Today I cooked up a batch of brown rice (1 cup dry rice) in the rice cooker, chopped up some leftover Italian sausage (2 sausages), and fried up some chopped onions, red pepper, and jalapeños together in the sausage dripping. Yum.
It made 3 hearty servings.
I’m not on a low fat diet.
Leftovers day for gluten-free breakfast!
The asparagus and rice were leftover and just needed to be reheated. The beef cutlet was eye of the round pounded to less than 1/4″ thick, floured with rice flour, salt, pepper, and cayenne. It was pan-fried in half butter, half olive oil.
As part of my continuing series about what a gluten-free person can eat for breakfast…
I just felt like making cashew milk last night and having cereal with those ripe bananas this morning. It feels so good in my tummy.
I was never much of a milk-drinker nor a cereal-eater, but sometimes you just get a craving.
Yes, that’s a ceramic bowl that looks like half a cantaloupe. Food tastes better when you present it attractively.
Since a lot of people seem to be finding my blog after searching for terms like “gluten-free breakfast” and “what do gluten-free people eat for breakfast?”, I thought I would write an occasional series on what I eat for breakfast.
I normally sleep late and eat late these days. I eat “breakfast” at lunch-time, sometimes breakfasty foods, and sometimes not. I have always cooked breakfast, and I have always been open to eating different foods.
If you have decided to go gluten-free, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you move on from the past and open your mind to the foods that are available to you. Food substitutes and analogs are a poor imitation of the foods you can no longer eat. Let them go and find new foods and new ways to prepare the ingredients you can eat.
What you see in this photo is this morning’s breakfast. I had home fries, thinly sliced beef sauteed in butter, an omelet with red pepper sauce, and fresh strawberries with a little cream poured on them.
So you say you still need biscuits, and bread things to go with your breakfast? You can have it both ways. The best are made fresh at home.
Okay, this would only have helped you if you had a Shaw’s Supermarket handy and you were able to get there during the sale, while they had Envirokids breakfast cereal on sale for $3.50 a box, which is like $1.50 off. I totally stocked up.
I guess this is an excuse to give you my favorite recipe for nut milk.
Cashew Milk
Put the cashews in the blender. Blend them into fine granules. Add water to cover, and then add more water as you blend, stirring them up from the bottom, until it is thick and smooth. Add more water until it is the consistency of cream. Add the salt. Pour into a pitcher, cover, and refrigerate.
If you blend it very smooth, there will be hardly any gritty residue, unlike almonds, which absolutely have to be filtered. I find it’s good enough for cereal and smoothies. I don’t drink milk. You may want to filter it anyway. Give it a stir after it has been sitting in the refrigerator for a while.
It is great over cereal with bananas or strawberries. Yum.
Somewhere in this blog is a post, maybe two, on using whole dried beans in baking.
I’m still down on bean flours, still trying to use up the ones in my cupboard. But it occurred to me that it might give better results to steam the bean bread rather than baking it, since it would not overcook on the outside before it was done in the middle. And just for you, my readers, I decided to take the plunge and see if it worked, so you didn’t have to.
I don’t have an exact recipe for you. What I did was soak 1 cup of dried white beans, 1 cup of brown rice, and 1 cup of blanched almonds separately. The beans may take several hours to overnight, even in warm water. I discarded the bean liquid and rinsed the beans. The rice and almond soaking liquid I reserved.
First I put the rice in the food processor. Hm. that didn’t grind it up very fine.at.all. I added some liquid, didn’t help. I added the almonds to it and processed it, then finally ended up putting it in the blender, to which I had to add a great deal of liquid in order to get it smooth. Next time I will start with raw brown rice that I will grind as fine as possible, soaking and then blending it, again, separately.
The beans are easy to grind up smooth in the food processor. After they are a gritty mush, add liquid bit by bit until they turn into a smooth, fluffy paste.
I mixed everything together, added a tablespoon of yeast, 1-1/2 teaspoons of salt, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, 1/3 of a cup of sugar, and a teaspoon each of xanthan gum and guar gum. I added 1/4 cup soft butter, 1/2 cup of sweet rice flour and 1 cup of white rice flour and mixed it all up.
What I’m not telling you, since I didn’t measure, is how much liquid I added to blend and process this. Obviously you’ll have to do whatever works for you. But when it comes to adding rice flour at the end, the amount you add should be enough to make it at least firm enough to scoop and pack into a greased nonstick loaf pan.
I steamed a small sample, which seemed okay. So I packed the rest into a large loaf pan, which it almost filled. I let it rise an inch, then put the loaf pan on a rack in a roasting pan with a dome lid. I buttered a piece of foil and set it on top, added an inch of water, turned on the fire, and set the timer for 15 minutes after it came to a boil. At 15 minutes I lowered the heat and tightened up the foil so it wouldn’t expose the surface to more steam than necessary.
I wasn’t sure how long it would take. I figured with a loaf pan that big, it would probably take more than an hour to bake in the oven. I ended up steaming it for 2 hours.
Surprise! it was brown on the surface, including the top, but with a softer crust that makes slicing easy. It has no beany flavor or texture. It is quite bread-like, in the “old-fashioned moist farmhouse bread” style I like so much.
I made a sausage and egg sandwich for breakfast. Oh, my!
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.
Makes 3 waffles
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.
I’m not sure what to call these babies. I just know that I went on a rice flour waffle-making binge, and realized that waffle batter poured into a waffle (or some other shape) made tasty breads for the table, without drying out as rice baked goods often do in the oven. Out on the prowl of kitchen stores, I found a pizelle maker, which I could undoubtedly make crackers from. But I was not in the mood to spend $40 on a pizelle maker that day.
Next time I was in the mood to shop, I went around my local stores. At Kohl’s I found a “quesadilla maker”, sort of an odd thing which is supposed to squeeze your quesadillas and seal them into little triangles, I guess. The issue was that the only one in the store was a demo model. They didn’t have any for sale at another local store. For all that, they didn’t have many small appliances for sale at all. As the clerk explained it to me, they stock up the store for the holidays. When the appliances run out, they run out and are not replenished by the central office. WTH? A store with no merchandise for sale? Is this Soviet Russia?
Anyway, I made a batter, poured it in, and baked. Mmm, good. Leftovers reheated in the toaster oven were just as tasty. You could serve these in a basket at any meal. The split peas give them a nice golden appearance.
1/3 cup yellow split peas, soaked in warm water for a couple of hours
1 cup of rice flour blend*
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup water
3 tablespoons melted butter, oil, or shortening
Drain and rinse split peas, and put in the blender with the water until smooth. Add remaining ingredients and beat until smooth. Pour into a prepared quesadilla iron (or any other similar appliance) and bake until brown and toasty.
*Rice flour blend: Mix 1 pound of sweet (glutinous) rice flour with 4 pounds of white rice flour.
Sorry, I ate the whole thing the first time around. But they were so good I ended up making them again the next day, so I got to take a few photos.
What I did was to chop a clove of garlic and an inch of leeks very finely. (Day 2 potatoes had sweet red peppers sauteed in with the leeks, as you can see in the photo.) I sautéed them in chicken fat—use butter, oil, or whatever fat you prefer— gently until soft, adding freshly ground black pepper and ground or crushed red pepper if desired. Mix in with leftover mashed or smashed potatoes. These will be better if there is fat in the mashed potatoes, but it will still work if the potatoes were mashed without fat. Taste to adjust for seasoning, adding salt if necessary.
I recently started zapping my potatoes in the microwave to mash them. Just put them in a deep, covered casserole and microwave until soft. It couldn’t be easier, and they cook up properly for mashing. You’ll see I’ve got what looks like a ceramic glazed cast iron dutch oven. It’s not. Actually, it’s a ceramic casserole with a nonstick coating that I got on one of those special promotions at the supermarket. It’s made in China, oh-oh…
Butter or grease a cold non-stick Belgian waffle iron. Pack in enough cold seasoned potatoes so that when you lower the top and squish it closed, the grids will be filled without coming out the side. Now plug it in and put it on high. Check after 5 minutes, giving more time if necessary until it is golden brown. If you have more potatoes to do, keep the first batch in a warm oven, loosely covered with foil while waiting for the remainder to bake. I think with a large waffle iron you can probably make four generous servings in one cycle.
I would probably serve these at brunch or as a side dish with dinner.
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