Recent Posts
So it's the holidays and everybody wants to include cookies with every gathering. My first gathering of the season, I took gluten free chocolate chip cookies made with Pamela's Baking Mix, and they were delicious as usual. So that was no problem. The next couple of gatherings that had cookies were fairly large and not many people noticed that I avoided the cookies like the plague. I did manage to have a piece of peppermint fudge at one of them, and that was remarkably satisfying.
And then there was today. It was a small gathering of my husband's writer's club, so my avoidance of stuff was very noticeable. And instead of being sensible and strictly avoiding everything except my own offerings, I caved to trying a chocolate chip pie. I only had a couple of bites, and I avoided eating any crust, but there was enough gluten in the filling that I could feel it within minutes. Blast! So then after we needed real food and we grabbed fish & chips at a local drive-thru spot. I figured I'd already blown it, and I was very hungry, so I might as well. Why do I do this to myself? My whole abdominal area is all inflammed and swollen up so that I just had to loosen my belt, and I feel my gallbladder complaining. I was already tired from a bad night's sleep, and now I can't seem to work up the umph to get upstairs and make dinner.
This reminds me why I've started taking gluten free eating so very seriously. I'm taking a sulphur supplement now, and my mother keeps telling me it will cure my gluten intolerance. Well, it has given me more energy and makes my skin look really nice, but no sign of improvement on the gluten front, as today's experiences make clear.
On Sunday I made a gluten free version of Lemon Cake with Lemon Curd and Mascarpone Cheese. Yummy! I'm just calling it a Lemon Cream Cake now, since it's basically a cake soaked with lemon syrup, and cream with lemon curd. On the second day, it tastes like the very best lemonade you've ever had. You can find the recipe on Epicurious.com (not gluten free, but I substituted Mama's Almond Blend Flour and added 1/2 teaspoon of xanthan gum and it worked great). It's good to feel like I can enjoy treats like this without suffering.
The moral of the story is, better to be impolite than suffer!
Whoohoo! My pie crust was the most successful pie crust I ever made! So far I made a wonderful quiche and a delightful apple pie. The crust wasn't perfect, I have intentions of making some tweaks, but it turned out crunchy and with good flavor. Pie crust has always been tough on me before, can't seem to be gentle enough, but the glory of gluten free is the gluten can't toughen your goods!
Tonight I made gluten free french fried onion rings. Bonus to that idea, no hydrogenated oils either! And it was remarkably easy and tasty. I just took a couple of medium onions and sliced them thin (about 1/8"), separated the rings, and spread them on a paper towel to dry for a bit. Then I beat an egg with a 1/2 teaspoon of mustard, some milk, and a few shakes of salt. (I used Walla Walla Onion Mustard w/Roasted Garlic, you can use any dijon mustard, or try something wild like Cranberry or Cajun mustard.) Then I took Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free Pancake Mix, added a few shakes of salt and pepper, and mixed it with my hands. I put a lump of coconut oil in a baking pan and let it melt. When it was ready, I grabbed a handful of onion and dunked it in the egg wash, and then into the pancake mix, and tossed the handful into the melted coconut oil. Baked the whole mess at 400 degrees for long enough to turn them golden brown and toasty. They were so yummy I had to take a few down to my husband as a preview.  Then I turned it all into a smashing good green bean casserole. Getting ready for Thanksgiving, you know!
Dinner was amazing, and I'm feeling pretty satisfied with myself. My honey had been having a lousy day, and that meal - green bean casserole, maple smokehouse chicken, roasted home-grown winter squash - was the first thing to get a happy face out of him. Gluten free can be satisfying for everybody, don't let anybody tell you different!
I am having such a hard time adjusting to life without frozen pie crust. It sounds silly, but I used to make quiche for lunch two or three times a month, and I can't seem to get myself buckled down to make pie crust from scratch, so we don't have quiche anymore. You could make a crustless quiche, I hear you say, but my husband always sighs and rolls his eyes about crustless quiche, and my grandmother and I neither one like it very well.
In the past I didn't make my own pie crust because it always got too tough. But my experience with making fancy cookies tells me that toughness shouldn't be a problem with gluten free flour.  Still, fear of it tearing too easily, and just taking a lot more time than buying frozen, holds me back. Today I intend to bite the bullet and make a gluten free pie crust. I certainly hope it ends up tasting better than the pie crust from the bakery I bought a strawberry pie from this spring. Gritty and dusty tasting, bleah. And when you've spent $18 for a pie, you'd like it to be good!
Speaking of fancy cookies, the holidays are rapidly approaching and cookie making season is coming on fast. Don't be afraid to tackle fancy gluten free cookies! I was thrilled at how wonderful mine came out. It was tricky to keep the dough the right temperature; too cool and it wouldn't roll out or be shapeable, too warm and it stuck to everything. But when I got it just right, the cookies came out beautiful and melted in your mouth like nobody's business! I used Mama's brand Almond Blend flour, a perfectly white, silky smooth flour with no discernable taste of its own, a big plus over beany tasting blends like Bob's Red Mill. I love Bob's for bread and such, but when it comes to sweets, Mama's Almond Blend or Pamela's Baking Mix are the way to go.
Here I go to make pie crust!
Well, it was a very busy summer! We put on a serious push to make our gardening more productive and profitable, and it worked! I'd say we still have a ways to go, but when we all pitch in together it really amps things up.
Being gluten free has become more and more of a focus for me these last few months. I find myself talking to people about it constantly. Hopefully I'm not becoming a bore! It's amazing how quick I feel the difference now when I slip up. This summer I gave in to temptation and ate a maple bar from our local bakery. Oh, it was so good! But by evening my body ached so bad I was curled up in a fetal position trying not to moan. No more doughnuts for me, it was so not worth the agony! I had never noticed a reaction like that before, but I certainly had had a lot of aches and pains. It took that experience to make me realize that I was suffering a lot less pain since I've gone gluten free
[ Click here to read more ]
I went grocery shopping yesterday. It's an all day affair for me, driving over an hour each way. In the past, I would always grab a take-n-bake pizza on the way home so I wouldn't have to cook after my all day odyssey. And that must remain in the past, since the last time I did it I was miserable all the next day from eating just two pieces.
In fact, Saturday night I cooked a small dinner for about thirty people, and I made a spinach spoonbread. The only gluten in the recipe is from a bit of corn muffin mix. Doesn't seem like a lot, and I only ate a tiny portion, but I felt the effects none the less
[ Click here to read more ]
I've had an awful lot to do lately. It's spring planting season, and we're trying to redo the whole garden in addition to planting and clean up and repairs. This makes it hard to sit down and write!
Today was difficult. I felt tired and sluggish all afternoon. It made me wonder if I had eaten some gluten without noticing. But I've gone over everything I ate in the last couple of days, and there doesn't seem to be anything with gluten. Grrr
[ Click here to read more ]
Sometimes it's amazing how many times you can use one dish. Sunday we had shredded beef tacos, and I put away a quart of shredded beef and sauce afterward. Monday evening, tired and looking forward to Dancing With the Stars, I whipped together a dish called, chilaquiles, with the shredded beef, some S&W pinquitos, cheese, tortilla chips, spinach. Nice layered casserole, it turns out satisfying and delicious. Today we had taco salad using more of the shredded beef and some chipotle coleslaw my son made last night. Yummy!
I am a great proponent of having children help in the kitchen. Both of my sons are better cooks than ninety percent of the girls they meet, and the only training they've had is cooking with me in the kitchen. I do tend to instruct anybody who hangs out in my kitchen, which means my boys have gotten plenty of good advice and the occasional harangue. [ Click here to read more ]
I've been having frustrations with my gluten free biscuit recipe. I created a rather wonderful (if I do say so myself) southern-style biscuit recipe adapted from one out of Rose Levy Berenbaum's cookbook, The Bread Bible. But since the first time I made it, it hasn't come out right. I finally decided to change my recipe in hopes of getting better results, and it was better, but not really good.
Finally I realized that when I first made it, I had used Swan Potato Starch Flour, but since then had been using Bob's Red Mill Potato Flour. Hmm, that just might be the problem. I had noticed that the two products weren't the same color or texture, but for some reason still thought I should be able to use them interchangeably
[ Click here to read more ]
Today for lunch I made egg salad sandwiches. The chives have just come up, so I popped out the door and cut a small handful to put in the salad. A little Best Foods Mayo, some dill and some sweet relish, and a lovely egg salad was ready to go.
My husband is quite sick, and he was delighted when I brought him his sandwich. "Wow," he said, "haven't had one of these in a while!" I was delighted too, because I had made gluten free burger buns a couple of nights ago, and had one leftover so that I could make a sandwich for myself. Going gluten free has really showed me how attached to sandwiches I am
[ Click here to read more ]
Over the last few years, I've become increasingly aware that gluten is not for me. The more I cut it out of my diet, the more unexplained symptoms I'd been having for years go away. Painful feet was the first thing to go. Irritability was the next thing to go. Then I stopped falling asleep at inopportune moments. After a while more, I realized that my bouts with depression were becoming less severe and less frequent. Wow, this is good stuff, I'm thinking to myself.
It hasn't all been a rose garden though. As tomatoes started flooding in from my greenhouse in August, I began to suffer from sandwich withdrawal. Going without bread had been getting easier up til then, but I started dreaming, fantasizing, drooling about tomato sandwiches. That's right, a very simple sandwich of mayo and tomato on bread. Eventually I gave in and ate a few. But the results were less than pleasant: my feet hurt again, I started nodding off whenever I sat still, and I was snapping at people. Back on the wagon
[ Click here to read more ]
|
|
Recent Comments
I've not commented on anything yet :(
|
Add Comments
Read More