Cream Croquettes -----> Chicken Pot Pie

I tried to make cream croquettes.  I tried to make cream croquettes knowing that I had never made them before, and I had to find a way to make them gluten free, dairy free, and soy free.  I don't know why this idea popped into my head.  I just thought that I could do it.  Well.  I tried.  And I learned something.  I need a better source of fat so that my mixture will actually firm up when chilled.  But let's see what I did and try to learn from my mistakes, okay?

Cream Croquettes
1 whole chicken, roasted
2 onions, chopped fine
2 tablespoons garlic
1 teaspoon cumin
Salt and pepper to taste
Fake white sauce, recipe below
Cornstarch
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups crunched up rice cereal


For "White Sauce"
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons GF flour
3 cups chicken broth

Roast your chicken, then pull apart and shred all of the meat.  Make up your fake white sauce by heating the oil in a small pot, then adding the flour and let cook on medium until not grainy anymore.  Add chicken broth slowly, letting thicken.  You want the mixture to be about the consistency of a thick mustard.  Pull off burner and set to the side.  Saute your onions in some olive oil, then add your garlic and spices.  Mix together chicken, onion mixture, and white sauce.  Pour into 9x12 pan, put into freezer and let sit until fully cooled.  When cooled, you are ready to start making your croquettes.  Heat a pan filled with about 1 inch of oil on medium.  Take a handful of mixture and form into a log.  Roll this in the cornstarch, then the eggs, then finally through the rice cereal before you place into the hot oil.  Let cook for about 4-5 minutes on each side, then drain on paper towels and serve with Tonkatsu sauce or chicken gravy.

Careful, if you follow this recipe you need to make sure your mixture is frozen so that it doesn't fall apart on you when you are shaping.  Otherwise you just end up with a huge mess that isn't worth your time.  That's what happened to me.  So, I made about a quarter of my mixture into croquettes so that everyone could have some dinner, and I threw the rest of it into a pot pie!  Well.  Kinda.

Fake Chicken Pot Pie
Leftover Croquette mixture
1 cup peas/carrots
1 cup corn
Easy oil pie crust

Pie Crust
2 cups GF flour
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup oil
1/4 cup soy milk

Make up pie crust by mixing everything together with a fork until blended.  Press into the bottom and up the sides of a 9x12 pan.  Mix together vegetables and chicken croquette mixture, and pour into the crust.  Bake at 375 for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how thick your mixture is.  Tastes much better the second day, after the crust has soaked up all the juices from the filling!!  Cover with gravy, if you like.

Rainbow Rice Krispie Treats

Since I have had a bit of a sweet tooth lately and no way to satisfy it, I decided that this week I would make up some Rainbow Rice Krispie Treats for everyone.  These were totally not gluten-free, but they satisfied that sweets craving that I have been having.

Rainbow Rice Krispie Treats
1 bag mini marshmallows
1/4 cup dairy free butter
1 small box Fruity Pebbles (you could substitute GF rice cereal, or any cereal really depending on what taste you want)

Melt together marshmallows and butter over low heat.  When fully melted take off heat and stir in cereal.  Turn into greased 9x12 pan, and flatten down the top with a greased piece of plastic wrap or some parchment paper.  Wait until cooled then enjoy!

We seem to forget about the best treats from our childhood it seems - how often have you made Rice Krispie Treats lately?  I think I want to make the butterscotch/chocolate ones next.  And maybe some of those chocolately chex mix things.  Oh man.  Now I'm going to be craving sweets again all day...

Pancakes, Spaghetti

Last week I made a few more foods that I forgot to post about.

First up was some pancakes.  I made them as an after-school snack for the kids before Japanese lessons.  I used a recipe out of Cooking for Isaiah again, this time for S'mores Pancakes.  No recipe for this today, you just take your favorite pancake mix, add a little bit of brown sugar and molasses in place of the regular sugar, throw in some chocolate chips, and cook them up.  Top with marshmallow cream for a good s'mores-like treat.

They turned out okay.  The kids loved them, but they were super sweet so what can you expect haha.  The pancakes were mochimochi again, because of the rice flour.  I'm not really going to complain too much about rice flour - at least it holds together and doesn't have a funny taste.  Maybe I can't do real baking with it yet, but for pancakes and such it will be just fine.  It's a good beginning for me to be able to hold onto little things that I really want to eat.  I'm sure it will be wonderful in my crepes...hmmm...

The other thing I made last week was some really thick spaghetti sauce with meatballs.  I liked the way the sauce turned out, it was just like normal.  This is the same sauce that I use as a base for my lasagna, so you know it has to be good. :D


Spaghetti Sauce
1 large can seasoned crushed tomatoes
1 medium can tomato sauce
3 small cans seasoned stewed tomatoes
1 small can  tomato paste
1 cup red wine
1 cup finely chopped sweet onion
1 clove garlic, crushed and chopped
1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms
1 can mushroom steak sauce
1 pound Jimmy Dean Sage Sausage
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 extra cup red wine, or more if needed

Cook up sausage.  Add everything except for extra wine.  Simmer for 4-6 hours, adding wine if you think it is too thin or like more body to the flavor.  That's it.  Super easy, right?  Serve over anything.  I used gluten free elbow pasta for mine, the boys just had it over spaghetti noodles.  The sauce is so thick that I had the leftovers just wrapped up in some corn tortillas!  So good.


Oh, the meatballs.  They were kind of dry.  I really think that I needed an extra egg and less breadcrumbs, but I was using up what I had.  These would also be awesome cooked up in the sauce, and would give it a meatier flavor, but I like to make them in the oven so I can eat them right away.

Meatballs
1 pound ground beef
2 cups GF bread crumbs (less next time?)
1 egg (needs to be increased)
Garlic, pepper, cumin, etc to taste

Mix everything together.  Shape into 1 inch sized balls, put into a cake pan and bake at 350 for about 20 minutes.  Good on their own or in a spaghetti sauce.

Okonomiyaki!

I love food.  That goes without saying.  Specifically, I love Japanese food.  I studied Japanese for forever, I lived in Japan, I worked at a Japanese restaurant for years.  Japanese food is something I know well and can never seem to get enough of.  It makes me really sad that so much of what I like is wheat-based.  Knowing this, this week I tackled one of the best things about Japan - Okonomiyaki.  It means "as you like it", and I usually make mine with leftovers.  Specifically, leftover gyoza filling.  My gyoza filling is so good, and I always make too much, so the natural thing is to make something else delicious with it, right?  Luckily for all of us this is super easy to make!

Okonomiyaki!
2 cups GF flour
1 1/4 cup dashi water
4-6 eggs
1 cabbage
4 stalks chopped green onion
FILLINGS OF YOUR CHOICE
*meats
*vegetables
*eggs
*bacon
*seafood
*etcetcetc
Okonomiyaki sauce (or tonkatsu sauce)
Mayonnaise

Wisk together flour, dashi water, and eggs.  Add cabbage and green onions.  On preheated skillet, fry together your filling ingredients over a medium-low heat.  Cover with batter, and cook for about 5-7 minutes.  Flip (you might have to cut it in half with your spatula) and cook for another 5-7 minutes.  Take out of pan and cover with sauce and mayo.  Should make two large okonomiyaki, serving 4-6.


The one that I made this time had the mochi problem again - instead of being fluffy, it was a bit more dense and had a slight gummy texture.  Being a Japanese dish, it worked.  I was not at all let down by this, it tasted almost as good as it ever did.  I even had the leftovers for breakfast the next day, and they still tasted good warmed up in the microwave.

A normal meal? Gyoza and Fried Quinoa

I had it in my head that I wanted to make gyoza that I could eat and fried rice.  I told Gabe this and he suggested I try using quinoa (which I just learned the other day is pronounced keen-wa) instead of rice.  Of course, I was totally up for it.  Only one problem - I had never cooked with it before.  A quick trip to the internet taught me that it cooks up pretty much like rice.  Once I knew that I was set.

To make gyoza, something that I know well and is dear to my heart, I had to first figure out how I was going to make GF wrappers.  Instead of using the premixed all purpose GF flour I had, I mixed up a new batch based on a recipe I got out of Cooking for Isaiah, a book I picked up a few weeks ago about cooking GFDF.

Silvana's all purpose flour blend
6 cups rice flour
3 cups tapioca starch
1 1/2 cups potato starch
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons xanthan gum

Whisk together all ingredients in a large bowl.  Transfer contents to an airtight container and store in a cool, dry place or in the refrigerator.

It seemed like it would be a good blend - all of the flavors in it would be nice and mild, and not overpower anything or make it beany.  And I guess it did turn out ok, but with one exception - everything turned out with a mochi texture.  That is definitely not a bad thing, I love mochi, the people I cook for love mochi.  But it's not the same fluffy texture that you get with flour.  Who knows, it was my first batch, maybe I did it wrong.  I added the potato starch in too late, so the proportions might have been off.  But anyways, my gyoza.

Gyoza Wrappers
2 Cups GF flour
1/2 Cup water
1 egg

Mix together, let sit for a while then roll out to as thin as you can get it without them falling apart.  Mine ended up pretty thick, my dough was very crumbly.

Gyoza Filling
1lb ground pork
1/2 head cabbage
4 stalks green onion
1T cornstarch
1/4 cup soy sauce
1T garlic
1t ginger

Finely chop the cabbage.  Put the cabbage into a bowl and cover with 2T or so salt.  Let sit for about an hour, stirring every 15 minutes.  Squeeze all the excess water out of the cabbage, then add all of the other ingredients.  Cook up a spoonful in a medium-high pan and taste.  Adjust the flavors to your liking.  When you are satisfied, put about a tablespoon of filling into each wrapper and seal shut.  Cook the gyoza in a meduim-high pan, browning in a bit of oil for 2-3 minutes before adding 1/3 cup of water and covering with a lid, steaming until done.

Yeah.  Looking back on it, it doesn't seem like it would work.  I didn't pay enough attention to the wrappers, I went about making them the wrong way.  I should have tried to make them more round, and I think I need to tweak the dough a bit.  They ended up being a weird chewy-crunchy, about the texture of fried mochi.  The filling was spot-on, but that's something that I know how to do with my eyes closed.  Over all, they tasted really good.  I just need to work on the wrappers some more.


What about the fried quinoa Aimee?  I strayed from my normal fried rice recipe and had a vinegar base for this.  Don't know why, just felt like it.  It turned out really good, with all of it disappearing really fast.

Fried Quinoa
2 cups uncooked quinoa
1 cup corn
1 cup peas/carrots
6-8 eggs
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup vinegar
2t Lawry's Seasoning Salt

Cook up your quinoa according to directions on the package.  Let cool for a while.  In a hot pan, put 2 tablespoons of oil.  Crack your eggs into this and scramble until about half done.  Add your veggies and cook for a few minutes.  Season with Lawry's.  Add quinoa and fry until it starts to brown.  Add soy sauce and vinegar (or for a more traditional taste, omit vinegar).  Stir until liquids are evenly incorporated, and fry a few more minutes until nice and browned.  Serve in bowls with spoons!

Learning to bake, for real. And a sandwich.

I'm not much of a baker.  I can handle cookies and cakes with no problems, but when it comes to yeast and kneading and real baking, I have no skill.  I have tried before, when I was younger.  All of the yeast rolls I made turned out hard, or they tasted weird, or something else just as bad.  I think I forgot this when I decided that i wanted to start out on the quest to remake everything that I love.

So, I have come to a conclusion.

I need to master the art of baking with real flour before I can move forward.  I need to learn about baking theory, and practice with methods that have been known to work for years.  I know that this isn't going to be gluten-free for a while, but it's something that seems necessary to do before I leap into trying to make gluten-free croissants again.

This week I made a braided sandwich.  For those of you out there that is wondering what this is, it's only the most delicious thing ever.  And of course I can't eat it lol.  But it was something to make to help me practice my kneading skills, something that I am completely lacking in.  That, and the boys loved it at poker night!

Braided Sandwiches
1/2lb ham
4 thick slices cheddar
Mustard
1 box Hot Roll mix

Mix up Hot Roll mix according to the package.  Knead for FOREVER.  Or about ten minutes.  Let rise about ten minutes, and cut in half.  Roll out the dough into a rectangle until about 1/2 inch thick.  Add half of your meat, cheese, and condiments to center of dough, leaving about two inches all around (all fillings can be changed according to what you want).  Cut the edges on the long sides of the dough about an inch in.  I usually do about 12 per side.  Fold up the short ends until they are touching and covering all the filling, then braid the cut ends together.  Repeat for the second half of the dough.  Bake according to the directions on the box, about 20 minutes.  Let cool for at least ten minutes so the cheese can settle, then cut and enjoy!


I really want to find a way to make this so that I can eat it, but I know that I need to take time.  Until then, I just have to keep experimenting and learning through trial and error.

Croissants, take one.

All week I have been CRAVING croissants like none other.  They have been all I could think about, so obviously that meant that I needed to try my hand at making them.  The only problem that I could foresee was...well, everything.  Hahaha.  Nonetheless I scoured the internet looking for a GFDF solution to my problem.  What did I find?



Gluten-Free Croissants from Living Without
1 cup sorghum flour
½ cup chickpea flour
½ cup almond meal or additional flour
1 cup rice flour
1 cup cornstarch or tapioca starch/flour
4 teaspoons xanthan gum
1½ teaspoons salt
4 teaspoons yeast
¼ cup sugar
1 cup warm milk of choice or water
2 eggs
8 tablespoons butter, margarine or Earth Balance spread, melted
12 tablespoons cold butter, margarine, vegetable shortening or Earth Balance spread, cut into small pieces

Combine first seven ingredients and blend well.
Scoop 1 cup of this flour mixture into a medium mixing bowl. Add yeast and sugar to this cup of flour mixture and blend thoroughly. Combine milk and eggs and add them to this mixture. Add melted butter and beat until smooth. Reserve.
In a separate bowl, cut cold butter into remaining flour mixture until butter pieces are the size of large peas. Pour in liquid batter and stir or beat until moistened throughout. Cover and refrigerate for 4 hours or overnight.
Remove dough from refrigerator and press into a compact ball on a surface that has been lightly covered with rice flour. Divide dough into 3 equal parts. Roll each third into a 12-inch circle with a rolling pin. Cut each circle into 8 pie-shaped wedges.
Separate wedges and roll out each wedge through the length of the piece so that it is about ⅛th-inch thick.* Brush each wedge with gently warmed fruit spread, if desired. Then roll up each wedge toward the point. Shape into a crescent by curving the edges.
Set croissants on an ungreased baking sheet or a sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover with plastic and let them rise at room temperature until doubled. (This may take 2 hours if the room is cool.)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Brush each croissant wedge with egg beaten with cold water. Place croissants in preheated oven and immediately lower oven temperature to 350 degrees. Bake 15 to 20 minutes or until golden.

Ugh.  I tried?  I think this was doomed to fail from the beginning.  I did a BAD thing and didn't follow the recipe completely.  I ended up using a pre-mixed GF flour instead of mixing my own.  I figured that would be fine, especially if I followed the rest of the recipe just right.  So I mixed it up, using my vegan butter, hoping that it would magically become the delicious croissants that I know and love.  I let them sit and rolled them out after the 4 hours, then waited patiently.  I baked them for the 20 minutes.  And what did I have?

Glorified crescent rolls.  They weren't bad.  They didn't rise as much as they should/could have, but they were edible.  Gabe even volunteered to eat a bunch of them.  I brought home a few bags, and had some for breakfast as mini sandwiches.  That alone was almost worth all the effort - I miss sandwiches like none other.  The ease of walking to the kitchen and throwing delicious things on pre-made store bought bread?  Oh man.  Not many things were better in my book.  The best was croissant sandwiches.  Turkey and cranberry cream cheese?  Oh man.

To get to a place where I am good at this, of course I have to have failures.  I am thrilled that at least these were edible.  Maybe they weren't the delicious buttery croissants that I was dreaming of, but I have time to experiment, to learn.  I think I will try to make regular croissants for everyone sometime so I have a good understanding of what the procedure is supposed to be, then I will go experimenting until I have it right.  I will be able to have my croissants again one day, I just have to be patient.

Crepes, two ways.

I miss food.  I miss the ease of being able to open up the fridge and eat whatever I want.  That being said, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at some gluten free crepes this week.  After living in Japan, I grew to love crepes and the variety of foods that could be put in them.  So I went online and looked up different recipes.  The two that I ended up using were from a blog called Gluten Free Gobsmacked, and another generic one from about.com.

 Gluten Free Easy Crepes from Gluten Free Gobsmacked
2/3 cup milk
1/3 cup (or 50g) cornstarch
1 egg
2 teaspoons olive oil or melted butter maybe 1tsp next time?
pinch of salt


Mix it all together, cook on medium high until they are crepe-like.  Super easy recipe.  Okay results.  They ended up a bit oily, and they bubbled a lot no matter what heat I had them on.  The bubbling didn't really change the taste, just the appearance.  We ended up filling them with bananas and semi-sweet chocolate chips, and they were nice and tasty <3  If I am craving quick crepes to throw a nice filling in, I will definitely break this recipe out.  I just need to remember to use less oil next time.

Gluten Free Crepes from about.com
1 1/4 cups milk (I used plain soy milk)
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons melted butter OR light olive oil
1 cup all-purpose gluten-free flour mix
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar  omitted for savory crepes
1/2 teaspoon vanilla  omitted for savory crepes
1/8 teaspoon gluten-free baking powder

Again, mix together and cook on medium high until crepe-like.  These crepes turned out amazing.  The texture was right on, the edges browned wonderfully, and they tasted just like regular crepes.  I was a little worried when mixing the batter - gluten free flour mixes seem to smell really bean-y.  Luckily my fears were put to rest when I finished these up.  I made these crepes into a nice lunch for everyone, filling them with a creamed chicken and spinach that I threw together.

Creamed Chicken with Spinach - Dairy free
3 cups cashew cream
1 tablespoon butter or olive oil
1/4 of a whole sweet onion
1/2 pound chicken thighs (or breasts, if you prefer)
1-2 cloves garlic
1/2 teaspoon coriander
3 cups raw spinach
Salt and Pepper to taste

Sautee the onions until they are clear through and just starting to brown.  While doing this cut the raw chicken into bite sized pieces, then throw into the pan.  Let the chicken brown, then add the cashew cream.  Add your spices and let simmer until the cream has reduced by about a third.  Add in spinach and let it cook down, then season with salt and pepper.


What's cashew cream you ask?  Only the best thing known to man!  Well...maybe not THAT good.  But having to go without dairy, it is a wonderful thing.  I found out about it through my vegan friend Rachel.  She sent me to a book called The Conscious Cook by Tal Ronnen.  Soy milk just doesn't cut it for when you want things to be creamy, but cashews sure do the trick.

Cashew Cream from Tal Ronnen
 2 cups whole raw cashews (not pieces, which are often dry), rinsed very well under cold water

Put the cashews in a bowl and add cold water to cover them. Cover the bowl and refrigerate overnight.  Drain the cashews and rinse under cold water. Place them in a blender with enough fresh cold water to cover them by 1 inch. Blend on high for several minutes until very smooth.


After making these two different variations on traditional crepes I was very satisfied with some of my first attempts into gluten free cooking.  I feel like I can actually do this, and do it well.  I hope that I can keep going and pushing myself to become as good of a cook gluten free as I have been in the past.