Fun and Games

I got David a "game cube" for his birthday.  And then promptly beat him at Parcheesi. (He later beat me at Chinese Checkers.)

   David's "fried egg".  Completely lacking any chicken byproducts. ;)

Playing trains with Lukie.

Of course, the guinea pig and cat had to play trains with us too...

Oliebollen (gluten free, egg free, dairy free)

Oliebollen are a Dutch New Year's Eve tradition, but for years I've done without because a gluten free, egg free, dairy free version simply didn't exist. I minded but didn't think I could do anything about it.  Finding ways to make traditional recipes Joy-friendly was a challenge, especially when the traditional recipes were written in a language other than my own.  But this year, as my brother and cousins and husband went to Grandpa's house for oliebollen, and Littlest Brother and I stayed home (He can't have wheat either), I decided I would give the recipe search one more try.
I've discovered that by searching for vegan recipes I can find recipes that are egg and dairy free, even though I am by no means a vegan! (bacon wrapped dates are on the menu for later tonight) So I searched for a vegan Oliebollen recipe, and found one.  A few tweaks, and it was also gluten free.  An hour later, I was enjoying fresh Oliebollen, complete with corn-free icing sugar.

and the recipe...
Ingredients:
1.5 cup all-purpose gluten free flour
3/4 tsp xanthan gum (omit if your flour blend already contains it)
1/2 tsp salt
2 TBSP sugar
4 tsp active dry yeast
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup raisins
1.5 cup warm (120-130*F) water (Hint: warmer than a baby's bottle, but not as hot as a hot shower)
1/2 tsp lemon juice
oil for frying
powdered sugar

How it works:
1. Mix all the dry ingredients together.
2. Add the warm water and lemon juice and mix until well blended
3. Cover with a tea-towel and set in a warm place to rise for 45 minutes.
4. Heat the oil for frying.  You want it really hot.  We used our little deep fryer, though you could also use a pan with an ample amount of oil in it.
5. Spoon the batter in small amounts into the hot oil.  When one side is cooked (browned), turn the Oliebollen over to cook the other side.
6. Set on paper towels to drain.
7. Enjoy with powdered sugar

Allergy Friendly Lasagna

My determination to make tomato-less tomato sauce the other day was fueled mostly by the fact that I had been invited to a lasagna lunch after church on Sunday (which I ended up not going to). There was no way I was going to just eat salad while everyone else ate lasagna. It was just not going to happen. And to make lasagna, I needed to make tomato-less tomato sauce first. Then I could make allergy friendly lasagna free from gluten, wheat, dairy, egg, tomato, and any other nasty stuff.  There is soy in this recipe, so if you can't do soy, I'm sorry.  I can't keep everyone happy.

Now for the Joy-Friendly lasagna "recipe"*:

In one container mix: browned ground beef, tomato-less tomato sauce, spices (I use basil, oregano, marjoram, rosemary, and thyme), and sauteed peppers and onions.

In another container mix: 1 package (12oz) firm tofu, a variety of daiya cheese

Have ready: oven ready rice lasagna noodles, extra tomato-less tomato sauce, spinach, extra diaya cheese, vegan parmesan topping, a 9x13 pan

Get started:
Spread a layer of mixture 1 (meat mixture) in the bottom of the pan.
Put a single layer of lasagna noodles over it.
Add a layer of spinach
Top with a layer of mixture 2 (likely all of it, unless you have a really deep pan)
Add a layer of noodles spread rest of the meat mixture over the noodles add sauce to cover any exposed noodles
Sprinkle with diaya cheese top with vegan parmesan topping stick in the oven and cook according to the directions on the noodle package.

Enjoy your lasagna.

It tastes even awesomer than it looks.  I'm not the best food photographer.

*I'm not sure I can actually call this a recipe because I don't actually measure anything.  I just guess and go with what looks good. 

Tomato-less Tomato Sauce

At some point last year, probably in an attempt to find something to do with all the beets we had from our CSA, my amazing roommate LDK found a recipe for a soup that we dubbed "red hooker lipstick soup". It tasted a lot like tomato soup, despite the fact that it was tomato-less. Shortly thereafter a recipe for marina sauce was found, which led to adventures with chicken parmesan, again, with no tomatoes. After these discoveries, my head went wild with possibilities. If I could use these same principles, I could recreate all my favorite tomato type dishes. Without the tomato. And I could make them for my little brother who is also tomato free. So many possibilities! Since then I have successfully made chili (okay, mom helped me with the chili...I have bad experiences with cooking dried beans...it's a long story) and my little brother has successfully made, canned and dried "tomato" sauce. This particular day it was my turn to make "tomato" sauce. 

I don't do things in small quantities. I purposely made a whole bunch so I can freeze some and have it when I need "tomato" and don't have time or energy to make any. So I started with about 60 oz (2 cans) of pureed pumpkin, 30 oz (2 cans) of whole cooked beets, 2 cups of chicken stock, 3/4 cup of lemon juice, 4 TBSP of balsamic vinegar and 4 tsp of salt. I was a little heavy on the salt. Next time I think I might cut back on the salt a bit, but in the end it was all okay. 

I pureed all of that together with my immersion blender. It was a delightful purply mess. At that point it was basically the equivalent of tomato-less tomato paste. Since I don't use tomato-less tomato paste very often I decided to go ahead and process it all the way to tomato-less tomato sauce, a product I use much more frequently. To this purple puree I added about 2 cups of lightly sauteed onion along with about 3 cloves of lightly sauteed garlic, 1 1/2 a tsp of oregano, 2 bay leaves, 1 tsp of pepper, 1/2 tsp of red pepper flakes, and 1 tsp of sugar. I then added about 4 cups of water and mixed it all together. The amount of water isn't important. It just had to be enough to make it liquid enough to let it cook so everything could cook together. Otherwise adding things like the oregano, bay leaves and red pepper flakes would be useless. I let it simmer on the stove top all afternoon, stirring frequently. As it cooked it went from purple to red, until by the end, when it was the right consistency for tomato sauce (all the extra water had boiled out), it looked just like tomato sauce. 

Here's a picture of my tomato-less tomato sauce all ready for use in yummy recipes.

In summary: puree together: 60 oz of pumpkin puree 30 oz of canned (or fresh cooked) beets 3/4 cup of lemon juice 4 TBSP of balsamic vinegar 2 cups of chicken or vegetable stock 4tsp of salt

Sautee: 2 cups chopped onion 3 cloves minced garlic

Add together: the puree and sauteed vegetables 1 1/2 tsp oregano 1tsp peper 1/2 tsp hot pepper flakes 2 bay leaves 1 tsp sugar about 4 cups of water

Bring to a simmer and let simmer for many hours, stirring on occasion to prevent sticking. When it has reached the right consistency for tomato sauce, it is done. Enjoy your tomato-less tomato sauce! (and clean up everywhere it splattered while cooking...)

Please Listen

To those of you who work in food service, whether high end or fast fast food, to those of you who cook for other people, to those of you who share food with anyone, whether it is for a price or free.  Please read this.
If someone asks you what is in something.  Please tell them.  Tell them everything.  If you don't know, tell them that. If they are taking the time to ask, the probably have a good reason.  They aren't just trying to be annoying or steal your secret family recipe.  So tell them.  Don't leave things out because there is a just a "little bit" of it in there or because you don't usually put that in there.  Be open and be honest.
If someone asks you to leave a specific ingredient out, for example cheese or croutons on a salad, please listen. They are trusting you.  Don't assume they want it left off just because they are picky.  Sometimes that might be the case, but not always. If they say no croutons and you forget and put them on, don't just pick them off.  Make a new salad.  Same if they say no cheese.   Sometimes it's a matter of life and death.
Think I'm exaggerating?  Mom and I stopped at a place where traditionally we've been able to get "Joy-friendly" food to eat.  I was tired and hungry after an afternoon of wedding dress shopping and also crashing from too many carbs at lunch, so I needed carbs to prevent the grumps from taking over the rest of the evening.  We went through the drive through.  Mom ordered and three times stated that we wanted no cheese on the salad.  No cheese. The person taking our order repeated it back to her.  No cheese.  We got our meal and I opened my salad and began to eat.  I spit most of my first bite back out.  There was cheese on the salad. It was dark so I hadn't seen it.  Mom took the salad back in and complained. I took my first two doses of benadryl and a dose of ventolin. They remade the salad and we continued home (maybe 5-10 minutes).  Shortly there after I took my third and last permissible dose of benadryl.  Followed very quickly by an EpiPen.  The next three hours were spent at the hospital while they tried to stabilize me and observed me.  One bite is all it takes.
So if you are giving food to anyone, for any reason, at any time.  Please, listen to them.  It could change their life.

Gummy Worms!

Today, instead of doing my homework, I decided try out a recipe that my cousin had sent me.  It was for gummy worms.  I have not been able to have gummy worms for a long time because gummy worms tend to be made with lots and lots of corn syrup and my body really doesn't do well with corn syrup.  Which is problematic because I really like gummy candies.  (I like jelly beans too, but aside from one accidentally "jelly bean cake" I have not mastered the hard on the outside-chewy on the inside jelly bean).
I was a bit skeptical as I started.  All my previous attempts at candy (aside from chocolate) had been miserable failures, but this looked pretty failure proof.  I didn't even need a candy thermometer! And there were absolutely no substitutions that I had to make.  For a recipe, that is always a good start.

some of my gummy worms (there were and still are lots more!)

Gummy flutterby

Ladybug!

Flutterby on a string!

Gummy Frog!

Flowers!

And then, just for fun I made scones.  I'd never had a scone before.  But they are yummy.  Olga and I sampled one fresh from the oven.  These are completely allergy friendly (top 8 free) and have chocolate chips in them.  As long as I don't eat them all before Monday, my peer group is in for a treat!  (if they keep well...the recipe said serve warm, so I'm hoping they hold until Monday)

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

So I was sitting on the couch this Sunday afternoon trying to work on next Sunday's sermon (it's coming awful hard this week), when I started craving peanut butter oatmeal cookies.  Which wouldn't be such a bizarre craving, except I'm severely allergic to peanuts. Not just "if I eat I'll get sick" type allergic, but "if I touch I'll swell up and if I'm foolish enough to eat something with peanuts in it I'll be needing the emergency room and fast" type allergic.  Thankfully, there is soy butter, and even better than that, I still have some of the good Canadian soy butter that mom got me last time I was up on the farm (sorry America, this time Canada wins).
Unfortunately, every peanut butter cookie recipe I found online either had an abundance of eggs in it or required other ingredients that I simply did not have on hand.  I was stumped, but still really craving peanut butter cookies. So I decided to invent a recipe. I mean, inventing a recipe can't be all that hard, can it?  I soon found out...
The most important thing I learned about inventing cookie recipes is to first decide how much dry ingredients I want to use and THEN add appropriate liquid, not the other way around.  Cookies, in reasonable amounts, take a startling small amount of liquid.  My 5 quart mixer got a work-out today to say the least.
Second thing I learned is that Joy-butter is relatively mild in flavor compared to bean flour blends.   A rice flour blend would likely have been a much better choice, or at least a higher rice flour to bean flour ratio.
I'm not super impressed with my recipe yet.  It's going to take at least one more go around before I get something I'm happy enough with to actually share (or someone with more refined taste buds than me to try these and tell me how they like them), but I'm most impressed that they held together.  It's been awhile since I've made a cookie that actually held together.  No crumbling, no "going out" in the oven, just a real solid cookie.
And that has been my Sunday afternoon adventure.

Chicken Parmesan

Back in January my roommate and I made "Red Hooker Lipstick" soup, which was a little like tomato soup.   It got us thinking about what else we could make along that same theme - tomato-like, but tomato-free.  I've not had tomato in many years because I am allergic to it, so this prospect excited me.  LDK found a recipe online for tomato-free "Marinara" sauce and we'd talked about trying it out sometime, but never did. Until tonight.
LDK suggested we make Chicken Parmesan for dinner.  I had never had Chicken Parmesan before, but when she described it to me, it sounded good.  (Actually, the original plan was for chicken nuggets with roasted Jerusalem artichokes and turnip...somehow we strayed from that).  For those of you, who like me, are unfamiliar with Chicken Parmesan, it is a dish that has breaded chicken covered in marinara sauce and mozzarella cheese.  I'm not sure why it is called Chicken Parmesan because it has no Parmesan in it.  Go figure.
Anyhow, "normal" Chicken Parmesan would be bad news for me on so many levels: breaded chicken usually has wheat and gluten in the bread, and sometimes egg on the chicken to make the bread crumbs stick better, marinara sauce is full of tomatoes, and cheese is full of dairy.  So pretty much, in order to make this Joy-Friendly, we had to substitute everything except the chicken itself. However difficult this might seem, we felt we were up the challenge.
I started by breading the chicken using PaneRiso bread crumbs and put it in a lightly oiled pan, while LDK chopped up some onion.

click to enlarge

With the chicken safely in the oven I pureed a can of beets (15oz, instead of 8oz like the recipe suggested...mostly because I forgot to read/listen) and LDK started frying the onion and some minced garlic in a little oil.

Click to enlarge

When the onion was translucent and soft we added the lemon juice and balsamic vinegar and then the pumpkin puree, beet puree, chicken broth, and some season as suggested by the recipe.  Had we been thinking we would have realized that we had more than 8oz of beets and 2 cups of pumpkin and adjusted the lemon juice and vinegar accordingly.  Live and learn.
While the "marinara" sauce cooked I boiled some Joy-Pasta.  I kid you not, that is its real name.  See?

When the chicken was cooked we poured "marinara" sauce on it and sprinkled it with Daiya mozzarella cheese.  Daiya is quickly becoming a favorite of mine because it tastes good and behaves like "normal" cheese.  Then we popped it back in the oven to get all yummy while the pasta finished up.
Finally we were ready for the table.  Our main dish looked beautiful and smelled really good (sorry, scratch and sniff technology has not been invented for the computer yet).

We also had a big bowl of pasta and one of extra marinara sauce for our pasta.

 This is LDK's plate because it was prettier than mine...I failed at taking my chicken from the pan neatly.

And that my friends, is the story of allergy free Chicken Parmesan.

Overall this recipe gets a "thumbs-up" or "come again", depending on which recipe rating scale you are using. The idea of using beets and squashes along with citrus juices and vinegars has opened a whole new world of possibilities.  I can imagine chili's and ketchups and spaghetti with meatballs and cabbage rolls and pizza sauce and salsa and....the possibilities are endless.  It's like adding tomato back into my diet without actually doing so. 

Red Hooker Lipstick

My roommate, LDK, and I share half a share in a CSA.  That means we get lots of yummy organic vegetables every couple of weeks and get to find creative ways of eating them. We get squash and kale and onions and garlic and shallots and beets.  The beets are the ones that we have the most fun being creative with.  Sometimes the beets are strange.  They look like candy canes.

Other times, like this week, they look normal.  By normal I mean, purple, the way red beets are supposed to look.   Last week we made beet pizza.  It was interesting to say the least.  Not necessarily on the "come again" list, but not awful.

Today, LDK found a recipe for Roasted Beet and Butternut Squash soup.  We made it up this afternoon.  It was pretty simple, especially since the squash was already pureed and frozen from our squash squishing party a few weeks ago.  After we cooked everything we pureed it with the whir-whir. It looked interesting.  When Jen saw it she said it looked like red hooker lipstick.  See for yourself:

Okay, so it also slightly resembles paint, but then so does the lipstick that hookers tend to wear.  The soup was yummy and tasted similar in a non-similar way to tomato soup.  We ate it with grilled ham and cheese sandwiches.  Probably the closest thing I'll ever eat to tomato soup. It made me happy.

In other news I saw the doctor today for my ear.I have a nasty cut in my ear canal, but thankfully the ear drum is intact. The cut, thanks to my amazing immune system, is infected.  I'm on antibiotics for it and it should clear up within a week.