Sausage and Cheese Rollups

The concept of sausage and cheese and onions “IN”  a bun  haunts me.  I once went to a restaurant where all they served was “stufffed sandwiches” and salads. It was great.  Super delicious, but then I wasn’t worried about gluten or cross contamination either.

Fast forward to me not having any fun food, or  party food to eat due to extreme allergies.. and we end up with a level of quirky, creative desperation.  Here’s today’s edition of quirky lunch. Wow! they were good.

Roly-Poly Lunch Rolls

• Brown  sausage with chopped onion.
• Make one recipe of the wonder dough.     Roll it out into a rectangle. Use a little potato starch to keep it from sticking  to everything too much. I rolled mine out on parchment paper sprinkled with potato starch.
• Spread the cooled sausage and onion mixture.
• Sprinkle it with shredded mozzerella cheese. Add a sprinkle of parmesan if you  feel like it.
• Roll up the dough, carefully including the filling.

Make 1 -  2  inch slices and place them, cut side up (like cinnamon rolls) in a lightly greased 9 x 13 pan.

Bake at 400 for 25-30 minutes. Let them cool. Serve with a big green salad.

One is missing, because I ate it before I remembered the camera. LOL. It was realllllllly good.

Other filling ideas:

• Boar’s head pepperoni, with pasta sauce + shredded cheese = rolled up pizza fun
• Cubed ham and shredded cheese.
• Cubed SPAM and shredded cheese
• shredded chicken and cheese

Kids! It’s taco night!

Taco mania around here is pretty consistant. It’s meat with spices, in a taco shell. And I am bored with that concept, as well as out of meat in the freezer at the moment.  So we invented meatless tacos.  You could add a layer of cooked meat to this under the cheese I suppose, if you must.

Lentil Tacos

Step one: Lentil Mash

• 1 cup dry lentils
• 3 cups water

 Boil gently for about 20-25 minutes, or until soft. Drain off most of the water, but save it for later( – you might want to thin the mash)… then blenderize the cooked lentils to a mashed potato like consistancy. Use the saved water to work that out to your taste.

Step two: Onions + Mash+ Taco seasoning (to taste)

• 1 T oil
• 1 chopped onion

Saute the onion until golden brown and then add in the mashed lentils. Then add:

• one packet of taco seasoning and a little more of the saved lentil cooking water if you still have any, or some broth if you don’t.

Step three: Spread the mixture into a baking dish. Layer on chopped tomatoes and some shredded mozzerella cheese. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes to let the cheese get all melty and bubbly.

Add some shredded cabbage on top if you want to.

Serve with corn chips. And if you are from the west coast, add some ranch dressing to the options on the table, sour cream is okay too. Tastes like tacos, but there is no meat. yay.  I am so taking this to the next potluck I go to.

Delish.

Chili-rific

It’s snowing. I am cold – even with the thermostat up, so I made a vat of chili. Yes, a vat. The reason I cook gallons of soup/chili/spaghetti sauce at a time is because we go through it so fast that it actually is less work to spend all of a Sunday afternoon concocting the mess and freezing it in containers to use later, than to make the recipe 8 times.  Less waste of my time, less continuous cleanup, more instant dinners in the weeks ahead. It’s all good.

Chili for chilly weather .Ha.

• 1 large can crushed tomatoes
• 1 large can diced tomatoes
• 1 -16 oz can garbanzo beans -blenderized into paste
• 1 can pinto beans
• 2 cans dark red kidney beans
• 3 C cooked lentils
• 1 lb. ground pork – browned
• 1 onion – cooked in with the pork
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp white pepper
• 1 tsp cumin
• Chili powder – to taste -  I used about 1/2 the container this time until it tasted right… I must have bought the wrong kind at the store.
• water as needed to make it the consistancy that you prefer.

 Blenderize the garbanzo beans into a paste and put it into the vat. (This helps to thicken the chili, as well as hide the fact that I am making them eat  — cue the dramatic music here — garbanzo beans…oh, the horror.) Drain the cans of beans.  Dump them all into the soup kettle. Add the tomatoes too.

Brown the meat and onions. Add that to the kettle. Add spices. Cover and let simmer for at least two hours. Stir the chili every 20 minutes or so to keep it from sticking. This version simmered for about 5 hours. It’s perfect.

Other things that I have been able to blenderize and add to the chili in the past: Green beans, broccoli, carrots, butternutsquash…. just think of all the veggies that they won’t even know they are enjoying… LOL.

 

Serve with grated cheese and frito scoops.  mmmmmmmm

Thanksgiving…

Everyday eating with assorted weird allergies is hard enough and the holidays are tricky because we all have favorite foods that just spell the holiday in our memories. Even foods that are now off limits due to allergies, intolerences and just plain old fashioned unexplainable hives. Ah!, hives for the holidays again?… No thanks.

I will be making the full gluten exposure version of dinner for those that refuse to give up their gluten. Silly people. Go ahead, knock yourselves out. Just don’t make me eat it.

So, then the rest of us will have the no-gluten identical dinner. Somehow I do this in the tiniest kitchen in America. I don’t know how, but it seems to work out okay.

I have Thanksgiving my way. Baked chicken, gluten-free stuffing, orange-apricot jello salad, green bean casserole.. (Who brought the green bean cassERole?), big salad, and a nice veggie assortment along with some pickles and some sort of dip that I can have.

Safe food.

Comforting food.

Along with watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade and sleeping during the football game, isnt’ comfort food what it’s really all about? Oh, and thanks. I am thankful that there is any kind of food left on the planet that I can eat.

Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Goat-herder Pie

Why the standard dinner pie/casserole is called a shepherd’s pie… I don’t know. But this is the adaptation of that sort of idea. And it’s good. And they ate it, and better yet, wanted more. That’s always a good sign. Maybe I should call this “peeled and chopped”?

Goat-herd Pie

You will need about 2 cups of mashed potatoes for the topping. You can either cook them now, or use up some leftovers… up to you.

Combine:

• 1 lb cooked – some kind of ground meat – turkey, pork, lamb, beef- whatever
• 3 peeled and chopped carrots
• 3 peeled and chopped zuchinni
• 1 peeled and chopped onion
• 2 peeled and chopped cloves of garlic
• 1/2 C frozen peas
• 1/2 C frozen green beans
• 2 T potato starch
• 1 C vegetable broth
• salt, pepper and Italian seasoning – to your taste

Cook meat. Saute onion, carrots, garlic, zuchinni until slightly cooked through. Add potato starch and stir in the broth. It should create a little bit of gravy. Add any seasoning. (I used a pinch of salt and a pinch of white pepper and a sprinkle of italian seasoning- YMMV)

Pour this concoction into an 8 x 8 baking dish and bake at 400 for 10 minutes.

Top with mashed potatoes. Bake for 20 minutes. Then add a 1/4 cup of shredded mozzerella cheese and let that melt on top for a minute. (I used Mozzerella because it’s the same color as the potatos- use cheddar or whatever you want.)

Serve. Repeat.

Green Bean Pizza

GREEN BEANS??!?!?!? What? Well, yeah,…. but it also had onions and garlic and whatnot. And it was good. So there. You are just jealous that you didn’t think of it first : )

Sometimes there are brainstorms when cooking, this was more like cleaning out the bits of leftovers in the fridge, I hate to throw out perfectly good food. So while I was sauteeing the onion, and garlic I was poking around in the fridge for a lonely zucchini or squash or something.. and the small tupperware container of leftover greenbeans said “Add me!!” So I did. I am not usually so adventurous with random green vegetables… but this worked out just fine.

The pizza crust was brown rice and potato.

The sauce was a small amount of the original pizza sauce, because I only had 1/2 C left, and the rest of the sauce was pureed pinto beans thinned out with a little gluten free beer.

So let’s see.. the gluten free revolution/mandate has brought me to a pizza of rice, potato,lentil thickened tomato sauce, pinto beans, greenbeans, onions and garlic topped with GF pepperoni and pepperjack cheese. And it was good. I only wish I’d made more.

Don’t you wish you had spiffy pizza to go with your GF beer? ha.

Biscuits, baby, biscuits.

I can’t tell you how hard life is without bisquik to make my biscuits quick and perfect, not to mention its other duties as pancakes, coffeecake and dumplings for the chicken gravy.

So. Onward in my quest for the recipe that I will keep on hand for biscuits. This one is a keeper. Oh, there have been several others… that turned out like rocks, or worse gummy rocks…. this one works at last. Ahhhhhh. This is good hot, cold, with jam, or gravy. Yum.

• 1 C rice flour
• 1/4 + 1 T palm shortening
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 Tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 tsp soda
• 1 1/4 tsp xanthan gum
• 1/2 tsp  salt
• 3/4 C coconut milk
• 1 tsp rice vinegar

Mix all the dry ingredients together, and cut in the shortening with a fork until it’s all blended. Add the vinegar to the coconut milk and mix in. Golf ball sized dough gently rounded and patted down to a 1/2 inch thickness works great. Bake at 375 for 15 minutes on a parchment paper lined tray.

Rainy Day Chili

Yes. It’s raining. The daylight sky is pretty dark and the school luch menu actually says “chili” today. Woohoo! Planning, it’s all in the planning. Fall weather always seems to need “soup” or chili of some kind.

Here’s what we came up with for lunch today.

First I cooked the lentils.

1 1/2 c  dry lentils, cooked in 4 cups of water until soft.

Then I cooked 1 lb. of ground meat (turkey, pork, whatever)

and added in:

• one large white onion, diced
• 1 large can diced tomatoes
• 1 large can crushed tomatoes
• 1 can red kidney beans
• 1 can pinto beans
• 3 tablespoons of chili powder
• 2 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp white pepper

Then I added about 1/2 of the cooked lentils and pureed the rest with 2 small jars of butternut squash baby food  with 1 can of garbanzo beans, and a small amount of water, probably a half of a cup. 

The puree went in the pot with the rest of the tomatoes and beans. I did add some additional water of an unknown amount to make it the right consistancy. YMMV.

Let that simmer for 30 minutes. Yum.

Chicken soup

Lunch out + wheat noodles = sick child. Hmmmmm.

Yeah. Well, so… after a nap she was “sort of” hungry again. I was skeptical but I made Gluten free chicken soup. I was going to put rice noodles into it, but decided to use pre-cooked rice instead.

• 2 C organic vegetable broth
• 1 C peeled and minced zucchini
• 1 slice of onion – minced

Cook the onion and zucchini in the broth- then blenderize it all to make it disappear. Then add:

• precooked rice about 3/4 to 1 C or so
• precooked chicken bits – leftovers work great

and simmer awhile. I suppose you could add even more veggies and blenderize them too, but that’s what I had on hand. Broccoli is good, lentils would be good too, but the clear soup then would be thicker…. hmmm…”Sneaky veggies”? or just “cooking” you decide what’s best in your kitchen with your kids.

I also added a bit of salt, and white pepper and some poultry seasoning to taste, with a dash of safflower oil.

She said it was tasty. That’s good. Eat your soup.

I heart rollwiches

Anytime we go out to lunch with the girls… I am faced with about 15 wrap sandwich choices or maybe a deli sandwich that I can deconstruct, sometimes soup.. or a bowl of fruit. Bleah. Expensive food I can’t eat anyway.. so why try?

Who needs to *eat out* when *eating in* is tastier? Well.. I do like to get out, but *eating out* is not really an option anymore. I guess I could take my lunch and just order for the wheat eaters…. hmmm… I should try that.

Anyway. I heart rollwiches. Sometimes known as “wraps”- they always come with a wheat tortilla. Now they don’t have to!! (see my previous post on tortillas).  I love my new food.

• 1 GF tortilla
• 4 thin slices Boar’s Head Hard Salami
• 4 slices Boar’s Head Pepperoni
• handful of shredded mozzarella cheese
• bits of butter lettuce to taste

Assemble everthing except the lettuce and zap it in the microwave until the cheese is slightly melty. Place lettuce on top, and roll as tightly as possible. Let cool a little.

Eat.

It can’t be easier. It can’t be tastier. I just hope it’s portable for roadtrips.