Worthy of a celebration

This year we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of our dinner group, four couples who have gotten together once a month for dinner since our (mostly) pre-children days through the hectic baby and toddler years when we hired a babysitter to tend the kids while we tried to eat uninterrupted. When we started getting together our meals were fairly complex, with children came simpler recipes, and then the “food issues” arrived for about half of us. You’d think restricting dairy, gluten, all grains, some kinds of nuts, lamb, seafood, and various veggies would cause a group like ours to implode and the folks without food issues to throw their hands in the air and say “We give up! You guys can’t eat anything!”

Fortunately, our friends are very tolerant AND creative.

This weekend we spent our annual weekend together at the beach. 8 adults, 6 kids and 1 dog. We have been going to the beach together for about 15 of our 20 years. Over the years we’ve worked out a system for our beach meals that works really well – each family is responsible for either a breakfast or a dinner which we all share and each family brings their own lunch fixings. Sometimes we stay in one big house we rent for the weekend, but this year we stayed at The Commons in Port Aransas in two side by side three bedroom townhouses. [Full disclosure - one of my other hats when I'm not a food coach is working to develop The Commons.] Having two units gave the adults and the teen kids a bit of breathing room from each other, plus two big tables to eat at – one in each unit. Most importantly perhaps, it gives us two refrigerators for our groceries because it is, after all, about cooking for each other and saying it was good…

My family cooked a dinner fit for a chilly fall evening, pot roast with gravy, roasted vegetables, roasted potatoes, and an apple pecan torte with caramel sauce. The pot roast got rave reviews from some pretty tough critics, and no one objected to my SCD (Specific Carbohydrate Diet) gravy (which is also gluten free, by the way). I’ll fill you in on the pot roast in another post. What I really want to share with you is the dessert.

Now, doesn’t that make your mouth water? Imagine a slice drizzled with caramel sauce. We didn’t get any pictures of that because we were all too busy eating.

Apple Pecan Torte [GF, SCD, DF]

3 cups pecan meal*

3 large eggs

3/4 cup applesauce

1/4 cup soft butter or coconut oil plus 1 teaspoon for coating the pan

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1 or 2 apples, peeled and sliced into wedges

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Coat the bottom of a 10 inch cake pan with butter or coconut oil. Arrange the apple wedges in a pleasing design. Mix remaining ingredients thoroughly. Gently spoon batter over the apple wedges so they aren’t disturbed. Smooth the top of the batter. Put in oven to bake until firm and edges start to pull away from the edge of the pan, about an hour.

Variation: If you want to start with whole nuts, just put all the ingredients, other than apple wedges, into a food processor and process until smooth. Proceed as above.  

*This recipe is very flexible and can use any type of nut you prefer. Almonds or walnuts would be particularly good. You can buy pecan meal or make your own. My personal method for making nuts is a bit involved but I believe it gives the nut meal a better flavor — I soak my pecans for a few hours in several changes of water to remove the bitter tannins, then I drain them well and put them on baking sheets. Put the baking sheets of nuts in the oven at 185 degrees F. and roast at this low heat [to preserve the nutrients and enzymes] until they are crunchy again. If you have a convection oven, use the convection setting. It takes about 4 or 5 hours. Turn off the oven and leave the pans in the oven to cool. The nuts get a bit crunchier if they are not put into storage containers while they are hot.

SCD Caramel Sauce [SCD, GF]

1 cup honey

8 tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon vanilla

Put honey into small pot and boil gently on stove, stirring occasionally, to evaporate off some of the water in the honey. You will notice the bubbles of honey get more viscous as the water boils off. Be careful not to let the honey boil out of the pot. When about 1/4 cup of water has evaporated out of the honey, turn off the pot and let it cool a little. Add butter while honey is still hot and stir to mix. When mixture is warm, add vanilla. Use to drizzle over cake or your favorite frozen confection. Store any leftovers in a lidded jar in the refrigerator. It will seperate as it cools. Warm to room temperature, stir to blend, and use as desired.