Bad Day in GF Land

Life rears it ugly head again!

It was a long day today, and long days are extra tough when there is a food allergy and a bad memory to juggle as well. I found myself in the middle of errands and suddenly realizing I had forgotten to put the chicken in the slow cooker. I also realized I was starving. It was lunchtime, I had people with me, and I couldn't make it home. My companions suggested I pick a safe restaurant to eat at, because they are awesome and amazing ladies who do not begrudge me my limitations, and off we went to Chickfila.

Eating at Chickfila is pretty easy around here because they have good gluten training, change gloves for special orders, and have separate fryers. The play zones are a huge bonus because they are hard to find now a days and I enjoy letting my toddler run around while I eat in relative peace. Its awesome.

Until they get your order wrong and you are too lazy and hungry to fix it, so you eat your bunless chicken sandwich without the bacon and cheese that would have provided enough fat to prevent you from getting hungry an hour later. -.-

Once home an emergency pizza order was made, and I was totally on board with this because that gave me an opportunity to try the Pillsbury gluten free pizza crust I had found at the grocery the other day. It calls for prebaking, but it was done start to finish in less than 30 minutes. I topped it with ham and pineapple, nom, and got very hungry smelling it bake. When it was done, I cut into it and was immediately disappointed. 

It's bad. Edible, but only because I was starving. The crust sagged when I picked up a slice. It is unpleasantly thick and chewy, and has the texture of play dough. The flavor is very processed. The whole experience felt like chewing a wet piece of cloth. None of the toppings stayed on the crust, either, they slid right off. I was hoping this stuff would be good, because then I could experiment with freezing it and using it for breadsticks, but alas. More processed junk.

So today, I am just hungry. And grumpy. Bah!

20 Minute Stroganoff - Gluten Free in a Hurry!

I love cooking. And by 'love', I mean I hate it. It's all the time, three times a day. Then you are forced to clean up. Plus, it takes time. I love it, really, but it is a huge hassle! On a long day the last thing I want to go is jump into a hot kitchen and slave.

So sometimes, I don't. Sometimes I take easy stuff of a standard grocery store shelf and make that instead. This is especially true on grocery day, because I can grab two or three fast things and throw them together at the last minute. It might be a rotisserie chicken, or pre-cut stir fry fixings, but today it was 20 Minute Stroganoff.

I love this because the whole family eats it, it only needs like, four ingredients which I can get at my neighborhood market, and its frigging fast! (Neighborhood market means Walmart, by the way. As universal as it gets in this country.)

20 Minute Beef Stroganoff

1 lb ground beef

1/2 onion

1 12 oz package Heartland Gluten Free pasta

1 18 oz can Progresso Creamy Mushroom Soup

Cook the pasta according to package directions. Meanwhile, brown beef in a large skillet, adding the onions in to sweat. Add the soup and heat, then stir in the drained pasta to coat.

See, was that hard? Fast 70's style comfort food, just like the Campbells like to make! Add some broccoli and you are good to go!

Adventures in Gluten Free Pumpkin Bread

There has been a pumpkin sitting on my cheese board for about three weeks. It was an impulse buy that was fueled by cooling weather and autumn excitement. That gorgeous orange talks to me, telling tales of pie and bonfires and harvest celebrations.

He almost was named Ralphie. Ralphie was delicious.

But as pretty as it is, it taunts me. It challenges me to narrow down the vast plethora of recipes into one or two dishes. There is so much you can do with winter squash! Roast it, stuff it, turn it into soup, the list goes on. Inevitably, though, it ends up in pie or another baked good, and with good delicious reason!

Happy roasting, Ralphie!

My husband's pumpkin bread is famous in our family, but mostly because he used fresh roasted pumpkin instead of canned. And it was expected for a gathering. We had another recipe to hunt down! (Yes, I am still intimidated by converting a single recipe from gluten to non-gluten. Quiet you, that cornbread was just a fluke!)

I found several options, but several led me right back to my trusty go-to site, Art of Gluten Free Baking. I took the hint and used hers. Of course I took some liberties. I lowered the sugar and oil, added vanilla and dried cranberries. I may have undercooked it, because it was overly moist, but yummy just the same!

First run. Look at that lovely moist crumb!

The next day I made it double, with more changes. I creamed butter and sugar with the eggs instead of oil. Unfortunately I forgot to double the butter, so it was more on the dry side, but still very tasty!

I think somewhere in the middle of the two adaptations would be just right.

Weekly Dinner List, Part 3

You know what? I never kept up on dinner plans like, ever, until I started posting them here. Woudathunkit?

Anyway, here I am, without the sales fliers for this week thanks to a certain almost four year old pretending they were part of a ball pit. So instead of hoarding sales, I am banking on our dwindling freezer and typical cheap options. What can I say, it's been a rough couple of weeks! There will be lots of chicken and frozen vegetables, and I can think of much less appealing options.

This week, in no particular order, and subject to replacement with tacos or pasta:

• BBQ and Gramma's. I am making gluten free pumpkin bread for the occasion. (I'll post on that later!)
• Roast Chicken and veg, potatoes
• Chicken Stir Fry and rice
• Chicken fried pork chops, mashed potatoes
• Lentil Loaf, and probably MORE mashed potatoes because they are a staple around here
• Pizza Night!

A grocery trip is in our near future, so the last slot will be reserved for something fresh, or dinner out.

The Story of the Grain Mill

And now for a tale that I tell myself every time I bake. Beware, it is a little sappy, because as tough as Honey Bear tries to be, he is still a big pushover in love.

It started about a year ago. I had been feeling like crud, my gut was always yelling at me, and my joints hurt. Something had to be the culprit, so I skipped the expensive doctor's visit and went straight to the source. I did an elimination diet and the only thing I reacted to was gluten (didn't see that coming did you?) At first it wasn't that big a deal. I ditched it about 95% and figured it would be enough. I wasn't going to worry about malt extracts or wheat-based thickeners.

One day I had a bad gut day, and it was seriously painful. We narrowed the culprit down to the thickener in the taco seasoning we had with dinner the night before. Again, no big deal, we will just throw out the little stuff like that, too.

And that is where it got hard. Breadcrumbs in meatballs, roux for gravy, there was still quite a bit of wheat in our diet and I had no idea! I found myself wandering through the grocery store alone looking unsuccessfully for something to make for dinner and stumbling upon the gluten free aisle. I had never looked to hard for it before, but now that I was there I found it really hard not to break into tears. Here was food that was safe in a sea of junk.

I grabbed a package of marinated fajita steak with a giant red 'GLUTEN FREE' label, some corn tortillas, and some Glutino sandwich cookies and booked for checkout.

I held it together on the way home as the realization dawned on me that this is not a little thing. This is not easy. This SUCKS, and it was forever. It's not a fad diet, it is a health condition. This was a major life change, and I was not prepared to cope with it. Flours were so expensive, and learning to bake again would require a lot of trial and error. And specialty goods are pricey, too, how were we ever going to keep this up?

My husband greeted me with a huge cheese-eating grin, because a large check we had been waiting for had come in, so we could finally make some large purchases and we even had some fun money left over. I listened patiently, but finally had to break in and tell him about the decision I had just made. He just smiled, and cut me off. 

“So we need to buy that grain mill you had your eye on.”

He had pretty much taken the words out of my mouth. Rice is cheap, rice flour is not, so the need was pretty evident, but the machine was expensive. His automatic support finally broke my emotional dam, and the fact that he held me and smiled gently while I cried made me cry more.

See? Pretty sappy.

Two weeks later, this guy arrived:

He does not have a name yet. I should get on that.

A Wondermill that I originally planned to buy for wheat is now our exclusive gluten-free flour maker. It set us back $300 of tax return money, and I do not regret a dime. Instead of buying over priced little bags of flour, I store buckets of white, brown, and sweet rice and make it on demand. The cost is cut by roughly 250%. By the end of the year that machine will have paid for itself. I still purchase tapioca starch, but that is only because making it is a huge time consuming and money burning process that I will happily pay 75 cents a pound to avoid. 

It took a few more weeks of experimenting before I found I flour blend I liked. I wanted one that was easily obtained, versatile, and easy to use. I settled on Jeanne's Gluten Free All-Purpose Flour, because it met all of my needs very well. I have found it is easy to adapt to other recipes, and is accepts other flours well. Plus, she has a huge list of applications with it already, so there is very little work involved finding a tried and true recipe.

Well, now you know why I spent the money on a grain mill. Would you have done the same?

Easy Peasy Cornbread

Chili is a seasonal dish around here. It is reserved for the cooler months, which is kind of a shame because it is so easy to throw together. Some meat, a can of tomatoes, some seasoning and beans, and you are done. I know, I know, real chili, COMPETITION chili, has no beans. Well, this isn't a comeptition, and I refuse to make chili without beans.

I also refuse to eat chili without cornbread. Honey Bear likes to try and insist on oyster crackers, but eventually he will learn that he is wrong. A nice hunk of cornbread on the bottom of a chili bowl is one step closer to heaven in my opinion, and it has to be made from scratch. Yes, the boxes are easy, but it still tastes like box to me. 

Except one. After the Great Gluten Purge, I bought a box of gluten free mix cornbread while I relearned what I was doing. It asked for the usual: milk, oil, egg... and baking powder? Doesn't that usually come in a mix? I didn't think about it too much, and just made the food.

It was a pleasant surprise to find that it tasted pretty much exactly like my homemade wheat flour cornbread, so I checked the ingredients. Maybe I could duplicate it? Cornmeal, white rice flour, and salt.

That's it! I was both thrilled and annoyed, because although I could easily replicate it, I had just wasted money on ingredients I already had at home. So, I did a really hard thing: I swapped out the wheat flour in my old recipe for rice flour.

Bingo. Flawless cornbread. It's like nothing changed. And thank goodness, because I might be a little emotionally attached to cornbread. Just ask Honey Bear.

Yup. That's all that was left when I came to get a photo.

Basic Gluten Free Cornbread

1 cup cornmeal

1 cup rice flour

1 tablespoon baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 egg

1 cup milk

1/4 cup vegetable oil or melted butter

1/4 cup sugar (optional. I used to skip it, but it helps the gluten free version brown)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and grease an 8 inch cast iron pan or a 9 inch baking dish. Whisk the dry ingredients together well. Beat the remaining together separately, then stir into the dry bowl thoroughly but gently. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until it looks delicious.

Just to be clear, I have no idea where I got the original recipe. I had been making it for years, and it is just imprinted on my brain. I LOVE that it was so easy to adapt. No complicated blends, no xanthan gum, just one simple swap. I wish it all was that easy!

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

I stopped making cookies ages ago. There seemed to be so many more important things to figure out after the Great Gluten Purge, and safe cookies could be purchased at the store. Try finding a premade gluten free pizza crust that doesn't taste like cardboard or cost an arm and a leg!

Now, fall has fallen and the weather is finally bearable again. My kitchen should smell like cinnamon, and there should be some sort of goodie cooling on my counters about every day. Autumn demands baking, and I wanted cookies.

Since I have no experience creating baked goods from scratch and the thought of trying freaks me out, I went recipe hunting and settled on this one from Free Eats. And, as usual, I tweaked it.

I pretty much threw out the directions and prepared them like a traditional cookie, creaming the butter and sugar, adding the eggs, then the dry goods. My flour blend (from Artof Gluten Free Baking) already has xantham gum in it, so I just added a pinch extra instead of the whole amount. Truthfully, I don't think it needed it.

These things spread, a lot. They taste pretty darn good, even if they don't hold up to milk dunking very well. Crunchy on the outside, more tender in the middle, and not overly sweet. Honestly, they seemed to be missing something, so next time I am going to ditch the vegetable oil and bump the butter up to ½ cup.

Obviously I will be making these again. 24 cookies for 5 people go quickly! Next on the fall baking list: something pumpkin. Probably more cookies!