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.
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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).
