Lentil soup with chickpea dumplings

Sometimes you've just got to have dumplings.  Yes, another day and another craving for comfort food - at least today I can admit the cause of the cravings is that I am 12 weeks pregnant :)  So yes, that's why the diet has been abandoned and my creativity in the kitchen took a bit of a dip whilst I was in the throes of morning sickness!  I'm now coming out the other side, but craving the stodgy stuff that would do nothing but pile on the weight.  So I decided to see if I could come up with a lower carb, wheat free equivalent to dumplings.  I was slightly hampered by not having any veggie suet in the house but it worked fine with regular margerine.

The soup is my 'whatevers in the fridge that needs eating + lentils' recipe; today we had two bunches of salad onions, carrots, celery and a green pepper which were fried in olive oil with a little garlic.  When they're starting to brown add a cup of red lentils and cover with stock then simmer for 20 minutes or so until the veggies are tender and the lentils are mushed.

Chickpea Dumplings
4 ounces of gram flour
2 ounces of veggie margerine
1/4 cup of rice milk
1/2 tsp of baking powder

Put the gram flour, baking powder and marg into a bowl and mix with your fingers until you get a breadcrumby texture.  Add enough of the rice milk to make a soft dough.  Spoon this onto the top of your cooked stew, cover with a lid and let simmer for another 20 minutes or so until the dumplings are puffy and solid.

Enjoy!

Gluten Free, Vegetarian Toad in the Hole

Because of my dietry quirks, I sometimes end up making a dish with ingredients that are so far removed from the original that you wonder if you can really call it the same thing.  But tonight I really wanted to eat toad in the hole.  I craved the soft stodginess of the middle and crisp edges of the outside.  The salty flavours in the egginess of the batter.  Now I have made veggetarian toad in the hall quite succesfuly with Quorn sausages before, but that wasn't what I wanted tonight.  No.  Tonight I wanted roasted veggies.

I started with a past its best aubergine, half a butternut squash, some almost at the end of their useful life mushrooms, a few cherry tomatoes and a couple of onions that were chopped into small pieces, tossed in rosemary infused olive oil and then roasted for 30-40 minutes at GM7.  Whilst that was cooking I whipped up a batch of this Gluten Free Popover (US term for Yorkshire puddings) batter which I've used in the past.  Combined the two in a large baking dish, back in the oven at GM8 for 15 minutes, and then down to GM4 for another 10.  Meantime I whipped up a little batch of onion gravy to go with it - although my SO declared that the toad was better without as you got the full flavours of the veggies.

Not quite Naan Bread

Naan bread is one of the things I miss about being gluten free.  There's something very special about dipping chunks of warm, flavourful, buttery bread into curries and delivering it to your tastebuds.  Wonderful!  Now this recipe is a very happy accident.  It came about when I was trying to make my frying pan corn bread and wanted to go lower carb so tried using gram flour in the place of the polenta.  It came out great and slightly naan bready in flavour, so the next time around I tried it with just gram flour.  It's not quite a naan bread, but if you're on a gluten free diet, or just going low carb, this is a great way to almost get a naan bread.

Not quite naan bread
1/2 cup of gram flour
1/4 cup of milk
1 egg
1 tsp baking powder
1tsp ghee or ground nut oil

Heat a small frying pan and add the ghee or oil.  In a bowl mix the other ingredients together to make a smooth batter.  Pour into the pan and cook on a medium heat until the bottom is golden, then turn and cook the other side.

We've had this plain and we've had this Peshwari style, by adding dessicated coconut, raisins and flaked almonds to the pan once the bottom has started to cook and patting them down into the mixture.

Corn Bread and lentil pate

Ah Christmas.  Lovely gifts for using in my kitchen.  This year I got a pretty Ciroa Miniamo Cupcake Stand and some of their silicone cupcake cases too.  Unfortunately I also got on Wii Fit Plus and found out I'd piled on 1/2 a stone in the last few months between comfort eating and celebrating, so making cupcakes was out of the question.  Doh!

I've been inspired lately by reading Cafe Karma which is the blog of the wife of an online friend of mine.  She makes some incredible vegan food and has recently posted about cornbread which reminded me how easy and delicious it is to make and suitable for my gluten free diet!  I sorted out my printed out recipes yesterday and found a few cornbread recipes I meant to try, and some of the lentil pate recipes I used to make quite often for lunch so when my SO asked me today "What's for lunch?" I had an immediate answer!  But more exciting was the prospect of using my cupcake cases to bake the cornbread.  Yay!

Cornbread muffins
2 cups of cornmeal
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 cups of milk (I used rice milk)
2 tbsp of vegetable oil.

Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 8.  Combine dry ingredients in one bowl and wet in another, then mix together.  Pour into muffin cases and bake for 10-15 minutes until they're golden and pulling away from the tin slightly.  Makes 12 muffins.  You can also bake this in a 9inch cake tin and cut into slices.

Lentil Dip
1 tin of lentils
1 onion
Butter or margerine
2 cloves of garlic
1 tbsp tomato puree
Balsamic Vinegar
Mushroom Ketchup

Fry the onions and garlic gently in a little butter or margerine until caremallised.  Add to the blender with the lentils (drained and rinsed) and the tomato puree and blend until smooth.  Add dashes of vinegar and mushroom ketchup until you have the taste you want.

The cornbread popped out of those muffin tins leaving them squeaky clean, wonderful!  The lunch was enjoyed by all of us, especially my 3 year old who had great fun working the food processer with me and 'tasting' the dip!  I am sad to report the loss of my Global mini-cleaver though, which broke into two pieces on being dropped today.  It was a great knife, but at least I now have an excuse to go knife shopping for the first time in a decade - those Global Knives are sheer awesome.

Pizza!

My little boy, almost 3 years old, was watching CBeebies today when the new program 'I can cook' came on.  It's a good idea for a show, with a presenter and some kids making something to eat together; todays recipe was Easy Peasy Pizza (all the recipes from the series can be found here)  I quite fancied a pizza for lunch myself, so told my son he could make his own lunch which he was very excited about.  He loves to cook, and we quite often make cakes together on rainy days.

But if he was making his own pizza, what were his Dad and I going to eat?  Pizza seemed a sensible idea so we could share some of the prep, so to begin with I made a batch of gluten free flat bread, not quite as cooked as I would normally make it if I were eating it by itself.  I mixed up some pizza sauce with tomato puree, garlic, olive oil and balsamic vinegar diluted with water to the right consistency and spread that over the bread.  Then I added my toppings (today we had courgettes and red peppers) and finished with cheese.

Both pizzas went in the oven together and cooked for 10-15 minutes before we had a feast before our very eyes!

Now I think that looks pretty tasty considering it was made by an (almost) 3 year old!

I can testify that the adult version was really good though :)

More cupcakes

I will, I promise, post about something other than naturally gluten free cupcakes soon.  It's just been the kind of week where comfort food was needed and boy do these cakes fit the bill.  Warm from the oven they are delightfully marzipan-ny and even cold (and the next day, they've never lasted longer than that!) they are a joy to the mouth.  For those of you who don't have to forgo wheat you probably won't understand me waxing lyrical about cakes you can eat the next day any more than you would have understood my rapture about the flat bread recipe, but believe me; the GF cakes that you can buy in the shops are dry and flavourless, often over sweet to compensate and don't last so to be able to home bake something so wonderful is a real treat.

Today I experimented with putting chocolate chips in, but the thin batter won't support them (I had tried with cherries a few days ago which wasn't a success either!) so I think these are going to be the kind of cake you flavour (or perhaps fill) rather than add things to.

Cupcakes take 2

To make 6 muffin case size cakes:


4 ounces of soft cheese
4 ounces of caster sugar
4 ounces of ground almonds
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder


Cream the cheese and sugar together, then add eggs, almonds and baking powder and mix to a smooth batter.  Pour into cases and bake at Gas Mark 3 for 20-25 minutes.

These were far better in texture than the previous attempt, not greasy at all but deliciously moist.  What's more they were even better the next day, whereas making GF cupcakes with GF flour I've found they need to be eaten the day they're made (not just an excuse for gluttony, honest!)  I'm sure they can be improved on though, any suggestions?

The search for a naturally gluten free cupcake

Whilst drooling over the pictures on Sweet Sugar Sixpence's Facebook page, I saw that someone had asked if they did gluten free cakes.  They said they didn't.  Now I can see why, because these ladies make the most delicious, perfect, decadent cakes and why would they want to make a substitute that wasn't quite as good? (as GF cakes rarely are!)  Which got me to thinking about making a delicious, but naturally gluten free cake.  Not something made with crazy mixes of 'flours' but a cake that just didn't have wheat in it.

A few weeks ago I made a rather lovely apple and almond pudding, the topping for which was very cake like, so I used that as the basis for my first experiment.  2 ounces each of sugar, ground almonds and butter with one egg, 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder and a dash of vanilla essence.  This made enough mixture for 3 muffin cases, just enough for a small trial, and I baked them at Gas Mark 3 for just over 20 minutes.  I tried to take them out at about 18 minutes but they were still a bit wobbly, and they sank considerably as I dithered with the oven door open so might have stayed more risen had I been more patient.  What I hadn't considered was that in the pudding the butter had melted down into the apple and sugar to make a tasty caremalised sauce, but in the muffin cases there was nowhere for it to go.  As a result the pudding topping was a good deal more cakey than the muffins which are quite greasy.  They taste amazing though!

I think they're a promising start.  My next attempt will be made using cream cheese instead of butter, as I've noticed a lot of low carb/gluten free recipes use this quite successfully.  Watch this space!

Croissants

Croissants are something that I really miss since cutting wheat out of my diet some years ago. They do sell gluten free croissants, but they don't bear much resemblance to the rich, buttery, flaky and light wonder of a real croissant. I wondered if it was possible to make your own, and having had some success with the gluten free gobsmacked's sandwich wrap recipe I thought I'd try their take on croissants.

The recipe has quite a few stages to it,so I picked a Sunday when I'd have time to play with croissants on and off during the day. I used Dove's Farm plain flour mix rather than mixing my own blend, and used margerine rather than butter as I didn't have any butter in, but otherwise made it as listed. I think the margerine probably made it a little more difficult to handle as it was softer than butter, even when frozen. The rolling out and buttering was a particularly tricky stage, my pallet knife came in handy and they are not kidding when they talk about using lots of flour! I couldn't roll the pastry as thinly as suggested (see through) but it was pretty thin and difficult to roll into a croissant so they looked a bit tatty around the edges.

The result was tasty, but not a croissant :( Pastry like but not light and flaky. They had a cheesey flavour to them too, although they were very nice with a bit of chocolate rolled up. So overall a good GF breakfast bake, but a lot of faff to make and for me the result wasn't worth it. I might give them another try with butter in the future but it would have to be for a special occasion!

GF Flat bread delight!

Long time no post! Life has been busy for us, but I just had to stop and share this fantastic site for any of you who have to cut wheat and gluten out of your diet for some reason. Gluten Free Gobsmacked is a blog written by a brave pioneer in the cooking of all things gluten free. I first came across the blog when looking for something interesting to eat for breakfast one day, and google turned up the GF Croissant recipe that I haven't got around to trying yet. Croissants are sort of my holy grail in GF cooking so I look forward to giving them ago when I have the time.

I've never been the sort of GF baker to mix my own flour blends, instead sticking to Dove's Farm Gluten Free plain and self-raising blends which work well for a lot of things; the exceptions being bread and scones (sob!) I thought I'd give the wrap recipe a try with it though, as some of the flours in the blend recommended on the site are hard to come by. To my delight, it worked a treat with the plain blend! I wasn't sure if I had spread it thin enough (about 5mm) and it rose quite a bit in the baking, but settled back down once out of the oven. It took a little persuading to come off the baking tin so I must grease and flour it more thoroughly next time, but after a few minutes it had settled down into a delicious looking flat bread. I cut it into four, and started making up a nice red lentil dip to go with it!

Reading my ecstatic tweets and status updates about the result, my SO came downstairs to investigate, tore a strip off and asked hopefully if this was his lunch. I told him no, he had to eat the shop bought bread :) I am just kidding though, I will share, this was really easy to make and I can see it becoming a regular fixture.

Next stop, croissants!

Pasta with Asparagus

One of the real joys of spring and early summer for me is Asparagus. We get it in our veg box, and we also sneak over to a farm in Sand Hutton that sells it fresh cut that morning - its wonderful! This week there was a bundle of the delicious green stuff in my veg box from Riverford (who I cannot recommend highly enough by the way, evey week they deliver me a box full of culinary potential and its a real treat to get to cook with such lovely ingredients) and I wanted to use it as fresh as possible, so tonight I went looking for an asparagus pasta recipe. What I found was the simply titled Pasta with Asparagus at allrecipes.com.

I adapted the recipe a little, of course, by using rice pasta spirals rather than angel hair pasta but also in the cooking directions. I cut the tips off the asparagus and put them to one side, fried the rest with some onion and the mushrooms before adding vegetable stock, the tips and finally a handful of frozen petis pois. Because I added a little too much liquid I thickened it with some cornflour. The result was a really tasty, low fat meal that had a good strong asparagus flavour. It went down well with the whole family and will definitely be one I add to my repertoire. For the carnivores amongst you, you might find it goes well with some nice streaky bacon bits or pancetta thrown in.