How Did We Ever Survive

Danielle Walker’s Against All Grain Celebrations: A Year of Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, and Paleo Recipes for Every Occasion – Danielle Walker – (Ten Speed Press)

How did we ever make it this far? How did our parents and grandparents survive and thrive into their 80s and 90s without the need to have paleo, grain-free, fill-in-the-blank-free diets? I feel like I should be the proud wearer of a I Survived Kindergarten T-shirt based on the number of my classmates that gobbled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on a daily basis.

Yes, I realize that people are diagnosed with a variety of health and diet-based issues, but I think we have reached the point of silliness when we need a cookbook featuring a recipe for an AB&J Sandwich…that means almond butter and jelly. Enter author Danielle Walker who scored bestsellers with her against all grain approach to diets and recipes.

Walker’s latest entry is Danielle Walker’s Against All Grain Celebrations: A Year of Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, and Paleo Recipes for Every Occasion, in which she posits a variety of recipes, notably for holiday based celebrations that are free, free, set them free of grains, dairy and would make a caveman happy. Gee wasn’t the average life expectancy of a caveman about twenty-something? Maybe it was a dinosaur thing.

The recipes in the book look amazing in the photos, but like all cookbooks the proof is in the pudding…oh wait, pudding probably has dairy…um the proof is in the arrowroot! While the meat, fish and seafood based recipes sound great, I just couldn’t bring myself to slap together the bread and baked goods that featured no grains. Oh and I’ll pass on the AB&J Sandwich; sorry but almond butter looks like wallpaper paste.