Food, cooking, eating, and me

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2

Boiled nuts help protect against illness
2007-10-28 02:24:00
Boiled nuts help protect against illness A research study has shown that boiled peanuts are much better for you than roasted or raw ones. Their “phytochemicals have antioxidant qualities that protect cells against the risk of degenerative diseases, including cancers, diabetes and heart disease.” For some reason boiling them makes more of these chemicals available to ...
More About: Nuts , Illness

Gluten-free dairy-free buckwheat pancakes - one more time
2007-02-22 10:19:02
Well, not really just one more time, as far as cooking is concerned. When I decided to do an article on buckwheat pancakes again, I wanted not only to have a tasty recipe for you, but also to be able to show you what they look like when you use different amounts of dark and white buckwheat flour. I ended up making many recipes of buckwheat pancakes in my quest for good photos and good taste quest. This was not an issue for me, as now I have a huge bag of frozen buckwheat pancakes I can thaw and eat in the mornings. I took some pretty good pictures with my cheapie camera, so you can see for yourself. If you’re looking at this article as a single post, check out my previous entry More About Buckwheat so you can see the raw ingredients I’m working with. But in the end, I found after all the measuring and pancake-making, there’s not all that much difference in eating quality between pancakes that have mostly dark buckwheat flour or mostly white buckwheat flour, provide...
More About: Pancake , Time , Free , Wheat , Gluten Free

Gluten-free dairy-free buckwheat pancakes - one more time
2007-02-20 18:24:00
Well, not really just one more time, as far as cooking is concerned. When I decided to do an article on buckwheat pancakes again, I wanted not only to have a tasty recipe for you, but also to be able to show you what they look like when you use different amounts of dark and ...
More About: Time , Free , Gluten Free , Dairy , Pancakes

More about buckwheat
2007-02-19 10:17:01
There’s a lot of information out there about buckwheat. For instance, I’ve heard it said that it’s not a grain (so far so good), but a fruit?? Just let’s use a wee bit of logic here, folks. Buck wheat is the seed of an herb, not a fruit. It’s also not even remotely related to wheat. Therefore, there is no gluten in it and it should be safe for celiacs. In fact, it’s a triangular sort of a seed that is ground for flour or cooked into a pilaf called kasha - which I will soon post my favorite recipe for. As you can see in this picture, the whole seeds, also called groats, are greenish when raw and tan when toasted. I prefer the toasted flavor. I was previously able to buy mine pre-toasted, but they were never toasted dark enough for me, so I do my own, stirring over a low flame in a frying pan. It is also possible to buy them coarsely ground for kasha, but I’ve never purchased them, so I can’t comment on it. The seeds are also available ...
More About: Wheat , About , Heat , More

More about buckwheat
2007-02-18 03:06:00
There’s a lot of information out there about buckwheat. For instance, I’ve heard it said that it’s not a grain (so far so good), but a fruit?? Just let’s use a wee bit of logic here, folks. Buckwheat is the seed of an herb, not a fruit. It’s also not even remotely related to wheat. ...

Hot chocolate and chocolate almond milk
2007-01-29 04:07:03
First of all, as far as I’m concerned, hot chocolate and chocolate milk are made with chocolate and drinking quality milk or “milk”, not with cocoa, and definitely not with some kind of mix that looks like you got dirt in your skim milk. I’m just a firm believer in the real thing. So what you have to do is melt the chocolate in the almond milk and blend it to mix it in. Almond milk should not be heated to boiling by itself, but you can safely heat it after mixing in the chocolate. I have found that some commercial milks can taste thin. If I want the finished product to be “milkier”, I add some coconut milk powder, which I buy at an Asian food store. For chocolate milk, it’s the same thing, but you may need to add some extra sugar, as chilled things taste less sweet. Gosh, better make plenty, too. I bought some chocolate rice milk once that was so horrible I took one taste and threw the carton away. Not this. This is the real deal. Ah, and th...
More About: Hot Chocolate , Milk , Chocolate , Cola

Hot chocolate and chocolate almond milk
2007-01-29 01:43:00
First of all, as far as I’m concerned, hot chocolate and chocolate milk are made with chocolate and drinking quality milk or “milk”, not with cocoa, and definitely not with some kind of mix that looks like you got dirt in your skim milk. I’m just a firm believer in the real thing. So what you have ...
More About: Hot Chocolate , Milk , Chocolate , Almond

Sorry it’s been so long. How time flies when you’
2007-01-14 15:59:04
Sorry it’s been so long. How time flies when you’re working two jobs while trying to maintain multiple websites and write multiple blogs… Sometimes it seems like there’s hardly time to cook anything at all. I haven’t been baking as much, but I know that my baked good recipes are the most popular ones that I do post. So basically I need to get better at posting the ones I do make, even if maybe they are still a little rough around the edges. Today I’ve got a killer recipe - if you’re into biscuits and gravy. It’s got neither milk nor flour in it, but you’d never know it. The gravy is thickened with blanched almonds, which give it milkiness and a bit of sweet rice flour and potato starch, which give it silkiness. This is a base I’ll be working on to create more dairy-free gluten-free sauces, which I miss. Heck, I was even trying to make a sausage gravy with water. Talk about desperation! Keep in mind that the best black peppe...
More About: Time , When , Long , Flies , Lies

Biscuit and Gravy Nirvana
2007-01-14 01:00:00
Sorry it’s been so long. How time flies when you’re working two jobs while trying to maintain multiple websites and write multiple blogs… Sometimes it seems like there’s hardly time to cook anything at all. I haven’t been baking as much, but I know that my baked good recipes are the most popular ones that I ...
More About: Nirvana , Gravy

Gluten-free mayo?
2006-12-01 11:15:05
Suze has requested a recipe for gluten-free mayo. First of all, I’ll let you guys in on a secret - mayonnaise should always be gluten-free if it’s made according to the traditional recipe, which contains only egg yolks, oil, vinegar or lemon juice, and salt. Obviously the food industry has no respect for the purism of traditional recipes, so lots of products are unaccountably glutenized, as we know. I have found the traditional recipe to be a bit hard to make successfully unless I’m making it in quantity, and it tastes quite rich if you’re used to commercial mayonnaises. So instead I make whole egg mayonnaise, and I use a blender, which gives the best-emulsified mayonnaise I’ve made, much better than handwhipped mayo, at least from my experience. I use pure olive oil, which is lighter in flavor than extra virgin olive oil, which I’ve heard is harder to work with and more likely to separate in processing or storage. I think olive oil is healthier t...
More About: Free , Gluten Free , Lute

Coconut sorbet
2006-12-01 11:15:05
This is so easy it hardly merits an entire post, but it is the best! I was thinking about making a coconut ice cream (thickened with egg yolks), but I never motivated myself to start. Finally it occurred to me that I could make a sorbet using a can of coconut milk and sugar. Actually, I had this feeling that that would be too fatty to have the proper texture, so here’s what I did: I put a measuring cup with 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup sugar in the microwave, and heated it for a minute, taking it out to stir it and continuing to heat until the sugar dissolved. It didn’t taste sweet enough to me at this point, so I added another ounce of sugar. I then added this to the contents of a can of coconut milk and stirred until completely mixed. I put it in the refrigerator until it was cold, stirring several times. Finally I put the bowl in the freezer and stirred it every 1/2 hour at first, less time as it started to freeze, smashing up lumps and scraping the edge off the bowl....
More About: Coconut , Coco

A bit about me and my food proclivities
2006-12-01 11:15:05
I love to eat, and I love to cook. That love has brought me a bookcase full of cookbooks. It has taken me through to a Culinary Arts degree. It has brought me to the point where I love to play with recipes and experiment until I master some technique or perfect a recipe list. I remember as a person in college, loving to cook, but finding many recipes that just didn’t seem to work for me. My bread used to come out heavy and tough. Looking back, I’m not really sure why, nor what happened to change that. In cooking school I took baking courses, which was undoubtedly a major factor. But one thing I feel is that it is important to become one with the process. Only then can you help it evolve. As a kid, I lived in a household that was all natural. My mother was totally fanatical about this. We bought all kinds of organic foods back when it was in no way trendy or fashionable. We ate, as a snack, medicinal-tasting bars masquerading as “healthy candy”. Nowadays these...
More About: Food , About , Proc , Koban

Gluten-free casein-free crispy rice treats
2006-12-01 11:15:05
Everybody knows (they do, don?t they?) that Rice Crispies have barley malt flavoring in them, which makes them non-gluten-free. Erewhon makes a crispy brown rice cereal that is gluten-free. Last night the draw was too great. I read the recipe for crispy rice treats on the back of that bag of gluten-free marshmallows I bought at Walmart, tore it open, and started measuring. I don?t use margarine (IMO, margarine is not a food, but a product of a chemical factory) and I?m trying to avoid butter as much as possible, so I substituted coconut oil (LouAna brand, also a Walmart product) for the butter in the recipe. I greased one of those flexible silicone baking pans with coconut oil. In fact, the box had exactly the amount of rice cereal called for by the recipe after the single bowl I had eaten, so I didn?t even need to measure. I melted the coconut oil with the marshmallows in a pan, stirring until it was a goo, added the crisp rice cereal, mixed, and packed half in the pan. A few choco...
More About: Free , Gluten Free , Case , Lute

Danged global warming & awesome garlic shrimp
2006-12-01 11:15:05
So sorry, it’s been too hot to bake. I’ve used up all my frozen cookies and brownies, but until we have a break in the heat, there’s no way I’m going to turn on the oven. Of course we did have a couple of nice days this week, but those were the days when my hot water heater was dead and waiting to be replaced, so I didn’t want to make a mess in the kitchen until I was able to clean it up again. But I did make some awesome garlic shrimp. Now the problem with cooking shrimp in sauces or glazes is that raw shrimp give off a lot of water when cooked. You could saute them in a little fat at a very high temperature, high enough so that all moisture evaporates immediately. But cooking them at a high temperature will generally overcook them. The unfortunate tendency is for them to give off their water and then stew in their juices. This is made worse by adding a sauce for them to simmer in. You end up diluting the sauce with the shrimp juice, which upsets the b...
More About: Global Warming , Garlic , Awesome , War , Global

Cream of Mushroom Soup
2006-12-01 11:15:05
I’ve always had a fondness for canned cream of mushroom soup that bordered on a perversion. Even though I only occasionally purchased it, just having it in the house was such a temptation that I often ended up eating it undiluted, thick and yummy. Of course I haven’t been eating much cream of mushroom soup since I went gluten-free, which is more than two years ago, and certainly no canned Campbell’s as in my diet’s previous incarnation. People have been posting about wanting cream of mushroom soups to eat and concentrate to put in casseroles, such as that famed green bean casserole with the Funyons instead of the crunchy fried onion bits (I can’t comment on that, as I haven’t tried it). I also read that Progresso makes a gluten-free cream of mushroom soup, but I haven’t looked for it. It must have something to do with that icon of Americana, the red and white soup can. Then last week I had an idea. I had been making sausage gravy with water ...
More About: Soup , Mushroom , Room , Cream , Mush

Breakfast potatoes part 2: Hash browns
2006-12-01 11:15:05
Nowadays you most often see the term “hash browns” used for those prefried/refried chopped potato patties that you get at the drive-thru of your favorite fast food emporium. Less often you will find slower food restaurants that still make the old-fashioned shredded-style hashbrowns, either on the grill or fried in a pan. Those are rare around these parts. I live outside of the land of Waffle House - not that I think Waffle House does a particularly good job with them, at least not with any great consistency. Just as I described in the previous breakfast potato posting on home fries - hash browns also often tend to be soggy and unseasoned, but since they start with raw potatoes, sometimes they are even not quite cooked through. It is really not hard to make them well, but there’s a trick or two to it. So get out your shredder. That’s what we’re making today. Just kidding, Folks. But if you’re going to be making these, you’ll need a good coars...
More About: Breakfast , Break , Brown , Potatoes , Potato

Breakfast potatoes part 1: homefries
2006-12-01 11:15:05
OK, homefries are supposed to be gluten-free. They’re just supposed to be potatoes fried in a pan, golden brown and crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, and seasoned with salt and probably pepper and maybe a little cayenne. You would think that would be a simple thing to do, but between badly-made traditional homefries which seem to be little more than lukewarm unseasoned leftover potatoes and those that are deep-fried and breaded or batter-coated, let’s just say the bar doesn’t seem to be particularly high nowadays. It’s a shame, because making excellent homefries is so easy to do. I’ll let you in on my “secret” method, which is so much easier than any I have seen before, and it’s much more reliable, too. But first, a little homefry talk. Years ago I read a discussion in an old cookbook that said that the difference between homefries and hash browns was that the homefries were made from raw potatoes, while hash browns were mad...
More About: Breakfast , Home , Break , Potatoes , Potato

Proper spelling: a pet peeve, to show I care
2006-12-01 11:15:05
OK, the word is spelled ‘gluten’. It’s not that hard, and it makes a difference. gluten: a tenacious elastic protein substance especially of wheat flour that gives cohesiveness to dough - Merriam Webster on ‘gluten’ glutton: 1 a : one given habitually to greedy and voracious eating and drinking b : one that has a great capacity for accepting or enduring something {glutton for punishment} - Merriam Webster on ‘glutton’ glutten: not a word gluton: not a word, but perhaps they will someday give this name to a newly-discovered subatomic particle As long as I’m on proper spelling, the word celiac is derived from a Greek word meaning abdominal cavity. The disease is spelled celiac with a small ‘c’, celiacs is the plural of celiac, referring to a group of gluten-intolerant folk, and celiac’s is something that belongs to a person with celiac. It really is possible for just about everybody to either learn how to spell prope...
More About: Show , Care , Spelling , Prop , Rope

A tasty gluten-free cocktail
2006-12-01 11:15:05
What can I say? There I was, thinking about back when I used to mix rum with maple syrup and heavy cream to make what I called the “Sea Captain’s Return”, back in the days when I was still enjoying dairy products. Foraging through my refrigerator, I pulled out a carton of store brand rice milk (no gluten ingredients). I filled a glass with ice, added a shot of rum, an ounce of maple syrup, filled it to the top with rice milk and stirred. Not bad at all. I could get used to that.
More About: Free , Gluten Free , Cocktail , Lute , Cock

Coconut sorbet
2006-10-01 20:17:00
This is so easy it hardly merits an entire post, but it is the best! I was thinking about making a coconut ice cream (thickened with egg yolks), but I never motivated myself to start. Finally it occurred to me that I could make a sorbet using a can of coconut milk and sugar. Actually, I ...
More About: Coconut

Cream of Mushroom Soup
2006-10-01 02:14:00
I’ve always had a fondness for canned cream of mushroom soup that bordered on a perversion. Even though I only occasionally purchased it, just having it in the house was such a temptation that I often ended up eating it undiluted, thick and yummy. Of course I haven’t been eating much cream of mushroom soup since ...
More About: Soup , Mushroom , Cream

Breakfast potatoes part 2: Hash browns
2006-09-08 15:18:00
Nowadays you most often see the term “hash browns” used for those prefried/refried chopped potato patties that you get at the drive-thru of your favorite fast food emporium. Less often you will find slower food restaurants that still make the old-fashioned shredded-style hashbrowns, either on the grill or fried in a pan. Those are rare ...
More About: Breakfast , Potatoes , Part , Browns

Breakfast potatoes part 1: homefries
2006-08-23 11:47:00
OK, homefries are supposed to be gluten-free. They’re just supposed to be potatoes fried in a pan, golden brown and crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, and seasoned with salt and probably pepper and maybe a little cayenne. You would think that would be a simple thing to do, but between badly-made ...
More About: Breakfast , Potatoes , Part , Fries

Proper spelling: a pet peeve, to show I care
2006-08-11 11:39:00
OK, the word is spelled ‘gluten’. It’s not that hard, and it makes a difference. gluten: a tenacious elastic protein substance especially of wheat flour that gives cohesiveness to dough - Merriam Webster on ‘gluten’ glutton: 1 a : one given habitually to greedy and voracious eating and drinking b : one that has a great capacity ...
More About: Show , Care , Spelling , Prop , Rope