Tasty Success

Seeing as my 'sweet' gluten free recipes were not working out last week I decided to take a break from them and work on something savory. Last week I had made a Gluten free sandwich bread and with the left over end of it I made bread crumbs. My mind was pondering what goodies I would make using them, chicken strips? no. homemade mac and cheese? no. Nothing I thought of sparked my interest so I hopped on Pinterest and looked through the food and drink category.  I found mozzarella sticks, not only that but the recipe was for GLUTEN FREE mozzarella sticks. My taste buds were watering as I read the directions. I had everything needed to make them and began setting everything up. Now because I've been doing this blog I've really been trying to do two things; 1 take pictures as I cook so I can share them on here and 2 write down the recipe. I eyeballed everything for this recipe but I did remember to take picture! lol

 Above I have my mozzarella cut into sticks, my rice flour and seasoning mixture, my egg wash, my bread crumbs, and a few sticks that already are coated. The KEY to making these work is dipping them twice in the two first bowls before rolling them in the bread crumbs. It fully coats the cheese enough to  let them get all melted without seeping out, I noticed on some of mine where they didn't get a good second coat they started to leak. So remember, roll in rice flour, egg wash, rice flour again, egg wash again and then coat with bread crumbs.

Make sure your oils nice and hot, these guys don't need that long for them to melt the inside and brown the outside.

Ta Da! The finished product with some marinara sauce to dip them in :) let me tell you they were yummy! :)
To give credit where credit is do this is the site that has the recipe   http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/04/gluten-free-tuesday-mozzarella-sticks.html

Some misadventures in baking....

I started last week with gusto, I was pumped and excited to make myself some Gluten Free treats and had looked up a few delicious recipes.

 After being tempted at work with cream puffs I decided I needed to make them myself. I  spent a good chunk of my Sunday looking for good Gluten free choux pastry recipes and found two the looked like they would work, one with a rice flour blend and the other with a corn flour blend. I decided to try the rice flour first as it looked similar to the original method.  When I was a kid I remember staying up with my mother as she baked for the holidays, she would make chocolate eclairs for Easter and I simply loved being the taster. If she made bigger puffs, after they baked she would cut them open and scrap out the insides to make room for the filling and this warm, moist, pudding like stuff would be scraped into a bowl. It really was only flour, butter, and egg but I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world and would gobble it all up. The rice flour recipe started out well, even looking like the gluten version through most of the steps. I was really beginning to get excited, then came time to put it in a bag and pipe it on to the baking sheet.
It was runny, but I had hopes it was just because it was Gluten free and Gluten free recipes tend to be moister than those with wheat flour.

I was wrong.

They flattened out into disc shapes and stayed there. I let them cool and tasted one, and it tasted pretty good, but was dense. My optimism  shoved the disappointment aside and I began to start on the second recipe I found.  As I cooked up the next test subject I could see it had a thicker consistency to it  and would hold its shape when I piped it out and sure enough I piped them out on the baking sheet and they didn't droop. I baked them and crossed my fingers that  I would soon be enjoying delicious cream puffs. Busy with other things I let them cook five minutes longer than called for and quickly pulled them out of the over, a little dark but not ruined. I pricked them with my knife to let out the steam and met only crunch, I then tried one, It was crunchy, and solid. Even if I had taken them out 5 minutes sooner they still would have been solid, crunchy and tasting like a tortilla chip.

 I decided that cream puffs were not happening that day and moved on.

Next on my list of things to try were Beignets. A sweet doughnut like treat you fry and dust in powdered sugar. It called for Gluten free vanilla cake mix which I happened to have, I thought it was fate. After doing the first few steps of the recipe, it called for you to put the 'dough' on a floured surface and knead in the rest of the flour until it formed a nice ball....This is what happened.



I ended up adding more flour to it than the recipe  called for. I never did get it into a ball, but I kept on going.

This was as close to a ball I could get it and I moved on to the next step, covering and refrigerating for at least 12 hours. 12 hours later it looked more like a dough ball and I rolled it out and cut it into pieces and got my oil nice and hot.

It broke into pieces if i tried to flip it over and cook the other side. In the end this is what I ended up with.

After reading through the recipes I decided that  with the cream puffs my liquid could of been off on both of those, but I think the recipe for the Beignets wasn't my fault for not turning out, or at least not for turning out as bad as it did.

I was done with trying to make sweet things and went back to something I had made before.
I was going to make chicken pot pie for dinner using that cracker recipe, remember? I made it omitting the salt completely and adding more chicken bouillon. I cooked up everything for the filling and rolled out the dough, It didn't want to cooperate and stay together when I moved it into the pie dish so I just mushed it in there and rolled the top portion out on wax paper and after filling it I plopped the top crust on and  pressed it down to seal it.

Not the prettiest but I felt triumphant.  I baked it until  it was golden and the inside was done.

Beautiful if I do say so myself, and it was tasty, the perfect tasting crust but when I went to cut into it.....

It was extremely  brittle and crumbled when I cut into it, I need to work on it a bit more  so it's more pie like but it turned out way betting than my attempts at baking sweet things Gluten free. When I work out the kinks you'll get the recipe :)

Chicken Crackers

On Saturday I took a "me" day and stayed home so I could get some things done and lounge around the house watching movies. I made a few things that day in the kitchen, one of which was batch of Gluten Free Chicken crackers. I adapted someone else's recipe for Gluten Free crackers as I couldn't actually find a chicken flavored cracker recipe. I took the basic recipe and lowered the salt and added my chicken flavored "better than bouillon"  I probably should have rolled them out a little thinner but was afraid they were going to stick to my counter (which some did).

I'm happy with how they turned out this first time. The recipe needs a bit more tweaking,  I think I will totally omit the salt and add more bouillon next time, as the chicken flavor was very subtle.

 After I made these and I was munching on them during a movie I came to the conclusion that instead of cutting them up into crackers they would make a killer chicken pot pie crust. So my mission this next week is to make this cracker recipe again (after tweaking it) and make pot pie, I will then share with you the perfected recipe. Until next time!

Happy New Year!

Hello 2012,
I was very pumped up and excited to greet you but I believe 2011 felt a bit sad and left behind and gave me a cold on the eve of your arrival and sadly I nearly slept all of your first day. I was wiggling with anticipation and excitement last week thinking about blogging, and what the post would be and what delicious creation I would make because of it. Alas my cold has sapped all energy from me and I've been eating Gluten-free toast  or rice with a bit of butter for the past two days but as a result I am now determined to make Gluten-free chicken in a biscuit crackers this week as I have been craving the regular ones. I think there are three circumstances when it is really hard for me to not indulge in eating gluten. The first is when I am starving, I haven't had anything to eat for hours and there is nothing safe (gluten-free) around for me to eat. Second is family holidays. My family is pretty good on at least trying to make things gluten-free and safe for us with gluten intolerance to eat. My boyfriends family, not so much, this past thanksgiving I tried eating at his dads, It was a landmine of temptations and even with staying away from most of the questionable items Gluten found its way onto my plate and made that night and the next day not the greatest. And third, is when I'm sick. As a child, whenever I was sick my father would make me tea and toast and we would watch movies all day. Among the things he would make/bring me to eat was chicken in a biscuit crackers, chicken noodle soup, top ramen, rice with butter, and 7-up. Now that I'm older these things still comfort me when I don't feel well.  I've found substitutions or Gluten free versions of most everything, honestly i'm sure there's chicken flavored crackers at my Gluten-free store but I've never needed to look till now and the store is clear on the other side of town and I refuse to get out of my PJ's and go to look. If I'm feeling up to it tonight I just might have to mix a few things together and try and make my chicken in a biscuit crackers.

 2012 I think you and I are going to get along famously this year.....