Gluten-Free Cooking Made Easy

I have a secret.  As much as I love cooking and baking, some of my favorite recipes mostly come from a box.  I know.  It's not exciting or sexy or a good recipe, but sometimes it's not worth the extra effort.  I mean really, I've never made my own pie crust, and yet I've received tons of complements on it.  I feel that pancakes fall into the same category.  Go for the mix!  Now that I'm eating gluten-free, my new favorite pancake mix is the Fresh & Easy brand.  But any brand will do.  I mix mine with soy milk or coconut milk.  And the real secret?  I fry them up in coconut oil.  Seriously.  Try it.  You won't even need syrup.  

I also add chocolate chips.  Because everything tastes better with chocolate.  Just make sure the chips you buy are also gluten-free.  I could eat these every day for breakfast, except that they're not all that good for me as an everyday meal.  

You can also experiment.  Sometimes I substitute things like oatmeal or quinoa ground into flour for some of the pancake mix.  Or add blueberries or bananas in lieu of chocolate chips.  Or in addition to chocolate chips!

I also tried something new today.  I started with some Glutino pretzels.  If you're looking for things like bagel chips or pretzels of the gluten-free variety, I highly recommend this brand.  I try to minimize how many "fake" wheat things I eat, but sometimes you just want something with your hummus or guacamole or cheese that is not made of vegetables.

Next, I melted some chocolate.  I leave it up to you which kind of chocolate you like.  I like dark chocolate, so I used a Ghiradelli Extra Dark Chocolate bar.  I melted it in a frying pan, as my double boiler was packed away.  You have to keep the heat low and be careful not to burn the chocolate.  I lined a cookie sheet with wax paper and poured the melted chocolate over the pretzels.  I mixed them around in the chocolate, and put the whole thing in the freezer to set.  I'm sure there's a more elegant way to do this with less chance of melty chocolate covered pretzels when you're done, but I'm ok with eating mine out of the freezer.  

A Change In Direction: How do you eat when your food is trying to kill you?

So back when I started this (and when I actually posted), this was meant as a collection of modified recipes to track when I tried to make things healthier, or cope with only having whatever ingredients were on hand.  But 8 months ago I was diagnosed with a host of food allergies - including tree nuts, wheat, tomatoes, squash, and celery.  Celery.  Who is allergic to a plant that is basically water????

This has made eating hard.  Wheat is in everything.  Celery is in most soup stock, so that's hard.  If I want to order a salad is it often full of nuts or tomatoes to compensate for the lack of wheat and celery.  Bottom line:  food is trying to kill me!  Well, I'm not that allergic (yet), but it's definitely doing its best to make me an itchy, snotty, inflamed mess.

This means that I need to step up cooking, and also step up my creativity while cooking.  So I'm attempting to step up the blogging, and share my new allergen free takes on recipes.  Stay tuned!