Cooking on Rachel Joi

slow cooking month

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 22:37:00 +0000

Merry Christmas! I thought it was time for another post after such a very long radio silence. I wanted to let y’all know about my month of slow cooking. I’m over halfway through and having a blast. I’ve used it every day except the first two Wednesdays (because we were rather overloaded with leftovers). I’m working from three sources - Michele Scicolone’s The French Slow Cooker, Cook’s Illustrated The Best Slow and Easy Recipes, and Stephanie O’Dea’s blog . So far, I’ve made:

GF communion bread

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:48:00 +0000

Another thing: I’m working on a recipe for gluten-free communion bread, preferably unleavened. I’ll post a recipe if I find one I like, but I would love suggestions!

Bread. Mmm.

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:11:00 +0000

I made banana muffins and banana bread over the weekend using two different recipes. The muffins used brown rice flour and pecans, and the bread used teff flour and cream cheese. I had never cooked with teff flour before. Apparently it comes in different colors - ivory, brown, and red - but our grocery store only had brown. Thus, the bread was a little darker than you normally expect. My husband thought both were good, though he preferred the muffins slightly. I thought the bread was quite rich, probably due more to the cream cheese than the flour. I think the verdict is just that banana bread is easy to make taste good, no matter what recipe you use. In the past, I have used a mixture of white rice flour, tapioca flour, and cornstarch, and that always turned out well. Brown rice flour has a little more nutrition in it than white rice flour, so I think I will use the brown rice mixture from here on out. Might try mixing in some teff or millet flour next time though. And then tonight, I made sourdough bread. I end up making two loaves about every other week. Carl says he likes it better than the store-bought bread. The starter has settled down now, so it is consistent from loaf to loaf. I’ve had the starter since July, so it’s nice and sourdough-y. It uses a mixture of garbanzo bean/fava bean flour, tapioca flour, cornstarch, and sorghum flour. And it is delicious. I use Bette Hageman’s recipe - can I reproduce it here? That is something a lawyer should probably know… The pictures aren’t uploading. Just imagine two delicious-looking loaves of bread and a single muffin. Mmm.

Gluten free amaretto cake

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:38:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, some friends and I participated in a trivia night fundraiser for Metro Lutheran Ministry. Part of the evening was a dessert auction, and one of the desserts was a “boozy amaretto cake.” We didn’t win - the trivia or the cake - but on Friday, MLM emailed out the recipe for that cake. It called for a cake mix, and luckily enough, Betty Crocker makes GF devils food cake mix. That was the only non-GF item in the recipe (certain brands of amaretto are GF, so that wasn’t difficult), and voila, we had the amaretto cake on Saturday. It was delicious. There is a LOT of amaretto in it, and less than half of it has any heat applied, so the alcohol is all there. I will post the recipe tomorrow, but I wanted to write about it tonight. I think it is a good example of how easy it can be to make something gluten free. Frequently, you can just do a straight substitute, and really, even when you can’t, adding in four other flours to get the right consistency is just not a big deal. The real problem comes from contamination, in my opinion. That seems like a good post for later this week. Carl thinks I should write more about cake, but I will let you discover its deliciousness for yourself. Tomorrow.