Against All Grain | The Dinner Special podcast

121: Beth Manos Brickey: Taking Control and Making Healthier Choices

May 4, 2016 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Tasty Yummies

Beth has been 100% gluten-free since 2005 and was inspired to create her blog, Tasty Yummies, after significantly changing her diet and her life in 2010.

Her goal is to inspire us to get creative with our food and to live and eat well with food intolerances and allergies. Her work has been featured in America’s Test Kitchen, Huffington Post and The Kitchn, just to mention a few. Beth is also an artist, a certified yoga instructor and adventurer and lover of all things yummy.

I’m so excited to have Beth Manos Brickey of Tasty Yummies joining me here on the show.

(*The photos below are Beth’s.)

On Whether or Not to Try a Gluten-Free Diet:

The longer I’ve been in this world, the more I see that it’s different for everybody. We’re all such individuals and there’s obviously classic signs of gluten intolerances, or you can have an allergy or you can have Celiac disease, which would also bring on the intolerance. There are varying degrees of symptoms. I would say, certainly chronic digestive issues, it’s worth looking into.

Brain fog, skin issues, just feeling generally run-down. I know people that have a very classic allergenic response, hives. So, it can take on many forms and there’s also different ways but I also think that sometimes people think, “Well, I don’t have diarrhea every day, so clearly…and I eat gluten every day, so clearly, I don’t have an intolerance,” but as I was saying previously, our bodies actually are really smart and they’re built with these mechanisms to protect us. If you’re constantly exposing your body to something that it doesn’t want, it will learn how to protect you from it by building up a tolerance. So, just because you don’t have itchy skin and you don’t think you’re tired or brain fogged or digestively challenged, it doesn’t mean that there’s not something else going on. So, it’s worth experimenting. I tell everybody, if there’s any question, just try it.

On Relearning to Cook Gluten-Free:

There were a lot of fails, a lot of fails, but I think that that’s what made me love food. I’ve always loved food, I’ve always had an appreciation for it but it really connected me in a different way. I built this different relationship with food, where I started learning that I had to listen to the food and what it wanted and what I wanted to do with it. Just getting back to basics but also, realize that there is so much exploring that can be done, and sometimes the most basic things can be the most beautiful things.

On a Simple First Step to Making Healthier Choices:

If I had it my way, I’d tell every person that I ever met to never eat a processed food again because it’s just garbage for you. Your body doesn’t recognize most of what you’re eating as true food. There’s no nutrition to it, so it’s not sustaining any sort of life force within your body. So, start to take note of the things in your kitchen and be aware of what’s in them. And obviously, we’re all in a world of convenience and needing to eat on the go, so if you’re going to pick a processed food – again, this comes from Michael Pollan – but my rule is five ingredients or less, and know what those ingredients are. If you cannot pronounce a word on a box, don’t buy it, just don’t.

On a Dish That’s Special to Her:

It’s actually under my website as a tutorial because it’s a little bit more step-by-step of a recipe. My family is Greek. My dad is 100% Greek and I grew up very surrounded by traditional Greek foods and everything that you see in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where Greek people eat, someone passes away, someone gets sick, we eat, we always eat. Food is celebration. So, growing up, my grandmother, my yaya, always made stuffed grape leaves. We call them dolmades; they’re called different things in other cultures. And it’s something I always loved, I thought it was a ton of work. I would love when she would make them and I would come over and I never made time to have her teach me how to make them. It’s one of those things, she passed away. Ironically, the month that I did that cleanse to remove everything, to find out if I needed to remove gluten, that was the month my yaya passed away, smack in the middle of that. I remember then and even now being like, “My gosh, I learned so much from her in the kitchen.” She was a great cook but I never learned how to make dolmades. I moved in to this house here in southern California about three years ago and when I moved in, the whole back alley of the house right behind my bedroom window, it’s all lined with grape vines.

And I was like, “Oh, I know what I need to do. I need to make stuffed grape leaves.” So my parents came out to visit and we got my grandmother’s old church cookbook that they – all the women of the Greek Orthodox Church in Buffalo – put together and we followed the instructions and followed her notes of the things that she changed and added and we learned, taught ourselves how to make stuffed grape leaves, with fresh grape leaves nonetheless. And after we did that, the first year I was like, “I need to make this a tutorial on my website. I need to show people that even though it’s cumbersome in the sense it’s a lot of steps and there’s a lot of hands-on aspect, it’s not just dumping stuff in a pot.” It’s also such an amazing and beautiful process that it’s one of those foods I have never once ever made them on my own. I always make them when my parents are here or when I go back home or something where there’s like a community, family love aspect to the meal.

It’s cool, it’s a recipe that I have a lot of pride in, even though it’s not anything original and it’s really simple but it’s just such a fun and beautiful connection-type recipe. And then I also – in the tutorial, because I generally avoid a lot of grains and I know a lot of my readers do as well – I offer the option to replace the rice that’s in the stuffed grape leaves with cauliflower rice. So, it’s kind of a different option and then you can make it with meat or without meat, you can eat them hot or cold. So, it’s amazing.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

This is not going to be a popular answer but I don’t really watch cooking shows anymore. I got sick of always turning on Food Network and always seeing Guy Fieri and a bunch of garbage food that I didn’t really want to get excited about. So, I just don’t watch it anymore. Although, Aida Mollenkamp, a friend of mine in L.A., she works with Tastemade and does a series, it’s a web series. She travels around the world and does a quick 10-minute show about the food of that area. And so, I guess I do watch a little bit, just not the traditional stuff. So yeah, that would be my pick.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

Some of my favorites are Nourished Kitchen. This woman, Jennifer, who does an amazing job sharing how to enjoy real food and get into the kitchen; very similar mind-set to mine, get in the kitchen, make it yourself, real food. I really love Salt & Wind, also created by Aida Mollenkamp, who I mentioned before. She travels the world, she has a bunch of contributors, it’s really focused on travel and the food of travel and all around the world and being inspired by that. I think the other one that really makes me happy right now is a blog called Will Frolic for Food. It’s a friend of mine, Renee Byrd, and she’s just a beautiful photographer, beautiful photos. Everything she makes is just gorgeous and you can tell she really puts time into every detail of every dish and there’s just this level of love in every recipe. It makes me happy to see somebody slowing down and taking time with food.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat that make you happy?

So on Instagram, I follow a whole bunch of people that stemmed from this one person, in terms of what she was doing. I really love Beth of Local Milk. She just takes beautiful photography that has so much emotion in it and most of the time, it’s food-focused. So, I just love what she does. There’s a feed on Instagram called How You Glow. It’s two girls from L.A. and they also seem to travel a lot and they promote healthy living and getting out and experiencing your world and experiencing all the different things there are, but also mindful living; they’re very focused on yoga and healthy eating. I love The Feed Feed feed, just because it’s a really great way to find new bloggers, new recipes, new people. And then I follow a lot of people that are very much in line nutritionally with what I’m doing. Some of them happened to be Paleo food bloggers, but Diane Sanfilippo, Mickey Trescott, Liz Wolfe, Robyn Youkilis, who I just discovered recently, who wrote a book that came out this month. I think it’s called Go With Your Gut. It’s about gut healing and food. So yeah, those are just some of my favorites. Again, I could probably go on forever.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

I don’t know if it’s unusual, but right now, it’s my most treasured. It would be a toss-up between my Vitamix and I just recently bought a pressure cooker, Instant Pot. I do a lot of batch cooking because I want to make sure that even when I’m busy and life’s crazy, that I can eat well. I drink bone broth every week. Again, another gut healing thing, and there’s just so many nutrients and I used to make it in a big stock pot and let it cook for 24 to 48 hours, and I don’t think that’s really safe to leave a pot on a gas stove that long. It doesn’t make me feel good. So the pressure cooker cooks it in a couple of hours and it’s the best. I buy a bunch of organic chicken thighs and cook that in there and I’ve been cooking sprouted grains in there. So, sometimes at the start of the week that thing doesn’t leave the counter for two days while I just cook a storm up.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

It’s kind of a weird thing. I laugh now but I used to think that maple syrup was really gross because the scent of it I felt like it would linger if you’d have it on pancakes. When you were a kid it would just, the smell of it would just stay on your body and then it was just all you’d smell. I probably realize now that it wasn’t real maple syrup and maybe that was what I was not loving. Now, I love it. I use it when I bake and it’s always in my kitchen.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

One that jumps out is Danielle Walker of Against All Grain, put out a meals-made-simple cookbook. It’s Paleo but I just like that it’s simple. It’s not, you have to have a million crazy ingredients you’ve never heard of; it’s casseroles made with cauliflower, rice and chicken, and comfort food and the things that you grew up with. I often just turn to that for when I want something easy that I can throw it on the Crock Pot and not think about. But I know it’s well tested and it will be great.

I actually don’t cook a lot from cookbooks but another book that I turn to a lot when I want some sort of inspiration, I love Indian food but I obviously didn’t grow up with Indian food. It’s just called India Cookbook.

It’s beautiful and it’s huge, and beautiful color pictures through the whole thing. But, it’s a really nice way to look at a very classic, traditional culture’s food and how they would make it, and nine times out of ten, it’s way more involved or ingredients that I don’t have access to, but it’s a good inspiration for something that maybe comes from it that’s inspired by it.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

A lot of times when I cook I don’t have music on, but it’s when I’m taking my photos that I turn music on and then that’s so dependent on my mood. And it’s so dependent on my mood that if you looked at my stream on Spotify, you’d be like, “Is this person bipolar or are they like schizophrenic? What’s going on?” Because it would be Iron Maiden and Motorhead, and the next day it will be Fleetwood Mac and Beyonce, and then it will go to traditional Indian yogic-style music and then jazz, and then Sigur Rós. I am all over the map with music. I just don’t like country music, it doesn’t make me want to dance. But depending on my mood, I would say almost everything else will make me dance and depending on the day.

On Keeping Posted with Beth:

I’m at Tasty Yummies on pretty much on every platform, so take your pick. I’m on Snapchat and Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook. The blog is always a good home base for recipes and just stay in the loop, probably with Instagram. I have a new website coming in the next few months. So hopefully my new website will be an even better platform to keep up with the yoga events I have and retreats I found working as a nutritionist, and all the different things that I’m doing.

095: Tessa Fisher: Gluten-Free Baking with Whole Ingredients

November 30, 2015 by Gabriel Leave a Comment

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Salted Plains

Tessa is fascinated with turning her love of baking into creating gluten-free treats that taste good. On her blog Salted Plains she shares recipes of her gluten-free creations many of which are also dairy-free or vegan. Tessa strives to use whole ingredients and refrains from baking with refined sugar whenever she can.

I am so happy to have Tessa Fisher of Salted Plains joining me here on the show today.

(*All photos below are Tessa’s.)

On Her Interest in Baking:

Baking was something that I always did growing up. My mom was a really great cook, she was always creating new things for us at dinner but she didn’t do a whole lot of baking. That was something that I always really liked experimenting with, probably putting weird combinations together when I shouldn’t have been. But it’s always been something that I’ve really just enjoyed doing.

I’ve always felt more comfortable baking than cooking and from preparing meals for sure.

I think the idea of just creating something sweet, I kind of have a sweet tooth, and then being able to share those things with other people, has always just been a lot of fun for me.

On Being Gluten-Free:

About middle school, high school, I started getting severe migraines and they would just put me out for a whole day and then make me pretty sick, very nauseous, dehydrated, just really awful. As I went through high school they kind of became more frequent. In college, they were very frequent, and so I tried everything. I did acupuncture and saw a chiropractor and saw ear, nose and throat doctors, and allergies and all sorts of things to try to figure out what was going on and no real an answer. Some things helped calm symptoms a little bit but nothing really ever got rid of them. I just became okay with the idea that I was always going to have migraines but at the same time when a special event was coming up, I’d get nervous that one would come and it would just ruin the day.

So I really came to be gluten-free because I had a friend mention that they had read that there was a connection between gluten and migraines and maybe I should check it out. So I did. I did some reading and I decided to cut gluten out for a couple of months just to see what would happen. I really didn’t think anything was going to change and I started feeling better and so I kept going and the migraines lessened. I’ve been a few years migraine free now, so kind of life changing.

On Baking Gluten-Free and Being Self-Taught:

My biggest adjustment, I think, with the absence of gluten–that kind of glues everything together–is just figuring out, “Okay, so how does that work exactly? And what do you use to replace it?” Just the very basics, really, of it. That was probably the toughest part for me and a little bit overwhelming.

When I went gluten-free and I started seeing the positive effects for me of that, I then also at the same time realized, “Oh, so that means no cookies and cake and all the stuff that I loved.” I was okay with maybe not having bread so much, but the other things seemed kind of dire so I started looking things up online. That’s how I became acquainted with bloggers that were dealing with being gluten-free and that kind of thing and really just did a lot of reading online about it.

On Some Good Resources for Gluten-Free Baking:

The blogs that I was going to initially over and over again for baking gluten-free and cooking gluten-free were Gluten-Free Girl, I learned a lot through what she was doing. Also Against All Grain, Danielle Walker’s site, I learned a lot there. Tasty Yummies, I went to all the time.

Against All Grain and Tasty Yummies are both, I think, more Paleo-based, but obviously grain free, gluten-free and so I learned a lot through reading their blogs.

On Baking Without Refined Sugar:

One of my favorite substitutes for just regular granulated white sugar would be coconut sugar. You can use it as a one-to-one substitute, it’s also a lower glycemic but it also has a little bit more nutrients than just regular white sugar so you can feel a little bit better about using that. I really like coconut sugar. I use honey a lot; I also use maple syrup a lot. Those three are probably my top unrefined sugars.

Usually honey and maple syrup are pretty interchangeable. It will change the flavor a tad bit, but for those recipes that could be converted to vegan, obviously maple syrup would be a great way to go.

I have some recipes on my site that are using coconut sugar and people try to use maple syrup or vice versa, the liquid, the granulated, usually don’t always transfer very well.

Coconut sugar is more similar to brown sugar, it has a more caramel-ly taste to it which I really like. I think it gives a whole different depth to your baked goods. So that’s something I wasn’t initially thinking about when I started using it. Now I will purposely use it in something that I think could use that flavor. Sometimes I use sucanat also, which is a little bit lighter. It doesn’t have so much of that caramel-ly flavor but is also unrefined.

Learning those little nuances with the sugars has helped a great deal.

On Her Blog:

I was riding myself ragged with my full-time job and I was also coaching swimming. That schedule in general was pretty intense. Early mornings, working all day and then late evenings and weekends. I was feeling just totally worn out which wouldn’t make you think, “Let’s start a blog,” but I was feeling the need for something creative, something to look forward to, to cause myself to learn about something on daily basis. It really was born out of that. I had started playing around with gluten-free baked goods by then, taking them to our weekly girls’ night and getting really good feedback and I thought, “Well, maybe this is the way to go for now and just see what happens.”

A lot of inspiration I get from just the seasons – the fruit and vegetables that’s out there seasonally, but also just what I’m craving a lot of times goes into what’s the next thing that I’m going to work on. Or, what have I not attempted yet that I think other people might want to have a gluten-free version of? Or, what not gluten-free grain could I use that I haven’t really played much with? That kind of dictates what I do next.

The Bojon Gourmet, I love her blog, her photography, what she does with her food I think is amazing, always getting really good ideas from her. The cookbook Flavor Flours by Alice Medrich is fantastic and she has chapters on, maybe seven or eight, different grains–gluten-free grains–and how to use them. So I go to that a lot to get ideas on the texture and what you can use for cakes, and what’s good for cookies and that kind of thing.

The Pressure Cooker:

Which food shows or cooking shows do you watch?

I don’t really watch a whole lot of TV and I don’t have a particular food show, but if I turn on the TV and I’m flipping through and there’s something related to food on, I’m going to stop and just watch.

What are some food blogs or food websites we have to know about?

Well, one quick blog that I came across recently that I loved is called Appeasing a Food Geek and Kelsey is the writer of the blog. She breaks things down from a scientific point of view, how things work and react and because I wish I knew more about that, I love that she does that.

Who do you follow on Pinterest, Instagram, or Facebook or Snapchat that make you happy?

I guess Instagram is probably my favorite. I love seeing photos from Food Stories. Also Adventures in Cooking–Eva Flores. She just does beautiful photography. There are so many and I love also following travel photographers on Instagram. Alex Strohl is a travel photographer and he just goes to amazing places so I would have to say those are my top.

What is the most unusual or treasured item in your kitchen?

Well, this is pretty simple. But my Silpat that you use for baking on your cookie sheets. It’s a reusable replacement of parchment paper, but I use it over and over and over again and it’s great. It cleans super fast and it’s always handy.

Name one ingredient you used to dislike but now you love.

Well, one food for sure is brussels sprouts. Never liked them growing up and now they’re probably one of my favorite foods.

What are a few cookbooks that make your life better?

Well, this is not a cookbook but Ratio. The book Ratio has been really helpful for me. My Paleo Patisserie that came out this last year has been fantastic and again I think I mentioned Flavor Flours, one of my all-time favorite cook books.

What song or album just makes you want to cook?

Well, Josh Ritter–he’s coming out with a new album and one of his new singles is Getting Ready To Get Down. That pretty much gets you ready to do anything I think, so love that song.

On Keeping Posted with Tessa:

I really love Instagram, I’m on there a lot. Also on Pinterest and Facebook, and those are all @SaltedPlains. Those are probably the best places to find me, and Twitter.