Happy 4th of July!

I know I'm a little late, but I think it's safe to assume that plenty of you are still celebrating the long weekend that this holiday has turned into.This year I decided to switch it up from the traditional US flag cheesecake and celebrate with a strawberry/blueberry pie. I found a ton a variations on this recipe, and I'm sure you have your own favorite. Plus, I'm not great at doing things like writing down what I put into a dish, or using exact measurements, so here are some loose tips for festive and unique berry pies of all kinds:

1. Use almond flour, but then cut back a little on the butter and water. Almost flour is great. It's tasty, it's better for you than white flour, and it tends to stick together in mixtures better than whole wheat. Most of baking is somewhere around 1/2 nut flour and 1/2 unbleached white. Just be aware that the oils in the nuts will make your dough stickier, so reduce your added fats a bit to compensate.
2. Keep it simple. You don't need gelatin. The only ingredients in the filling of this pie were the berries, a little sugar, and starch. (Tapioca and potato are both great choices.) It did come out a little runny, so I would probably add a bit more starch and maybe even a little flour in future experiments.
3. Cookie cutters are your friends. I don't know why I had never thought to use cookie cutters for pie crust before, but now that that mental door has been opened, the possibilities are endless.
4. Foil makes a great divider. The line between types of berries was made by folding a double layer of tin foil, sticking it gently into the raw bottom crust, filling the berries in, and then taking it out before adding the top crust.

These basics can be used to create any kind of shape or flavor combination. What kinds of creative pie recipes have you tried?

Corn Free July 2018

Happy Corn Free July again, everyone! I appreciate you checking back after such a long hiatus. A few things have inspired me to get back to the blogging game. The first is, of course, that it's that time of year again and,true to form, I've spent July 1st hungry, confused, and wishing I had planned ahead a little better.

For those of you new to the site, Corn Free July was an experiment I tried in 2011 after reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, to see if I could eat in a way that was slightly kinder to our animal friends and to the environment. For more details on the diet challenge, check out how it all started, or check out the recipe list.

One of the other reasons that I decided to come back here today is that, a few months ago, I had a pretty scary health crisis. I've been lucky enough to be in good health and to not struggle with my weight for my entire life, and so the health part of dieting, for me, has always been maintenance, or insurance against the future. I got a serious wake-up call in January when the future became now. On my first grocery shopping trip after that, I saw John Mackey, Alona Pulde, and Matt Lederman's The Whole Foods Diet: The Lifesaving Plan for Health and Longevity. I had never heard of it before, but into the cart it went without a second thought. There is some amazing science in these pages giving concrete evidence that our Western diet is killing us. There wasn't much that I hadn't heard before, but I was due for a reminder.

If you're interested, The Whole Foods Diet is for sale on Amazon, I'm sure, because oh my God can you even believe Amazon owns Whole Foods now? One of its features is a 28-day meal plan complete with recipes, and since I finished the book the day before yesterday, I decided to fold it into Corn Free July. This diet advocates for a 90% plant based diet, which will be an added challenge for me, since that isn't something that I typically focus on, but I think it's worthwhile to try. I hope you'll join me!