Gluten Free meets Agave?

You might think going Gluten Free is a big enough challenge but being health and making good food choices is my over all goal and this is the next stage. I got inspired by a coworker recently diagnosed as Diabetic and missed being able to eat all my great health goodies because they weren’t low in processed sugars. So, I decide to do some research and see what options I had. I have a parent that is also diabetic so I knew a little bit concerning my options but honestly I haven’t cooked a lot with alternative sugars since all the new options have come out like Splenda etc.

My first receipt I tried substituting Agave for Sugar was a recipe for Gingered Carrot cornmeal muffins. I had a lot of carrots left and wanted to make some kinda of goodie with them and decided muffins was easier for people to enjoy than making a carrot cake (also easier for me). In my research, substituting Agave for sugar isn’t a straight substitution like GF flour mixes is for flour. Agave is super sweet, like honey, and if substituted straight for sugar the baked good might actually be way too sweet. I know, you don’t think that’s possible if you are a super sugar person but it can happen. If a receipt calls for 1/2 cup, I usually do 1/3 +2 tbsp. In terms of the texture etc, Agave breaks down like regular sugar when baking so no worries there.

My coworkers loved the muffins and my dear friend also loved that he could partake of some great goodies too. I am excited to try using Agave as an option in cookies and see if there are any issues there!

Mastering GF Cookies-My biggest success yet!

Like most women who bake, I love to make cookies and have been trying for honestly 10 years to make those professional thick, gooey, large cookies that just melt in your mouth.  I have tried a lot of recipes, lots of secret options and have found limited success.  The biggest culprit to my success is mainly my oven and has been where ever we’ve lived (except in our first home in Columbia, Mo, that oven was amazing, if only I had my current wisdom about cookie making).  Yet, today I might have found my chocolate chip cookie master piece and its also GF.

I love dark chocolate and decided to just used the recipe on the back of the Ghirardelli 60% cacao bag and use my most favorite GF premixed baking flour by Pamela.  I used real unsalted butter, used a nice cold baking pan and I did chill the batter for approx. 35 minutes.  I used my smaller cookie scoop and placed them about an 1″ apart.  I did use parchment paper just to make it each to clean the sheets between use.  When I went to grab the cookies, just a minute or too before the suggested time I was expected to find my normal, thin, over cooked, but still great tasting cookie but was presently surprised.

I didn’t even tell my husband I was making GF ones but he can into the kitchen due to the smell and also commented on the looks of the cookies.  After having about 5 and saying how I finally found my recipe for cookies, I told him they were GF.  He didn’t believe me at all until he saw all my ingredients and knew I didn’t have any GLUTEN flour left in the house.

Now, I need to make sure this wasn’t a fluke so I will be experimenting next week!!

Baking success is so much fun!

 

Paleo & GF stuff

One of my coworkers is doing the “Paleo” eating plan where mainly you are focusing on eating natural products (including meats, eggs etc) but staying away from flours (even GF ones) that are made with grains, i.e. rice flour etc.  Instead, the plan calls for using flours made from nuts, like almond, coconut etc.  I haven’t really experimented with either of these flours, main due to their price and inability (coconut for sure) to use as a direct substation for general flour.

We recently had a work party with a fall them so I decided I would make some fall harvest muffins using Paleo friendly ingredients.  I was surprised how many recipes were out there for Paleo and specifically pumpkin, all with a lot of the same ingredients but I liked a few that used maple syrup or honey as substitutes for sugar.  The Paleo Pumpkin Muffin GF I used and of course modified a little, made my entire house smell of freshly baked pumpkin and made my husband and I super hungry.  I wasn’t even sure these bites sized muffins were going to even make it to the party.

I really liked almond flour and found that Trader Joes sells an Almond Flour mix that you could probably use like flour pretty cheap.  Be careful when using Almond flour with lots of oils and not something to absorb the oils bc the dish will become extra oily!

 

Off to find more GF options.

Muffin Progress…

Its been way to long since I posted anything on my blog.  Life has been super busy but I’ve actually kept baking but not posting.  I think the new iPhone 4s with all its great creatures, like Siri, can help me be better at this.  At least that is what I a telling myself in terms of justifying getting a new one.

Since my last post, mainly I have been trying out lots of different GF flour combinations with my core receipts and trying to figure out if I really want to make a go of this muffin business adventure.  In my trials (I have had a few bombs I must say) I have found Pamela’s Baking & Pancake Flour to be some of the best direct flour substitutes out there.  I used it recently to make cinnamon rolls from scratch and used a very GLUTEN oriented recipe and just switch the flour for the GF option.  I had my husband try them fresh out of the oven and he thought the GF ones were the Gluten ones.  Several other peers found that the GF option were super tasty, without that weird texture and often bad after taste.

My real learn in some of my trials was that millet flour is WAY too flaky of a flour to be used on its own as a flour substitute but can be great when a recipe calls for both pastry and multi purpose.  Millet the grain however is an amazing little gem and when I make the Pumpkin Millet muffins at work people are always surprised by the crunchy sweetness of the millet.

More recipes and adventures to come.

Angela

I’ve become the “Muffin Lady”

In my recent change to Gluten Free life style, I have found it almost IMPOSSIBLE to find locally, fresh or semi fresh baked goods. So, I’ve started making some muffins, figuring out which ones are good GF, and see if maybe I can find a few local places to sell my muffins too.

My first round of muffins included the following recipes.

Enjoy!

Zucchini Choc Chip Muffins GF

Zucchini Oatmeal Muffins GF

Oatmeal Choc Chip Cookies GF (aka oatmeal chocolate chip w/maple syrup)

GF muffins: conversing normal recipes to GF

I had a morning meeting in which I knew there were going to be unhealthily breakfast items & thought this might be a good time to try out some GF options & see how they faired. I cook & bake a lot for my friends & coworkers so I knew they would try them & give me their honest feedback.

I found a GF recipe for Whole Grain Morning Glory Muffins on my whole foods app which had everything converted to GF items. The other two were general heathy muffin recipes (Pumpkin and Millet Muffins& Lemon-Cranberry Muffins) that I just substituted general flour for general GF flour & used white rice flour when recipes called for pastry flour. I didn’t even add the xatham gum, which normally you adrenal using GF substitutes.

Of the 3 muffins I made, the two conversion recipes where the most “normal” muffin in taste & texture. The GF morning glory where also vegan & I think had they had eggs & butter they too would have also resemble more of a muffin. Although key item in the two other muffins were either sour cream or Greek plain yogurt.

All & all a great experiment & a lot of my friends @ the mtg where surmised that the muffins were Gluten Free.

My First Gluten Free Party

Most of us have at some point encountered someone that has our same birthday. When I moved to KC in 2008, I found one person who shared my bday of Aug 22 and now I have 3 amazing coworkers, yes I work with these people, that also have a birthday on Aug 22. So, we decided a while back that I would have a birthday party at my place for all of us. One big birthday blowout bast. Trying to coordinate 4 people’s schedules isn’t easy but we decided on a date (Aug 13th) and sent out invites. Our theme, oddly enough, was mexican, mainly because our friend Paul offered to get us a real piñata filled with candy! At this point of my healthy living journey, I was NOT gluten free but one of the birthday ladies was so I was planning on having some general things she could snack on. Yet, life is always changing and I was officially gluten free 2 weeks before this party. Kinda crazy because I had figured out the menu and drink options already and most of them involved a LOT of gluten.

I still have not figured out exactly how I am going to maintain my pantry, keep gluten and gluten free things separate and identified but I knew I had to future out some food options for this party that people would actually eat. My sangria has become a little famous I must say and although very gluten, I had to offer this or honestly the party would be the birthday girls, Charley, and the dogs. I began looking closely at the menu I had prepared and look to see if there were options of converting that menu to Gluten Free by just substituting GF ingredients for gluten ones. I asked some of my GF trusted advisors to make sure these substitutions would be allowed and began trying to locate all the ingredients in GF.

As to not go on and on about how much fun I had locating GF stuff, especially Corn Meal, I will just say that I ended up making two main dishes that were GF: Mexican Hushpuppy recipe & falafel. Falafel its is GF but a lot of mixes are made in factoring areas that have wheat so I had to locate options that specifically said GF. The Mexican hushpuppies was the main recipe I substituted GF ingredients for non GF and they worked out amazingly well. The heat on the mexican hushpuppies was increased and I did had a little cheese but all my GF & non GF friends thought they were great. I was excited personally to find this transition not to difficult and hopefully I will start seeing what of my standard receipts can I convert and use just as easily.

I will have to say that having Gloria make a GF cake was pretty impressive as well. This 3 tiered cake had its topper as a white GF cake with icing (both were mixes) and I was surprised at how moist and yummy both the batter and cake were. I think I will be eating on the leftover GF cake for a while but it was a great feeling to not feel like my part was divided or less of a great event because I was GF. It did make me want to open up a coffee/bakery/sandwich shop that focused solely on GF items though, but that dream will have to wait a little bit!

Off to bed. This has be a fabulous night but I am exhausted!

-A

GF Coconut Cream Cake

My birthday is closely approaching and I have been on this healthy life journey for a year but decided for my birthday this year we would have a nice, not so healthy, birthday cake.  Low a behold someone else had another idea and I became Gluten Free approx 2 wks before my birthday.  My plan of moist, rich, chocolate cake was just a dream and Charley would get to now enjoy cake without me.  Yet, a truly do have great friends because today at work, Darlene, brought me a GF Coconut Cream cake that honestly was some of the best cake I have every had.  I offered it to a few of my coworkers and I think many of them were trying to be polite and just take some because it was cake.  Yet after they tasted it they commented how amazing it was and how awful they thought it was going to be.

The cake itself was more like a spice cake than white cake but the frosting tasted almost like cream cheese with coconut sprinkled on top.  I had two piece that day before I left work and then one large piece for my dessert.  Charley actually liked it a lot too and agreed that the cake itself was really moist and better than it thought it would be.  I forgot to take a picture of the whole cake before we all devoured it but I was too excited to try some!  I did grab a pic of the cake once it arrived home & was in the take out container but Im going to guess this cake its going to last long.  I hope I get one more piece before its completely gone, but well see!

-A

My New Favorite Snack: GF Granola

Last night Charley and I decided to bike to Traders Joe’s in old Missouri to see what Gluten Free things we could find there. We love TJ and shopped their all the time when we were in Boston but going there for GF things is going to be an entirely new experience. The TJ on StateLine & 85th is pretty nice but oddly enough they don’t have bike racks but the one in Leawood does. So, we had to lock our bikes up to the cart rack along with about 6 other bikes. I have visited the TJ in Leawood and it seems a lot small than this one, maybe its just the high ceilings or something but it does seem bigger. I can’t believe I lucked out having a TJ by my work and my house! The produce section is a lot bigger than any other TJ we visited in Boston, along with all their prepared foods. Most of my Apple Leawood coworkers eat lunch at TJ. It funny how many TJ brown paper sacks leave the Apple Store everyday. Its way too convent that they are in the small shopping center that we are. I have resisted visiting there so far during lunch but I am sure once I forget to t bring my lunch one day I will be visiting there like my peers.

So, back to our TJ GF journey. As we started looking around, I noticed most of the GF stuff were mixed within the general stuff. There is a small “g” symbol next to lots of the labels indicating GF items. Oddly enough, there were at least 2 choices in each of the major categories for GF. I guess I looked weird as I was examining the ingredients in some of the products, one of the associates asked if I need a list of TJ GF products. I asked if there was an iPhone app but I could tell from their expression that they didn’t have that but a complete list of products on paper would still be helpful. Someone should invent an iPhone app that would allow you to scan a UPC code and determine if it was GF or not. How cool would that be.

Charley and I started going through the list, which was actually 6 pages long and grouped into logical categories, like breads, crackers etc. As I was looking down the list I came across GF granola! I hadn’t really seen GF granola anywhere and its one of the big things that I miss with my yogurt so I figure it was worth trying. Lets just say I tried some when we got home and wow, its amazing. I had a quarter of a cup just as a snack and found myself going back to the bag and grabbing another small handful to snack on. This is my new GF crack. I am going to have to put this stuff under lock and key or I will eat the whole bag. Its not too expensive either, about $3.29 per bag. I can tell you that the current bag is going to be gone in the next day or so if my snacking habit continues. At least Trader Joe’s is easily accessible from either work or home!

-A

Week 2 of Gluten Free

I have officially resisted having yummy gluten items for a week! I will have to say the first few days were extremely difficult at work because everyone seemed to have gluten baked treats, like yummy blueberry scones! Yet, I resisted and got an iced coffee instead with a piece of Christopher Elbow chocolate! Most of my meals really are small snacks that include veggies, hummus, fruit, yogurt, and some GF fruit and grain bars. I am just starting to think about what type of cookbooks and resources I want to use to start changing my pantry from Gluten to Gluten Free, but my brain is a little overwhelmed right now.

Charley hasn’t minded doing Gluten Free stuff, even bread but I think overtime that will get old. I tried some store bought GF bread and it was horrible. Most of it was overpriced, hard pieces of dried bread like substance. I am hoping to find some bread options but I think making my own bread is honestly going to be the best option. I hope GF bread freezes well because I can’t imagine trying to eat a loaf of bread before it goes bad.

That’s all for now.

-A