Cooking in L.A. Color

An intro for the food part of this blog: each post will cover two recipes. One will be local to the country where the Olympics took place and one will be from one of my favorite food bloggers, adjusted to be friendly to my food allergies and intolerances. (That means free of dairy, gluten, tree nuts, soy, coconut, and various fruits and vegetables.)

DW: While I’m definitely not a sophisticated food person, I certainly can appreciate flavor … until I inevitably forget it. But I am absolutely in favor of eating, so this will be fun for me too!

Local Fare

This was a tricky post, because I wanted to find something local to California and I was not going to make a Hangtown Fry. Enter our local library, where I found bäco by Josef Centeno and Betty Hallock. Centeno has multiple restaurants in downtown LA, including Bäco Mercat. I chose his recipe beets bi tahini, as I had been making a beet tahini spread for weeks…

And I quickly realized I WAS DOING IT ALL WRONG. Because Centeno’s recipe was AMAZING. Like “sit down with the bowl and crackers or a shovel and eat all of it” amazing. The freshly roasted beets were incredibly sweet, and much better than the pre-roasted beets I’ve been buying at the store. The recipe was also incredibly easy; it took ~20 minutes of hands-on time to make (and most of that was peeling the beets).

If you check out the book and make this recipe, please roast your own beets! It makes all the difference to the flavor of the recipe, and the color. Isn’t it gorgeous?

Liz-friendly Fare

Next up…chocolate banana bread, because we had a ton of super ripe bananas in the fridge.

Since removing dairy and gluten from my diet, I have made a lot of banana bread recipes. This one, though, was the best. No contest. It was rich in flavor, but light in texture (which can be a big challenge with gluten-free baking). It was also a huge hit with the family; I didn’t even get to bring any to work, because we ate all of it so fast!

Here’s the recipe I used:

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Fit Foodie Finds

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

I love Fit Foodie recipes, though I’m not sure I’ve ever tried any baking recipes before…? It’s clearly a massive oversight on my part and I will be rectifying that as soon as I’ve finished this post. 

DW: This was absolutely delicious. I felt guilty eating it, mostly because I wanted to eat all of it.

Anyway! Here are the replacements I made:

Honestly this recipe didn’t even taste Liz-friendly, and in hindsight, I really wish I had brought some to work to see if I could’ve fooled people. Guess I’ll just have to make it again! 😊