Noelle likes Good Food

I love food. What a surprise, right? I also love eating food from other cultures and one of my favorite cuisines is Mexican food. I greatly enjoy freshly made corn tortillas, all the different types of salsa, beans, pico de gallo, jicama, etc...  Like I said in my post yesterday, Nicole took me to two of the communities where she has been working. In their culture, if they are having guests they will feed you. So, the first house we went to, in the first community, they were eating a late breakfast and they invited us to eat with them. They had a big pot of soup or 'caldo' on the stove that they dished into bowls. Then we squeezed some lime juice and spooned some spicy salsa into our soup. I enjoyed that meal very much.  Here is the family's mortar and pestle and they made 'salsa' out of dried chilies, roasted tomatoes, and a pinch of salt. It is spicy, but incredibly flavorful and tasted great in our soup. Now that I have a mortar and pestle I am going to make t...

I found out about this "Adopt a Gluten-Free Blogger" event about 2 months ago and knew I wanted to join. Sea at the Book of Yum has been hosting it. For anyone that enjoys reading gluten-free food blogs you can 'adopt' one of them and pick a recipe or two to try out. Then you write about it and talk about the person or blog that you chose. You can click here to see all the adoptions for this month. At the end of the month Sea will compile all of those posts and recipes where you can see what experiments and adoptions others have made. I thought it was a fabulous way of creating community in the blogosphere and I am so excited to be able to join this month. I was selfish and chose Sea, the amazingly talented woman hosting this event. I haven't been reading her blog for very long, but I greatly enjoy the culture, variety, and creativity she puts into the food she makes. I am a big fan of trying crazy new foods and foods from other cuisines and cultures. She tak...

I like sauces. I like dressings. I like condiments. I like dips. Anything that I can scoop into, dip out of, spoon from, or be squeezed out is a friend of mine.  I was looking for a way to use up some black beans I had cooked up last week. Given my love of anything dip related, this recipe practically jumped out at me. It was a recipe for mexican layer dip from my Clean Food Cookbook. The 'sour cream' was made out of tofu and it was completely gluten and dairy free. I thought I would give it a try and put in my own few twists. The recipe called for 16 oz of bean dip. What I had were unseasoned black beans. I would give you the recipe for how I made my bean dip but I am not sure the exact amounts. I know I started with two cups of black beans, 1/2 diced onion, 2 cloves garlic, 1 tsp pepper, 1 chili in adobo sauce. I blended and tasted. It was bland but spicy. Eck. So I added 1 tsp chili powder and 1 tsp. salt. I tasted it again and realized I put in WAY too much salt. (Thi...