Sweet Al's Sauce Kickstarter!

What is one of my jobs? Working with people that I love (my family and occasionally a friend or two) with our catering and events business, we love to feed people. Our Teriyaki sauce is amazing and reminds me of my childhood, sweet, salty, a little tang, a little heat. After some demand from the public we are getting it bottled so you can take it home and share with your own family. Please help support our family run business. Can't afford to donate? Then please share the link and spread the word! Help keep a Mom and Pop business open and thriving!

Sweet Al's KickStarter!

Where have I been? What have I been eating?

I've got papers piled high on my desk, books and notes stacked some what neatly on the shelf, and my office is cold. Autumn is here! I have a few excuses for why I haven't been posting all year but instead of complaining I am going to gush about future plans.

Meat?

Last month I felt like a real farmer, I killed and cleaned my first chicken (6 chickens actually).  These were chickens that I had helped raise from fuzzy yellow chicks, I felt proud knowing they had a good life (down right spoiled) and we gave them a quick and clean death, with the purpose of feeding our family. I look at store bought meat in a different way now, I question it, I feel sad on the freeway when I pass a semi truck full of white feathers, knowing they are going to die in a chaotic processing plant after a short miserable life. It really inspired me to raise my own meat, so this winter I'm setting up the property and building pens for meat chickens, ducks, and a few geese and turkeys. 

Eggs?

I have 12 beautiful hens in our snazzy new chicken coup (remodeled this summer). I love these birds and they are just starting to lay the cutest and tastiest  little eggs. I recently bought them a Rooster.

 

I named him Egon (from ghost busters) and after the girls bullied him for 3 days he became part of the flock. I look forward to incubating some eggs in the future and getting babies from them, as future layers for myself or for resale.

Produce?

My garden this year has been bountiful,  Tomatoes, Zucchini, Cucumbers, 3 different kinds of beans, Broccoli, Beets, Swiss chard, Potatoes, White currents, and Herbs.

I'm a beginner at gardening and I learned a lot this year (I didn't trim my tomato plants and ended up with a tomato tree forest  and a few other newbie mistakes).

22 Lbs of Yukon potatoes! (I didn't think they would turn out at all, people told me I planted them too late in the season) they taste amazing. 

This was half a weeks worth of tomatoes! It made the most delicious  Tomato sauce (first time canning!)

I know now to stop my mom at 2 cucumber plants and 3 Zucchini plants (we had 6 cucumber plants and 8 Zucchini plants) we feed a lot of friends with what we couldn't eat, some even went to the neighbors pigs so as not to go to waste.

Above is Layla my 6 month old hybrid (Shiloh shepherd/malamute/wolf mix), best dog I could of found, shes learning pretty quick how to be a farm dog. She's with me wherever I go on the farm, she gardens with me and keeps the chickens in the coup while I feed them.

Eating Gluten free has taken me on an amazing food journey, I've really been looking at where my food comes from. I've greatly enjoyed feeding myself and my family from things I have raised and grown. Next year the garden is expanding as well as our livestock.  

I'm looking at getting laying ducks before winter sets in and in the spring I want to get Honey Bees.

I'm also researching dairy cows for a dual milk/meat production, maybe as early as next summer but we will see.

My point is that I'm still here, I'm still eating Gluten Free, I've just been doing more Homesteading than baking. But do not fear, Autumn is here and with it the holidays, I feel like winter is baking season, and I will have more recipes to share with you (and probably more homesteading posts)

Life and whats happening.

It's disgusting to think I haven't posted sense January. It's not that I haven't thought about what to blog about, or haven't taken pictures for blog ideas.  In the winter my apartment is a dark hole and the artificial light makes nothing appealing. We've also been dealing with a mold problem, a decrease in income, and a general  jumble of life. The past few weeks we've been working on the second house on my parents property, so Mr. Beam and I can move in. We've replaced windows, walls, tiled, redone the kitchen cabinets and much much more. We still have some things to do (like carpet the bedroom), but we only have a week left in the apartment, this next week is going to be chaotic.

That post from January? I still plan to do it all. I'm hoping to start up next month, I will have a bright, clean kitchen, with room to move and cook in. I also have some product reviews to post, as well as my weekend with my celiac cousin and the treats we ate :)   I'm really looking forward to starting up this blog again, I've been bursting  with ideas.

2013 Gluten Free Resolutions And Goals

Next month will mark the one year anniversary of this blog, when I started it I was trying to inspire myself for my new gluten free lifestyle. I cannot tell you that within that year I have not missed gluten. There have been teary car rides with the windows rolled down so a gluten fulled goody wouldn't smell as good and not tempt me. There have been mistakes leading to gluten hunting in my kitchen and  restaurant nightmares. It's the road of a food allergy, it has ups and downs and mistakes. It has good times too, I cried when my one day mother in-law had the entire family secretly eat organic and gluten free at a family party, no one knew until after they ate. I have realized how caring the people in my life are, they want to feed me and go the extra mile to make sure I can, without complaint.

 I have gained so much knowledge cooking gluten free this past year and I've come up with some tasty recipes. I'm at home in my tiny kitchen. There are still some things I haven't perfected or found gluten free that can fill the void of the gluten original. So this year I have some goals with my gluten free baking, I also have a new adventure for my kitchen, but before I tell you what that is I'll list 6 of my Gluten free goals for 2013.

* Try some gluten free sourdough recipes.

* Find a good gluten free french bread recipe

* Make gluten free cream puffs that actually work out

* Try making gluten free English muffins

* Perfect my gluten free ravioli recipe

* Replicate a Taco Bell Crunch wrap.

 I have a few others I could put on the list but I thought I might get overwhelmed so limited it to 6. These 6 will take me some time to complete but I will have posts when I attempt/complete them. I'm also going to try and be more consistent when I post, I'd like to post once a week or once every two weeks but we will see how that goes.

*****

The New Kitchen Adventure

Last fall I started to think of a direction for this blog and my cooking in general. I'm always wanting to learn and try new things. Trying to think of different bread items and making them gluten free was getting me by but wasn't really challenging me or catching my interest on a regular basis. I was just following other's recipes and it felt cheap to re-post another blog post someone had done, just adding my experience, it's been done before, boring. 

I have a wonderful friend that works at a books store, I often confide in her about my ideas and I had found a book that I absolutely wanted but couldn't afford the $50 cookbook. A month later she came up and placed the book in my hands, her store had put it on sale AND she got her employee discount. I wanted to know what I owed her and she simple said I had to feed her. Needless to say we feasted.

Now Christmas was around the corner and after looking through my shiny new cookbook I realized how many of it's recipes had gluten components, I would have to  find substitutes or make it from scratch to un-gluten them. I found a cook book to remedy the situation. As a Christmas present I got the second book. 

The Gluten-Free Asian Kitchen by Laura B. Russel

And

Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking is said to be the Chinese version of  Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French cooking. Its beautifully written and laid out, I'm just finishing the last two chapters.  It not only teaches you the dishes of china but also the regional specialties and the culture. It wants you to focus on making the most authentic food you can, no american short cuts. The obvious problem for me was their wheat bread and wheat based dumplings but after I got the book I realized I would have to hunt down a lot of the sauces in gluten free form (I did not realize how many different kinds of soy sauce  there are, eek!) I will have to special order somethings, like the gluten free oyster sauce for instance.

The Gluten-Free Asian kitchen (GFAK) is my cheat sheet. It is a cook book in it's own right, and I'm sure I will be cooking from it as well (and posting about it when I get there), but it's giving me a leg up for following the recipes in Mastering the Art of  Chinese Cooking (MACC).