Say Hello to Carolyn From All Day I Dream About Food

Posted by Correen in Articles, Interviews | 5 comments

Thank you to Nancy from Spicie Foodie for introducing me to Carolyn. I sure do love this venture of discovering food bloggers, perusing their sites and getting to know them a bit more. And I did not even mention the nom nom bites I get to find along the way…lucky me, huh? Let’s get to know what Carolyn from All Day I Dream About Food is up to…

I have lots of memories of being around in the kitchen long before I could even see over the countertops. What was your childhood kitchen like?

We lived on a farm when I was little and we had a housekeeper who taught my mother to bake her own bread. I remember the huge metal bowl where my mum would mix her ingredients to make 6 or 8 loaves at a time. We would eat it around the big old pine farm table with chili or soup, and we kids always got to have a piece with butter when it was still warm from the oven. I also used to practically run to the kitchen when I heard the electric mixer going, because I knew I would get to lick one of the beaters if it was something sweet.

How did you get into blogging, and what was your motivation for starting All Day I Dream About Food?

Honestly, I started my blog on a whim, when searching for recipes and coming across other food blogs. I’ve always modified recipes to suit my own tastes and reading these blogs made me realize that it would be fun to share my recipes with anyone who cared to read. But once I realized that the gestational diabetes I’d had with my third child wasn’t going away, my blog took on more purpose. I began experimenting with low carb and gluten free ingredients and coming up with some wonderful treats that didn’t adversely affect my blood sugars, and I knew that there were people out there who could benefit from my experiments. Diabetes changes your relationship to food, you have to be so careful about what you eat, and my blog helps me stay on track by allowing me to get creative with my ingredients.

Last week hubby and I went to a party and he gave me a hard time about how I was fussing around with arranging my appetizer plate…ugh men! What are your thoughts about food and how it’s presented?

I am usually not all that concerned with presentation, I tend to be impatient and not all that worried about the details. Every day meals get plopped on a plate and we eat it, because my kids don’t care how it looks. Unless we are having company, I don’t fuss about how things look on the plate. But I do care about how my baked goods look, whether it’s just the family or we are having someone over. I love baking and I want my foods to look so tempting, everyone wants to dive right in. And I love the praise that comes with something that tastes AND looks good!

Love your tagline – Adventures in Cooking, Baking, and Eating the Results because that’s me in a nutshell too. Talk to us about what this tagline means to you and how it shapes your blog.

Well, let’s face it, we all have failures in the kitchen. And a lot of my dishes are true experiments because I can’t always be sure how some of my alternative ingredients, like almond flour or coconut flour, are going to behave. It’s very different than baking with wheat flour and sugar. I try to share my successes and my failures, so people can learn from my mistakes. And I usually recap how I think the recipe turned out, and what I might change for the next time.

If you opened your fridge and grabbed out five ingredients right now what would you make? Talk to us about what is going through your head, what you do to create the dish.

Eggs, frozen spinach (does the freezer count?), parmesan and garlic, and some olive oil off the counter. These are the makings of a fantastic meal, a spinach and parmesan frittata. Heat the oil in a pan over medium low, whisk the eggs, toss in the rest of the ingredients, salt and pepper to taste, cook slowly. Let the bottom brown while the top remains almost uncooked, and then you pop it under the broiler to firm and brown the top. It’s one of the first meals I ever cooked for my husband and the one I always go to in a pinch.

All Day I Dream About Food is devoted to mostly low carb and/or gluten free recipes, with a few conventional recipes thrown in for good measure. Carolyn is diabetic with a sweet-tooth and a fast metabolism, so she loves creating low carb goodies that taste just as good as the flour-and-sugar variety…sometimes even better.

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