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April 24, 2009

Read all about it

Two of my friends are in the news this week.

Chef Jo Gonzales Vegan Coach Sassy Knutson

Jo Gonzales is a personal chef in Houston. This article, A Day in the Life of a Personal Chef, is undoubtedly the BEST article that I've read about personal chefs.

Patty "Sassy" Knutson is a vegan coach and the author of Get Sauced with Sass!. This story describes how Sassy helps aspiring and current vegans and vegetarians learn how to follow a vegan diet and how to make food that is simple to prepare, but is full of flavor and healthful.

Posted April 24, 2009 10:43 AM in Business & Networking | Comments (0)

April 12, 2009

Menu Plan Monday/Gluten Free Menu Swap

Yikes, I never did get back to last week's menu post to add pictures. Just not enough hours in a day.

Head on over to OrgJunkie.com to check out what's cooking this week and to learn more about Menu Plan Monday.

The Gluten Free Menu Swap is an offshoot of Menu Plan Monday and is currently headquartered here. Each week there is a host for the swap and the host selects an ingredient or theme and the participants try to plan their menus keeping that ingredient in mind. Cheryl at Gluten Free Goodness is hosting this week and she has chosen flax seed as the ingredient.

I'm not gluten free, but some of my clients are gluten free. At home, I often cook gluten free; sometimes on purpose and sometimes just because what I decided to cook happens to be gluten free. My menu this week doesn't include any flax seeds, but everything on it can be made gluten free.

I spent some time today cooking ahead for this coming week, so I have some pictures to add to this post.

Taco Stuffed Peppers, Weeknight Turkey & Stuffing, Honey Soy-Glazed Chicken Wings

Cocoa-Mint Roasted Lamb
Cumin-Roasted Potatoes -Yukon Gold potatoes tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and ground cumin
Sauteed Spinach

Honey Soy-Glazed Chicken Wings - These are from Robert M. Landolphi's just released Gluten Free Every Day Cookbook. I'm making these chicken wings to bring to a Southern NH Gluten Intolerance Association potluck dinner meeting. I met Chef Landolphi at the Gluten Free Culinary Summit last September. I can't wait to try Chef Landolphi's Country-Style Chicken Pot Pie; it has a cream cheese crust!

Taco Stuffed Peppers - these are a meal in themselves, I might make a salad to go with them.

Weeknight Turkey and Stuffing - turkey cutlets wrapped around a bread stuffing with a light gravy. These are inspired by Eating Well's Turkey and Stuffing for 2. Use your favorite gluten free cornbread or bread in the stuffing. I wish I had some cranberries in the freezer so I could make cranberry sauce to go with them.
Sauteed Carrots

Tangy Barbecued Boneless Pork Ribs - I haven't decided if I'll cook these ribs in the crockpot or the pressure cooker.
Creamed Corn Cornbread - this was on the menu last week, but we ended up with a lot of leftovers, so I didn't make it. The ground turkey planned for last week's Chipotle Sloppy Joes is making an appearance in this week's Taco Stuffed Peppers.
Coleslaw

Posted April 12, 2009 9:23 PM in Gluten-Free, Menus | Comments (0)

April 11, 2009

Is it the salt or the plunge in cold water?

Today is a big day for eggs. Lots of people will be making hard cooked eggs and coloring them. Perfect day to write about making perfect easy-to-peel hard-cooked eggs.

Is it the salt or the plunge in cold water? I think it is both.

The first thing that you might notice is that I'm calling them hard-cooked eggs rather than hard-boiled eggs because I don't boil the eggs; boiling the eggs often results in rubbery whites, green tinged yolks, and shells that are impossible to remove.

I've been on a mission to make perfect easy-to-peel hard-cooked eggs. I've long used the method of placing the eggs in a saucepan, filling the pan with water to cover the eggs by 1 inch of water, bringing the water to a boil, immediately removing the pan from the heat, covering tightly, leaving for 16 minutes (for large eggs). The eggs are cooked perfectly for me, but they aren't always easy to peel.

Some say that the secret to easy-to-peel hard-cooked eggs is using older eggs. Sure that works, but who has time to plan ahead for their hard-cooked egg needs? I went in search of methods that would give me good results from whatever eggs I had on hand.

For me, the secret seems to be twofold: salting the water and immediately plunging the cooked eggs into ice cold water. Since I've been adding a tablespoon of salt to the water before I add the eggs, my eggs peel beautifully, even the ones that have been cooked ahead and left unpeeled in the refrigerator for a few day. The eggs don't taste salty.

Added 4/15/09:
After making some hard-cooked eggs, I read about using natural dyes to dye eggs on the Book of Yum blog. So even though I don't celebrate Easter, I had to dye some eggs. I used the turmeric dye to make pretty yellow eggs. It was easy and fun.

On Sunday I turned my pretty yellow eggs into deviled eggs with saffron, prosciutto, and capers. Saturday night I mixed 1/2 teaspoon of finely crushed saffron into a few tablespoons of mayo and let it "steep" overnight. For 4 eggs (8 halves), I mixed a tablespoon of saffron mayo with the mashed yolks, added 2 ounces of finely chopped prosciutto, a tablespoon of chopped capers, and a little of the caper brine. (I needed the mixture to be a little looser, but I'm not a big fan of mayo, so I used the brine instead, if you like mayo, use more mayo.)

These deviled eggs were sooooo delicious.

Posted April 11, 2009 12:44 PM in | Comments (9)

April 5, 2009

Gluten Free Menu Swap/Menu Plan Monday

I'm trying something new this week. My Twitter friend Wendy (@celiacsinhouse) is hosting the Gluten-Free Menu Swap on her blog and invited me to participate.

The Gluten Free Menu Swap is an offshoot of Menu Plan Monday and is currently headquartered at here. Each week there is a host for the swap and the host selects an ingredient or theme and the participants plan their menus keeping that ingredient in mind.

If haven't heard about Menu Plan Monday, you can read all about it on OrgJunkie.com. I'm thinking that Menu Plan Monday is a good thing for me because after planning menus for my clients, I don't always take the time to plan what we are going to eat. That doesn't mean that I don't cook dinner for us every night, but it is often an on the fly thing rather than a planned out thing.

Wendy at Celiacs In the House is hosting the Gluten Free Menu Swap this week and her ingredient is favorite sides and salads.

When I plan our dinner menus, I tend to plan the number of dinners we need that week, but I don't really plan what day we are eating them.

Here's our menu for the week. It's typical of the meals that I make for my gluten-free clients with one exception: the broccoli slaw. The dishes that I make for my clients are almost always freezable.

Salmon Vera Cruz - inspired by a Rick Bayless recipe. I'll season the salmon with salt, pepper, and smoked Spanish paprika, sear it, then roast it. I'll also serve it hot rather than at room temperature.
Corn and Black Bean Succotash - garlic, red bell pepper, green bell pepper, salsa (I'm using tomatillo salsa), canned black beans, corn.

Braciole Stuffed Flank Steak - from the premiere issue of Delight Gluten Free magazine. I can't wait to try this.
Roasted Broccoli and Red Peppers - the veggies are tossed with a bit of crushed red pepper to give them a nice bite.

Chicken Marsala - I'm trying out a version from Cook's Illustrated, will use Bob's Red Mill gluten-free flour.
Oven-Baked Brown and Wild Rice - I always bake my brown rice. Here's a basic recipe from Alton Brown.
Garlicky Green Beans - my mom's method: saute lots of chopped garlic in olive oil. Take the pan off the burner and let it cool for a minute. Add an inch of water, your veggie steamer basket, and the green beens, cover and steam beans in garlicky water until done.

Cheesy Hash Brown Chili - I'm shirking on the veggie side this day. This one dish meal is reserved for an extra busy day. Oh, and I'll make this with ground turkey rather than ground beef.

Chicken Florentine with Caramelized Garlic - lots of spinach and roasted garlic. Our veggies are in our main dish this night.
Quinoa Pine Nut Pilaf

Chipotle Sloppy Joes - substituting ground turkey here too. And instead of buns, I'll make my favorite gluten-free cornbread.
Creamed Corn Cornbread - this recipe is from Alton Brown. There's no need to adjust the recipe to make it gluten-free because it is a cornmeal only cornbread.
Broccoli Slaw - we love all types of coleslaw .

Oh, and I'm also making a gluten-free chocolate cake as a gift to my Tuesday client who is having a birthday. It is the Basic Cake (chocolate variation) from Rebecca Reilly''s Gluten-Free Baking.

This post is sorely lacking in pictures, so as the week progresses, I'll come back and update it with pictures of our dinners.

Posted April 5, 2009 8:29 PM in Gluten-Free | Comments (3)

April 1, 2009

Playing with food

I wanted to do something fun with food as April Fools' Day treat for my April 1st client. My searches for April Fools' Day food came up with some pretty gross stuff, like kitty litter cake. Gack, just looking at a picture of kitty litter cakes makes me feel ill. Just when I was about to give up, Google led me to sweet sushi from the Brownie Points blog. Hey, I can do that. And more importantly, it uses real food and I can make it gluten-free and dairy-free, which my April 1 client requires.

The recipe starts with rice krispy treats. OK, that's butter, marshmallows, and crisped rice cereal. Or in my case Earth Balance Buttery Sticks, Kraft mini marshmallows, and Erewhon Rice Twice cereal. I'm sure I made rice krispy treats with my mom when I was a kid, but I've only made them once as an adult and I didn't have fun. The mixture was like boiling hot cement. So I really wasn't looking forward to the rice krispy treat part of this recipe. But, it surprised me. I don't know if the ingredient ratio was different from my last attempt, but these were easy to mix and handle. It probably helped that I used a huge pot (6 qt). The recipe on the Brownie Points blog calls for using a 1" round cookie cutter to cut the rice krispy treasts. I used to have a small round biscuit cutter, but I never used it so it went to Goodwill last summer. I thought I could simply use a 1" cardboard circle as a template to cut the cylinders, but that didn't work. The still warm mixture didn't hold its shape when cut this way. Ugh, what to do. Hey, can I roll the mixture into long cylinders and cut them into small segments? Yes! That worked. The still warm mixture was easy to roll into cylinders. I coated my hands with the Earth Balance to do this step. If I ever make this again, I'll buy a 1" round cutter because it would have been faster and my rice krispy rolls had smooth tops from being sliced. Ideally, you want the bumpy rice krispy top. More about that later.

I really wish I had more pictures of the entire process. I had to work quickly and didn't have time to stop for many photos.

Here are my rice krispy rolls.

Next up, dipping the rolls in chocolate. The Brownie Points recipe has you add green and black food coloring to the chocolate to mimic the color of the nori. But there was no way that I was going to add food coloring to my beautiful 72% dark chocolate. After dipping the rolls, I popped them in the fridge to set up.

How do I dip them? Well, my method is not elegant, but it works. It involves toothpicks and a fork. The fork's job is to be a spatula. Stab what will be the top of the roll with a toothpick. Dip bottom and sides of roll in chocolate. Let excess drip off. Hold the dipped roll so it looks like a lollipop (toothpick held between thumb and index finger, dipped roll pointing straight up. Hold it with your nondominant hand. With the fork in your dominant hand, place the fork under the undipped part of the roll. Roll is now sitting on fork, toothpick is between tines of fork. Pull toothpick out off roll. Use fork as spatula and place on wax paper covered rack or baking sheet. This is where I should have pulled out the mini video camera. But I was elbow deep in chocolate before I thought of that.

The next step is dipping the tops in white chocolate and topping each with a dried papaya square. The papaya needs to be cut up and ready to go when you start dipping because the melted chocolate is the glue that makes the papaya stay in place. So cut up your papaya squares as your white chocolate is melting. Since I sliced rolls of rice krispy treat mixture into cylinders rather than cutting them out with a cookie cutter, my pieces were totally flat. I think they would look better if they had some of the bumpy texture of the rice cereal. Next time! I didn't want to handle the chocolate covered rolls, so I stabbed the bottom of each roll with a toothpick and used the toothpick to dip the top of the roll in the white chocolate. I pulled the roll off the toothpick, set it on a wax paper covered rack, and plunked the papaya on top.

Here are the dark chocolate dipped rolls waiting to get dipped in the white chocolate.