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Breakfast

Creamy Tarragon Salad Dressing

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This dressing is excellent on Boston Lettuce, especially in the spring when the tarragon is just starting to sprout new shoots. The recipe was developed for the Gf-Zing! website, which celebrates flavor in the gluten free world.

Mix in a bowl:

1/3 cup gluten free mayonnaise
1 1/2 Tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/3 cup olive oil
1/4-1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4-1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 Tablespoon snipped fresh chives
1 teaspoon snipped fresh tarragon (or more)
sugar to taste

For the sugar, only add this by 1/4 teaspoon amounts until the flavor of the dressing is balanced. If the lemon is not very sour, there will be no need for the sugar.

Set the dressing aside for 20 minutes or a half hour before serving – this will allow the chives and tarragon to flavor it up!

You can add coarsely grated carrots, steamed or roasted asparagus, chopped walnuts, raisins or diced hard-boiled eggs to this salad.

Gluten Free Empanadas

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Empanadas are delicious! And, for Gf-zing! they are one of the holy grails of gluten free cooking – we seek to make a dough that will encase the meat filling and be dry but intriguing, and not quite like pie crust. We have found a way to do this by using the Breads from Anna mix (without the yeast), and the traditional white wine and olive oil that make the interesting and tasty-flavored crust. The recipe was developed by Gf-Zing! , which celebrates flavor in the gluten free world.

The many ingredients and spicy flavors of empanadas are delightful, and the empanadas can be carried like a sandwich, for lunch, backpacking or picnics. We find that our friends always want the recipe but are sometimes appalled by the list of ingredients – raisins, cheese, allspice, cayenne pepper, meat – it is a medieval list of ingredients, but SOOOOO good!

Dough:

3 1/2 cups Breads From Anna mix (Soy and Rice free kind), but don’t include the yeast packet
1/2 Tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup olive oil
1 egg

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. You will have a little bread mix left in the bag, which you should save for the filling and rolling. In a second bowl, mix the milk, white wine, oil and egg, then add to the dry ingredients. Knead (yes, knead) the dough until it is like pie crust in texture. Cover the bowl until you are ready to fill the empanadas, as this dough dries out quickly. As you work with the dough, you may need to add extra white wine, a teaspoon at a time, if the dough starts to dry out.

Filling:

Fry the following ingredients in a non-stick skillet, just until the meat is cooked:

1 Tablespoon olive oil
1/2 pound ground beef, chicken or gluten free turkey
1/2 of a green bell pepper, minced
2 Tablespoons garlic, minced

Then add and stir-fry briefly:

1/3 cup golden or brown raisins
1/4 cup chopped olives (green ones stuffed with pimientos, or black ones in brine but not oil-cured)
1 1/2 Tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon Breads from Anna mix (see dough, above)
1 3/4 teaspoons ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Take the pan off the heat, and add:

1 cup packed grated Jack or cheddar cheese
1/3 cup chopped fresh cilantro (we wash it and snip with scissors)

The mixture will be damp but not soupy. Set aside.

To make the empanadas:

Preheat the oven to 350-375 degrees

Take a walnut sized piece of dough and squish it in your hands to compact it. Put a piece of waxed paper on the table, sprinkle with leftover Breads from Anna mix, and put the walnut-sized ball of dough there. Top with another sheet of waxed paper, then use a rolling pin to roll the ball of dough into a circle of 4″ diameter. Take off the top sheet of paper. (This method of rolling the dough yields very little mess to clean up!)

Place 1 Tablespoon of filling on the bottom half of the circle of dough, then fold the top half down to cover the filling, and squish the edges together to form a half-moon shaped turnover, completely encasing the filling. Place the filled empanada on a Silpat lined baking sheet. Repeat this process 23 more times or so – the recipe will make approximately 24 empanadas. Leave an inch between the empanadas, as they expand some while baking.

Once you have a sheet full of empanadas, bake them for 12-20 minutes. Take a look at them after 12 minutes, and let bake for additional time if needed. We prefer them slightly browned.

Serve warm, or put them in the refrigerator and use them for packing a lunch box or going backpacking.

Make sure all your ingredients, including the spices, are gluten free!

Batter Fried Fish – gluten free!

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One of the most popular postings on the Gf-Zing! website is this method of making batter for frying fish.  It originally comes from Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking book. She uses cornstarch and chickpea flour, which yields a much nicer fried fish than any wheat flour will do. The batter is excellent for hake, cod, scallops etc. Cut larger firm-fleshed fish filets (skinless) in to 2 x 1 inch pieces. The recipe for the batter can be halved.

You marinate the fish in seasoning to flavor it, then dip it in batter, then fry and serve.

Seasoning for 2 pounds fish or scallops (marinate in this mixture for 2 hours):

1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 Tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1-2 jalapenos, minced (omit if you don’t like spicy food)
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt (or 1/4 teaspoon table salt)
pepper
juice of 1/4 lemon

Alternative seasoning:

Sprinkle the fish liberally with a few teaspoons of a spice mixture of your choice, for example (the following makes a lot of extra spice mixture):

1 teaspoon of gluten free cayenne pepper
1 Tablespoon of fresh ground black pepper
1 Tablespoon gluten free paprika
1 1/2 teaspoons dried EACH thyme and oregano
1 Tablespoons gluten free garlic powder
2 Tablespoons kosher or sea salt

The batter:

3/4 cup corn starch
3 Tablespoons chick pea flour (store this in the freezer)
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper or other seasoning
1 teaspoon coarse salt (or 1/2 teaspoon table salt)
1 Tablespoon gluten free baking powder
3 Tablespoons peanut oil
2 large eggs
3 Tablespoons cold water

Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the wet ingredients and stir until smooth. Dip pieces of seasoned hake, cod or whole scallops in the batter and fry in very hot oil (2″ deep) until golden brown. If you use a deep fryer, the result will be superior.

Make sure all your ingredients are gluten free.

Sushi, Musubi

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Mix up a batch of gluten free sushi rice, and you are ready to make a Hawai’ian specialty called “musubi.” In Hawai’i Musubi is often topped with Spam, but no matter, it is a great method of making a sandwich-like concoction that is perfectly sized for lunch. This recipe is presented here by Gf-Zing!, celebrating flavor and excitement in the gluten free world.

You will need a plastic musubi mold or a Spam can to make this recipe. You are going to make a sort of brick of seasoned rice wrapped in seaweed, with fillings in the middle. Spam musubi would have the Spam on the top, rather than in the middle, but that is no matter.

You can cook sushi rice on top of the stove or in your rice cooker. Use about 2 to 1 ratio of water to dry, medium grain Japanese or sushi rice (Kokuho Rose or Nishiki are two common brands.)

Rinse 2 units of rice well. Cook it in 4 units of water, or use the sushi rice line on your rice cooker insert to measure the water. Turn on the cooker and wait until it is done.

When it is just finished cooking, place the rice in a large bowl. Have ready some gluten free seasoned rice vinegar, a rice paddle, and a piece of paper or a small hand-held fan.

While fanning the rice with one hand, stir the rice (using the rice paddle) with the other hand. Sprinkle a bit of seasoned rice vinegar on the rice and continue stirring and fanning. Continue to do this, adding more seasoned rice vinegar, until the rice has a pleasant sweet-sour-salty taste and has gotten cool. The rice is ready. For two cups of dry rice (5-6 cups cooked), you would use about 7 tablespoons or so of the vinegar.

Cut a piece of sushi nori (that is a dark sheet of edible seaweed that looks like shiny green-black paper) to fit the bottom and up the sides of the musubi mold. It should extend out the top of the mold on both long edges by an inch and a half. Typically, this requires half a sheet of sushi nori. Keeping the edges of sushi nori going up the sides of the mold, put some of the prepared rice in the bottom, on top of the nori. On top of this, you can add small amounts of any of the following fillings, as you like:

Cooked fish or shellfish
avocado slices coated in lemon juice (so they don’t get brown)
slivered cooked carrots
gluten free smoked fish
cucumber slivers
Japanese seasoning peppers (gluten free)
gluten free ham, sliced very thin

Fill the rest of the mold up to the top with seasoned rice. Press down on the rice with your rice paddle firmly. Fold the ends of the nori down over the top, then use the presser that comes with the mold to tightly compress the entire thing by pressing down on the top of the folded nori. You will have a dense brick of rice and pretty colored foods all contained in a portable form. Wrap this brick in tin foil (aluminum foil) and you have a nice complete lunch. Depending on the ingredients you used for filling, you may not need to refrigerate this musubi, making it very convenient for camping or work places without refrigeration.

Important Notes: Unfortunately, currently the gluten free community must avoid wasabi paste, which often contains wheat. Soy sauce also often contains wheat, so read labels before trying to dip your musubi in soy sauce. Be careful also to make sure that the seasoned rice vinegar is gluten free. Some are not. Also, imitation seafood products are often made with wheat and should be avoided.

A picture of spam musubi (with the spam on top) is available at the following page:
Wikipedia article

Always use gluten free ingredients.

Gluten Free or GF Pie Crust

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We tried mixes, and recipes, and had almost given up on ever having a decent pie again, when we discovered this method for making gluten free pie crust. Let’s just mention that pie was one of the most important foods in our repertoire, and we used to be very proud of our pie crust, and then we entered the parallel universe of gluten free cooking, for medical reasons. We went in to pie withdrawal – depression, cold shakes, somber mood…..after all, what were we going to have for breakfast, if we couldn’t eat left-over pie?

Well, the news is good – you can have your pie and eat it too!

Use the Dream Pastry Recipe from Bette Hagman’s More From the Gluten-Free Gourmet. A very similar recipe is also called “Donna Jo’s pie crust” and is available on the internet. (Be careful about the recipes on the internet, which are sometimes missing key ingredients in the list of flours, such as the sweet rice flour, for example!) Of course, we don’t exactly follow the recipe anyway, so we have printed here the method we are using at the moment…..

We prefer the flavor of lemon juice to the flavor of vinegar, so we use fresh lemon juice in the recipe. Also, we use one stick of gluten free margarine and one of butter (we don’t like Crisco so much). Lastly, we sprinkle the top of a two crust fruit pie liberally with sugar.

To save time and aggravation when hand-mixing the pie dough, we use a large cheese grater to grate the butter into the dry ingredients. This makes it much easier to get the “lima bean” sized pieces of butter called for in the recipe. We have also used a Braun food processor to make this crust, and it was acceptable, you just have to be careful not to overmix the butter.

Here are the ingredients for one two-crust pie shell:

Dry ingredients:

1/2 cup tapioca flour (tapioca starch) – make sure this is the flavorless kind, not the fermented find
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/4 cup potato starch (katakuriko in Japanese stores – this is NOT the same as potato flour)
1 cup sweet rice flour (mochiko flour – not the same as white rice flour)
1 teaspoon xanthan gum
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar

Shortening:
1/2 cup gluten free margarine or butter
1/2 cup butter

(we use all butter)

Liquid ingredients:

1 egg
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 Tablespoon ice water

wax paper
sweet rice flour to sprinkle on the wax paper
lots of sugar for sprinkling on the top of the pie

Put the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix them thoroughly with a fork. If you own a sifter, you could sift them together, but it is not necessary. Grate in the butter and margarine using a large cheese grater. Mix the dry ingredients and the shortenings up with a fork until the pieces of butter are distributed evenly – you don’t need to get the pieces of butter as small as they would be in a wheat crust. The size of “lima beans” may be a little large, but don’t go smaller than kidney beans! Anyway, mix up the liquid ingredients until well combined, then pour them in to the dry ingredients and mix together. Squish the dough into a ball and wrap it up to store in the refrigerator for one hour. (For the record, we have made this crust in the winter and gone straight to rolling it out, without refrigerating it. You wouldn’t do this when the air is warm in the summer, but it is ok to do this in the winter when it is cold.)

Divide the dough in half.

To roll out this crust, spread out a piece of wax paper, dust it with sweet rice flour or GF flour mix, or whatever comes handy, put one piece of the dough on top, sprinkle with more flour, spread another piece of wax paper on top of the dough, and roll out with a rolling pin. * The dough is now contained between two sheets of wax paper. Peel off the top piece of wax paper, flip the crust on top of the pie plate, adjust it to fit the dish and remove the other piece of wax paper. Your counter is clean, and your pie crust did not fall to pieces when you tried to put it in the pie dish! You rock!

Fill your pie, then repeat the pie crust rolling maneuver for the top crust. Cut pretty holes in the top crust before transferring it to the pie, if you wish. After putting the top crust on the pie, sprinkle the top crust liberally with sugar – maybe 2 – 4 Tablespoons! Cut steam vent holes in the crust, if you forgot to do it before, and then bake the pie. This crust gets nice and brown and crispy, and it has a delicious buttery flavor! You bake it as you would any other pie crust (about 50 minutes at 400 degrees, for a filled two-crust fruit pie.)

*Note about the rolling pin: We use a piece of dowel from the hardware store – makes a perfect rolling pin, and costs very little. The piece we purchased was being sold as “closet pole” and is 1″ in diameter and 18 inches long.

Some Pies to Try:

See this post for yet more thoughts on gluten free pie crust: Click here.

Make sure to use all gluten free ingredients!