Recipes – Page 7

My Chinese Kitchen: Gluten-Free Victory

April 10, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

With all the benefits we’ve seen to going gluten-free since it started as a begrudging experiment back in October, I was determined to make GF work in our new environment.

But I wasn’t sure how.

I knew that restaurant food and dinners at others’ homes wouldn’t accommodate our choices, and no one seems to have ever heard of people choosing not to eat flour, but I was willing to try and make it work, at least at home.

Quick breads, muffins and cookies aren’t a problem. When we lived here before, we were already eating a gluten-reduced diet, and I’d discovered buckwheat flour, which is very accessible and easy to use, and if you don’t mind the slightly drier texture and earthy flavour, it’s a wonderful substitute for anything baked without yeast.

Bread was my big challenge. But in eating gluten-free over the last number of months, I’d had some experience with what a gluten-free bread dough was supposed to look like and how it was supposed to perform. I’d even figured out the culprit in my previous failures: too much moisture, which may have had more to do with climate than the recipes I tried, since we lived in the south of the country at the time, in a sub-tropical climate.

But i hadn’t officially figured things out. And I was still in search of a simple recipe–one that didn’t involve a lot of fancy ingredients I was unable to get my hands on, like flax seed, applesauce, amaranth. I didn’t want to have to use a whole lot of different flours.

This thing can’t be time-consuming if I’m going to do it every week without a bread machine!

I finally found THE recipe. Of course I tweaked it so it’s barely recognizable as the original, because it was intended for bread-machine use and I don’t have one. Also I wanted to use my kefir (a yogurt-like lactose-free dairy product we make ourselves) instead of skim milk powder.

Finally, I typically substitute honey for refined sugars in recipes, so I wanted to accommodate that change as well.

Here is the final product. It’s super-yummy. Everyone has declared it so (with the exception of JavaMan because he hasn’t been around. We can’t wait to see him tomorrow).

Finally, we have a winner!

Note: neither xanthan nor guar gum are available in China. I brought my own. Both gums replace the role of gluten in helping the loaf “stick” together. Xanthan gum is preferred for baking bread, but is to be avoided by anyone with severe allergies to corn and corn products.

The ingredients for this recipe are simple and relatively easy for me to get my hands on. I can buy brown rice at our local market, and I bring it home and grind it with my hand grinder. I can buy little packages of potato starch at the market as well. Tapioca flour was a little harder to locate, but I managed to find it at Walmart.

GFbread

Ingredients:

2 cups brown rice flour
½ cup potato starch
½ cup tapioca flour
2 ½ teaspoons xanthan gum (or guar gum)
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 ½ tablespoons honey
⅔ cups warm water
⅔ cup buttermilk, plain yoghurt or kefir
1 ½ tablespoons dry yeast, granules
¼ cups butter, melted
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
3 eggs, room temperature
1-2 tablespoons cut up sunflower seed (optional)

Directions:

1. Combine 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast with the water and allow to proof.

2. Mix together all the flours, xanthan/guar gum, salt and sunflower seeds (if using).

3. Beat the eggs.

4. Combine water, butter, vinegar, eggs and buttermilk/yoghurt/kefir.

5. Mix wet and dry ingredients together and beat with a stand mixer or a hand mixer with bread hooks for three to five minutes. Texture should be like stiff cake batter. (I use a hand mixer with bread hooks and the mixture often “crawls” up the hooks.)

6. Pour into greased loaf pan and smooth top. Cover with saran and a towel and set in a warm place to rise approximately 30 minutes, or until dough rises to the top of the loaf pan (mine rose a little more).

7. Bake in 350 degree (F) oven for 50 minutes. Top should be nicely brown. Cool on cooling rack.

Note: This bread freezes well. For convenience, slice before freezing.

- Carey Clark

My Chinese Kitchen: The Crockpot

April 4, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

{Note: Too much time in the Chinese kitchen this week, so Hold the MSG will post tomorrow instead.}

As I mentioned in another post earlier this week, life in China has some challenges. Things take a little longer to accomplish. We use public transit, there are crowds just about everywhere, and we’re just not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy–or Toronto, for that matter.

I’ve been experimenting with gluten-free baking here. I think I just about have a handle on it (victory report forthcoming). We also have a historical issue with oatmeal. In the supermarket, it’s possible to buy instant and quick-cook oats, but I’ve never been a fan. In the market, you can by large flake oats, but they’re thicker than we’re used to, and the texture is chewier–like eating quinoa–which would be fine if it were quinoa, but it’s not. It’s oats, and we don’t like our oats chewy.

When we first came to China back in 2008, I brought along my grain mill. At the time, we were already eating flours with less gluten, like spelt. I brought a significant quantity of spelt groats with me (so they’d stay fresher than pre-ground flour) and used the mill I had bought back home to grind them.

grinder

We discovered this week that buying oat groats and grinding them makes a lovely consistency of oatmeal that everyone’s happy with. They’re not like steel-cut or rolled, so I don’t know what to call them exactly, but we’re happy with them.

ground oats

But that’s just an example of something that takes a little bit longer here. There’s also the dishwasher. It takes a little longer here too.

My sink

All of that to say, I’m always looking for kitchen shortcuts, like my Deluxe Crockpot Oatmeal. I originally found this recipe at A Year of Slow Cooking. Stephanie O’Dea who blogged and cooked in her crockpot for an entire year AND cooked gluten-free was a source of inspiration, and I looked forward to her every post.

I can’t find this recipe on her site anymore, but I’ll include it below. I made some adjustments to the original because it called for the oats to be cooked overnight, but what I found was that they cooked in about half the time, so if you truly put them on when you went to bed and you went to bed at a decent hour, you’d have partially burnt oats the next morning. I remedied this situation by setting an alarm for the middle of the night and turning on the crockpot. But really. Who else but me is going to do such a crazy thing?

Since returning (and perfecting my oat-grinding), I found the perfect way to make them “just right.” (I feel like Goldilocks.) I cook them for an hour on the high setting prior to going to bed and turn them down to “keep warm” overnight. Perfection!

Except if you forget to turn them down.

Which is precisely what happened to me last week, and which is the real reason for this post. My poor crockpot was toast. Burnt toast. Layers and layers of it. There was a solid, stuck-on mass of charcoal in the bottom of the pot and I thought I’d NEVER get it out.

But then I discovered this amazing solution. I am huge believer in baking soda and vinegar. They clean anything. If vinegar won’t do it, baking soda will. Vinegar for mirrors, baking soda to scrub the scum out of bathtubs. You can even use baking soda for laundry detergent and vinegar as a softener. Really. Love the stuff. Perfectly natural, things smell and look clean afterwards, with no heavy smells of chemicals.

But now I’m even more impressed with the power of baking soda. I turned my poor crockpot on and added my faithful baking soda (which is good for a post all on its own, don’t you think? I brought this home from the store and was already using it before I discovered something was not quite right…)

Armandhatchet

I let the crockpot come to a boil then turned it down and let it simmer overnight. This is the result. Nothing short of amazing! All the burned-on charcoaly stuff just peeled off, leaving my lovely crockpot behind, just like new.

Clean Crock

And now I can make my oatmeal again:

Deluxe Crockpot Oatmeal

1 cup oats
2 cup milk
¼ cup honey (or less, to taste)
1 tablespoon butter – melted
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup finely chopped apple
½ cup raisins and/or dates
½ cup chopped walnuts or almonds (I omit these–not everyone in our family is a nut fan)

Grease the inside of Crockpot. Throw all ingredients inside Crockpot and mix well. Cook for one hour on high and turn to keep warm overnight. Stir before serving. Enjoy! (And don’t forget to turn it down overnight.)

- Carey Clark

Tortilla Soup

January 17, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

The theme for December was small, flat and light: we requested that all gifts from family members fit those three characteristics.

The theme for January has to do with meal preparation: fast, family-pleasing and nutritious. (Don’t tell anyone, but I might let the last one slide.)

Last Tuesday, I packed half the day and accomplished quite a bit:

eliminated summer clothing that won’t fit, is no longer suitable or wouldn’t pass down because it’s just too worn
cleared a staging area for our bins (we use light plastic bins because they’re lighter and easier to pack than actual suitcases)
sorted through homeschool books to decide what we’d actually use in the next one or two years and what should be filed away for the next cycle through the trivium
removed CDs and DVDs from their cases and stored them in a media folder and organized the DVDs we’ll want for homeschool (like Math-U-See) into a separate, smaller media case

I also made several important phone calls and sent a number of emails to follow up on items that need to be accomplished before we leave.

At the end of all that, I looked up and realized I hadn’t done anything about the dinner I’d planned. Oh dear.

Enter the internet. I found this great, very quick recipe for Tortilla Soup that used just the amount of leftover chicken I had in the fridge. It was a total hit! (I made some adjustments, as always.)

2 T. Vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
2 c. shredded leftover chicken
1.25 oz. package taco seasoning mix (preferably chipotle)
4 15oz cans chicken broth
1 can tomatoes (When not pressed for time, I used fresh tomatoes. Canned are awful in comparison.)
Toppings: Shredded Monterey Jack cheese, chopped cilantro leaves, tortilla chips, lime wedges.

Saute onion in oil until soft. Add remaining ingredients. Stir well and simmer for at least 10 minutes. Garnish and serve.

Note: I had no chipotle-flavored taco seasoning mix, so I used the seasoning mix plus a small piece of chipotle in adobo, Delicious!

Bon appetit!

Gluten-Free Cranberry-Pecan Drops

December 22, 2011 by Carey Jane Clark

Pumpkin really likes these cookies, although my GF girl, not as much. She’s not crazy about dried fruit. This one was a variation on the original recipe that called for pineapple, which I didn’t think was very festive. They’re definitely yummy, but not quite as from-scratch as I’m accustomed to making. They use a gluten-free cake mix. I’m not as crazy about doing that because I can’t control the sugars. I typically replace all the sugar for honey (1/2 cup honey to 1 cup sugar) to avoid refined sugars. Every bit as yummy, and better for you. Cream butter and “sugar” as usual, but if you’re adding it later on, mix it in with the wet, not the dry ingredients. For brown sugar, add a small amount (1/2 to 1 teaspoon) of molasses to get the brown sugar flavor. This works just about every time. The only notable exception is cinnamon rolls, for which I use maple sugar.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1/2 cup butter
1/8 cup plus 1 tbsp honey
1/2 tsp. molasses
1 egg
1/2 tsp. dried lemon peel
1 pouch GF white cake mix
1/2 cup pecans
1-2 tbsp fruit juice (I used two)
1/2 cup dried cranberries

Method:

Preheat oven to 375°F.
In a large mixing bowl, cream the ricotta cheese, butter and honey.
Add the egg and dried lemon peel.
Add all the cake mix except 1/2 cup to the batter. Stir thoroughly.
Mix the remaining cake mix with the fruit and nuts. Stir into the batter.
Drop onto ungreased cookie sheets by the teaspoon full, two inches apart.
Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove from cookie sheeet while still hot.

Makes 5 1/2 dozen 1 1/2-inch cookies.

Is it too early in the day to eat one?

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