Two pounds of fresh beets
fresh thyme
Olive oil
Black pepper
Sea salt
You will need two pounds of fresh beets - red and yellow beets are pretty when cooked together! Fresh beets are not pretty to start out - they usually look like what they are - root vegetables. This recipe will make a real beet enthusiast happy, and it will turn the beet skeptic into a member of the beet lover's club!
The beets must be washed, peeled and cut in slices. It doesn't really matter how big the slices are, but I generally cut the beet in half and then make 1/2 inch slices. Put the slices in a single layer on a silpat lined cookie sheet, or in a ceramic or glass oven-proof dish. Sprinkle them with the leaves from 3 branches of fresh thyme (that's 1/2-1 teaspoon of dried thyme depending on how much you like thyme), 2 Tablespoons of olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon of fresh ground black pepper and 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt. Cover the pan with foil. Bake the beets for one and a half hours at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Then take off the foil and stir the beets around before serving.
This beet recipe turns out a very sweet roasted beet, and it makes enough for a family of four people who like beets. For those who love beets, it would serve three people. If you like the beets a little sweet and sour, you could sprinkle a little gluten free wine vinegar or other vinegar that you are confident about on top and stir them around.
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
Gf-Zing! Celebrating flavor in the gluten-free world...
September 28, 2005
Green Beans with Shallots
2 pounds fresh green beans
2-3 shallots
vegetable oil
1/4-1/2 cup of broken nut meats or pine nuts
salt and pepper
water
Grab either two pounds of fresh green beans, or a bag of the frozen haricots verts (the little skinny french green beans), prepare them for cooking and make sure you have some shallots and some pecans or pine nuts on hand.
In a heavy skillet, stir-fry 2-3 shallots, peeled and sliced, in 1 Tablespoon of vegetable oil until they begin to brown. Shallots brown very nicely. Then add 1/4-1/2 cup of broken nut meats or pine nuts - your choice! Pecans and pine nuts have a slightly sweet flavor and are the best for this purpose. Stir fry for another minute, then add the green beans and some salt and fresh pepper. Stir fry until the beans are cooked to your liking, adding 1/3 cup of water to the pan to loosen the tasty shallot material that is stuck to the bottom.
This dish goes well with almost any meat course, and of course it goes well with rice!
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
2-3 shallots
vegetable oil
1/4-1/2 cup of broken nut meats or pine nuts
salt and pepper
water
Grab either two pounds of fresh green beans, or a bag of the frozen haricots verts (the little skinny french green beans), prepare them for cooking and make sure you have some shallots and some pecans or pine nuts on hand.
In a heavy skillet, stir-fry 2-3 shallots, peeled and sliced, in 1 Tablespoon of vegetable oil until they begin to brown. Shallots brown very nicely. Then add 1/4-1/2 cup of broken nut meats or pine nuts - your choice! Pecans and pine nuts have a slightly sweet flavor and are the best for this purpose. Stir fry for another minute, then add the green beans and some salt and fresh pepper. Stir fry until the beans are cooked to your liking, adding 1/3 cup of water to the pan to loosen the tasty shallot material that is stuck to the bottom.
This dish goes well with almost any meat course, and of course it goes well with rice!
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
September 24, 2005
Baked Potatoes
Baking potatoes
vegetable oil
coarse salt
scallions
cooked, crumbled bacon
For many years, we bought in to the idea that by using a microwave oven we could obtain a good baked potato in less time, but that is not true. Using the microwave to "bake" potatoes produces a cooked potato, and it is speedy, but that is all. You can stick a fork in a microwaved potato, but is that enough? If you are not satisfied with speedy, uninspired microwaved potatoes then you will want to go back to the old ways, and bake the potato in an oven - that is where the baked potato earned its reputation as one of the great foods!
The baked potato is the staple restaurant starch for the gluten free community, and we always want to reproduce that excellent baked potato at home. Here's how!
First, obtain some really excellent, large potatoes - Prince Edward Island (PEI) potatoes are that kind of potato, but a nice big russet baking potato will work also. Scrub the potatoes with a brush and clean water, remove any imperfections on the potatoes, and all of the larger "eyes" on the potatoes, with the point of a sharp paring knife. Oil the potatoes with vegetable oil - we use safflower oil. Then, sprinkle them with coarse salt, and be generous about the salt. If you haven't had to carve out any parts of the potatoes, then prick them each in several places with your knife or a fork. Put the potatoes on a baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees - a hot oven - even hotter is ok - for 2 hours! That's right, cook them for an hour longer than the cookbooks tell you to!
This long-roasting recipe will give you a beautiful baked potato experience with a crispy tasty skin that you will want to save for last - it is that good. You will be wanting to skip the rest of dinner and just have that baked potato as the main course! Serve your perfect potatoes with butter or margarine or sour cream, some chopped scallions and some freshly cooked bacon crumbled up in pieces, and pass the salt and pepper.
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
vegetable oil
coarse salt
scallions
cooked, crumbled bacon
For many years, we bought in to the idea that by using a microwave oven we could obtain a good baked potato in less time, but that is not true. Using the microwave to "bake" potatoes produces a cooked potato, and it is speedy, but that is all. You can stick a fork in a microwaved potato, but is that enough? If you are not satisfied with speedy, uninspired microwaved potatoes then you will want to go back to the old ways, and bake the potato in an oven - that is where the baked potato earned its reputation as one of the great foods!
The baked potato is the staple restaurant starch for the gluten free community, and we always want to reproduce that excellent baked potato at home. Here's how!
First, obtain some really excellent, large potatoes - Prince Edward Island (PEI) potatoes are that kind of potato, but a nice big russet baking potato will work also. Scrub the potatoes with a brush and clean water, remove any imperfections on the potatoes, and all of the larger "eyes" on the potatoes, with the point of a sharp paring knife. Oil the potatoes with vegetable oil - we use safflower oil. Then, sprinkle them with coarse salt, and be generous about the salt. If you haven't had to carve out any parts of the potatoes, then prick them each in several places with your knife or a fork. Put the potatoes on a baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees - a hot oven - even hotter is ok - for 2 hours! That's right, cook them for an hour longer than the cookbooks tell you to!
This long-roasting recipe will give you a beautiful baked potato experience with a crispy tasty skin that you will want to save for last - it is that good. You will be wanting to skip the rest of dinner and just have that baked potato as the main course! Serve your perfect potatoes with butter or margarine or sour cream, some chopped scallions and some freshly cooked bacon crumbled up in pieces, and pass the salt and pepper.
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
Favorite Rice Cooker (2005)
The GF community eats a lot of rice, and we're pretty fussy about how it is cooked! After we got over the initial gluten-free shock of realizing how much rice we would be about to consume, we didn't mind spending more money on a newer and better rice cooker than the cheap one we had purchased in 1990. That old one was a standard no-frills rice cooker with an aluminum insert. It cooked rice, but the rice was never quite right, and the bottom rice was always a little browned.....but it was fine for us when we could choose to eat rice! Now that we have to eat rice a lot, we have become real rice snobs!
Enter the Zojirushi rice cookers. We figured that if the thing is made by people who eat a lot of rice, it will probably be good.
The Zojirushi fuzzy-logic rice cookers make the GF life-style a breeze! Jasmine rice gets a good soaking and comes out perfect every time. Brown rice comes out cooked just right, not like a bowl of tiny stones. The interesting setting "porridge" seems to be for a type of porridge unfamiliar in the west, perhaps a congee style of porridge.
A few pointers: There are a couple of different measuring devices that come with the Zojirushi rice cookers - one is green, and one is clear. It is important to follow the advice in the cooking manual and use the clear one for standard white rice. Also, when the cooker says it makes "5 cups" that refers to the number of their little measuring cups of dry rice. So if you fill the clear cup 3 times with dry jasmine rice, and fill the water up to the line on the cooking pot that says 3 for white rice, then you will get "3 servings" of cooked rice a the end of about an hour. This is the correct serving size for people who eat lots of rice, but will be more than the right amount for people who typically don't eat rice as a staple food.
It takes a little longer to make rice in one of these rice cookers - the typical elapsed time before the rice is done for dinner is about an hour for most white rices. Brown rice takes longer. Stove top rice cooking takes less than a half hour for white rice, but that is because there is no soaking cycle. The Zojirushi adds a soaking cycle, which is why the rice is so delicious! We usually put the rice on to cook before starting to make the rest of the dinner, that is unless there is pie for dessert. If there is going to be pie for dessert, we start that first, pop it in the oven, then put on the rice and get going on the vegies and other good things!
It is important not to try to cook rice in coconut milk in one of these rice cookers because a lava flow of coconut milk comes spewing out the steam vent and flows down the sides of the rice cooker onto the counter top. Likewise, it is important not to add raisins and things like that which would clog up the steam vents. Stick to cooking rice, that is the best thing, and put the add-ins in separately.
It is possible to cook quick-cooking gluten free rice mixes in a rice cooker. It takes a little longer than on the stove-top, but the rice comes out nice. We used the "quick cooking" setting.
See more information at this posting: Basmati Rice in the Zojirushi Fuzzy Logic Rice Cooker.
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
Enter the Zojirushi rice cookers. We figured that if the thing is made by people who eat a lot of rice, it will probably be good.
The Zojirushi fuzzy-logic rice cookers make the GF life-style a breeze! Jasmine rice gets a good soaking and comes out perfect every time. Brown rice comes out cooked just right, not like a bowl of tiny stones. The interesting setting "porridge" seems to be for a type of porridge unfamiliar in the west, perhaps a congee style of porridge.
A few pointers: There are a couple of different measuring devices that come with the Zojirushi rice cookers - one is green, and one is clear. It is important to follow the advice in the cooking manual and use the clear one for standard white rice. Also, when the cooker says it makes "5 cups" that refers to the number of their little measuring cups of dry rice. So if you fill the clear cup 3 times with dry jasmine rice, and fill the water up to the line on the cooking pot that says 3 for white rice, then you will get "3 servings" of cooked rice a the end of about an hour. This is the correct serving size for people who eat lots of rice, but will be more than the right amount for people who typically don't eat rice as a staple food.
It takes a little longer to make rice in one of these rice cookers - the typical elapsed time before the rice is done for dinner is about an hour for most white rices. Brown rice takes longer. Stove top rice cooking takes less than a half hour for white rice, but that is because there is no soaking cycle. The Zojirushi adds a soaking cycle, which is why the rice is so delicious! We usually put the rice on to cook before starting to make the rest of the dinner, that is unless there is pie for dessert. If there is going to be pie for dessert, we start that first, pop it in the oven, then put on the rice and get going on the vegies and other good things!
It is important not to try to cook rice in coconut milk in one of these rice cookers because a lava flow of coconut milk comes spewing out the steam vent and flows down the sides of the rice cooker onto the counter top. Likewise, it is important not to add raisins and things like that which would clog up the steam vents. Stick to cooking rice, that is the best thing, and put the add-ins in separately.
It is possible to cook quick-cooking gluten free rice mixes in a rice cooker. It takes a little longer than on the stove-top, but the rice comes out nice. We used the "quick cooking" setting.
See more information at this posting: Basmati Rice in the Zojirushi Fuzzy Logic Rice Cooker.
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
Plum Pie
September 24, 2005
Plum Pie
Filling:
2 pounds ripe Italian prune plums, stoned and cut in quarters (you don't have to peel these plums)
1/4 cup white sugar
2 tablespoons gluten free orange liquer
1 tablespoon tapioca starch
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 sugar for the top of the pie
uncooked two-crust pie crust
In a large bowl, mix all of the filling ingredients except for the sugar that goes on top.
Make a 2-crust pie crust such as the Dream Pie Crust from Bette Hagman's cookbook The Gluten-Free Gourmet Makes Dessert. Line a 9" glass pie plate with a single crust, fill with the plum filling, place the top crust on top. Cut holes in the top to allow steam to escape. Sprinkle with the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until done. The juices that are bubbling out of the sides of the pie and through the steam holes should be slightly thickened, and the top should be golden.
Note: you can obtain tapioca starch at health food stores or Asian food stores.
Serve warm.
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
Plum Pie
Filling:
2 pounds ripe Italian prune plums, stoned and cut in quarters (you don't have to peel these plums)
1/4 cup white sugar
2 tablespoons gluten free orange liquer
1 tablespoon tapioca starch
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 sugar for the top of the pie
uncooked two-crust pie crust
In a large bowl, mix all of the filling ingredients except for the sugar that goes on top.
Make a 2-crust pie crust such as the Dream Pie Crust from Bette Hagman's cookbook The Gluten-Free Gourmet Makes Dessert. Line a 9" glass pie plate with a single crust, fill with the plum filling, place the top crust on top. Cut holes in the top to allow steam to escape. Sprinkle with the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until done. The juices that are bubbling out of the sides of the pie and through the steam holes should be slightly thickened, and the top should be golden.
Note: you can obtain tapioca starch at health food stores or Asian food stores.
Serve warm.
© Gf-Zing! | Alice DeLuca
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