Two wheat-free weeks

I've been eating, and cooking, lots of everyday food lately. Things like chicken soup with white beans and swiss chard (and misc. other veggies, whatever's in the fridge) that I don't use recipes for. You haven't seen a new post from me lately 'cause although plenty of good food has come forth from my kitchen, not much of it has been (to my mind) blog-worthy. It's all been tasty and healthy food, sure -- I'm a good cook, and we eat well -- but I'm guessing that if anyone besides me ever reads these posts, they might be more interested in a new idea or two, or a delicious recipe they can follow.

My only culinary adventure lately has been a two week wheat-free experiment, which I undertook for no good reason than I was curious to see what it would be like and how I'd feel. Hubby's been patient with it (he's a brown rice consumer, mostly; so long as that's always on his plate, he's fine), but I'm gonna need to get back to bread-baking soon to keep him truly happy at the table.

I thought I'd miss bread horribly, and I am feeling nostalgic for whole grain toast with peanut butter (my usual breakfast until two weeks ago) but the big surprise from this adventure was that it's the convenience of bread that I missed most, even more than the consuming of it. Toast is soooo much quicker and easier to make than a pot of brown rice!

Mostly I've just been avoiding wheat, eating more rice, and making do without bread, toast, or crackers (not as hard to do as I thought, but wouldn't wanna keep it up forever). I did get creative and make a brown rice and zucchini pizza crust one night, which was... interesting. Not horrible, or even bad. But not something I'll rush to repeat, although I might not be able to resist the challenge of seeing how much closer it can get to memorable (in a good way). And not anything you'd want me to share the recipe for, at least in that first rendition.

So anyway, this is my long-overdue post, the wheat-free weeks are up, and I'll be making bread (and toast!) again soon, but tomorrow I'm off to the Left Coast Crime conference (held right here on the Big Island this year, so yippeee!), so I'll be eating restaurant food until next Thursday. Oh boy: Pacific Fusion Cuisine, here we come! We're planning to eat at Roy's -- at least once -- and Sansei, and maybe check out Merriman's Market Cafe dinner menu (we enjoy lunch there) as well. That will blow our dining-out budget for a good long time to come, and be worth it.