Gluten Free Living, Months 4 and 5
September 5, 2018
Month 4!
I didn’t get creative this month with food, travel logistics ate my brain, but my family did. For our trip to SDCC, my beloved Mama S made me so much good food, adapting my favorites to a GF version. She’s the best.
This was a very baking month. I turned out a few versions of rolled oat and peanut butter cookies. They’re still not quite right, they come out too flat and nearly crispy. I hate crispy cookies. Chewy is the goal! Next round, I’ll sub in powdered sugar for the granulated sugar and refrigerate the dough before baking to see if that helps.
Do you suppose reducing sugar in a cookie recipe without any substitutions would be dreadful? If the recipe also has peanut butter and chocolate chips, it feels like a 25% reduction in sugar should be safe.
It was also Muffin Month. I bake like I work, I do what I feel like when I feel like it. And July felt like a muffin month so I baked as much as I could and froze the rest against a month when more cooking than baking was happening. It’s my version of making hay while the sun shines – when there’s energy and willingness to bake, roll with it.
Month 5!
Meatloaf! This was my first meatloaf since going GF and I substituted ground up rolled oats for the breadcrumbs. It was a little softer than usual, probably because I used a giant zucchini instead of a small one like usual, so I’ll double the breadcrumbs and reduce the zucchini next time.
Coconut curry (from a packet). We picked up a GF curry packet at Sprouts and combined that with my sauteed chicken thighs, cubed potatoes, and sliced carrots. We usually don’t like cooked carrots much but JB especially requested them.
Roasted pork log. I don’t remember which part of the pork this was but I slow roasted it at only 275 degrees with garlic, sadly we were out of pesto or it would have been covered in that, and we ate it for daaaaays with rice and veggies on the side. Later, the second and third pork roasts I made were slow roasted with pesto, for 3-4 hours, and it was perfection. I’m not making it any other way again!
Pork turned into enchiladas. PiC was perfectly happy eating the pork as is but I decided not to push my luck and transformed the leftovers. He was skeptical the first time I pondered this aloud but as is almost usual when it comes to experimenting in the kitchen, my idea panned out. I made red and green sauce enchiladas in the same pan because each packet only makes 4-5 enchiladas but our casserole dish holds at least 10-12. Leftovers!
Shrimp and cheesy grits. I finally perfected the water to grits ratio (3 cups water to 1.25 cups of grits) when I’m also adding lots of mozzarella cheese, and cooked it all on low. We get our large shrimp frozen on sale from Sprouts for $7/lb every so often and I grill those babies right before serving dinner. This was a hit – so much so that JB ate all the shrimp that we adults didn’t eat, and nearly all the grits as well.
Speaking of perfecting ratios and recipes, I’m not there yet with zucchini but they’re back on our dinner table and not just hidden in pasta sauces, muffins, and cake. It turns out, when done well, we all like it. The problem is the darn things go from not cooked to over-roasted in some mysterious and mystical way that has no relation to temperature, cook time, or cut size. It’s driving me up the wall but also got my attention in a way that no vegetable has since we discovered brussels sprouts and bacon are a winning combination. For the moment. Update: 7 minutes at 400 degrees seems to be doing the trick as long as the quartered slices were big enough. My store bought zucchini has also been going into several rounds of a modified lower sugar version of Erin’s chocolate cake.
If chewy is the goal, the refrigeration of the dough should help. My youngest daughter is the cookie expert around here, and she refrigerates dough religiously – with unfailingly chewy results.