murphy's is always a guest

Today was a big day. After making some pancakes, i made some mini quiches with a sweet potato crust and  then I tried my hand at lasagna.
Instead of being half way normal, using pre made lasagna noodles, and keeping the thing for myself, i went all the way out, and made the noodles from scratch (why else do i have a pasta machine?), and I invited some friends over for dinner. i made 3 pans of lasagna (2 vegetarian, and one normal) so as to make sure that if there were problems, i would enjoy them fully;)

From the get go, something went wrong. I used a tiny measuring cup which had tbsp which i confused with tsp (small letters, no caps), and i put 3 times the amount of Xantham gum, and salt, which would have been a disaster. So I tried to recover and tripled everything.
It went down from there.

The result was good, so somehow i recovered.;)
i learned:
1)The lasagna noodles should be very thin because they will double or triple during cooking.
2) People like chewy lasagna noodles, so I probably need to reduce the pre-cooking time to try to get an aldente feel.

coconut almond pancakes

Today is a big testing day.
I just made some coconut almond pancakes, from the nourishing meals cookbooks. I love that cookbook. The pancakes were delicious but very hard to flip. I made a bunch and froze them. I guess I can make them in the weekend only. They are too long to cook for a herding cats weekday breakfast .

I am gearing up to make some GF lasagna tonight. That should be interesting. It turns out that in spite of all the flours i own, i still don't have the one used in most of the home made recipe.. I am lacking potato starch.

turkey sausages

For my first experiment, i thought i would try something that is a standby in our home, but which contains bread crumbs. I call them "turkey sausages". I found the original recipe in a baby cookbook: baby bistro cookbook After making it once, I modified the recipe greatly. My daughter loves them, my ex loved them. They freeze well, and can be used as finger food. They are a complete meal, with vegetable, protein and carbs. i used to make them much smaller.

I chose to replace the bread crumbs with Quinoa flour.
The result is ok. Not great, but ok. Maybe I should add some almond or filbert's flour to give it a nutty taste as well as absorb some of the mixture.

Here is my approximate recipe:

• 3 pounds of ground turkey
• 1 big onion chopped fine.
• garlic or garlic powder (about 2-3 TB)
• 2 bags of spinach, wilted.
• salt, pepper
• sage (about 3 Tablespoons)
• coriander (about 3 TB)
• a tsp of cayenne pepper
• 3 eggs
• enough quinoa flour to make the mixture hold together, in my case about 4 TB.
• applesauce (1/2 Cup)

Mix everything very well. Form little patty using two tablespoon, saute until cooked and browned.

This recipe makes about 30 patties.
Miriam's comment was "i don't see the difference with the regular ones", which is encouraging..

Intro

My name is Odile. My daughter, Miriam, 7, just got diagnosed with Celiac before xmas. Until that time, we both were omnivorous. Her dad and I have decided to give her one last gluten filled xmas. After our xmas vacation, i.e. tomorrow, 12/29/2012, we are going cold turkey.

As a cook, I am triply cursed: I am a foodie, I am french and my mom started her career as a cooking teacher. Needless to say, I have used two cake mixes in my entire life. I make everything from scratch. Maybe I thought I was making "everything" from scratch. I have learned in the last month that gluten is in an amazing number of foods, including 'soy sauce', spelt, and that the jury is still out when it comes to oats.

I am facing a big challenge, I am going to have to re-learn how to do everything from scratch, but without gluten. I have bought a dozen cookbooks to learn how to bake and cook again.
Since my daughter's santa's list has contained "Pasta" for the last 4 years, part of my experiments will be to learn to make decent pasta, esp. raviolis and also decent crusty, yummy, filled with holes, bread.
I am not sure how this is going to turn out, so I am going to document my experiments. If they work, I will post the recipes. If they don't, well, I will have learned something.