Archive for February, 2010

Gluten free pancakes – revised

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Gluten free coconut pancakes

DRY INGREDIENTS (MIX)

1/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/4 cup brown rice flour (sifted to remove unground kernals)
1/4 cup millet flour (sifted to remove unground kernals)
1/8 cup soy flour
1/8 cup tapioca flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda 
3/4 tsp cinnamon
WET INGREDIENTS (MIX)
2 whole eggs
1 cup hot water
1 tsp heaping coconut cream concentrate
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp maple syrup grade b
Mix up eggs in a medium bowl. Mix coconut cream concentrate in hot water over heat in a sauce pan to make a coconut milk. Add coconut milk to eggs, add in maple syrup and vanilla. Mix very well with wire wisk until layer of foam forms on top.
Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add wet mixture into dry mixture and mix with wire wisk. Cook on a cast iron pan with coconut oil. These are delicous. Makes about 8 x 5? pancakes. Batter should be fairly runny and spread out quickly on pan.  Be sure to oil the cast iron pan each time before pouring more batter on. Cook them on whatever you want, I just like my cast iron pan and metal turner.
After cooking, put some butter on them and some grade B maple syrup. They taste better than wheat ones I’ve made and they are wheat free.

I’m back to growing

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Yeah, back to growing this year. Manzanita from cuttings, california junipers from cuttings and seed, rabbitbrush, sagebrush, of course coulter pine (Pinus coulteri), singleleaf pinyon pine, and various fruit trees. I’m also propagating some grape vines and pomegranate cuttings and plum tree cuttings, and blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and rasberries. The rain has been good this year. I’ve recorded about 7 inches in Phelan, CA and more may be on the way soon.

A few years ago I moved to Colorado, had to give up my whole stock before leaving, including about 30 x 10 year old coulter pines that I started from seed. What a shame. Well I hope they’re still all alive. Coulter pines can be a bit touchy, especially when potted or moved or 2-3 years after transplanting. Now that I’m back in southern California, I’m back at it again. I am always getting emails from people wanting to buy Coulter pines, probably more emails now, than when I actually had them.  The biggest Coulter pine that I grew from seed is now about 15′ tall with a spread of about 10′. This particular tree was a fast-grower from birth approx 13 years ago.

Upgrade Word Press

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

I had a bunch of hacked links all over this site. Just upgraded to the latest version available. I couldn’t do the upgrade where the site was hosted because the mysql version was not good enough. So I had to move the site to a different host and then the upgrade went perfectly! Whew, glad that’s done!

Garage work for the weekend

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

I had wanted to build some cabinets in my garage. The garage is about 1000 square feet and attached to the house. I intended to build some cabinets and put them up along the south wall of the garage between two windows. This is about 16 foot long area. I didn’t want anything fancy but just some extra storage. Anyhow, as way leads to way, the weekend came along and I somehow picked up a computer virus _ex-08.exe and monnid32.exe. Figuring this out and cleaning up my system took most of Saturday so the prospect of getting these cabinets built did not look good. (Btw…. for the virus issue, just incase someone stumbles on this page with the same problem, I used Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and it did a great job at cleaning the system). Now, short on time, as this was a weekend project, I remembered a friend of mine, William, had told me weeks earlier when I was talking about the cabinets that he just simplified it and lined the wall of his garage with ordinary gym style lockers. I looked more into it late on that Saturday and decided to give myself a break and put the lockers in instead. Well I went shopping for the best price (actually I had only my budget for the cabinet materials to spend). I didn’t realize the selection I’d have but I ordered ones like this locker. I got 4 of these for a total of 36 compartments. Since my budget allowed it I went and upgraded to assembled. They arrived about 2 weeks later on a freight truck and after unpacking, I put them into place, screwed them into the wall, and viola, 36 cabinets. For the situation at hand, it can’t be beat. No time wasted, computer is clean and the cabinets are in and I’m back to work… oh yeah. Bye!