Dairy Free Cucumber Dill Salad

I had never put together a cucumber salad before, but I assumed it would be easy enough to find one. I was wrong. There are tons of cucumber salads with dill, but most have yoghurt or some type of cream. I was looking for a basic cucumber salad with just olive oil that I had seen at WholeFoods.

So I just came up with my own based on what I remember seeing at WholeFoods. It’s easy, vegan and delicious.

Ingredients

• 1 Large cucumber
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper, or less to taste
• 1 pint grape or cherry tomatoes, more to taste
• 1/4 large red onion, thinly sliced
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp fresh dill

Just mix all the ingredients. Remember to slice the cucumber. Store covered in fridge to keep chill.

This went great with our Mother’sDay picnic red snapper. It paired perfectly with a bottle of Mud House Sauvignon Blanc. Maybe it was the fact that I had dill on the counter but when I first sipped the wine, before eating anything, I noticed a hint of dill.

This is a new recipe for me, so if you have any suggestions for taking it up a notch please leave a comment below. I just ask that it be a dairy free recipe because dairy is still one of my son’s FPIES trigger foods.

Cheers!

Roast Pork Loin – Garlic Orange Marinade

This recipe was amazingly easy, yet the results are delicious. I picked up a pork loin on sale and marinated it overnight in orange juice. The next day, my mother came over and suggested we put parchment paper on the bottom of the roasting pan to make clean-up simpler. I’m not sure if it made much of a difference, but the results were so fantastic that I want to document exactly how this meal was created.

After lining the pan, we preheated the oven to 350 degrees and rubbed the loin with crushed garlic and Goya adobo seasoning (a mix of salt, garlic and oregano)*****check label and cut it in half – it was huge and way to long to fit into the pan.

We slid the loin into the oven and cooked it for 20 minutes per pound. After a few hours, I checked the internal temperature and when it hit 170 degrees, I pulled it out. I let it sit for about 15 minutes, then sliced part of it up to eat right away. The rest was divided between the refrigerator and the freezer for a time when we are too busy to cook. We stored the sauce/drippings in a separate container. It might not look very pretty right now, but after adding the sauce/drippings back onto the top, it was amazing!

Kitchenware used:

Roasting pan
We bought this huge roasting pan a few years ago, and its been a great investment. We used to use roasting bags, but they can be messy, we’d prefer to keep cooking plastic away from our food, and frankly, as much as we cook, it eventually saves money to use non-disposable cooking tools. Roasting is a wonderful way to make large portions, and since we tend to make enough to eat one day, and freeze a bit for another time, this pan has really been worth the expense and shelf space.

Meat thermometer
When unsure if a meant has been cooked well enough, I tended to overcook it to be on the safe side. This meat thermometer allowed me to check the meat a bit early and pull it out when it was exactly the right temperature.

Gluten Free Chicken Enchiladas

Trick for the Best Homemade Kettle Corn

Best Homemade Kettle Corn

We figured out the trick to making perfect homemade kettle corn.  When my wife sets her mind to something, the persists until it gets done…especially if it’s her favorite treat, POPCORN!

Since both our babies started out with a dairy food trigger for their FPIES reaction, my wife hasn’t eaten dairy for years.  So, she turned to kettle corn instead of the traditional popcorn with butter.  She may have always preferred kettle corn anyway, but I can’t remember since it’s been so many years since she’s had butter.  I have to say, homemade popcorn comes out better glazed with sugar than drizzled with butter.

THE KETTLE CORN TRICK

• Place 2 kernels in pot while oil is heating, add rest of kernels after one of the two pops
• Keep heat on HIGH the whole time
• Add refined sugar directly onto the sizzling kernels, cover and start shaking
• Cover and shake pot the whole time – vigorously
• Shake while kernels pop
• Keep shaking
• Don’t forget you need to keep shaking vigorously
• Ok, when popping dies down remove from heat immediately, remove cover immediately, and pour into bowl immediately
• Salt immediately and try to shake while salting – this is difficult and you’ll probably end up salting first then just mixing later once it’s cooled and not so searing hot and sticky.

To give the formal recipe, here you go (add or reduce quantities to fit your pot and desired serving size.

1. Heat on high enough vegetable oil to coat bottom of a wide pot.  Canola is recommended but I usually just use basic vegetable oil.  Also, I use a Teflon pot because it’s the best size among all my pots, but you experts may prefer traditional aluminum or stainless steel.
2. Drop in two kernels
3. When one kernel pops, add your desired amount of kernels – perhaps enough to cover half the bottom of the pot, but never more than one layer.
4. Sprinkle 2-5 tbsp of sugar on top of kernels
5. Cover and start shaking vigorously and constantly
6. Once popping dies down immediately remove from heat, remove cover, and pour into large bowl
7. Season with a few pinches of salt – to taste and serve

As you can see in my pic, I chose to pair this snack with a cheap botle of Apothic Red Wine – probably cost me $8.99.

Cheers!

Flour Substitutes Explained

Recently, I ran across a woman who was desperate to find some sort of flour that her child could digest. I started to write out a list of all of the flours we had found over the years and was amazed at the sheer number of options.

Not every flour can be used to bake a cake, but the heavier flours can still be used to bred a cutlet or fillet, or thicken a gravy, which might be just the trick needed to expand the variety of foods you create.

Wheat flours – I listed these because I wanted to be comprehensive and didn’t want someone to run across one of these and assume they were something completely different. They have different names and uses, but they are all wheat, so proceed with caution :

Bread flour – high in gluten and protein, this is your best bet when baking traditional breads

spelt flour – very nutritious grain from the wheat family, so not an option if you are gluten free

Rye flour

whole wheat flour

Semolina flour – used to make pasta and couscous

Kamut flour

Triticale flour – wheat-rye hybrid. It is higher in protein than either rye or wheat flour, but has less gluten than regular wheat so if baking, follow the package directions for substitution instructions.

Bean flours:

Just about any type of bean can be ground up and made into a flour, but these seem to be the most popular ones. While you can add a bit of this to other flours to add protein, it doesn’t seem to be a great choice for baking. But these seem to make great thickeners for sauces and dips.

Soy flour,

garbanzo flour

fava bean flour

Black bean four

White bean flour

There is even nut flour – I’ll keep searching and see if there are more nut flours. I assume these are relatively high in fat though, and are probably not very helpful in large doses unless you are trying to add large amounts of healthy calories. These flours seem easier to use in baking, but I haven’t been able to test this in our nut-free house. One glitch might be the fact that, since they are nut based, these flours are best kept in the refrigerator.

almond meal/flour

Peanut flour – Just the mention of this on my blog makes my heart race, but I want to be as comprehensive as possible. Obviously, only try this (or any of these) if you are SURE your child is okay with the original food!

There are countless others, but here is just a list of some of the ones I’ve run across:

Barley flour – While not a wheat flour, many people with gluten allergies have issues with barley. Again, proceed with caution.

Buckwheat flour – despite its name, buckwheat is not related to wheat at all. Buckwheat is actually a seed related to Rhubarb and sorrel

Coconut flour

Corn flour – Various types of corn flour are common ingredients in Latin dishes. Since my family is Colombian, you will probably see this used fairly often here.

Quinoa flour – Fairly expensive compared to other flours, and a pain to make, but found in many recipes and gluten-free mixes because quinoa is generally “safe” for many, and such a great food.

Oat flour

Teff flour – similar to millet or quinoa

Plantain flour – a relatively new flour, I am still trying to figure out how to used it. It doesn’t seem light enough to bake, but might work as a thickener or a crepe.

Yucca flour – Yucca is a tuber, like a potato, and this is also a staple in many Latin breads and dishes

These flours are often used in baking recipes:

Rice flour (brown or white)

Amaranth Flour

Millet flour

Sorghum flour

Potato flour (not potato starch!)

Tapioca flour

And, of course, there is the general…

gluten-free flour

Hopefully one of these flours is in a category you can already tolerate. Many are available online, but I am also seeing an increase in the number carried at local stores, especially health food stores. I have even toyed with the idea of getting a mill to grind my own flours in large amounts, but will leave that project and investment for another day.

Allergy Free Homemade BBQ Chicken

My dear wife stayed up late into the night to cook a ton of stuff I had loaded into the fridge. I was too exhausted to stay awake.
She made the best BBQ chicken I’ve ever had from our own oven, as well as the barbecue sauce and some boneless pork chops to really get ahead on meals for the week with the kids.
She also made the barbecue sauce from scratch using a few recipes she found online and what we had around in our own kitchen.
It turned out so spectacular that I had to post it right away.

Here is her recipe…

While I was waiting for soup to boil, I decided to try putting together a barbeque sauce so I could make barbeque chicken for dinner the next day.  In general, weekday dinners either need to heavily prepped beforehand, or reheated.  This recipe, put together after reading quite a few recipes online, allowed me to do most of the work while I was already cooking other things.

I like marinating meats before cooking, but this time tried to brine the chicken instead.  Brining makes meats wonderfully tender and flavorful, so I threw salt, brown sugar, crushed garlic and some thyme into a bowl of water and stirred it up. Then I put the mixture in a plastic bag with the chicken legs and put it back in the refrigerator overnight.

After reading many articles, it seems the following basic recipe was almost standard:

• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 – 2 cups ketchup
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons red or white wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon dry mustard
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• Freshly ground black pepper

Some recipes added thyme, others used molasses, paprika, chile powder or cayenne.  I was out of dry mustard so used regular mustard. One recipe suggested cooking up a strip of bacon in olive oil, then adding the rest of the ingredients to this yummy pork kicker.

The next day, I took everything out of the fridge and had to microwave the barbeque sauce a bit, since the pork fat had solidified.  Then I put the chicken legs on the pan I had prepped the night before.   After brushing the sauce over the 6 chicken legs, I put it in the oven for about 30 minutes.  Of course, the cooking time will vary based on the size of the chicken legs and the quality of your oven.

For such a quick meal, it was pretty tasty!  Next time, I think I will try switching it out of the brine midday and just shaking it in the sauce to see if I can cut even more prep time out of the witching hour.