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About Scratch Cooking + Quick Beef & Veggie Soup Recipe

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 09:12:41 -0800

I make a lot of product recommendations, but I have found a product that I consider an essential to gluten free cooking.

Here’s the thing, if you’re going to eat well and be gluten free, you simply have to cook most things from scratch. There are many, many recipes and dishes that are naturally gluten free, but when you buy a commercially prepared version of those things they are often adulterated with wheat and gluten to save time and money in the manufacturing process. Toasted wheat is often added as a colorant and flavor enhancer. Wheat flour is often added as a thickener. Even when you don’t see wheat in the ingredients list, there’s always a risk of cross-contamination in the manufacturing process. The way to get around this processed food road block is to cook things yourself.

Some of the easiest things to cook from scratch are stir fried, Asian dishes, either Chinese or Thai. You can prepare these dishes gluten free if you use gluten free soy sauce and other standard ingredients that are easy to find. Most of these dishes can be cooked in 10 to 15 minutes. It’s the rice that goes with them that takes at least 45 minutes and requires constant attention. This is where the product I am about to recommend comes in. It will cook jasmine rice in 10 minutes with no babysitting. It will make soup, chili, or beef stew in 30 minutes. It will cook a traditional New England boiled pot roast dinner in 40 minutes.

The product I’m recommending is an electronic pressure cooker called "Instant Pot”. Just this evening I made homemade vegetable beef soup from scratch in ours. Here’s what I did:

Remove the meat from 2 pounds of soup bones and cut into 1/2” cubes. Trim off the gristle and fat. Put the cubed meat and the bones into the Instant Pot along with a couple tablespoons of butter or oil. Add the following:

1 Tbsp minced garlic
1 Tbsp basil
2 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp thyme

Push the “Saute'” button on the Instant Pot and brown the meat, stirring occasionally (about 10 minutes). While that’s going on prepare the following:

1/2 white onion, diced
3 cups (or so) of diced potatoes
2 to 3 stalks of chopped celery
3 cups (or so) of sliced baby carrots
2 cups (or 14 oz can) of diced tomatoes
8 oz tomato sauce (canned or homemade)

Set those ingredients aside until the meat is done browning.

Once the meat is browned, add the vegetables and tomato sauce. Add roughly 1 to 2 cups of water to cover all ingredients. Put the lid on the Instant Pot and press the “Soup” button. Now here’s the magic, 30 minutes later you will have delicious home made vegetable beef soup that tastes like it’s been simmering for 24 hours, and meat that you can cut with the edge of your spoon. Start to finish this took 45 minutes, most of it sitting on the couch waiting for the Instant Pot to notify us that dinner was ready.

The Instant Pot is our secret weapon when it comes to gluten free cooking from scratch.

Unboxing & Review: Panasonic Gluten Free Breadmaker

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 12:17:55 -0800

First, let me say this was purchased with my own money and nobody is paying me or compensating me to write a review on it. All opinions are entirely my own. I think this fact will become painfully obvious as this review continues. I began writing this review on December 20 (as the blog date indicates) and started updating it periodically while waiting for the machine to actually arrive on my doorstep. I finally completed, or rather truncated, my review process on January 12, 2016.

Let me start with the customer service experience. I ordered this machine on Cyber Monday (Nov 30), direct from Panasonic because they had a coupon code on their website which made it cheaper than Amazon.

The Experience:

In hindsight, probably should have ordered from Amazon. 10 days after I ordered, I received the wrong bread machine from Panasonic, a much cheaper model in fact. Ok, fine. Mistakes happen. I called to very kindly and politely alert them to the problem and they took about 24 hours to generate a return shipping label for me. I took the machine to a FedEx drop-off location as soon as I had the label, and it began its slow, week-long trek back to the factory. Then I got an email letting me know that when it arrived back at the factory (estimated arrival date December 18), it would take 2-3 business days for them to process and ship the return. I emailed them to let them know it was on its way (and included the tracking information) and indicated I really wanted the right machine by Christmas. The next day I got a cryptic phone call from Panasonic asking me for the tracking number. I asked if they had received my email, and was told they had, and said the tracking number was in the email. A couple of days later I hadn’t heard anything more so I emailed them again, once again indicating that since I ordered on November 30 I felt they really should make an effort to expedite the replacement to have it here by Christmas. I never heard back.

I sent several emails, posted on Facebook twice, and called a couple of times. Usually, I got no response. Occasionally, I got a very brief, non-apologetic assurance that my order would eventually be processed. On Christmas Eve, I got the following email:

“Elizabeth,
Greetings;

Thank you for contacting Panasonic. This email is to inform that no tracking information has yet been assigned. Again we ask that you allow 7-10 business days, with the Christmas Holiday in mind, from 12/18, the day the return arrived.”

I am not kidding here, folks. That was their exact response. I finally called again on December 29 and asked immediately to talk to a supervisor. The friendly CSR put me on hold and then came back to tell me that no supervisor was available but that my package had been shipped. I asked for a tracking number and she said she didn’t have one yet. I spent some time telling her how disappointed I was in the service I had received and asked her to have a supervisor call me back. She put me on hold again and came back and said the supervisor was off his previous call and she could transfer me to talk to him right then. She then proceeded to transfer me into his voicemail. I left a message and never heard back.   On December 31, when I still had not received tracking information, I filed a dispute with PayPal. On January 1 they finally responded to my dispute with the tracking information - which, it turns out, was generated late in the evening on December 29, several hours after I called and was told (falsely) that it had already been shipped.

The bread machine finally arrived on January 2, a full 33 days after I placed my order and 22 days after they were originally notified of their shipping error. Needless to say, for customer service, I give Panasonic 0 out of 5 stars.

The Unboxing:

Now, on to the machine itself. Panasonic describes this machine as the “Automatic Gluten Free Bread Maker with Yeast Dispenser SD-YR2500” It is capable of handling both gluten breads and gluten-free breads, but with a “Proud Sponsor of the Celiac Disease Foundation” sticker boldly displayed on the product page, it’s clear that they’re marketing this machine directly to gluten-free consumers.

Interestingly, this feature is a lot less pronounced on the front of the box. And even less so in the manual. When you open the manual, which now I wish I’d read before making the purchase, you are presented with a detailed description of various types of wheat flour followed by pages and pages completely full of recipes for various items to be made in the bread maker using gluten-containing flours There are 24 of these recipes in total. At the very end, as an afterthought, there are 3 “pages” of gluten free recipes each containing mostly white space and a couple of recipes. All told there are 7 gluten free recipes included, mostly plagiarized from the Bob’s Red Mill website. There are 3 for bread, 3 for pizza dough, and 1 for pasta.

Working the Machine:

Well, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you hanging at this point. After reading the manual and deciding the $234 I paid for it (with the coupon from Panasonic) was about $200 more than I feel the machine is worth, I decided to box it back up to return it. When Panasonic then insisted I owed them a 15% restocking fee for returning the item, I filed a claim with PayPal. They sided in my favor and although I’m still out the return shipping that was better than the 15% restocking fee.

I hate leaving such a horrendously bad review for a product. I really do. I would love to be able to sell you this machine through my affiliate links on Amazon and get my little monetary kickbacks; but I really cannot recommend this machine. And I know this isn’t going to look good for anybody who thinks they might want to send me a free product to review someday (which, if you’re a manufacturer reading this, I’m totally open to even though I’m sure I’ve turned you off with this review). After the singularly worst customer service experience I can remember ever having followed by an overpriced and falsely advertised machine, I simply couldn’t leave this review unwritten and I don’t have anything positive to say about the machine. Maybe it bakes bread well. I don’t know and I’m not going to find out. Sorry about that.

If anybody has a recommendation for a bread machine that does a great job with GF breads, I’m interested in hearing about it as long as it isn’t a Panasonic brand. I am DONE with Panasonic.

Recipe Review: Brittany Angell’s Paleo Zucchini Parmesan

Sat, 7 Sep 2013 18:43:58 -0700

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Brittany Angell, she is an amazing gluten-free “foodie” who comes up with some of the most spectacular recipes on her website, Real Sustenance. She is also the author of two of my favorite Gluten Free resource books, The Essential Gluten Free Baking Guide (parts one and two). If you don’t have these books yet, I highly recommend buying them.

Tonight I decided to try her recipe for Zucchini Parmesan. I have an abundance of zucchini and yesterday I canned a dozen jars of homemade tomato sauce from tomatoes grown in my garden. So I went out and picked some fresh overgrown zucchini this afternoon and got to work.

I have to be honest. I am never making this recipe again. I’m tempted to burn my printout of it rather than simply throw it in the recycling bin.

Don’t get me wrong - I would eat this meal again in a heartbeat. If Brittany wanted to come and make it for me, I’d give her a kiss. And a lamb. A whole one. Seriously. I would order this dish in a restaurant if I could. The problem is not with the end result. It’s with the process. If you’re the kind of person who loves to cook, who doesn’t mind starting over if something doesn’t go quite right, and whose idea of a good time is getting your hands covered in batter and spending an hour in the kitchen prepping dinner and another hour cleaning up, this recipe is for you.

I am the kind of person who only cooks because I get tired of eating scrambled eggs or peanut butter smeared on pickles. I am the kind of person who, when something doesn’t go quite right, my first response is to scream, stomp, cry, hide in the corner, and feel like an utter failure while I send someone out for Chinese food. I am the kind of person who would prefer to throw a Stouffer’s lasagna in the oven if I could. This recipe is NOT for me.

Oh, it looks easy enough. Looks are deceptive. First of all, you’ll see that the recipe starts out with a thickened milk and starch mixture. You apparently have to get this mixture just perfect for it to work. Mine went from the consistency of plain milk to the consistency of Gak in the blink of an eye. I have absolutely no idea how to fix this problem. Since I don’t know why it failed in the first place, I decided not to repeat the experiment. I went with the assumption that I’d get the same lousy result every time.

Next, you “dip” the Zucchini in the starch mixture and “dredge” it in the flour mixture. Right. I ended up smearing the starch mixture by hand on each side of the zucchini and then taking my starchy, sticky fingers and sprinkling flour mixture on both sides. I washed a lot of almond flour down the drain of the sink this way. Oh, and have I mentioned that I’m allergic to raw zucchini? It gives me a rash. This method required way too much handling of the squash for my tastes, and took way too much time.

I was able to coat a grand total of 5 slices of zucchini in what was left of the thickened liquid before I was only left with Gak that wouldn’t stick to the zucchini at all. This was going to be just enough to cover my baking pan with one single layer of breaded zucchini, and left me with an abundance of breading mixture I was unable to use. It also let me with a lot of freshly sliced zucchini which will now be fed to the chickens for lack of anything better to do with it.

Now comes the broiling part. You place it on parchment and broil it. That part is simple enough. Then you are supposed to flip it over and broil it on the other side. At which point most of the breading comes off and sticks to the parchment.

You then move the freshly cooked and limp zucchini from the baking sheet into your baking pan. Somehow. I managed to get 4 of my 5 slices into the pan, which didn’t quite cover the bottom. I couldn’t figure out how to get the last, limpest slice off the baking sheet. So I took it out and let it cool. Later, I ate it off the parchment with a fork because I was still hungry and couldn’t figure out any other way to get it off before throwing the parchment away. Brittany, if you’re reading this, I’d love to know how you accomplish this step. Maybe a video?

Since I only had one scant layer of breaded zucchini to work with, I browned a pound of ground lamb and used that for the 2nd layer in the dish. Other than that, I pretty much followed the recipe.

The result was delicious. But next time I’m just going to skip the whole breading thing as wasted effort and mess and expense (almond flour isn’t cheap!). Maybe I’ll sprinkle a little of the almond flour over the top when it’s in the pan or something. Or I’ll just make Zucchini Lasagna instead.

Stuffed Zucchini

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 18:20:33 -0700

It’s a challenge sometimes to figure out what to do with all the zucchini our garden is producing this year. We share it with friends and family. We share it with our livestock. But, whenever possible, we like to eat it. At least, some of us do.

For some reason, not one of our children likes zucchini. This makes me very sad. I have had some success finely shredding it and sneakily adding it to spaghetti sauce, but sometimes I just have to say “Too bad, we’re having zucchini for dinner. If you don’t like it, go scramble an egg for yourself or something.”

Tonight, I chose to make Stuffed Zucchini for dinner. This is a favorite of mine for those oversized zucchini that like to take over the garden when you have to be out of town for a few days. Little zucchini are best thinly sliced and fried in butter with some salt and pepper. Mmm. That’s hard to do with the giant zucchini, though.

I didn’t measure anything tonight. This “recipe” is very flexible. Have some fun with it.

Pancakes!

Tue, 2 Jul 2013 12:01:12 -0700

Pancakes are simple and quick to make, but gluten-free pancake mix can cost a fortune! Guess what? You don’t need a mix! You can make gluten-free pancakes from everyday ingredients.

Our basic recipe is not very healthy, so use it in moderation. The “flour” is made up of one part asian rice flour, one part “sweet” or “glutinous” rice flour, and one part tapioca starch. We get all these ingredients cheap (about $1 per pound) at the asian grocery store.

Last week, however, my mom ordered a 50 lb bag of certified gluten-free buckwheat flour and shared some with me. So today we substituted the regular rice flour with buckwheat and the pancakes turned out great! The sweet rice flour and tapioca starch still make up 2/3 of the carbs in this recipe, though, so this is not a diabetic- or carb-friendly recipe. But it’s a nice treat once in a while, and the buckwheat does add some nice nutritional value to the meal.

How to Roast a Chicken

Fri, 31 May 2013 17:03:31 -0700

Everyone should know how to roast a chicken, and it really doesn’t have to be difficult. Contrary to popular belief, you do not HAVE to truss your chicken. It’s more important for larger birds like turkeys. Other than making it look a little neater, I really don’t see the point with a chicken. In my experience, it’s just an unnecessary step, as well as an extra kitchen supply (string) I have to keep on hand. So I rarely do it.