Sugar and Spice and all things nice.

Today Miss B is three! In previous years we've kind of gone with a green theme being that it's St Patrick's Day. But now she's at an age where she knows what she wants, everything has to be pink!

So what could possibly be girlier than Rosewater cupcakes with fairies on top?

Gluten and Dairy Free Rosewater Cupcakes:
125 mls rice bran oil
3 eggs
2/3 cup white sugar
1 ½ cups gluten free plain flour (I used white wings)
1 ½ tsp baking powder
¼ cup rice milk
1 tbsp rosewater

Preheat oven to 180C.
With a handmixer, beat together oil and sugar. Keep beating adding one egg at a time.
Add flour, baking powder, rice milk and rosewater and beat until batter is smooth.
Equally distribute between 12 cupcake cases and bake for 25 minutes (check with a skewer, clean skewer = ready).

Decorate as you please, but if you want to ensure they are allergy friendly read decoration packet's carefully.

I simply coloured sugar with pink colouring for the fairy dust beneath the cupcakes. The icing was pure icing sugar, pink colouring, a teaspoon of rosewater and a splash of rice milk. The fairies are from the supermarket and one of the few GFCF things I could find!

Muffin Madness!

In my search to find more things to fill T's lunchbox, I've decided to make a massive batch of muffins. Thankfully, both were a huge hit with all three kids so this should also be a good breakfast for B who is refusing her gluten free cereal. And surely they can't be any less healthy than commercial cereal anyway.



Carrot and Cinnamon Muffins. (makes 12)

• 3 Cups Orgran Plain Flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
  
• 1 Cup white sugar
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 cup of rice milk
• 90 mls rice bran oil
• 1 generous cup grated carrot

Blueberry Muffins. (makes 12)

• 3 Cups Orgran Plain Flour
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
  
• 1 Cup white sugar
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
  
• 1 cup of rice milk
• 90 mls rice bran oil
• 1 generous cup fresh blueberries
  

Bake for 20-25 minutes at 210 degrees celsius.
Allow to cool on tray for 10 minutes, then they're ready to eat or allow to cook completely and store in an airtight container.

Message Sticks.

"A message stickis a form of communication traditionally used by Indigenous Australians. It is usually a solid piece of wood, around 20–30cm in length, etched with angular lines and dots.

Traditionally, message sticks were passed between different clans and language groups to establish information and transmit messages. They were often used to invite neighbouring groups to corroborees, set-fights and ball games."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_stick

It seems my children have been sending me a rather bizarre message. When they don't eat the food I prepare for them, it is not necessarily the food itself, but the delivery of the food. I like spicy food, and until recently it hadn't been a problem. But then I realised it wasn't the taste of the food they were complaining about. To test my theory I turned uneaten chicken curry into curry chicken patties....and the little buggers ate it. So over the next few weeks, you are likely to be seeing a lot of patties, croquettes, balls, nuggets and sticks!

About a year ago, I went to a barbecue with a group of friends. Two foods stick in my mind from that barbecue - Chickpea Salad and Beef Korma. I grabbed the Chickpea Salad recipe from my friend, but never got the recipe for beef korma. Also, I only had turkey and lamb mince in the freezer, so I did it my way!

Lamb Korma Skewer Sticks:

700 grams lamb mince

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1/4 cup finely chopped mint

1 teaspoon ground cummin

1 teaspoon ground coriander

0.5 teaspoons turmeric

Place the lot in a large bowl and squish until combined. Pop in the fridge for an hour. Use this time to soak your skewers if using bamboo ones, so they don't burn. With damp hands, form sausage shapes and skewer. Grill over medium heat on a griddle sprayed lightly with oil. Enjoy!

Ours were served with cos lettuce, cucumber and aioli.

The Gluten and Dairy Free 1st Birthday Party!

Yesterday Baby E turned one!

As he had his Maxillary Frenulum Release operation on Thursday, we just had a quiet party for him. Just us, his Dad and a couple of my friends and their kids. As we didn't throw a party for Torin in December, I wasn't too sure on what to have on the menu. But it turned out to be quite easy.

For the grown-ups:
Antipasto - artichoke hearts, roasted capsicum and eggplant, olives, marinated asparagus spears, prosciutto (Hans make GF).
Maggie Beer Pate, dips and King Island double brie with rice crackers, carrot sticks and celery.
Home made california rolls, filled with avocado, cucumber and smoked salmon with wasabi, soy and pickled ginger on the side.

For the kids:
A fruit and veg platter - watermelon, grapes, carrot sticks, celery, rice crackers and corn chips.
Icy poles.
Chocolate crackles (made by the wonderful Donna).

The cake:
Home made by Donna. GFCF Chockie cake.

The Gluten & Dairy Free Lunchbox Trials.

This has not been fun. With Torin being at school five days a week this year (finally) I have concluded he would be bored witless with eating rice and/or corn thins every day. But he's fussy. And there are many lunches we have that need to be served at a certain temperature.

So my evil plotting mummy tactics have been in overdrive. Starting with the introduction of salad. Every night with dinner we have been having salad to get him away from the idea he has to have mashed potato, peas and carrots with every meal. I had been able to replace the vegetables easily enough if they were cooked. Although he STILL refuses to eat green beans??? So I have been buying gluten free sorbet and gluten free ice cream cones to provide incentive to eat dinner. Being that I'm picky about some things too, I've even provided different types of salad vegetables so we can determine what he deems edible. Spinach leaves and ice berg lettuce = FAIL. Cos Lettuce = WIN!

At home I make my own tortillas and finally have a press (which I bought from Monterey Mexican Food for anyone who is after one. They're a brilliant business to deal with). But after a while they go a little hard if not wrapped in plastic and popped in the fridge. And they're not big enough to roll.

So I bought some Old Time Bakery Tannour Bread which works beautifully for wraps. The ones I made for today's successful lunch had gluten free ham, Castlemaine Dips Hommus, shredded cos lettuce and grated carrot. So I finally have one more thing I can add to Torin's lunchbox. Yay!

I promise you...

1. I'm not being lazy.

2. I will start putting the camera out of reach of children so they're not able to delete photos before I can blog them.

3. That I have not killed anyone since quitting smoking.

4. That even though I am about to become a World of Warcraft addict, I will still blog.

5. I will not blog about World of Warcraft!

;)

Peer pressure!

Isn't it funny how over the years peer pressure changes?

Smoking, for example. I always joked that I didn't start smoking due to peer pressure, it was because my Mum smoked AND worked for a tobacco company. But seriously, if it was deemed extremely uncool like it is now, I don't think I ever would have started at all. So my New Years Resolution is to quit. I have just smoked my last cigarette. As a back up plan, I have the name and number of a hypnotherapist in case I fall off the wagon.

Another thing that's changed is New Year's Eve. Unless I have been pregnant (and gone to bed early sulking and muttering angrily at the neighbours all partying on) I have managed to get myself a little bit too happy. Even the year I volunteered to work at Flemington Races on New Years Day. But before kids, you can manage little sleep and downing 30 litres of water to make it through the day and manage to skip a hangover.

This New Years Eve was different. I spent it at a friend's house, having a barbeque, with all the kids in tow. There were my hosts, and their three kids, and another couple, who also had three kids. And my need to sit down and chat to adults and relax and actually have someone else do the cooking for once, completely outweighed my need to get drunk!

Not only that, these amazing friends made it a gluten free event so I could relax without stressing about myself or Bridie geting ill!

And my last point on peer pressure is this. Jeanette has started blogging!
Jeanette was always willing to share recipes and would frequently PM me or write me notes on facebook but now she has a blog!!!! It is here - http://umeboshipink.blogspot.com/ and I have already baked and eaten a slice of her pumpkin bread (mine had garlic, chopped spinach and cummin and is pictured above) and it's awesome.
So she's worth stalking if you need vegan, gluten and dairy free recipes!

Chocolate chicken. Seriously.

I have been wanting to try this dish forever. It's been so long since I first heard about it, I can't even remember where I heard about it.l And today I took the plunge.

Chocolate Chicken.
2 chicken breasts
1 tablespoon of cocoa
1 teaspoon of ground cumin
1 teaspoon of ground coriander
0.5 teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tablespoon lime juice
2 tablespoons water

Preheat oven to 180C. Blend all ingredients until a runny but thick sauce is formed. Place chicken in an ovenproof dish and paint with the chocolate sauce. Bake for about an hour.

We had them sliced on top of home made mini tortillas with roasted capsicum strips. I am SO glad I tried this. It was utterly awesome. The kids were intrigued that I could dare serve up chocolate chicken!!! But ate it nonetheless. It will definitely make it's way into my work-in-progress menu plan as a summer dish as I can see it working really well with salad.

I've been an absolutely lazy blogger of late. I have excuses though!!! I have had several orders through my store which I have been churning out as quickly as I possibly can, as well as finally getting some sewing for my kids done, a little Xmas shopping and organising Torin's 7th birthday which is this coming Saturday. So once I stop running about like a headless chicken, I will try and be a better blogger.

The Better Batter.

We're pretty lucky to have a Gluten Free Fish & Chip shop here in Ballarat. It means that from time to time I can have night off from cooking!
Another store I have been pleased to find is Abunda - a dedicated gluten free mini supermarket.

So last week I went into Abunda and got some rice noodles. I'd been checking the supermarkets and couldn't find any, and I had been hankering for a stir fry instead of fried rice!

Stir fry is simple here - snow peas, capsicum, water chestnuts, yellow beans - tossed in the wok with sea salt and ginger and rice noodles.

But we will be moving one day, and there mightn't be a fish and chip shop that does gluten free so I thought I'd use tonight to try out a gluten free batter recipe as well. I've never made batter before really, other than the once time I cooked oysters in tempura batter from my Jamie Oliver cookbook. I think I even used packet mix tempura batter for the last chicken nuggets I fried *blush*. This batter is simple and light, and I can see it working for all sorts of things, chicken, fish, vegies, the lot!

Gluten Free Batter for Deep Frying
1/4 cup cornflour
1/2 cup rice flour
1 teaspoon bicarb soda
3/4 cold water

Whisk together until the batter streams in a ribbon off the fork or whisk. It needs to be runny, but not too runny. Coat fry-able item in batter and toss into hot oil. Remove when golden brown.

Happy Thanksgiving and TGIF!

Apologies - I know I'm a day late, but we don't celebrate it here. But happy Thanksgiving to all of you in the US. Anyone manage to catch the rickroll in the Macy's Parade?
:D


Well it's Friday again. I've been a lazy blogger because I've been sewing! More Christmas outfits for some friends. So tonight was an easy meal.

Spiral Pasta with spinach, pine nuts and bacon
1 packet of pasta, cooked according to directions
2 rashes or bacon
1/2 cup pine nuts
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 handfuls spinach leaves
Olive oil

Gently toast pine nuts, toss in garlic and bacon. When bacon is tender, stir through spinach leaves. Drain pasta and stir through, drizzle with olive oil and serve immediately. Easy!

The shortcut to Ratatouille!

We went fruit and veg shopping this morning. And I went a little overboard. Rather than decide in advance, we went in without a list and bought everything we thought looked fantastic. I'm still not so great at menu planning. Don't get me wrong. I am a planner. But menu planning seems to get undone by life's little hiccups so it hasn't happened for us yet.

But when looking at the pile of delicious vegies sitting on the kitchen bench I was inspired to try something I kept meaning to try... which also happened to be a summer vegetable dish. Ratatouille!

So this is my spin on Ratatouille with a little bit of a time saver involved ;)

Roast Vegetable Ratatoille

1 medium sweet potato, cubed
1 medium eggplant, cubed
1 ear of corn, with kernels cut off
2 medium zucchini, cubed
7 cloves of garlic, whole
7 spears of asparagus, trimmed
olive oil (about 2 tablespoons)
cayenne pepper (about a teaspoon)
and the shortcut ingredient - a jar of salsa. I used Maloa House Lecsó (Hungarian Salsa)

Preheat oven to 230 C. Place vegetables and garlic (excluding asparagus) into an casserole dish. Sprinkle with cayenne pepper and drizzle with olive oil. Toss. Lay asparagus spears on top and roast for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and spoon salsa over the vegetables. Combine gently with a spoon. Pop back into oven for 15 minutes. Serve on a bed of brown rice.

This turned out fantastic and with plenty of leftovers to make omelettes for breakfast or quesadillas for lunch!

Real Men Don't Eat Quiche.

Or do they???

In fact, I've never met a man who doesn't but then I've never really been around men that read books!

But call it what you will - quiche, tart or flan - the fact remains they taste great!

Ours was simple. We had success again with Maggie Beer's GF Pastry recipe and the filling was simple, and as follows:

• 250 grams shaved ham, torn up
• 5 cherry tomatoes, quartered
• 5 mushrooms, sliced
• 6 eggs, whisked
• 1/4 cup rice milk
• 1/4 cup grated cheese
  

Basically, after lining the pie dish with the pastry, I assembled the quiche in that order. Baked for 30 minutes at 220C and there it is.

I'm having trouble with the GF blogs I follow. Most of them are based in the US or Canada so they're cooking gorgeous autumn and winter dishes and I have to remember Spring is almost over and Summer is on it's way. Although it's easy to forget when it's chilly and raining like today. But quiche is great in that it can be eaten cold with salad. So I'm back on track.

Ice Ice Baby - a Summer Treat

And with a new season on it's way in, our gluten-free, dairy-free journey has taken another step. Different foods on the menu, mean more items to be closely examined in the supermarket.
So Good soy ice cream is safe if it's Vanilla. But not if it's chocolate. Nestle Icy Poles are safe (and now marked gluten free on the package) but I've never really forgiven them for that bad thing they did.

So before investing in an ice cream maker and doing it all myself, I thought I'd give sorbet a go by hand first.
When I spotted Kiwi Fruit on special, it was all the inspiration I needed. But having never made sorbet before, I had a lot of research and reading to do.

My first port of call was my friend Skipper. She had loads of wonderful recipes on hand but hers contained egg. As Baby E hasn't had egg yet, I kept looking. And I stumbled across a familiar place - the blog of Pig in the Kitchen, another Mum with an allergy child! And even better, a starting point on how to make sorbet!
I particularly liked how her recipes were more rustic (so many recipes demand you force the fruit through a strainer).

Kiwi Fruit Sorbet.
250 grams white sugar
600 mls water
9 kiwi fruit, [peeled and roughly chopped
0.25 teaspoons xantham gum
1 teaspoon citric acid

In a medium saucepan, dissolve the sugar in the water. When dissolved, throw in the fruit and remove from the heat. Allow to cool. Pour into a blender. Add citric acid and xantham gum. Blitz until smooth. Pour into a metal tin (I used a cake tin) and freeze for an hour. Remove from freezer and beat with a handmixer. Put into freezer containers and re-freeze.

So it's almost Christmas.

And I was trying to be all bah humbug about it. But when you have friends who are Christmas-obsessed it's hard to just pass it all by.

Today, I was innocently standing in my kitchen making the kids some corn tortillas from scratch for lunch. As I rolled out the dough and daydreamed, I somehow ended up grabbing a cookie cutter. I must say, it was easier than having very wonky circles because I cannot for the life of me roll balls of dough into circles. When I'm rich, I'll buy a tortilla press!

I am pretty happy with how these turned out. Even happier to be able to say they are free of gluten, dairy, egg, yeast and fructose and are still tasty!

Corn Tortilla Recipe.
1.5 cups cornflour
0.5 cups cornmeal/polenta
1.5 cups hot water
1 teaspoon Nuttelex dairy free spread

In a bowl, mix the cornmeal and cornflour. In a jug stir the margarine into the hot water until melted.

Pour liquid into the corn mix and stir with a metal spoon. Allow to cool. When cool enough to handle, knead until smooth. Roll dough out between two pieces of plastic (I used shopping bags!). Carefully peel back plastic and gently fry in a dry pan for a minute on each side. You can use cookie cutters to make shapes, or for larger tortillas, use balls of dough about the size of a peach rolled out.
If you make smaller ones with the cookie cutters, you could probably cook them a little longer to dry them out and use them as chips for dipping.

Pumpkin and Pine-nut Risotto.

This is a simple dish and one that everyone seems to adore.

Pumpkin and Pine-nut Risotto.
Half a butternut pumpkin, peeled, cooked and mashed
2 cups arborio rice
4 cups vegetable stock
nutmeg to taste *optional
small handful of pine nuts, lightly toasted
oil for cooking

Heat oil, add rice and stir through until translucent. Add stock one cup at a time until completely absorbed. In between the 3rd and 4th cup of stock, stir through the mashed pumpkin (and add nutmeg is you like). Add last cup of stock. Serve garnished with toasted pine nuts.

Ok. So some of mine were a little more than lightly toasted. Feel free to turn a blind eye!

Three Jars Full!

Well there will be three, but currently there is only two.

I've put my food processor to hard work this morning and have already made Pesto (sans cheese) and Macadamia Nut Butter. To complete the trifecta, I will be adding Hommus once the chick peas are all soaked.

Please excuse the shocking photo. It's from my phone as I can't find my rechargeable camera batteries.

Dairy Free Pesto is super easy. I can honestly say I think I have only ever bought pre-made Pesto once.
All you need is Fresh Basil, a little garlic, some pine nuts and olive oil (which isn't even really necessary in my opinion). I pick 3 handfulls of basil leaves. Process in food processor. Add 1 handfull of pine nuts, lightly toasted (I pop mine under the griller for a very short time). Process a little longer. Add one clove of garlic, crushed. Process until you're happy with it. Add oil if you wish. But remember if you use pesto for lots of different things, it doesn't always need to be "oily" so you can add the oil later if you need to.

Even simpler again, Macadamia Nut Butter. Take one 250 gram bag of natural macadamia nuts (not roasted not salted, just plain naked). Add a handfull at a time to food processor until the consistency you prefer. If they get dry, add a little oil (I used rice bran oil). And there you have an awesome spread for your toast!

And yes. In realise it looks like someone has been stuck into the pesto. I was hungry and I can recommend it with cheese in an omelette!

Dammit! I contaminated us all!!!!

And would you believe it only took One Single Litre of Soy Milk to do it?

I have learned, yet again, to read EVERYTHING. Even read it twice. Freedom Foods, which makes so many foods we can usually eat, makes Soy Milk which contains gluten.

I did wonder why I was itchy as hell. And why Bridie's "output" was a little pale.

I guess you live and learn....

No Tomato Pizza - A new challenge

With Bridie reacting to all things Fructose, we've had to avoid tomatoes a bit. But with Torin begging for pizza, I've had to put my thinking cap on. Now there are other ways of avoiding putting tomato on your pizza. Pizza Bianca uses dairy, such as sour cream, but we're dairy free. Some pizzas have pesto (which generally also contains dairy in the form of parmesan cheese) but my basil is yet to grow. It has little tiny shoots but it'll be a while yet.
And I wanted RED! Sweet and red....So this is what I did:

Roasted Capsicum and Garlic Pizza Sauce
2 large red capsicums, de-seeded and quartered
1 whole bulb of garlic

Place capsicum skin side down on tray. Place whole garlic bulb on tray. Roast in oven preheated to 180c for 30 minutes. When soft the garlic will jump out of his skin with a gentle squeeze. Pop the garlic cloves and capsicuim in a food processor and whizz until chopped. There's your sauce!

For the base we used this recipe except we used White Wings GF flour this time and a little more water.
We topped it with chopped mushrooms and soy cheese, 20 minutes in the oven (190 C) and it was great!

Semi Free-form Kangaroo Meat Pies.

Yay! I managed to get meal prepared for the October challenge Vittoria is hosting.

There is one disadvantage to being Australian and it's culinary. Our country doesn't have a long history, unless you consider the Aboriginal people. And, sadly, a lot of their history is lost, or handed down by word of mouth. The other difficulty was that they lived on the land and we kind of use kitchens to prepare meals.
*sigh*
So I thought about this for a long, long time until I could find a way to bring all of Australia to the table.

There is nothing more Aussie than a meat pie. Granted Australia is not the only country who eats meat pies, but ask any Australian what is an "Aussie" food, in amongst the Vegemite and beer, someone will mention meat pies.
But that alone, wasn't Indigenous enough for my liking. So I figured no other country has Kangaroos! We're going to whip up a Kangaroo meat pie to die for! On top of that, it's gluten and dairy free!

For the pastry, I again used Maggie Beer's Gluten Free pastry recipe. As usual, I replaced the butter with Nuttelex dairy free spread. I have called them "semi free-form" because I did use pie dishes but I rolled the pastry out to a larger size and just kind of gathered and tucked the extra over to form the tops. I filled each with my delicious kangaroo filling and baked in the oven (220 C) for 20 minutes.

Kangaroo Pie Filling (makes about 4 small pies)
400 grams kangaroo steak, cubed
1 tablespoon rice bran oil
1 Massel Easy Onion cube
1 teaspoon dried sage
1 cup vegetable stock, hot
1 tablespoon cornflour

Heat the oil in a saucepan. Brown off the meat and stir in the sage. Crumble in onion cube and add hot stock. Pop lid on and lower the heat, allowing to simmer for 30 minutes. (This is a good time to roll out the pastry).
Remove the lid, stir and add cornflour. Turn the heat up and stir from time to time until a gravy has formed from the liquid. Then it's ready!

'Go ahead honey, it's gluten Free!' October Challenge - Indigenous foods.

Yay my first challenge!
This month Vittoria is hosting the "Go ahead honey, it's gluten free" challenge and her twist was we are to use ingredients indigenous to our region and country.

I've also been menu planning. I've been extremely unmotivated lately and I am pretty sure the kids are no longer ok with eating fried rice twice a week.

So stay tuned because I am working on some ideas.