartment comes one of the things I love the most: French Toast. So #treatyoself to some French Toast this week for breakfast/lunch/dinner and bask in its glory.

*I’m really not adding any measurements here since how much batter you make is going to depend on how many slices of French Toast you’re going to make. I made two slices of French Toast for myself, so I just used 2 eggs and a splash of milk until it got to a good consistency, so use your best judgment

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Gluten-Free French Toast

Ingredients
– Gluten-free bread
– Milk of choice such as almond, cashew, or cow’s milk
– Eggs
– Vanilla extract
– Cinnamon
– Butter
– Maple syrup, for topping

Method
– Make your batter: In a large bowl, add the eggs and the milk. Mix these together and add a touch of vanilla and some cinnamon. This is what is should look like (with some bread in there)

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– Heat the pan and add the butter. Start soaking your bread in the mixture.
– Once the pan is hot, add your bread slice and sprinkle and bit more cinnamon on the top part of your bread and start soaking another slice in the batter. Flip the slice to cook the other side and allow each side to brown. Place the French Toast slice on a plate and repeat the process. If you’d like, warm your oven and put the cooked slices on a plate in the oven as you’re cooking the rest of your French Toast (that way they stay nice and warm).

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– Plate your French toast and top with maple syrup and more cinnamon if you’d like
– Enjoy!

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If you can’t tell, I really like my maple syrup. I’ve found that adding the vanilla and cinnamon in the batter really gives my French Toast a wonderful flavor. Hope you try it out! If you really feel like getting crazy, you could create a stuffed French Toast by putting a cream cheese filling between two French Toast slices – but I’ll let you be the judge of how crazy you get. 😉

xoxo,
Paige

Steak with Mushrooms and Broccoli

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As a self-taught cook, there are several food items that scare me – steak being one of them. I’m not sure if any of y’all feel that way, but it’s always something that I avoid cooking. That is, until now.

I was walking through Whole Foods (as I typically do) and stopped by the butcher. I was between two things – seafood, which I had already passed, or beef. I thought to myself “screw it” and bought a beautiful cut of grass-fed beef, New York Strip to be exact. I picked up some veggies, as well as some gluten-free chicken nuggets (it’s okay to treat yourself!) and went home to cook.

Since I’ve never made a steak, I watched a few videos to get the hang of it. Being from East Texas, all the steaks I’d ever seen be cooked were done on a grill. In fact for a long time, I thought that was the only way to cook a steak. However, I don’t have a grill and I actually really hate food cooked on a grill. I don’t know, something about the smokey taste really turns me off. Anyway, I found this video of the great Gordon Ramsey showing how to cook a steak and followed that method exclusively.

As always, feel free to customize this to your liking! I will say, I apologize for the lack of care I took into make the Bearnaise sauce, which is why there’s a runny yellow substance under the steak, but why there’s nice fresh herbs on top (which was lovely).

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Steak with Mushrooms and Broccoli

Ingredients
– Steak, warmed to room temperature
– Mushrooms, chopped
– Broccoli, cut into florets
– Avocado oil
– Rosemary, fresh and chopped + whole sprigs
– Chives, fresh and chopped
– Tarragon, fresh and chopped
– Butter
– Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce (for mushrooms, optional)
– Salt and pepper
– Garlic, I used garlic powder but fresh is always best

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Method
– Prep everything: chop all vegetables and herbes, make sure that the steak has been set out to reach room temperature
– Cook the broccoli: heat a pan and add a fat of your choice, I used butter. Let get hot and add the chopped broccoli and season with salt, pepper, and garlic. Cook to desired tenderness and set aside on a plate.
– Cook the mushrooms: in the same heated pan, add butter and rosemary sprigs. Let the butter melt and the rosemary cook. Add the chopped mushrooms and season with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce. Cook the mushrooms. Once cooked to desired doneness, put on the same plate as the broccoli and put in a warm stove to they stay warm for serving.
– Heat a cast iron pan and add avocado oil
– Take the steak and season with salt and pepper on each side
– Once the oil is smoking, add the steak
– For a rare steak, only sear each side for 2 min – this is where Gordon Ramsay’s video really helped me – and only flip once
– Flip steak to other side and cook for 2 min for rare, more for other doneness
– Add a knob of butter to the pan and some of the chopped rosemary, let it melt and coat the steak with the butter, herbs, and juices
– Transfer the the steak from the pan to a plate and let it rest for at least 5 min; add chopped chives, tarragon, and rosemary to the top of the steak
– If desired, make a bearnaise sauce or hollandiase sauce
– Take the vegetables from the oven and add to a plate
– After the steak has rested, cut into slices and transfer to the plate with the veggies
– Top with more herbs or the bearnaise/hollandiase sauce
– Enjoy!

Let me know how you like it! I’d also love to hear any modifications you made to this. Happy cooking!

xoxo,
Paige

About Me!

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10666068_10155202174260451_8099086257443451984_nHello! You can find a summarized version of my “about me” in the “about” tab, but I wanted to go into more detail about myself, my journey, and why I love my lifestyle.

For starters, I’m Paige. I am a current student at the University of Texas here in Austin, Texas. My major is Corporate Communications with a minor in Rhetoric and Writing. I’m from a small town, so living in such an incredible city and attending a large school has been quite the adventure – but more on that later.

I wanted to start this blog to document not only my health progress, but to also post the recipes I make. I want to show other college students and young adults that it IS possible to live this lifestyle. I want to show people that health is possible.

To get into my health journey: I was never very “sickly” when it came to conventional illnesses one gets growing up. I only ever had strep once, I’ve never had the flu, and I rarely missed school for other things along those lines. However, I had my own set of difficulties, which started in 2nd grade with migraines (yes, 2nd grade). I have pretty vivid memories of going to the nurses office to take Children’s Motrin – I particularly liked the grape flavor for whatever reason. As I grew older, I was put on beta blockers to prevent migraines, as well as Maxalt (bless that med) for when I had a migraine. When the beta blockers stopped working and I hit puberty, I was put on birth control to manage migraines and anti-seizure medication. I hated the anti-seizure meds, they really messed with my sleep patterns and make me feel a little off, so much so that I just stopped taking them to prevent my migraines.

On top of my migraines, I later developed sever abdominal pains. These episodes would last for hours and were debilitating – I often couldn’t walk and would just stay in bed with pain. Imagine a huge ballon in your stomach expanding, but it never pops. These landed me in the ER a few times, where I was never told anything about why these things were happening and they sent me home. I also had a number of inflamed lymph-nodes in the back of my neck, always the same one – on the back left of my neck.

I’d been tested for a number of illness before discovering one of the huge factors in all my discomfort – gluten. I was 18 when I found out I had a gluten allergy. It didn’t make sense to me until I had my first plate of gluten-free pasta: for the first time in my life, I was not in pain after eating pasta. I sincerely thought that everyone felt as horrible as I did after eating pasta. Going gluten-free healed my migraines, stopped my strange abdominal episodes, and helped me gain weight – I am about 5’7″ and weighed about 110 pounds. That wasn’t okay.

Fast forward to my sophomore year of college. My health took a turn for the worst when I was having trouble remembering simple tasks. Had I eaten? Had I already washed my hair? While basic, as a 19 year old it felt very strange to just forget very basic things. I also started loosing some of my hair, experiencing pretty severe exhaustion (I was sleeping about 16 hours a day), as well as other ailments. It took about a year, but I was later diagnosed with an “undifferentiated connective tissue disease mostly resembling lupus.” So, basically, my blood-work is just really funky and all over the place, but not quite at the numbers to be lupus. My doctor told me that it would, and would, get worse if we didn’t act. I was put on 400mg of Plaquenil and told to give it 3 months before it would kick in. However, I didn’t leave without asking about changing my diet. He told me, “it couldn’t hurt” and to let him know how it went.

I chose the Paleo Diet after doing a lot of research of my own on autoimmune disease. For me, this way of eating made sense – eliminate foods that cause inflammation and decrease inflammation in the body. By adhering to this diet and taking my medication, in February 2014, I was told that I was in remission! Not only that, but my Doctor had never seen someone go from my numbers to nothing. When he asked what I did, I reminded him that I started a Paleo lifestyle to which he said, “well keep it up and you can get off your meds.” How cool is that?!

Now, in 2015, here I am completely off my medication and controlling my disease through diet and exercise. It has been an empowering experience that has shed light on just how powerful food, exercise, and lifestyle is.

With this blog, I hope to encourage others like me, post awesome recipes, and advice for anyone who is young who is either battling with an autoimmune disease, or is just trying to live a healthier life.

Welcome! Let’s keep it healthy!