* Here's a great recipe for a low-carb almond meal bread. It turns out like a wetter, spongier cornbread but tastes like almonds. It takes only 5 minutes from start to finish. Use a coffee mug to get a uniform shape, and substitute 1 Tbsp of heavy cream for one of the 2 Tbsp water. It's better to leave out the fruit when microwaving it into shape. When it's done, you can slice it into 4 disks. Slather on a bunch of Devon cream, cream cheese, butter, or whatever. Then add fruit on top of that. Mashing up blackberries, raspberries, and some pomegranate seeds in a bowl makes a great makeshift jam that doesn't require sugar.
I'll be honest: these don't taste really decadent, but they're about the closest thing to low-carb muffin slices you'll get, and they're great considering they only take 5 minutes to make. I've tried adding some cinnamon and vanilla extract, but either I need more or these just don't want to taste rich. I'll try toasting them in the toaster oven -- maybe that'll give them more crunch. Still, these are good enough to become a staple. It's also a great way to get an egg in every day, in case you're pinched for time.
* Without knowing it, I had naturally gravitated to cheeses made from unpasteurized milk: after trying a bunch last summer, my favorite three were Roquefort, Gruyere, and Murcia Curado. I recently added Emmental to the list of regulars, and it turns out that's unpasteurized too. After learning this, I've been checking the cheeses at Whole Foods to see what else is made from raw milk (not all at once, obviously). Today I found a pretty nice Fontina-style cheese: Fiscalini's San Joaquin Gold.
There's just something -- a lot -- missing from pasteurized cheeses. Vitamins, minerals, other things... whatever they are, they really rob the cheese of its fullness and richness. I can only dream what butter made from raw milk tastes like. Baby.
* Speaking of delicious butter, I just noticed that Organic Valley has a limited time only pasture butter. The grass that the cows graze on is supposed to be more full of great fatty acids during the spring and summer. I could care less, though -- it's yellower and tastes a hell of a lot richer, and that's what matters. Tastes better than what comes from the poor things that have to slurp grain from a trough all day -- cows aren't any more suited to that diet than humans are. A similar result was found in an informal blind taste test of steaks -- grass-fed beef blew all the others out of the water, and cost the least too!
Kerrygold butter from Ireland is available in many regular supermarkets in the gourmet cheese section and is also from pastured cows. They don't put it on the labels, go to the website. I eat butter by the spoon and this tastes as good as the Organic Valley pasture butter but is easier to find.
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