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.

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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).

Learning to love Olives

As a child Olives were the black things next to the pickles on the dinner table during the holidays, their only use was to wear them on my finger tips and chase my cousins around. My mother always yelled at me if I were caught because she knew I would not eat them, and was wasting food. As a result every time she caught me my only punishment was to try to eat one and if I didn't like it I wasn't to do it again. I believe my mother was hoping I would acquire the taste and no longer waste them, but instead I just stopped playing with them. Olives, I decided, were gross. I did not like the sour briny taste, texture I didn't have a problem with however. ( I also didn't like garlic till I was 13 and pickles until I was 15 or so, I was a little weird)

This summer while at a farmers market a friend bought a pasta from one of the vendors. We stood talking while he ate and while standing I tried to smell what was in his dish, secretly at first, it smelled so good that I asked if I could have a closer look (knowing I couldn't eat it our friend didn't mind my brief inspection) It was full of herbs, sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms, and olives. It's smell was heavenly and I really wished I could of tried some. I made a promise to myself  that I would try and replicate the recipe one day soon and went about our lazy Saturday.

Fall is settling in now and while I was shopping at Whole Foods a few weeks ago I saw the row of olives and I reminded myself of the promise I made. I looked at all the choices and settled on a mixture of Mediterranean Olives, and when I got home I put it in the pantry next to my capers that I still hadn't tried. And there they sat, side by side, until last week after our upstairs neighbor and growing friend gave us a jar of his mothers Italian canned mushrooms. That was the final push, I had to make something with them.

I started out with my Capers, Olives, and Mushrooms and tasted and smelled each of them, Salty, Brine-y, and Herb-y. I took stock of what I had in my fridge and began.

I sauteed some garlic and yellow zucchini in oil before I added the chopped canned mushroom and olives. I cooked them long enough to heat them but not over cook them, this also lest the brine become a sauce. I added Gluten Free Spaghetti noodles and topped with more oil, the capers and Parmesan cheese before I tossed it all together.

 If I had Parmesan I would make some after writing this but alas I need to go grocery shopping. This was really good. I was surprised at how much I like it. Mr. Beam loved it and made sure I didn't have any leftovers, the bum.