Not exactly cordon bleu

So I've been trying to train myself to cook and no, it's because I've mistakenly woken up with the mindset of a 1940's housewife. I want to learn to cook for me particularly now that I'm trying to expand my diet and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find foods I can eat never mind am willing to eat. I can't eat most of the crap in processed foods even if they do come with the gluten free label and I refuse to do without treats completely, it's too damn depressing to even contemplate. I do like fruit a lot and I could eat strawberries and raspberries until they can no longer grow them to keep up with my demand ( or until I can no longer afford to support my habit, which let's face it will probably happen a lot sooner) but sometimes I want to eat cake. But trying to find a cake to eat when you can't have sugar or wheat or most artificial sweetners isn't exactly a joke.

So here I am branching out and trying to find a way to bake things that won't make me horribly ill but that I'll actually look forward to eating. Then the only real challenge will be finding people to share these goodies with to stop me from eating them all. All of these years I was telling myself I eat all the junk food because the sugar and msg and so on makes it sort of addictive but it turns out it's really just me because I have successfully removed all of those things from the equation and I still can't seem to exercise the correct amount of restraint. 

Now here's the thing about my cooking, it's not terrible. In that I've never made myself ill or anything from it but I'm not always great at managing timing and I will admit I'm getting better both in my tolerance and my overall skills. I am learning to cook new things but I will no longer bin a whole dinner because I over cooked the potatoes and now it just doesn't taste right (yes I have actually done that more than once)  

The thing is I work best when I know the exact amounts of everything the recipe requires. I am happy and comfortable with that sort of cooking but the problem is I have been scouring cookbooks lately and I find either the recipe is for something that sounds appetizing but requires 15 ingredients which I mostly don't have yet or else it's much simpler but made up almost entirely of things that are no longer part of my diet and this is where it gets interesting because it seems I can either bankrupt myself entirely to fund my efforts at clean eating by the book or I can take the recipes I like and start to improvise.

It's all going to get pretty messy because I'm fairly certain I don't improvise well. You should have tasted my first attempt at wheat free pancakes. For starters I couldn't even fry them, they were like brown sugary gloop (yum !) and I was pretty frustrated afterwards especially because the store bought pancake mix I bought instead was nice but it still felt like something was missing (gluten, I would think) but then I was told I was using the wrong flour and too much sugar so I played around with the ingredients a bit and suddenly I had really delicious pancakes (wahey) and I thought maybe I had underestimated myself.

This will be my new mission. I am going to teach myself to bake things that I can eat and that other people will eat voluntarily and I have set up another blog just to chart my progress and possibly document  the hilariously disastrous bits as I keep learning. 
check it out http://cantcookmusteat.blogspot.ie/