Gluten-free Chicken Pot Pie of Awesomeness.

After spending much of last year on the gluten-free bandwagon, I fell off the wagon towards the end of the year and after spending much of the end of the year feeling like poo, I am back on the wagon for this 2014.

And speaking of which, happy new year folks! May 2014 bring you peace and happiness, in whatever form you choose.

But back to me. It's been a week back on the gluten-free and I can't say that my life has changed, but I can say that I am feeling clearer headed, my stomach is less bloated and sore, and I am sleeping better. So there's that.

Tonight, I didn't want to venture out into the world, or into the cold, so I decided to cobble together a chicken pot pie to combat the stupid cold and the coming snow. And so I did. And so we ate. And so it went. (ha ha)

I read a number of recipes online for both biscuits and chicken pot pie. I wanted to figure out a way to make the kind of chicken pot pie I like, with biscuits and a slightly creamy sauce. I settled on some version of this:

I made the biscuits first, to let the dough settle, especially because of how sticky it can be.
(I made an altered version of this recipe from here: http://www.sugarfreemom.com/recipes/gluten-free-chicken-or-turkey-biscuit-pot-pie/)

You need:

1 cup gluten free flour (I used Bob's Red Mill, which I don't entirely love)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon xanthan gum 
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 cup butter - cubed
1 beaten egg (part in the sauce, part as a wash)
just over 1/2 cup milk 
chopped fresh parsley 
pepper to taste

Mix the dry ingredients. Add in the butter and mix. I never quite understand this step. I don't know how it's supposed to look, but I just whizzed it around in the mixer for want of better instructions. From there, I added half the beaten. I then slowly added in milk, just until it all started to come together. The amount you use will probably vary depending on the flour blend, etc. I then added in chopped parsley, pepper, and realized that at this step you could add in all sorts of tasty things. Use your imagination.

I then set the bowl of the raw biscuits over to the side and went on about the rest of the meal.

For the rest of the meal, I used the following:

1 lb or so of boneless chicken breast
some butter
1 cube of chicken bouillon 
2 stalks of celery, chopped
2 smallish potatoes, chopped (I don't peel potatoes but of course you can if your life is interminably long)
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
2.5 cups of chicken broth
1/2 cup of milk
frozen peas
french cut green beans (I used frozen)
thyme
3 tablespoons of corn starch

While I was mixing the biscuit dough, I was also poaching some chicken breast in water with bouillon and pepper. I cooked it for 15 minutes, took it off the heat, and kept the liquid it had poached in.

I put some butter in a large pan and once melted, I added the chopped potato, carrot, and celery. To this, I added the liquid from the poached chicken slowly while the vegetables softened. I added thyme, salt, and pepper and kept it cooking slowly. I would say it cooked for maybe 20 minutes or so? I chopped the chicken into little cubes and added it to the pan, along with the stock, the milk, frozen peas to taste, and green beans to taste. I let that come back to the boil.

In a separate little bowl, I mixed the corn starch with the leftover broth from the poached chicken (a couple of tablespoons). You can use water if you don't have any broth leftover. 

After the mixture had reached the boil, I slowly stirred in the cornstarch mixture and brought back to the boil and cooked for a few minutes, until it started to heat up. 

I poured the mixture into a pan large enough to fit (it made way more than I expected, as I was just sort of throwing stuff in the pan). I took the biscuit mixture and put little dollops of it all across the top, watching in horror as some of them sunk into the mix! It didn't cover it completely, but I wasn't trying to. I didn't want it to be too bready in case the biscuits were rubbish. 

(Anyway, while all this is going on, you should be pre-heating your oven to 400 degrees.) 

Over the tops of the little biscuity dumplings, I brushed on the rest of the beaten egg and then threw the whole lot in the oven. 

Because my biscuits were so small, I needed only cook the entire lot for about 25 minutes. 

No word of a lie, it was delicious!  I was super happy with it, and am looking forward to the upcoming leftovers. Here's the inside:

Honestly, you could add anything you like.  I didn't add onions or garlic, though lots of recipes called for them. To be honest, I just didn't want my hands to smell. That being said, the end result was creamy without being overly heavy, but filling and warming all the same. 

As we embark on this new year, I am working on some new things including a new blog, new plans, and improving my diet and overall health. We lose sight so quickly of taking care ourselves and then once we start feeling crappy again, we just feel like it's the way it's always been. So enough of that crap. Enough of complacency. And maybe one baby step in that direction is the introduction of a delicious gluten-free pot pie. 

Just ducky

Have had a duck in the freezer for months so I've been waiting for an opportunity to give it its due. Over the holidays I got it in my mind that a roast duck dinner was inevitable and even necessary but as I was flying solo for much of it, I never got around to it. One person can only consume so much duck. So with amorphous New Year's Eve plans in place, I figured this would be a great time to prepare a roast dinner for J and myself.

It has been years since I actually roasted a duck and the last time I had a lot of trouble finding a recipe that didn't have Asian flavours -- in the end, I had to use one from a hunting magazine that began with "firstly, remove any buckshot." My foray onto the internet proved much more fulfilling this time around and I settled upon this Christmas (I know that was so last week!) roast duck recipe from Jamie Oliver. I had everything required on hand in the house so didn't even have to go shopping.

It takes time but is not all that complicated and it turned out even better than could be expected. Roast duck with potatoes roasted in duck fat is not a light meal that you'd want to eat very often but for a special occasion, it really hit the mark. The gravy (which I made gluten free for J) made with port wine was luscious and brought the whole meal together.  Simply added a few steamed and dressed green beans (and a glass of bubbly) to the operation and we had an absolutely divine NYE dinner.

Albondigas with a twist

For the many Sephardim that read this blog (and there are so many of you I can hardly count you all on my fingers), you'll be familiar with the traditional version of albondigas that we've been eating (and loving!) since we were all tiny. They're red, it's all about the tomato. Well tonight I went off the beaten path, well onto the somewhat beaten path of Mexican flavours that I've embraced and turned the blessed albondiga of my youth on its ear! Tonight's were green, that's verde, yes!

I had some tomatillos sitting in the fridge that I had picked up at a farmers' market a while ago. I needed to use them. I was not willing to let those beauties go to waste but I needed something one step up from salsa verde, because that does not a dinner make. So a little searching and a little cobbling together and here's what I came up with.

Albondigas verde

• 1-2 pounds of ground beef
• 10 or so tomatillos
• 2 poblano peppers or a couple of jalapenos
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 big white onion (1/2 cut into chunks, 1/4 chopped super finely)
• 1/2 cup of chopped cilantro
• 2 tbsp of uncooked rice
• few tablespoons of oil
• salt 
• 1 or 2 eggs

Clean and remove the husks from the tomatillos and put them in a pot of water to boil for about 15 min until they turn a little yellowish. If using jalepenos, boil with the tomatillos and remove seeds etc once cooked.. Once ready, drain the water from the pot.

Roast the poblano peppers (either under the broiler or over the flame of a gas stove) until they are fairly charred. Put in a plastic bag and let sweat for about 10 minutes so the skin will be easy to get off. Clean the skin off, remove the seeds and rinse the pepper to get all the black bits and seeds off.  

Chuck the cooked tomatillos, poblano peppers/jalapenos, chunks of onions, cilantro, garlic, and about a cup of water into a blender and blend until it is a very nice green colour.

To make the meatballs, mix the eggs, ground beef, finely chopped onion, rice and a couple of pinches of salt into a bowl and then form into walnut sized balls. Not too tiny but not big either.

In a pot large enough to fit the balls essentially in one layer, add the oil and let it get hot. Pour the tomatillo mixture in (and enjoy the sizzle). Mix and let it come to the boil. You should add a bit of water to thin it out now (I used the blender and got all the rest of the tomatillo mixture out with the water). 

Once the sauce comes back to the boil, add the balls, turn down the heat, and let it simmer partially covered for 30 minutes. Add salt etc as required to taste.

I served this over pink rice and a little Mexican style salad with chopped onion, a few of the last stragglers from my tomato crop, chopped lettuce, and some chunks of avocado dressed simply wiht some lime juice, olive oil and a bit of salt.  They don't look all that fantastic in pictures but we're about flavour here, not looks!

Just ducky

It's not your average work day dinner that I whipped up tonight but since I didn't have the enthusiasm for it last night, I had to do tonight. Sometimes I enjoy the frenetic-everything-has-to-be-cooked-at-the-same-time madness and tonight was one of those nights. I've been having a hankering for duck for quite a few weeks and finally last week picked up a nice magret duck breast at the St. Lawrence Market. Popped it in the freezer and then took it out on Sunday with a plan to make a nice meal for both of us. That planned got a bit scuppered by events of the day, and as mentioned, my enthusiasm for the cooking had waned.

So it had to be eaten tonight, so I got to it. Pan fried duck breast in a red wine and mushroom reduction (based somewhat on this recipe). I get a kick out of making the diamond shapes in the fat of the duck breast and searing it. And then continuing the low-fat meal prep, I used the duck fat to pan fry some gnocchi, which was what J had a hankering for. They come out spectacularly. Even using the packaged ones, they were crispy on the outside and soft and fluffy inside. Nice!!! Along with that, we roasted some broccoli.


There were pots and pans and all manner of things flying about the kitchen. What fun! And a friggin' gourmet feast for a Monday night people!

Good but surely not fast

It's been a while since I've had the time to make anything in the kitchen. Eating out has it's high points but I miss the home cooking. I took a quick jaunt to the grocery store at lunch today and there was ground turkey on sale. So I bought some and the ideas for dinner started percolating. At home were still the remainders of our last food box (didn't get one this week because we just couldn't make it to the farm to pick it up) that included some corn and carrots. Also in the house were potatoes, onions. Hmm . . . sounds like the fixings for a cottage pie, or is that a shepherd's pie.

Turkey cottage pie (4-5 servings)

• 1 pound extra lean ground turkey
• 1 onion
• 1 carrot
• 1 clove of garlic
  
• 1/2 cup frozen peas
• 1/2 cup corn kernels (I cut 'em off the cob but you can use frozen)
• 2 tbsp worchestershire sauce
• 1 cup chicken stock
• 2 tsp tomato paste
  
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 2 tsp flour
  
• salt & pepper to taste

• 2 russet potatoes
• splosh of milk
• 2 oz of cheddar cheese
• salt & pepper to taste
  

Peel and cut the potato into 1/2-inch squares and boil until soft. Once ready, drain water and add milk, cheese, and salt & pepper and make a lovely bit of mash.

Preheat oven to 400F.

Chop the remaining vegetables up quite finely. Saute onion and carrot in olive oil. Add turkey and brown. Add garlic and saute for a couple of minutes. Then add peas and corn along with the worchestershire sauce, thyme, tomato paste, and chicken stock. Let it all simmer away for about 10 or so minutes until the vegetables are soft. Add a bit more stock if it boils away. Add the flour and stir to thicken the mixture.

Put the meat mixture into an ovenproof dish that's been sprayed with a bit of cooking spray. Cover the meat mixture with the mashed potatoes and make a groovy little design in it with a fork. Cook in the oven for about 20-25 minutes until the peaks you've made in the mash turn golden brown.

Eat it up!

Tinga de pollo or how to make the most out of a giant bag of tomatoes

I have not mentioned it yet but last week, el presidente-of-the-company-that-used-to-own-me-but-doesn't-anymore gave me a giant sac of tomatoes from his farm. I can't say how much exactly but many kilos of tomatoes and they were all pretty much ripe and needed to be dealt with shortly. So I spent a number of late nights in the kitchen and brewed up a few sauces.

The first one was a relatively traditional tomato sauce for pasta. I enjoy the roasted tomato sauce the best but don't have a flame of any kind for the roasting so decided to mix some cultures and Mexicanize (if you can even believe it!) the proceedings. Essentially I roasted the tomatoes and the garlic on the comal so they were all nice and charred up and then went about making the sauce in an ordinary way - with some onion, salt, pepper, oregano and basil (from my window garden). Cooked it for a while and then just bottled it up.

I have not tried it yet so don't have any verdict on how it worked out. The taste out of the pot while cooking seems to point to good news . . . .

The next night I used up a whole whack more of the tomatoes and made a big batch of roasted tomato and chipotle sauce. It is my favourite sauce and I like to eat it in many ways. It was one of the first introductions to the beauty of Mexican cooking that I got from, you guessed it, Rick Bayless. Now I make it all the time and I had been waiting for the good tomatoes to start rolling in. So I made a lot. Gave some to el presidente and kept the rest.

Having some fresh sauce on hand, I decided to make a tinga de pollo. In this case, it's shredded chicken (let's just buy one already cooked, it is a weeknight!) along with shredded onion and potato. Cook up the potato and onion, shred about half the chicken and add it along with a cup or so of the sauce and you have an absolutely outstanding dish. You can use this inside tacos, on tostadas or sopes, or just eat it straight up. I toasted a few tortillas and layered them up with some sour cream, chopped white onion, sliced avocado, and freshly chopped tomato. What a feast.

2 for 1 roasts

Metro had some eye of round and outside round roasts on 2-for-1 special this week, so I thought I'd drop by and see what was what. The thing about shopping at the store that's right in the confines of Ryerson University is that they have lots of smaller sized cuts of meat, which is great if you're cooking for just a few people rather than a whole family. So I managed to find a couple of smallish roasts, being quite chuffed to get the deal.

Apparently with the eye of round, some people cook them in the oven but they are also okay as a pot roast. As a someone who hearts her pressure cooker, I decided to go the pot roast route as you can really get a lot of flavours in there and you don't have to have the oven on for ages! Oh and just in case, I've not shared my great pressure cooker with you, here's a pic of her. It's a Futura brand and I love it because it has the easiest and least scary pressure valve that I've ever seen on a pressure cooker. And it is pretty easy to clean.

Once you've prepared everything - sauteed some onions and garlic, browned the meat, then added beef stock, a bay leaf, some thyme, and - it takes about 40 minutes of cooking time (maybe a little less). While it was cooking I cut up some carrots and fingerling potatoes that we got from our Cooopers' Farm box this week. I added them after the 40 minutes and let them get up to pressure and cook for another eight minutes. Then I made a gravy by thickening and reducing the sauce, adding some sliced up mushrooms and a little bit of worchestershire sauce for a bit of zing. It all came together very nicely and the potatoes were just out of this world!! And there were lots so J could carbo-load before her 10K race that she was going to run the next morning!

We also got heirloom tomatoes and beets in the box this week. And never one to pass up a chance for a beet salad, made one to go with our lovely Friday night roast dinner. This one had some soft goat's milk cheese and candied walnuts to go with the beets, onions, and tomatoes. Delicious and I roasted enough so we can have a rerun of this fab salad again.



I was up at Cooper's Farm this past week and they assure me that they are growing poblano peppers, which I am thrilled about. We'll be doing some of our picking soon as the tomatoes and tomatillos are ready to roll. I have purchased new canning bottles and salsas are on their way!! Can't wait.

Getting tippy with it

I recently bottled some chipotle en conserva and there was quite a bit of sauce left over once I had put most of the conserva into bottles. I kept the saucy onions that were left over and figured I'd use all that juicy goodness as a base to cook up something spicy in the pressure cooker. Well tonight was that night and I decided to make sirloin tips in chipotle sauce.

I obviously used sirloin tips and the leftover conserva sauce. I also added a poblano and a couple of cloves of garlic, dry roasted on the comal. I browned the meat and added everything else to it in the pressure cooker and cooked it for 15 minutes. I wanted to use up some other vegetables that were in the fridge so cut up and added a zuke and a combination of beet greens and swiss chard after I opened the pressure cooker. Let the veggies boil in the sauce for a a few minutes and presto, a quick and delicious meal. J had said she wanted polenta so I kind of obliged. We only had white corn meal but I made it up and managed to get a pretty good consistency.


The meat come out nice and tender. I really enjoyed the flavour of the greens, which were stronger than spinach. And all of that sauce, which was a little sweet as the conserva was made with quite a bit of sugar as it's supposed to be kind of marmalade-y, absorbed by the polenta. Mmm, mmm. Served the whole thing with a small salad of lettuce, tomato, onions, cilantro and a lime vinaigrette. Salad brought the whole thing together, aha! :)

Local Food Tastes Good!

We've been subscribing to a meat and veg CSA box this summer and it has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it's given us some amazing meat and vegetables to eat, and a curse because there seems to be this ABUNDANCE of meat and veg to eat staring at us all the time!

If you aren't involved in a CSA program, I highly recommend it, though. Ours is through Cooper's Farm and Maze, and the quality of ingredients we have been getting has been amazing! Our biggest down-side for this farm (and a large part of why we may find something different next year) is that it's quite far away from us so it's a bit of a mission to get there every week.

Nevertheless, we've had lots of nice things to eat, peas, carrots, zukes, eggplant, tomatillos, lettuce, chard, and lots of lovely meat! The chickens have been amazing and the beef is very flavorful and fresh tasting, even when frozed! This meal was a very "local" meal for us, in that just about everything on the plate came from the farm!


The yellow is a sauteed zuke that was nicely cooked, but had a very bitter after-taste. Maybe it's the skin? The white to the side of that is a scalloped potato I made from a recipe in America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two magazine (which I HIGHLY recommend if you are a bit like me and have a hard time cutting down recipes to feed only two of you!) and a lovely steak of some sort pan grilled with sauteed red onion and mushrooms. Pretty much all local and all made at home.

Cooking at home is also a blessing and a curse. You may not think so, but with cooking and eating there is always clean up of dishes to do that, when you get home late to begin with, means the "dinner time" activities can often take up a couple of hours of the very short evening. I am trying to get past that, and I have realized that doing the dishes takes less time than complaining about doing the dishes, so it's been productive in that sense. It's really important to us though to start eating more at home. Long talks with my cardiologist (nothing major wrong, no need for concern, but I do now officially have a cardiologist) suggest that eating at home more and cutting down the portions (my biggest issue) would improve the issues I am having significantly because I would then have control over what's going into my food. Add to that the cost of eating at home being substantially cheaper than eating out, it's a win-win right now.

Plus, and I don't know if this is just us or what, but we are so tired of everything that there is to eat here. We still go to Rashnaa, and I love it to bits, but there is little else that is reasonably priced and inspiring to eat these days. Very little holds any interest, and I don't know if that's just dining out fatigue or what, but it's very much there. So eating at home more (even when that dinner is simple scrambled eggs and toast) has jumped in to save the day. Fortunately, the kitchen at Chez Hunger Over Thirst generally serves up tasty treats!

Dinner at the Lodge -- I do Kudu.

The second night was crazy! Our safari drive was cut short by a monstrous rain storm that was beautiful while it was approaching, and frightening when it hit! Our drive Geoff raced through the range to get us to the lodge safely, but early. The rain was pouring and we all sat in the lounge and had a drumming lesson while the kitchen staff prepared us a lovely dinner.

Here's my first plate...

The game on the menu the second night was kudu. It was basically a tenderloin of kudu that had been grilled on the bbq and was all smokey tasting from the rain. It was absolutely and without question one of the most delightful things I had ever tasted!


Wow. It was just amazing. Kudu rules all the way 'round. It was one of my favorite meats that we tasted AND I bought a beautiful kudu purse while staying in Cape Town. God Bless the mighty kudu!

And for those among us not ready to taste the beloved kudu, there was a lamb roast...


It was very lamb-y, and a bit outside my lamb comfort zone. More kudu, please!

There were also some very lovely hassleback potatoes...


And rice! I love rice and potatoes. Bring on the carbs!


There was also a big bowl of cheesey cauliflower and broccoli...



And there was a giant helping of mixed veggies.


Eh. Not my cup of tea, but so be it really.

And then came the showstopper. After wine and food and stories of the rain, we were served a delightful dessert...


Banana crepe with cream and little cocoa pawprints. TOOOOOO FREAKING CUTE!!!!! I loved it! Everyone oohed and ahhhed and dug into their dessert. It was delicious.

It's amazing how hungry and tired you can be when all you do is eat and relax! We went back to our canvas tree top room (which was gorgeous and very sturdy) and crawled into our gigantic bed and fell straight to sleep. It was a good day.

Dinners.

This past week has been an interesting exercise. I am trying to eat less wheat due to the stomach issues, but we are also trying to clear out our freezer and eat some of the things that have been languishing far too long... like these lovely pierogies!

This was a great dinner! We ate the pierogies (which had a little freezer burn, but were otherwise delightful) after they were cooked with a little onion. We topped them with low-fat sour cream. On the side, we sauteed some really lovely and sweet local carrots and browned some turkey kielbasa. (Note that I am saying "we" but this was all G. I mean, I was in the house and offering moral support, but it was not shake-n-bake and I did not help.) I have become a hughe carrot fan, and these were specatacular. I think G just fried them in a little butter in the pan until they were soft and delicious. Oh yeah!

We also had a lovely dinner of fricadelles, sliced fresh tomatoes, marinated mushrooms, and zuchinni salad! Delightful!

The zuchinni salad is a family recipe of G's. You microwave the zuke until it is soft, and then you dice it up and add salt, vinegar, garlic, and oil, and let the whole thing marinate in the fridge. This zuke was ridiculously sweet. It was really very nice, though. The marinated mushrooms were from Cumbrae's, and really weren't all that great. I wouldn't buy them again (and I wouldn't recommend them.)

And the freezer is getting cleared slowly!