10/08/2026
♥️
I love cookbooks.
Especially beautiful ones.
Ones with no-fuss, family friendly recipes.
And one of the questions that I get on the regular is, “Gayle, is it clean?”
I chuckle everytime.
If you mean, are the pages clear of batter and anything else that might have stuck to the pages? Probably not.
If you mean, are the recipes without seed oils, enriched flours and other things that we avoid? Probably not.
I make them clean(er).
One ingredient swap at a time.
Moving through a good, better, best journey that I’ve been on for a while.
I swap the Crisco for grass-fed ghee in my Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Brownies.
I trade out the seed oil in salad dressing recipes for avocado or olive oil.
I use organic flour for baking hamburger buns and sourdough bread instead of bleached flours that are often grown with synthetic agricultural inputs.
I don’t buy “clean” cookbooks, mostly because that is an overused and poorly defined word these days. I simply make the swaps that align with how we eat.
A quiet Friday night (rare), might find me curled up with a new cookbook, a cup of coffee and a cozy knit blanket. I’ll be marking pages with sticky notes and creating a list of what I need. Sometimes you’ll find Heidi beside me, scoping out things like that caramel sauce below…made with grass-fed butter, organic brown sugar, real salt, raw cream and homemade vanilla.
We get to define what clean is and we shouldn’t allow other people to write that script for us. Do some homework, make some small swaps to start with, and enjoy ♥️
