Food, cooking, eating, and me

This is mostly a rant. My personal preference is to mix 3 parts white rice flour with 1 part sweet rice flour, which gives the mix a little clinginess. I’m getting back into using gums. I’ve been using 1/2 teaspoon of a mix of guar gum and xanthan gum per cup of flour, which doesn’t seem to bother me. The mix tastes and feels a lot like wheat flour in many ways. Not only that, but it’s cheap.

So what’s the deal with the bean flour blends? Yecch. They don’t taste particularly good, and they feel like, I don’t know, hummus in your mouth. If you don’t overcook whatever it is to death, they taste gross and raw bean-ey. People buy them for me when I visit so I’ll be able to bake while I am there, probably because they cannot imagine not eating baked goods.

I think it’s a conspiracy to get people to spend $3.50 a pound on a specialty item rather than $1 a pound on something that can be bought at any Asian market.

I am trying to use it up now. Recipes soon. And yeah, the whole site is going to get a makeover really soon.

Definitely quick and easy. Authentic? Not remotely. I’m not Thai, don’t blame me for liking this. Spicy? Somewhere between spicy and really, really hot. So if you like Thai food, you’ll probably like this. If you haven’t had Thai food and aren’t into spicy-hot, it’s probably not for you.

1 can Thai curry paste, any flavor (check the label for wheat)
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1 can coconut milk

Dump the ingredients into the blender and process until smooth. Heat and serve over rice, steamed vegetables, meat or poultry, or whatever.

Thai curry paste comes in a lot of different flavors. After you’ve sampled a few, you will start to be able to tell some differences.

Years ago I used to belong to a Yahoo coconut oil group, where people would discuss the miraculous health benefits of coconut oil and ways of consuming more of it.

Coconut oil has been much maligned. It has since then been shown that research blaming heart disease on coconut oil was faulty. In fact, in countries where coconut oil is a major part of the diet, there is no more heart disease than in countries where it is hardly ever consumed.

The group is still there, though I had to check to see, it’s been so long. It is also pretty busy.

But getting back to the subject at hand, it was on that list that I first saw mention that you could whip coconut milk. I bought a can, chilled it, and whipped, but nothing happened.

There’s a need for a non-dairy whipped topping that isn’t all crap. There’s also a need for a vegan whipped topping, um, that isn’t all crap. Really, the only home recipe I saw for something like this was made by beating silken tofu with sweetening and pouring it over the dessert. The recipe poster admitted it was not as good as whipped cream. The only person who made the recipe gave it 1 star and called it the worst recipe she had ever made and a waste of tofu.

So imitation whipped cream can be bad.

If you’ve ever opened a can of coconut milk in cool weather, you’ve probably noticed that it looks like a big lump of fat with some liquid. I always assumed that it was mostly fat. But finally this week I was opening a can of coconut milk and noticed the nutrition facts. I asked myself how that compared to dairy cream.

Was I surprised! Canned coconut milk has only half the fat of dairy cream, about the same as coffee cream. No wonder it doesn’t whip. But the question is, could it whip if it was more concentrated?

So I took a can of coconut milk, warmed it up to make sure all the fat was melted, added 1/2 cup of dried coconut milk powder and 1/2 cup of sugar. After stirring for a while and leaving at room temperature to cool, I put it in the refrigerator, stirring every half hour until it was cold. I whipped it for a long time to get soft peaks, but it definitely was whipped. And grainy, in a cold coconut oil graininess kind of way. So it wasn’t great, but it was at least as good as a lot of non-dairy fakes. And it was natural.

Flash forward. The next time I added an entire cup of coconut milk powder.

I poured it in bowl of my electric mixer to chill, put that in the refrigerator, and put the beaters in the freezer. As the mixture cooled, it thickened like heavy cream, and was white like cream, rather than translucent like skim milk. I continued to whip it a few strokes every 15 minutes or so, until it was chilled. Then I put it onto the mixer, and WOW! In about 45 seconds I had perfectly stiff peaks of yummy coconutty whipped creamy goodnes. The texture and mouth feel are exactly like whipped heavy cream. Okay, it’s pretty coconutty, so it will probably go better with tropical fruit than temperate types. In fact, I would server this with pineapple, mangos, etc. to my friends who aren’t dairy-challenged. It is really that good.

A reprise of sorts. That coconut sorbet recipe has been incredibly popular, and I thought I’d take it to the next level. So I made it with chocolate. It is totally yummy, if not as creamy as regular ice cream. If you’re interested, the proportions I used were: 1 can of coconut milk, 5/8 cups of sugar, 1/2 cup water, and 1/2 cup quality dark chocolate, chopped. I melted the ingredients together and let them cool in the refrigerator, then made it up by the old “remove-stir-repeat” method, owing to the fact that I don’t have an ice cream maker.

It wasn’t as smooth as I would like, undoubtedly due to the fact that I was too tired to stay up and finish it. I’m going to try again before I post the complete recipe. I’m thinking a little more dilution might help. And then I’ll put up a photo, too, instead of just eating it all.

Time to plan ahead to grow whole fruit in bottles. Undoubtedly these make great holiday gifts.

How To Put A Whole Fruit Inside A Bottle! – The most popular videos are here
I suggest you try adding some sugar to some of them if you like sweet liqueurs.

I finally did it, figured out how to redo the site in php so I can more easily put new recipes in the recipe index. My goal was to change the appearance as little as possible, and I think I’ve succeeded in that. This blog has not been changed. The biggest difference that you should see (aside from a few ads I’m hoping will defray the cost of the site) is that each of the old pages has a new name. The old page will be redirecting for a while so that people who have bookmarked specific pages can change their bookmarks. Eventually you will not see those redirects anymore.

With the new format, I should be able to put new recipes in the index much more easily. Eventually all the recipes that are mixed into blog entries should end up there, even as I keep making new ones.

Happy gluten-free eating!

I’m sorry, I ate it all before realizing that I ought to snap a photo.

Seriously, the site gets a fair number of hits from people searching for gluten-free and/or dairy-free breakfast options. It seems like what used to be a “balanced” or “square” meal in the old days – eggs, meat, potatoes, juice, bread – has become an artifact preserved only in those museums of culinary archival, restaurants. Nowadays few people eat anything for breakfast besides cold cereal or baked goods.

This morning I had breakfast fried rice. I fried a jumbo breakfast sausage, removed it from the pan and sliced it. In the pan I put some more butter, leftover brown rice, and a cup of chopped green onions. After the rice was hot I added back the sausage and an egg. I stirred until done, seasoning with black pepper and crushed red pepper. No salt was needed as both the rice and sausage were previously seasoned. I served it with a small bowl of fresh pineapple. Yum.

Heres a link to the breakfast fried rice recipe, if you’re a recipe sort of person. There are also bacon, ham, and vegan fried rice variations.

I know it’s been a while, but unlike other times of redolence and maybe debauchery, I’ve been working hard trying to perfect recipes worthy of posting. Unfortunately, some of these recipes require a lot of attempts before you feel like you’re starting to make progress. Then all of a sudden, you’re there.

I’ve got one here now.

Oh, this is perfect. Light, airy, crispy, gluten-free, and vegan.

Gluten-free vegan chocolate waffles

Makes 3 waffles

• 1 cup of rice flour blend (4 parts white rice flour, 1 part sweet rice flour)
• 3 tablespoons cocoa
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 3 tablespoons coconut oil, refined or virgin (non-vegan option: butter
• 3/4 cup water

Method 1: sift together the dry ingredients. Melt the coconut oil. Mix all together with the water and beat with a wire whisk until smooth.

Method 2 (when the coconut oil is solid): Place the dry ingredients and the coconut oil in the food processor and process until smooth. Dump into bowl and beat with wire whisk until smooth.

Heat a non-stick waffle iron on high. When hot, brush grids with a little coconut oil. Pour enough batter to almost cover the bottom grid, close the iron and bake until done. Remove, sprinkle with powdered sugar and eat out of hand, or serve with crushed berries.

A reader asked me about sweet rice flour, which he had been unable to find in his area. I suggested looking in Asian stores for “glutinous rice flour”, which is another name for it. Sure enough, he and the clerk finally found it, although they were at first understandably concerned by the resemblance of “glutinous” to “gluten”.

Various types of glutinous rice are used in Asia. In Korea and Japan, they use short-grain glutinous rice, while in Southeast Asia, they use long-grain. I understand there is a black type in Thailand, but I have not seen this.

The first time I ever saw long-grain sweet rice in a Cambodian store, I asked the clerk how I should cook it, and he said, “Very carefully.” OK.

If I want to boil it like regular rice, I rinse it well and soak it for a few hours in my rice cooker before turning it on to cook with a regular cycle, one cup of rice to 1-1/3 cups of water. I like salt in my rice, so I add 1/2 teaspoon per cup of rice. I understand I’m the only one who ever does this, as the traditional method is to soak it in water for a long time, then steam it over simmering water. Personally, I love my Zojirushi neuro fuzzy rice cooker and would need a really good reason to cook it any other way.

Sweet rice when used in cooking tends to get moist and stay soft. So a sauce or pudding thickened with sweet rice flour will not harden up when chilled like one thickened with white rice flour. Sweet rice flour used in baking makes the product moister and stick together better than without. I prefer not to use xanthan gum in baking, as it causes blisters on my tongue. I find that using some sweet rice flour in a baking recipe often gives the result I need.

The Japanese make mochi, which are soft rice cakes made by pounding steamed sweet rice, either with giant mallets in a stone mortar or with a powerful machine. I will have to talk about mochi sometime…

Here’s a photo of the different types of rice I happen to have in my cupboards right now. Can you tell I like rice?

1. Long-grain sweet rice
2. Arborio rice, for risotto
3. Short-grain sweet rice
4. Jasmine Rice
5. Short-grain Japanese rice
6. Long-grain brown rice
7. Brown short-grain sweet rice
8. Black Chinese forbidden rice
9. Lundberg mixed brown rice
10. Short-grain brown rice