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...)

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.