Gluten'd!

Last  weekend I got some buckwheat flour from my farmers’ market. I was really eager to try it out, so I found a recipe for buckwheat and sorghum pancakes. I have some sorghum flour from a clearance sale my friend found at a local grocery store, so I was pretty excited about it.

This morning it dawned on me that I don’t have any xanthan gum.

Rather than give up entirely, I wondered how it would work if I subbed in some buckwheat flour with my normal pancake mix. So I used Pamela’s mix, doubled the recipe like I normally do, and subbed in some buckwheat flour. I did a 3:1 ratio of pancake mix to buckwheat flour, so I had 1 1/2 cups of pancake mix and 1/2 cup buckwheat flour.

I’ve never had buckwheat before. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. The pancakes cooked up just fine, but without syrup the buckwheat flavor was definitely there. I’m not sure what I think about it. I’m glad I made the pancakes, but I’m also glad I opted for less buckwheat flour rather than more. I saw recipes online in which people used 50% mix and 50% buckwheat flour. I think that would have been wrong for me.

The pancakes are very tasty with syrup and very filling! Buckwheat is a healthy whole grain, so this was a nice addition to my pancakes. I wonder what would happen if I subbed in 1/2 cup of sorghum flour, too. I’ll have to try at some point!

Gluten-free cooking often feels like an experiment to me. Thankfully, most of my experiments seem to work out!

Today I’m doing lots of baking. Some is for me, some is for my church, and some is part of an evil plot to take over the world (not really I guess…). It feels so good to bake and even better to eat delicious gluten-free treats. I made some banana nut muffins today and they are so good. They are just a little crisp on top, nice and soft in the middle, with a delicious banana flavor and a walnut here or there. With my fortune of having a fabulous flour blend at my gluten-free bakery of choice and having Annalise Roberts’ wonderful book, I’m relearning how to bake.

I will be attempting to make a gluten recipe gluten-free a little later today. It’s a recipe for chocolate oatmeal cookies. I’ve made them before when I could eat gluten, but this is new territory for me. I’m hoping for the best. I have gluten-free rolled oats from a friend.

One thing I’ve noticed since going gluten-free is that there are so many flours out there to choose from. Sweet rice flour, brown rice flour, millet flour, quinoa flour, sorghum flour, even bean flours like chickpea flour and fava bean flour. Almond flour is nice, too. I have a local farmer who sells millet flour, quinoa flour, soy flour, amaranth flour, and some other gluten-free flours (she also sells oat, spelt, barley, and wheat flour, so I can’t buy her mixes but the flours are ok). It’s awesome how much variety is out there for me. Right now I have my brown rice flour blend, some millet flour, some sorghum flour, and some buckwheat fl0ur. I may have to do some more baking experiments!

I know, long time, no post. But it’s ok. I’ve been experimenting with some wonderful gluten-free grains and I simply must share!

Polenta

My sister is in a college class, and no one in her class has ever eaten polenta. What tragedy! Polenta is awesome. It’s super cheap, easy to make, easy to reheat, and it is a culinary blank slate, waiting for flavors. I usually make polenta about once a week and eat it for breakfast every day.

A bag of yellow cornmeal from the grocery store is less than five dollars. Compared to other grains and gluten-free products, this is extremely inexpensive. To compare, a bag of gluten-free oats is about $7 where I live, and the bag has significantly less product. I paid about $3 for a 5-pound bag of cornmeal.

When I first started making the polenta, I bounced around between a few recipes and techniques. This recipe from Joy the Baker was my first foray into the world of polenta. It’s very delicious. A sweet, yummy polenta, perfect for breakfast. But I wanted more. So one day, I made my polenta plain. I had it for dinner with a little pasta sauce, butter, and cheese. It was amazingly delicious.

Tonight I made polenta and added it directly to a foil-lined loaf pan. Going to try slicing it up and frying it this week. It’s good to try different things in cooking.

Also, most recipes have you add the cornmeal to an equal measure of cold water before adding it to the hot liquids in the pot. Every time I do that, the cornmeal/water mixture falls out in messy plops, splashing hot milky water everywhere. So this time I added more water to the pot and poured the cornmeal in dry, whisking as I went. No lumps! It came out beautifully. I think I will try this again.

Teff

I found teff one day in the grocery store when I was contemplating getting some of those pricey gluten-free oats. Teff costs about the same amount for a bag, but it absorbs a lot of water. The tiny balls of grain absorb four times the amount of water.

Cooking is fairly simple: 1 part teff, 4 parts water, bring to a boil. Stir, reduce heat to a low simmer (I have to take my electric stove all the way down to “warm” or it’ll overcook), put a lid on it, do something else for 15-30 minutes. When the water is absorbed, the teff is done.

In the bag, teff smells nutty and chocolatey. When cooked it doesn’t smell quite as chocolatey, more nutty. I don’t really care for this cereal warm. Instead, I cool it down to room temperature. I mix in some cocoa powder and sugar, then process it in my blender until it’s smooth, like pudding. Sometimes I add vanilla extract, too. This makes a chocolate pudding that is simply divine. I had this one day when I was feeling tired and anemic and it was marvelous. Teff is very nutritious and high in iron.

You can also add milk to the “pudding.” I would do this in the morning before eating it instead of blending milk into the entire batch.

Amaranth

A lady at my farmers’ market sells some wonderful gluten-free flours, including the millet flour I adore. She also sells whole amaranth. I picked some up.

Of course, when I went to look up recipes there were complaints about how amaranth is gummy as a hot cereal.

Hmm, there had to be something.

Then I learned how to pop amaranth. Amaranth, like popcorn, will pop if the little grains are heated. They don’t need oil, just a hot pot. I wrote about popping amaranth before.

Popped amaranth is delicious plain, as a substitute for puffed rice cereal in rice crispie treats, or mixed with a little honey, cinnamon, and milk as a cold cereal.

Being gluten-free means I’ve had to try a new variety of grains. I never knew how many different grains existed in the world! It’s exciting to have delicious choices.

Today I followed Gluten-Free Girl’s instructions and made some corn tortillas from scratch. It was remarkably easy, so easy it almost didn’t seem right. When you say you made something from scratch, like pudding or pizza crust or cake, people get this look on their faces. I’m not crazy for cooking from scratch! I want to scream that it’s not that hard, that it’s so much better to make it yourself, but it seems that our society values quick and cheap over delicious, by far.

Take store-bought corn tortillas, for example. They are disgusting. I had one right out of the bag recently and they were gross. They had this nasty, off flavor. I grew up eating flour tortillas, so I was terribly sad to find that corn tortillas were so gross.

But I had a recipe to try. I was going to make Huevos Motulenos from The Kitchn’s recent contest. I was using leftover beans, a fresh shiny green pepper from the farmers’ market, and a few of my endless supply of eggs. There was only one problem: tortillas. Sure, I had a bag of Mission tortillas in the fridge, ready to go, but the thought of those yucky things made me almost want to forget the recipe altogether and make something else.

So I searched for how to make my own tortillas. Surprisingly, the process seemed quite simple. Of course, many were quick to say that you just HAD to have a tortilla press or just HAD to have some fancy schmancy tortilla press/griddle combo. Pfft. I don’t tolerate unitaskers in my kitchen. It’s strange enough that I have an ice cream maker. My rice cooker and crock pot can at least do other tricks, like making lentils or making whole rice dishes. The crock pot makes delightful chicken stock and perfect beans. But a tortilla press? I somehow doubt you can do more with that than press tortillas.

Shauna made the whole process look easy and worthwhile, so I scouted out some corn flour at Schnucks (it was on the bottom shelf of the “Mexican” section of the store, and even the price tag said it was gluten free!). I noticed that it was roughly a 2:1 ratio of flour to water for the recipe, so I tried it out.

The “dough” was dry, but formed little balls that I could squish together. It was fun, like making a crisp using my hands instead of a mixer or utensils. I formed the dough into balls and squished them flat in a cut in half plastic bag. You can apparently use wax paper, too. I deftly slid the tortilla onto my hot cast-iron pan and let it cook, flipped it, let it cook some more, then put it on a plate. I made three tortillas. They were easy.

The more important part? They were delicious. Soft, moist, no weird flavor, just simple and delicious. The way things should be. They were perfect for my recipe.

Knowing how simple these are to make, I’m excited to say I will definitely make the recipe again. I still have leftover black bean mixture in the fridge, ready to go. Dinner will be as simple as making tortillas, warming up the beans, and putting the two together. Wonderful!

I’ve found that it is so much easier for me to cook a large batch of food at once and then eat leftovers. Yesterday I made polenta and I plan to eat it all week. Last week I ate from the same batch of polenta all week.

Today I made gluten-free sesame beef.

I used:

• a pound or so of breakfast steak from the farmers’ market (thin cuts are best!)
• sesame oil
• gluten free soy sauce (I use La Choy)
• rice vinegar
• mirin
• half a large onion (one whole medium would suffice)
• a red bell pepper, a yellow bell pepper, and an orange bell pepper
• sliced button mushrooms (they were on sale… it was a dollar for already washed, already sliced mushrooms!)

What I did:

Put the steak in a medium pyrex or plastic bowl. Make a marinade of about 1/4 cup sesame oil, 1/4 cup soy sauce, a few tablespoons mirin, and a few tablespoons rice vinegar. Massage marinade into meat. Pour marinade in dish with meat, cover dish, and let marinate overnight.

Remove steak from marinade and slice into thin strips. Brown the meat in a little sesame oil over medium high heat. It will cook quickly. Set cooked meat aside and clean out pan.

Add more sesame oil. Cook the veggies on medium high. I started with the onions, then added the peppers after the onions got soft, then added the mushrooms. I poured the marinade in the pan early in the cooking process and then added more sesame oil, soy sauce, and rice vinegar.

After veggies cook, add the meat back in and stir around, heating the food through. Top with some sesame seeds.

Eat over rice!

This made enough for tonight, for lunch all week at work, and for a couple more meals. Yay!

It is so much easier on my budget and on my stomach to make food in advance like this. Now I have lunch and dinner covered all week. Even though I bought grass-fed breakfast steak, I will be getting at least 6 meals from it. Stir frying is awesome because you can use the cheap, thin cuts of meat and combine them with enough veggies and rice that you don’t need much meat at all! Best of all, making this meal gluten free is as simple as using gluten free soy sauce. Nothing fancy at all.

Worked late tonight and had to make brownies for church. I made brownies using Pamela’s mix and a half a container of Nutella. They smell like chocolate evil incarnate. I have high hopes for success, though I may have to fight off the people trying to eat them all before I get any for myself!

I wanted a little dinner, but nothing fancy. I have a corn spaghetti I do not like, so that wasn’t going to work. I have an acorn squash that would be easy to make, but I wasn’t feeling like it. So I took out my little container of puffed amaranth, poured it into a small bowl, added some milk, honey, and cinnamon, and ate it up.

Delicious. It’s kind of like a honey puffed rice cereal. My goat milk added a tang to it I’m not sure of (I’m going back to cow milk next week, this is just kind of a science experiment on myself again), but it was good. Really good. Simple and delicious.

I can’t run out to get fast food and I can’t order pizza, so it’s important to have stuff like this around to eat. Quick, simple food. That’s all I need, really.

A while back I got some amaranth with the goal of making a hot cereal. I didn’t. I ended up eating polenta and fried eggs for breakfast all week, not that I’m suffering at all. My breakfasts have been delicious.

However, poor little amaranth has been sitting there in a jar, waiting for some love. Well, today the wait is over.

I popped my amaranth.

That’s right, amaranth can be popped like popcorn. If you search the web for popped amaranth you’ll see recipes and techniques and whatnot. I’ll explain what I did.

First, I got out a pot. Not a small pot, but not my stock pot. I’d call my pot medium, even though I use it for pasta and such and it is effectively my large pot.

I put the pot on the stove and turned the heat on high. No oil. This probably wouldn’t work with cheap cookware or those with the finicky non-stick coatings. My pot is stainless steel.

When the pot was hot, I added a tablespoon of amaranth and put a lid on it.

I took the pot off the stove and started shaking it. Immediately I heard the excited little grains popping. I took the pot completely off the heat and continued shaking until I heard no more pops. Then I opened the pot and there was some lovely popped amaranth!

The second batch did not go so well. I tried to return the pot to the heat to pop the unpopped grains. You know how there’s about three seconds between popcorn and burnt popcorn? Amaranth is the same. The fail batch met the trash.

The third batch I kept the pot off the heat like I did the first time and I got lots of yummy goodness!

I put the popped amaranth in an empty, clean plastic yogurt container with a lid. I munched just a little of it. It has a mild flavor, like that of puffed rice. I will try this with a little milk and maybe some honey.

Unfortunately, the burnt batch is still stinking up the house… but this is how learning takes place! I have learned from my mistake. Don’t put the pot back on the heat!!!

Yum!

I made my pizza crust using the recipe from Annalise Roberts’ book, Gluten-Free Baking Classics. It was pretty easy and came together nicely in the stand mixer. The recipe uses her brown rice flour mix and millet flour, which I picked up at the farmers’ market.

I’ve heard before that the biggest enemy of a gluten-free crust is sogginess, so I kept that in mind. After the prebake was up, I put on cheese and garlic oil. I baked it again for 10 minutes, then put sauce on top. It’s a different looking pizza, but very crisp and yummy. The crust is great. It’s thin and crispy with a great flavor, likely because of the millet. It was not too hard to make, even though the process is different (for example, the dough is very wet and must rise in the pan, not in the mixing bowl).

I’m glad I got this book. This is the first recipe I’ve made from it but I’m sure there will be others!

I went to the farmers’ market yesterday and came home with lots of delicious things (including a ham steak, some apple cider, a small Yellow Doll watermelon, and some figs). I got a couple of grains from a stand there. I got some whole amaranth and some millet flour. The millet flour should be nice for pizza crust. I’d like to pop the amaranth and use it for cereal.

I got a huge bag of cornmeal from the regular grocery store. I’ll use it for spoon bread tonight, but I’d like to start making polenta and maybe even cornmeal mush.

Much as I’m enjoying the process of learning gluten-free baking, the fact of the matter is that I must rely mainly on other grain sources. I was already eating rice, I made quinoa and it was delicious, and now it’s time to branch out to amaranth and cornmeal. I’m trying very hard to eat a diet of few processed foods and it seems to be working. I have been spending more on food, mostly to get good produce and meat. However, having better quality ingredients has made me more excited about cooking. Now my Facebook status updates about my latest food endeavor are making friends drool. It’s worthwhile and I know it’s healthier.

I will be calling CSAs in the next couple weeks to see about signing on for a 2010 season.

Long time no post, I know. I’ve been settling back in now that I’m home. Been battling sinus headaches, too. The weather here is going back and forth and it seems that illnesses are going around work, so I’m trying to stay healthy.

I’ve been trying harder lately to eat fresh, local foods. When I got back from my trip, I went to the local farmers market. I picked up persimmons, grass fed beef steaks, a quart of Yukon gold potatoes, fig jam, and some Bulgarian roasting peppers. I proceeded to make steak and potatoes for my beau on Sunday. He is a meat and potatoes sort of man, which makes it really easy to make gluten free meals for us both. He can eat gluten, but he is perfectly fine without.

The food was amazing. The potatoes and steak had so much flavor. We had frozen corn, too, but it was nothing compared to the rest.

I am now looking into several CSAs. I love getting delicious local vegetables and I want more. They are wonderful. They are gluten-free. They are real food. I consider that worth the price. Besides, a CSA subscription would probably cost less than what I’m paying for produce every week at the market.

My parents have an abundance of eggs, so I’m scoping out delicious recipes to use them. Fritattas. Corn spoon bread. Pudding. I made pudding tonight for dessert and it was so delicious. Easy, too. I’m looking at adding eggs to pastas, rice, and other dishes. And of course, I’m having the occasional fried egg for breakfast. These eggs are wonderful. They are so substantial that when I went to separate them for pudding I found it much easier to pluck out the yolk with my fingers than muck around with the egg separator.

I’m discovering more and more that so many delicious things are naturally gluten-free. It’s real food, healthy food. I read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan on the way home from San Francisco and I love the idea of eating real food. Yes, my fresh farmers market food costs more than it would at the supermarket. No, I don’t make a large income (I’m below average in terms of income!). However, it’s still worth every penny for me to get good, satisfying, real food.