It's Not Easy Being Cheesy

I love macaroni and cheese. It's the best part about a potluck or covered dish.

Fried chicken? Okay. Biscuits? Sure.

But first show me to the macaroni and cheese. The kind baked in an old harvest gold porcelain dish with the picture of a fox hunt on the side. The kind with the crumbs on top and the chewy, overbaked noodles on the edge. Mmmm....

Although, come to think of it, I won't argue with the boxed stuff either (except for that Velveeta version-- that stuff's only fit for hockey players and people who dress their dogs like Smurfs).

But I'm gluten-free.

And dairy-free.

That rules out all semolina, milk, and cheese.

What about the mac & cheese, man? What about the mac & cheese?

Here it is! It looks like macaroni and cheese, it tastes like macaroni and cheese.... it even strings like macaroni and cheese!! Hooray!

All I need is a harvest gold baking dish.


MACARONI AND CHEESE

1 package of Tinkyada rice elbow/rotini noodles
1 cup carrot puree (cooked whole or baby carrots, pureed in the blender with a little bit of the water they are cooked in)
2 cups almond milk
1/4 cup + 2 T arrowroot or tapioca powder (fill the 1/4 cup and then fill it halfway)
1/4 cup canola oil
2 tsp salt

Add noodles to boiling water. Boil for 10 minutes. Drain and spray with cold water to stop the cooking process. Add all other ingredients to the blender; blend until smooth. Pour into a saucepan and cooking until just boiling and thick. Pour over noodles and stir.

I usually serve this with broccoli and flax seeds (ground or whole).



Image: http://www.bluebuddies.com

Dr. Seuss Day

The Littles' preschool celebrated Dr. Seuss' Birthday on March 2nd, so we did, too!



We had green eggs and ham (er, turkey),











and the preschool had green egg-shaped cookies with green frosting. Another challenge!

I couldn't use food coloring, so for the nice green color I used liquid chlorophyll.

It was Silly Sock Day, too!

This is what I sent with my kids:













DR. SEUSS' GREEN EGG COOKIES

1 cup brown rice flour
½ cup sweet white rice flour
½ cup tapioca flour
½ cup sugar
1T guar gum
1 ½ tsp baking soda
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

 ⅓ cup water
½ cup oil
1 tsp vanilla
1 T liquid chlorophyll

 Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Gradually add dry ingredients to wet, kneading if necessary. Shape into eggs and bake at 350 for 20 minutes.













I am not going to post my frosting recipe, as it still needs a LOT of work!

A Gluten-Free, Casein-Free, Corn-Free Purim

Nothing says Purim like Nutella Hamantaschen. I need them. I make them every year. Every. Year. Without Nutella Hamantaschen (capital letters, please), the newness of spring becomes merely the agonal death throes of winter. Without Nutella Hamantaschen, it cannot be Purim. Without Purim, I cannot begin Passover cleaning, which means my house will sink into the abyss of unfound chametz, and chaos and panic will ensue. Nutella Hamantaschen are critical for survival. FEMA keeps track of this stuff.

Nutella contains both milk and artificial flavor. Oh, bother.

Purim is the celebration of the Jews' deliverance from yet another plot to exterminate them. A lot of people think of it as Queen Esther's holiday (the story is detailed in the book of Esther). Here's a link to one version of the story. It involves quite a bit of irony, a beauty pageant, a few face-palm moments for Haman (the king's vizier), and such noble themes as justice, family bonds, faith, and purpose.

Traditionally, the story is read to children, who "BOO" and spin groggers at Haman's name and cheer for Mordecai. Some dress up in costumes, and there is a tradition of drinking until one cannot tell the difference between Haman and Mordecai. Hangovers are not my style, so I don't recommend that one, particularly if you have to work the next day.

So I had to try to make GF/CF, Corn-free Nutella Hamantaschen. Whew.

Nutella is a chocolate hazelnut spread. So, I started with 2 cups of hazelnuts. Hazelnuts are incredibly expensive. I had one shot.

Hazelnut Blender Cam

I placed all of the Hazelnuts on a cookie sheet and into the oven at 420 degrees, per an online recipe. 12 minutes later, I had nicely burned hazelnuts.

"They'll be okay, Mom."
"You mean, after the smoke clears?"

Perseverance, right?

I let them cool and then rubbed them with a dry towel. This pulled the skins off and made a delightful mess. As I'm doing this, I keep hearing an ominous crackling sound coming from the nuts. In disgust, I left them to cool overnight.

Everything is supposed to look different in the morning, but these looked remarkably similar to how I had left them. I piled the hazelnuts into the blender and added canola oil. I make cashew butter every other week, so I was familiar with the process. I put in the other ingredients and out came a beautiful batch of homemade nutella. A batch of homemade nutella that tasted just like sweet, chocolatey, charcoal.

But Purim is about overcoming difficulties, right? Right?

So I tried again with cashews. I can make some mean cashew butter, so I knew I had a better shot at this. I made a base of cashew butter and added the nutella goodness. Voila! Cashew nutella. It ain't quite the same, but perhaps it will spare us the demise of Western culture. The only drawback was that this recipe used agave as the sweetener, and I found the fruity-overtones confusing. Just give me sugar. It's a holiday, after all.

I'm still looking for the ultimate GF/CF,CF sugar cookie recipe.The only sugar cookie recipe I have at this point is my Dr. Seuss recipe (that post is coming); it's not fantastic, but I thought it would work. I made a batch of that, cut out triangles/formed triangles--I couldn't decide which method was better--and plopped some chocolate cashew butter in the middle. The triangle shape is used so that it looks like Haman's tricorn hat; fashions of the American Revolution were all the rage in Ancient Persia. After baking for 10-15 minutes, I had my own homemade cashew nutella hamantaschens. Make that Cashew Nutella Hamentaschens. Yeah, I just might survive.

So, we were watching VeggieTales Esther and eating cookies. And the wheels start turning. Hazelnuts. Cashews. PEANUTS!! I made a peanut butter version using my favorite no-sugar-no-oil-just-peanuts-peanut butter: Joseph's Creamy Valencia Peanut Butter. Soooo good. It's worth another batch of cookies....

Nah.

Just hand me a spoon.

Purim Sameach!


CASHEW BUTTER

2 cups of cashews
1T of canola oil

Place cashews in the blender, and pour oil in the center. Blend until very smooth; it may take a few minutes. Makes 1 cup cashew butter

GF/CF CORN FREE NUTELLA

2 cups of hazelnuts
1 T oil
1 T vanilla
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/3 cup agave
(OR 1/3 cup water and 1/4 cup sugar
OR stevia equivalent)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup almond milk

Heat oven to 350. Place hazelnuts on a cookie sheet. Roast for 8 minutes-- watch carefully!! Let cool. Rub with a dry towel to remove skins. Place in a blender, pour oil into center of nuts. Blend for a few minutes until smooth. Add remaining ingredients. Blend until smooth and well mixed. Makes 2 cups nutella.

HAMANTASCHEN

1 cup brown rice
½ cup sweet white rice
½ cup tapioca
½ cup sugar
1T guar gum
1 ½ tsp baking soda
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

 ⅓ cup water
½ cup oil
1 tsp vanilla

Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Gradually add dry ingredients to wet, kneading if necessary. Form into a log and wrap with plastic. Refrigerate for at least 20 minutes. Cut slices and form into triangles. Place jelly or nutella in the middle. Bake for 10-15 minutes.

PEANUT BUTTER NUTELLA

1 cup peanut butter
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 T vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup almond milk
1/4 cup sugar

Place ingredients in blender and blend until smooth. Makes 2 cups.

Going All Cultural

Chopsticks from Publix + Kale, Bean, and Egg soup + 7 silly kids = Lots of dinnertime fun!

KALE, GREEN BEAN, AND EGG SOUP

Vegetable stock
1 Bag of Kale
2 cans of green beans
4 eggs


Cook beans and kale in stock (remember that green will greatly reduce with cooking. Add eggs at the end, stir only a few times to break them up a little, and then continue to boil for 2 minutes.

Chocolate Pudding Awesomeness

This recipe has been rushed to the blog as quickly as possible with complete OMGoodness status. This pudding is so rich and chocolatey and easy and good and versatile and... it's that good.

CHOCOLATE PUDDING

1/4 cup sugar
2 T tapioca flour/starch
2 cups almond milk
1 cup Ghiradelli semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 T canola oil
1 tsp vanilla

Whisk the sugar and tapioca in a saucepan. Stir in the almond milk and cook over medium heat until bubbly and thick. Stir in remaining ingredients. Pour into small bowls and chill for 2 hours.

But get this: you can freeze it (think ice cream... fudgsicles...yeah) or use it as pie filling. Wow!!

Crazy easy, crazy good. Check it out!

Fufu Cake

Since going gluten-free, I've had to look outside of Western culture for recipes. Asian recipes are nice, but I found this cake recipe on a Liberian (African) site.

Fufu is a thick, pasty starchy, usually made from roots, that is a staple food of Central and Western Africa-- and it's not in the cake. However, it was in the site name (www.fufucafe.blogspot.com), so when I would search for the recipe I would type in "fufu". Hence, fufu cake.

FUFU CAKE RECIPE

7 large bananas (enough to loosely fill the blender)-- if you want to go traditional, then use plantains
1 cup canola oil
1 egg
1 cup water
1/2 to 3/4 cup molasses
1 tsp stevia, optional

2 cups cream of rice-- recipe here
2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt

Blend the wet ingredients in the blender until smooth. Combine with dry ingredients. Pour into a greased 9x13 baking dish and bake at 350 for an hour. No, seriously, an hour. I always want to pull it out early, and it is always crunchy when I do. The cake must be in the oven for an hour to cook the raw rice. If it burns before an hour, then the next time add a bit more water.

This cake holds well: I can bake it on Sunday and the children will eat off it until Tuesday.

Personally, when I hear of Fufu, I think of "Fufu the Snu." Maybe that's just me.

Acorn Squash

Who says gluten-free, casein-free, corn-free is a boring life of rice? Check this out!

ACORN SQUASH

Ingredients:

Acorn Squash
Mango Juice
Apples-- one for every squash
Almonds
Canola Oil
Canola spray
Salt

Wash acorn squash and slice--carefully--in half. Scoop out the seeds and reserve for roasted squash seeds (yum!)-- or not. Score the inside (see the picture) and brush with mango juice. Sprinkle with salt and spray lightly with canola oil-- this keeps it from drying out too much. Roast at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.







While they are cooking, slice and chop apples and almonds. Place in a pot with 1/2 T oil and 1/4 cup or so of mango juice. Cook until apples are soft.  When the squash have cooked for 30 minutes, remove them from the oven and fill the squash with the apple mixture. Return to the oven for 30 minutes.

Homemade Rice Grits

We eat rice grits regularly now-- at least twice a week. This makes boxed grits a bit pricey. So I make my own!

HOMEMADE RICE GRITS

Ingredients: Rice


Place a bag of rice in the freezer. I hear that it usually takes about 30 minutes to freeze rice, but I usually put mine in the night before. Pour 2-3 cups of rice into the blender. Blend for 1-2 minutes until you can see no more big chunks of rice. It takes a good, sharp blender for this. My old one does not chop them nearly as fine as my new one (Read my post about my blender). Pour the blended rice into a sifter or strainer. Sift the rice grits out. They are what's left in the sifter. What's in the bowl underneath is cream of rice-- so make a Fufu Cake!! I grind 6 pounds (3 bags) of rice a week. This gives me 8 cups of cream of rice to make into two Fufu Cakes and one batch of cream of rice for breakfast, and also gives me two days (7 cups) worth of rice grits. These grits are just like the ones in the box and work exactly the same in any grit recipe (Here's mine!)

Cooked Apples

It's cold. They're hungry. Time for a snack.

COOKED APPLES

1 bag of Golden Delicious Apples
1/2 cup of water

Cut the fruit-- I use an apple cutter. Place in a sauce pan. Add water. Cook on medium high until soft.

Fried Plantains

As I search for good gluten-free, casein-free, etc. ad nauseum snacks, I find that I need to look outside American culture with it's corn, wheat, and sugar obsession. Getting all cultural, we tried fried plantains. Yeah, they're fried, but they are oh, so, good.

FRIED PLANTAINS

Plantains
Oil for frying (I use canola)
Powdered sugar, if you are into that kind of thing

Cut the plantain into sections, slice in half and then slice thinly (1/2" thick, 3 inches long). Heat oil in skillet, place plantains in hot oil and fry for 2 minutes each side. Remove and drain on a paper towel. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Yum!

Kale Chips

We eat more than just rice, I promise.

For a snack during school time, we often eat kale chips.

They are crunchy and salty, and, though you will never be fooled into thinking they are potato chips, they are extremely healthy!

KALE CHIPS

1 bag of kale, your oil of choice, salt.

Dry the kale overnight on a towel. It must be dry or the oil will not stick. If the kale is not dry the next day (it usually isn't), then place it in a large bowl and dry with a hair dryer. We use the top of a cake cozy (see the picture). When it is dry, cover your hands with a bit of your oil, about 1/2 T--- we use canola, but olive oil or coconut oil will work, too. Work the oil over all of the leaves, really coat it, not so much thickly, but thoroughly. Sprinkle with salt and spread on a cookie sheet or jelly roll pan. Bake in the oven at 350 until it crunches like fall leaves (20-30 minutes).

An Heirloom Recipe

I'm still working on a standard gluten-free, casein-free, corn-free, soy-free, low salicylate, Feingold-approved menu... still looking for recipes.... still looking for snacks...

Today I found a good one. A great one. A recipe that is so good it will be passed down for generations to come on a carefully-treasured scrap of yellowed paper.

Here it is:

RICE PUDDING

1 3/4 cup rice grits (from 2 cups of frozen rice)
4 cups almond milk
2 cans coconut milk (approx. 13 fl oz)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp salt

Place all ingredients in a sauce pan on medium heat. Stir frequently. Cook until thick (about 25 minutes)

It was SOOOOO good....

With a flourish, I served it to my precious, sweet, angelic children, who...

come to find out....

don't like the taste of coconut.

Meh.

Back to the drawing board.

Image Courtesy of: http://thenourishingcook.com/simple-rice-pudding-comfort-food-at-its-best/

Muppins

UPDATE: WARNING!! THIS POST MAY NOT BE CORN FREE. I have decided to leave it up for all of our GF/CF and not Corn Free friends. 

ORGINAL POST:
When my son was younger, he called muffins "muppins" and the name stuck. This morning I made muffins from gluten-free Bisquick. There was no recipe for muffins on the box, so I made my own:

BISQUICK MUFFINS

1 box of gluten-free Bisquick

2 cups rice milk

2 eggs

2 T canola oil 

1/3 cup sugar

Combine ingredients and spoon into a muffin tin. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. 

These were very white and light in texture and flavor. They will go well with any type of topping. And with no gluten and no casein, it works well here. I did have a small reaction to the xanthum gum (or my coffee??). But, for now, at least it will remain on the menu for our weekly Sunday Muppins.

UPDATE: The reaction seems to have been from the xanthum gum. Though xanthum gum is made from the black mold found on vegetables, the "vegetable" most commonly used to grow it is corn. Soon, I hope to have a corn-free, homemade recipe for Bisquick. Check back soon. 

After you make the muffins, you can make donuts with this quick and simple method:

Image Courtesy of: www.amazon.com

My New Blender

I have a really great blender. Really. White, glass jar, crunches ice. Sure, I melted the front in a mishap with the electric skillet, but, hey, it isn't THAT bad. Adds character. It's an old friend--- and essential for making rice milk, which is essential for our casein-free life.

But then I lost the O-ring. 

I have really great children. Really. In the process of raising responsible citizens, they help with the dishes. In the process of raising responsible citizens, the O-ring disappeared. 

But I needed rice milk. Right. Then. Argh. 

So I went to Wal-Mart and picked up a new blender. Need it with a food processor, too? Sure. Why not? 

Of course (of course!) as soon as I got home I found the old O-ring. Score. 2 blenders! And they have really come in handy with the amount of chopping and pureeing I do. The new blender made me realize how dull the blade of the old one had gotten over time. The new Oster blender can blend smoothies and rice milk much creamier than the other blender. 

So here is my recipe for Rice Milk:

RICE MILK

1 cup brown rice

6 cups water

1/2 tsp salt

Put the brown rice in a small crockpot and add 6 cups of water.

Cover and cook from 3-6 hours, the longer the better. Let cool.

Put half of the rice into a blender. Add water to fill. Blend for 1-2 minutes on high. 

Pour through a strainer into a large pitcher. 

Put remaining rice into the blender. Add water to fill and 1/2 tsp salt. Blend for 1-2 minutes on high.

Now here's the tricky part:

Pour the rice milk from blender into the pitcher with the rest. Then pour it from the pitcher back into the blender, and then into the pitcher, and then the blender. You get the idea. The turbidity of the pouring liquid mixes the two batches more effectively than a spoon. Chill. 

*****

I'll be making a batch of this in just a few minutes. Right after I find that O-ring...

photo courtesy of: http://khuzama.edu.glogster.com/brown-rice/

Rice Grits

On a whim at Wal-Mart, I decided to purchase Arrowhead Mills' Rice & Shine Rice Grits. We ate them this morning, and they were a big hit! Easy to make (though they do need constant stirring) and no sweetening required to make it palatable. Just add some salt and canola oil and you're good to go.

Not knowing how much I would need for our family, I made too much for breakfast. But all was not lost, as these make great leftovers, not like the congealed mass that corn grits turns into. The kids gobbled up the rest at snack time.

This recipe does not meet most paleo standards, but it is kosher, gluten-free, casein-free, corn-free, and Feingold approved.

Now we embark on the journey of learning how to make our own.

Here's the recipe I used for 9 people with enough leftovers for snack:

RICE GRITS

1 box (which was 1 qt) of Arrowhead Mills' Rice & Shine Rice Grits
2 tsp salt
3 T oil
12 cups of water

Place all ingredients in a large pot. Cook on medium/high heat, stirring constantly, until desired thickness.

Photo courtesy of: www.amazon.com