Gluten Free Eye Round Roast and Tangy Homemade Steak Sauce

Natural Gluten Free Eye Round Roast

Food can be a very tricky facet of our lives. Beside the actual buying and painstaking preparation of your jars and bushels and packages and bags of sustenance we have a whole host of social and familial implications to contend with. Maybe you're lucky and you don't haul emotional food issues around along with your spare tire. Maybe your family was ultra pragmatic (and completely outside the realm of the "normal" American family, read: dysfunctional) and never ascribed hives of emotional longing and investment into your Grandmother's spaghetti sauce, zucchini bread or borscht. Maybe your aunt never praised you to the rafters for cleaning your plate (even though you were stuffed to your earlobes and about to explode into a geyser of mashed potatoes). Maybe you've never told yourself "That's IT, food is evil, I'm only chewing on ice cubes for the next 5 days." If you are someone who has escaped the inner hell of food obsession and fully grasped the meaning of "I'm eating to live, not living to eat", I applaud you. If you're one of the rest of us, still hunkering through the battle of emotional eating, I offer you Gluten Free Eye Round Roast for meals without a second thought.

Gluten Free Thai Ginger Chicken

Delicious Thai Ginger Chicken

We recently watched Food, Inc. in two sittings no less because my blood pressure was rising to a dangerously molten level after the first half. If you've seen it you know why and if you haven't, well...watch it, discuss it, talk about it, share it with friends, make changes in your life. Or have the immediate reaction I did and paw through your fridge and cabinets, scanning the labels on every jar, box and bag for mutant GMOs, and the viscous poison of High Fructose Corn Syrup. Even though you know your entire loft is a GMO and HFCS free zone and your boyfriend is lounging on the couch, watching you swivel around the kitchen, calling out "that's all natural!", "minimally processed!", and "I ground that meat myself, it all came from a single source!" and indeed, he did. For that is what butchers do, part time or otherwise. And so naturally, even though I know everything we buy is natural or organic and minimally processed and all that jazz, I was pretty sure I never wanted to eat anything purchased at the store ever again and promptly began making mental plans to hang large planters from the ceiling in which to grow my own bounty. Until, of course, I came home to this Thai Ginger Chicken - this local, organic, free range chicken.

Gluten Free and Dairy Free Lasagna

Gluten Free Dairy Free Lasagna

People are out in full force around Santa Monica. Bikers in skin tight racing gear or ambling along leisurely on beach cruisers dot the streets, the parking structures along 4th street are buzzing with perfect-spot anticipation and the beach front is filling out with the toweled squares of families and friends laughing with reckless abandon in the constant ocean wind. Girls strut down the promenade in their Uggs, bright sundresses billowing and snaking around their tanned legs, weighed down with the happy satisfaction of spring packaged up in boastful bags. And they keep saying "it's spring, spring is here!". Which, I suppose it is. Technically. So what else is there to do but make a Gluten Free & Dairy Free Lasagna?

Simple Gluten Free Ingredients for Your Kitchen

Lately I've felt very...how to say this...well, "eh" about food. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I've been feeling pretty lukewarm on the whole traditional dinner front. You know, chicken - vegetables - sauces. Maybe just meat in general. I go through phases like this, you see. I will be intense and unrelenting in my need for pasta with a meat sauce and then BAM the next week the very thought of such a dish will launch me down a sickly yellow sea of nausea. Bottom line? I'm pretty much like a pregnant woman nixing that whole womb-invasion thing. Thank God. Still, salvation remains. I have in my posession a solid list of Gluten Free go-to ingredients to punch up, dish out and tuck in to almost any dish - whether you're feeling culinarily lethargic or ready to take on a round of Chopped.