Tag: gluten free

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Joy! My First Recipe Book is Here!

Lovely ones, for years and years, you’ve been telling me how much my books make your mouth water and make you hungry and how much you want me to write a recipe book. Well, finally I have put together my first recipe book, and it’s available from today, just in time for Christmas celebrations and gift giving.

Joy: GET YOUR COPY NOW

What’s in it? My blue ribbon winning strawberry jam recipe, for one. 🙂 These recipes are family friendly, all gluten free by default (but you can substitute your own flour, no problem) and usually dairy free (but you can also substitute your usual replacements). They are highly flexible recipes, made for you to play with. Cooking is creative, after all, so I want my recipes to be inspiring and supporting, as much as they are instructional.

I’ve also included a five-page special event guide on How To Throw A Tuscan Feast. This is a great event for a special occasion, such as Christmas, Easter or (as I did) for a special wedding anniversary. I’ve also included recipes for cakes, cupcakes, icing, cocktails, apple crumble, a hearty chicken dinner, gingerbread and more.

My food stories and recipes are inspired by my bestselling foodie fiction books. For years, I’ve wanted to bring you, my readers, this accessible, family friendly and tested collection of some of my favourite recipes. This is the first volume of recipes, accompanied by behind-the-scenes stories and memories. It’s a great idea for a Christmas gift for a loved one, especially if you can’t catch up in person – you can send this ebook to them, wherever they are.

I hope you love it.

Jo x

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In Praise of the Crappy Gingerbread House

Loves, I made my first ever gingerbread house from scratch and it really, really elooks it 😆 I think the world is breathing a sigh of relief right now that I became a writer and not an engineer because this house is held together with determination and a half kilo of spakfilla!

The recipe quantities were wrong so there were last minute ‘recipe rescue’ emergencies, AND it’s gluten free (which always adds a difficulty factor of 150), and I had to use paper stencils rather than cutters. But… it is really yummy! 🥰

The point of the gingerbread house is that I made it with my kiddo and it was fun and he got to see that things go wrong (quite a lot!) but we can work through it and we can still be proud of our efforts and progress. Progress is something I think we should be applauding far more than we do. We tend to celebrate achievements and ‘the best’ of everything, the top academics and the fastest runners (which is absolutely worth respecting and valuing) but I’d love to see a world that ALSO champions effort and progress and the courage to mess up and try again.

So, yep, I’ll be serving up this gingerbread house on Christmas Day because it too is an achievement of which we can be proud. (And also ‘cause it took hours to make so there’s no way we aren’t going to enjoy it! 😆)

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Maggie Beer and Me

I have pretty much written a love letter to Maggie Beer in my new novel, The Jam Queens. My love for Maggie began so long ago I can’t remember when it started but I’d like tell you a little about me and Maggie.

I have watched Maggie’s wonderful television show The Cook and the Chef. I’ve collected and read her books, sinking into her stories about her early years on the orchard and with then pheasant farm with her kids and husband Colin. Just about the only episode I can remember of MasterChef was the one which she was a guest competitor. A friend once offered me a last-minute ticket to see Maggie at the State Library of Queensland, just before Christmas time, and I cancelled everything to get to the sold-out event to hear her speak. She was, as you’d expect, warm, funny, engaging and generous. (I bought one of her books there and stood in line for an age to ask her to sign it but as it was a sold-out event and the line snaked around the terrace I didn’t have time to lavish her with my adoration… probably to her good fortune.) Twice a year every year, my friend Kate and I go on writing retreat together and have often daydreamed and drooled about making the next one an adventure down to Maggie’s Orchard House to cook in her drool-worthy kitchen. My husband works in aged care and we enthusiastically snapped up her book Maggie’s Recipe for Life and encouraged everyone in the company to go buy it too. Maggie’s foodie values–love, family, sharing, sustainability, celebration, honouring the source of our food, and growing food–are values I share and find their way into my books as I write.

You get the drift, right? I’m a big fan.

I suppose it was inevitable that when I decided to set a book in the Barossa Valley, Maggie’s spirit would find its way into my story. One of the driving plot points of the book became the annual jam competition at the Royal Adelaide Show. As my main character Aggie’s family is full of jam queens, they have created a system where one queen may nominate herself to enter in a given year while the others stand aside. But this year, there is an extra incentive to win, with the triumphant jam queen invited to cook with Maggie on her television show. Perhaps then, the rules could be broken just for this year? After all, it is Maggie Beer they’re talking about! Who could resist the opportunity to spend time with her? While it might be Aggie’s turn to enter, her mother Valeria is torn. Maggie is her idol. How could she not enter?

I travelled to the Barossa in 2017 with my husband and then five-year-old son. (The flowers in the valley were well and truly out. Aren’t they gorgeous?) Of course, at the top of my list of things to do was to head to Maggie Beer’s Farm Shop, which we did three times in less than a week. The lake, the olive trees, the grounds, the shop… it’s all gorgeous. (And she has the best gluten free bread rolls I’ve ever had! And I’ve been gluten free for 30 years, so I’ve eaten a lot of them.) I confess I was hoping to simply bump into Maggie by good fortune, but the closest I got was seeing her disappear out through the kitchen door, and it was all I could do to stop myself leaping over the counter to chase her down… which, of course, probably wouldn’t have ended too well for me, so it’s lucky I haven’t been a high jumper since primary school.

This is all just to say, ‘Thanks, Maggie, for nurturing the hearts, minds, bodies and souls of food lovers throughout the country, including mine’ and inspiring a a plot line through my new book. I hope you love it.

Love

Jo x

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Mini Meringue Bites

These meringue bites are so simple (and inexpensive), they’ll become your go-to treat for any last-minute guests dropping in for coffee, or maybe use them as additional birthday party treats.

This is another recipe from The Cake Maker’s Wish. My cake maker, Olivia, gets to have fun creating a wedding cake for a celebrity couple and adds meringues as embellishments to her design, which is another great use for these mini meringues.

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The basic meringue recipe is simple but it’s also flexible as you can change the colour (pink, blue, white, caramel or rainbow unicorn!) or flavour (think vanilla, chocolate, coffee, rose or orange blossom) to suit your taste or needs. Glam them up or keep them simple. They can go as far as your imagination desires.

This one can also be gluten free. (In theory, cream of tartar is gluten free but if you have any concerns about it being processed in the same facility as grains then check with the manufacturer.)

Ingredients

  • 4 egg whites, room temperature… free range, please… I love my chooks 🙂
  • 1 cup of castor sugar
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla
  • 1/4 tsp cream of tartar
  • Add colours or flavours of your choice (e.g. vanilla, rosewater, orange blossom water, coffee, chocolate powder, strawberry powder, jam etc.). Add these to the desired taste or effect but most flavourings only require about half a teaspoon.

Method

  1. Preheat your oven to 120C.
  2. Beat your egg whites and cream of tartar until they are beginning to hold shape.
  3. Add in your sugar a little at a time, mixing well between additions until the sugar is completely mixed through and the meringue is white, fluffy and holds stiff peaks.
  4. Add your vanilla and/or flavourings or colourings of choice and beat through.
  5. Pipe your mini meringues onto baking trays lined with paper. Bite-sized pieces could be the size of a twenty-cent coin.
  6. Place the trays in the oven and reduce the heat to 90C and bake for around an hour and a half. You want them to cook slowly so that they harden into bites.

Tip

Have fun with these! You could try splitting the meringue into two halves and colouring them differently, then putting both colours into a bag and piping them in a swirl to show both colours.

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Feel the Love at Goodness Gracious Cafe

20160524_105802LOVE. This is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Goodness Gracious Gluten Free & Organic Cafe in Yandina on the Sunshine Coast. The women who run this charming abode (Jill and Nicky) radiate love.

But I’ll get back to this. For now, I’m going to sidestep a little to a time in my life when I was really sick. Stay with me…

About thirteen years ago, my health was in a terrible mess, diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), Hashimoto’s Disease, hypothyroidism, a host of rheumatological issues and more. It was an intensely frightening time, unable to work to make the money I needed for the many treatments that doctors and natural therapists claimed would help. Unable to afford them, I had to make Big Life Decisions. But one of the easiest decisions I made was that I needed to invest the little amount of money I had into FOOD. It was clear to me that high quality food would be the basis of everything after that.

I started going to the Northey Street City Farm organic markets each week. And then for whatever reason, I found myself drawn to eating at Govinda’s (Hare Krishna) cafe in Brisbane city. Something that deeply impressed me about the Hare Krishna lifestyle was how important food was in their service and spirituality. So much so, I was told, that to be a person elevated to a food prep position was something of an honour, something that had to be earned. To prepare food in a Hare Krishna kitchen included loving and blessing the food before it was eaten.

Call me crazy if you like, but I felt some deep healing on those Sunday evenings spent at Govinda’s.

And this takes me back to Goodness Gracious Cafe. From the moment you pull up on the footpath you are surrounded by love–in the welcoming chalkboard signs; in the organic garden that’s lovingly tended by these women; in the heart-shaped art pieces hanging from the ceiling; in the locally-made handmade artworks for sale; in the groups of women knitting at the tables, with their rows of stitches becoming blankets for the homeless in the local area; and most certainly, most definitely, in the food.

Everything here is baked on site inside this post-war home on stumps–a home that has a fascinating history including being a railway station master’s home and having had a resident spirit called ‘Alfred’ walking the rooms (who was later ‘released’ when his daughter, who’d also lived in the home, happened upon the cafe and took him home with her).

Jill and Nicky and their friendly staff are always there with a warm smile, knowing many of their customers by name. Their gratitude for living their dream is evident, with the cafe and its customers supporting more than half a dozen different charities, both local and overseas. And their gastronomic creations never let you down.

My favourites include the Turkish delight hot chocolate (with real rose water); the chocolate, blueberry and lavender mud cake (seriously, you MUST try this!); the banana pancakes with homemade caramel sauce and banana ‘nice cream’ (dairy free); the chicken crepes and salad; the paleo lemon bar; and, well, pretty much everything else on the menu too.

There is some kind of deep wisdom that tells us that to provide food with love, and to eat food with love, is one of the most powerful things we can do. That’s why so many of our memories involve food with loved ones. That’s why we say ‘you are what you eat’. That’s why we go home for a ‘home cooked meal’. That’s why we make our loved ones soup when they’re ill.

Hippocrates is reported to have said, “Let food be thy medicine.”

Whether it’s intentional or not, the love and care that comes from these women’s hands infuses every mouthful. Just like my time at Govinda’s all those years ago, I come away from Goodness Gracious every time feeling blessed, nurtured and a little bit healed. And I walk away feeling that the world is a good place after all.

 

Goodness Gracious Cafe: 3 Conn St, Yandina. 

Opening Hours

Mon – Fri  8:00am – 4:00pm

Saturday  7:00am – 2:00pm & Sunday  7:00am – 1:00pm

(This post is part of a series of fortnightly reviews by Josephine Moon and Ashley Jubinville of healthy places to eat on the Sunshine Coast.)

 

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Husk & Honey (Food Tour of the Sunshine Coast)

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(A guest post today from my friend and tour partner, Ashley Jubinville, Kitchen Coach.)

Like the quiet little bees that go about their service of pollinating flowers so we can exist – without question or many thanks from us, this little café has been diligently going about “business as usual” in quiet little Nambour for over 4 years! The difference though is that their “business as usual” is really quite extraordinary and so refreshingly authentic.

If the reference was suiting enough already, the café’s name happens to be Husk & Honey AND my café-touring friend Josephine Moon has most recently released her wonderful foodie-fiction book called The Beekeeper’s Secret too (lovingly set on the Sunshine coast)!!! How fitting?! …you probably think I planned that one…. Haha

For those of you diligent foodies out there who are looking for a refreshing break from the stress of finding somewhere that you can eat without concern, the short drive out to the very funky Queen St. in Nambour is highly worth your while. There is not an ounce of gluten to be found anywhere in their kitchen, nor any other grains for that matter, and they make everything from scratch!!! – like everything! Even their tea blends, non-dairy milks, and hot chocolates! I LOVE YOU!

Next time you go, please pass on an extra bit of gratitude on my behalf to the lovely Johnny, Tashi, Sam, & Sarah for me – for their dedication to healthy, homemade goodness, authenticity, and happy service! And for anyone wanting a copy of any of your Josephine Moon books signed by the lovely Jo herself, you MAY just find her writing her next book in the cosy corner of Husk & Honey one day too!

Keep up the great work, smiles, and AWESOME food Husk & Honey – we need more like you to lead the way and help inspire people with what is possible. For all you Sunshine Coasters, lets ‘vote’ wisely with where we choose to spend our dollars – for the future of our food supply like the good bees we can bee!

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Kunara — a health foodie’s dream

Dear friends,

As Australia’s first foodie fiction author, I take my position seriously and therefore I have decided to make the ultimate sacrifice for you and eat my way around the Sunshine Coast in order to let you know what’s out there. No, please, no need to thank me. It’s my service to you 😉 To keep my spirits boosted during this obviously arduous task, I’ve enlisted the assistance of my friend, Kitchen Coach Ashley Jubinville (of the amazing “bee cake” fame). Together, we will eat on your behalf.

The obvious place to start is at Kunara, the organic superstore that is fast becoming the power centre of what the Sunshine Coast does best: health. Not only is there the organic supermarket itself, but organic cotton clothing, an organic hair salon and day spa, a holistic vet, holistic doctors, organic garden centre, organic butcher and more on the way.

In the cafe you’ll find everything a food sensitive soul would want: coconut milk cappuccinos, paleo chocolate desserts, golden turmeric mylk, vegan pastries and more.

One of the most delightful things about Kunara’s cafe is the outdoor seating that is situated within their garden shop, with the sound of the natural (and spectacular) water feature nearby. It’s a tranquil little space and we both agree it’s rather special. The other thing we particularly loved today was the gluten free spinach and feta roll. Wow! (If you’re not gluten free you won’t understand how exciting this is. For me, I’ve been gluten free for twenty-five years and this is the first one of these I’ve seen in that time. Trust me, it’s a big deal.) Ashley and I are strictly gluten free and to stumble across one of these was a first for both of us. And it didn’t disappoint. Go get one!

And for a bit of trivia, Kunara even features in The Beekeeper’s Secret.

Until next time,

Jo x