a productive weekend

So I accomplished quite a bit this weekend. Figured out how to sew with Ultrex (a Gore-tex type material), got the guest room ready for a friend (quite a feat, I assure you, as it is also my sewing room), and did a fair amount of cooking. So here it is, in order of increasing good-ness:

salsa: I had a lot of tomatillos and cherry tomatoes from the garden, so I decided to make salsa. I put in about a half-dozen tomatillos, four handfuls of cherry tomatoes, a shallot, two cloves of garlic, a jalapeno, and some lime juice. It is definitely spicy, a little watery (I probably just processed it too long though), but it is okay. I think it will be really good with chicken or fish, so we’ll try that tomorrow night. Mmm.

dog treats: My husband made me breakfast on Saturday, and we had some leftover bacon. I made dog treats with bacon, peanut butter, shredded carrot, honey, and a mixture of oat flour and brown rice flour. I had to make my own oat flour using GF rolled oats (seriously, make sure the oats are GF), which I put in the blender until they turned to powder. The dogs seem to love them. I found the recipe at http://tidymom.net/2011/homemade-dog-treats/. I followed the recipe exactly, and it turned out well.

bread: Sad news – my sourdough starter died. Good news – I got to make beer bread instead. I used this recipe, though I cut out the dill. I used Green beer, partly because we had it around the house and my husband won’t drink it, but also because it is a nice dark beer (even if it doesn’t taste great). It made the bread really delicious. My husband said he liked it even better than the sourdough. Because it isn’t a yeast bread, though, it didn’t rise, and so it was just a really really flat loaf. However, like I said, delicious. If you know the beer is there, you can taste it, but it just tastes good. The texture was really light and the beer makes nice holes in the bread the way yeast does in yeast bread.

and the best thing this weekend:

chocolate chip cookies: I didn’t even try the recipe I have in a book, because my experimentation worked out so well. I adapted an old Toll House recipe that my grandmother had altered years and years ago. I wanted to try millet flour, and I’m glad I did. I think it added a flavor that just tasted substantial, if that makes sense. One thing I have done in the past that I wish I had done here is add some cinnamon. But anyway, here is my GF chocolate chip cookie recipe:

• 3/4 c millet flour
• 1/4 c tapioca flour (tapioca starch)
• 1/2 c white rice flour
• 4 T potato flour (not potato starch)
• 2 t xantham gum
• 1 t salt
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 t hot water
• 1 T vanilla
• 1 pkg chocolate chips
• 2 c oatmeal
• 1 c shortening
• 3/4 c brown sugar
• 3/4 c granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 t cinnamon (optional)

Sift flours with soda and salt (and cinnamon). Cream shortening and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time. Add hot water and vanilla. Add sifted dry ingredients. Mix well. Add chocolate chips and oatmeal and mix only until blended. Bake at 375 for about 10 minutes (my grandma said 8, I think it’s closer to 10, just keep an eye on them).

So there’s my follow-up from yesterday. Now it’s time for another busy week – week 2 of my new job!

What I’m doing today

I apologize for the long hiatus. It’s been a few weeks of out-of-town weekends and very busy weeks. Today, I’m going to make another two loaves of sourdough bread, experiment with GF chocolate chip cookies using a recipe I found and attempting to alter a recipe I love, and then I’ll make bacon treats (also GF) for the dogs. I will make a full report on how everything turns out.

I also get to plant amaryllis bulbs today. And I’ll try to get to planting some lily bulbs and replanting daffodil bulbs that came up last weekend.

We dug up all our sweet potatoes – some are 8 inches across! My husband is going to build them a bin in our basement so that we can have our very own semblance of a root cellar.

Bread. Mmm.

I made banana muffins and banana bread over the weekend using two different recipes. The muffins used brown rice flour and pecans, and the bread used teff flour and cream cheese. I had never cooked with teff flour before. Apparently it comes in different colors – ivory, brown, and red – but our grocery store only had brown. Thus, the bread was a little darker than you normally expect. My husband thought both were good, though he preferred the muffins slightly. I thought the bread was quite rich, probably due more to the cream cheese than the flour. I think the verdict is just that banana bread is easy to make taste good, no matter what recipe you use. In the past, I have used a mixture of white rice flour, tapioca flour, and cornstarch, and that always turned out well. Brown rice flour has a little more nutrition in it than white rice flour, so I think I will use the brown rice mixture from here on out. Might try mixing in some teff or millet flour next time though.

And then tonight, I made sourdough bread. I end up making two loaves about every other week. Carl says he likes it better than the store-bought bread. The starter has settled down now, so it is consistent from loaf to loaf. I’ve had the starter since July, so it’s nice and sourdough-y. It uses a mixture of garbanzo bean/fava bean flour, tapioca flour, cornstarch, and sorghum flour. And it is delicious. I use Bette Hageman’s recipe – can I reproduce it here? That is something a lawyer should probably know…

The pictures aren’t uploading. Just imagine two delicious-looking loaves of bread and a single muffin. Mmm.

Disjointed matters

I’m sure I will have many posts on disjointed matters, but here is the first in my recent posts.

First, the sweet potato chips were a huge hit with the dogs. I think I may make more tomorrow for them.

Second, I’m rather frustrated with my orchestra right now. I really miss playing in my college orchestra where people practiced and the conductor encouraged players to be better. One derisive comment the conductor made at practice tonight really made me think seriously about not going back. But I can’t leave the orchestra without a bass player…

Third, I’m struggling with sewing ultrex, which is a goretex type material. My stitches are really close together no matter what stitch length I set them at, and the feed dogs push the fabric through faster than the needle, so it puckers. I fiddled with the tension and thought I had it figured out, but no. I’ve ripped out about seven inches of very close stitches, and I have another two to go, so if anyone has any suggestions, please share them. I definitely learned my lesson about practicing on scraps instead of the actual project.

And fourth, I will be starting a new job in two weeks at another firm here in Kansas City. I will be doing e-discovery and data privacy consulting, as far as I understand it, but everyone knows you don’t really know what your job entails until a month into it. I am so grateful for the experience I’ve gained at my current firm, but it is time to go somewhere else, and I am excited about this next chapter in my career.

That’s it for now. Mulling over a few other things that I might post, but we’ll just have to see.

Still harvesting!

This year has been really hard for our garden. We lost pretty much all our squash, cucumbers, zucchini, watermelons, cantaloupes, and cauliflower, and our tomatoes and peppers did not produce as much as they did last year. And our corn failed, and our broccoli never got off the ground… literally. It was a depressing summer garden-wise. However, this fall is apparently turning out great! Beans are coming in (I pulled one to see if they’re ready for harvesting), tomatillos are ripening, carrots are getting big, tomatoes are still happening, I found some red peppers today, and… we have HUGE sweet potatoes coming in. It’s quite exciting. I’m baking one right now, and I cut another one up to make chips. So here is a picture of my pride of the day – yay!

Bulb planting time

Last weekend, we planted a lot of bulbs on the side of our house. We are hoping to have bearded irises bloom in the spring and saffron in the fall. We are going to harvest our own saffron threads once they are ready. So excited. Daffodils also bloom over in that bed, and we will plant some allium bulbs and some other summer-blooming flowers so that we have blooms basically from March through October or November. Awesome, right? Once we get everything in the ground, I will post what exactly is in there and when it should (hopefully) bloom. We may need to supplement the late summer time period. I don’t think we have any bulbs coming for then. Any suggestions?

Sewing class

I’m currently taking a sewing class at JoAnn Fabrics. I thought that since I’ve been teaching myself and learning as I go (and as I make mistakes), it would be good to take a class to fill in the blanks. It’s been great. We are making a skirt. I will finish it tomorrow – it seems the hem on mine is going to be fairly tricky. I will post a picture when it’s done. The education coordinator at JoAnn has also agreed to do a serger class. A family member and a friend are interested, so I think we will all do it together. The instructor has been awesome, and I’ve learned quite a bit. I would recommend trying out their classes, if you are interested.

Gluten free dogs

We have two dogs – a maltipoo (Maltese poodle mix), and a cockachon (cocker spaniel, bichon frise mix) – and they are terrifically adorable. Zoe and Wash have been part of our family for over a year now. Wash had all sorts of problems when we first got him. He had parasites and bronchitis and a high susceptibility to fleas. We took care of everything, except that he was really itchy. He scratched so much that he broke skin a few times. It was horrible. We didn’t know what to do, but we decided to change food. They were on Science Diet, and first we tried Avoderm, but they didn’t like it too much, so we settled on Blue Buffalo, which is a high quality, grain free food. His skin got a lot better, but he was still scratching. We had him on an antihistamine, and if he didn’t get it for a day, he would start scratching a lot. We finally decided to cut out all grains, including from treats, thinking that maybe it was more than just going to a higher quality food that had helped him. And it has been great! Wash no longer scratches, and we haven’t given him a pill in over a week. Blue Buffalo makes some grain free treats, and so do some other brands. We also discovered that Wash (but not Zoe) LOVES raw carrots cut into thin slices. Crazy, right? Both of the dogs also love duck jerky. So now everyone in our house is gluten free, except that I keep a loaf of bread and some crackers around. I will need to make GF dog treats now, beyond raw carrots. Liver treats, perhaps?

If you have pets, and if you are feeding them Science Diet, do some research. I think we went to dogfoodadvisor.com.com when we were looking for a new food. We were surprised at what goes into dog food.

Amaretto cake recipe

As promised in my prior post, here is the recipe for the gluten free amaretto cake I made last weekend.

1 box devil’s food cake mix (Betty Crocker makes a gluten free one)
1 3.9 oz pkg instant chocolate pudding
1/2 c vegetable oil
1/4 c water
3/4 c amaretto (Hiram Walker’s is gluten free)
4 whole eggs
1 egg yolk
Crushed almonds to coat Bundt cake pan

Preheat oven to 350F. Mix wet ingredients together in a big bowl. Add cake and pudding mixes. Sprinkle crushed almonds into greased cake pan. Pour mix into pan. Bake 1 hour. Invert onto plate and poke lots of holes into cake. (LOTS of holes)

For the glaze:
3/4 c brown sugar
12 T butter
1 c amaretto

Bring sugar and butter to a low boil, stir to make it creamy. Remove from heat and add amaretto.

Pour glaze slowly over the cake, allowing it to seep in between pours. Let cool 1 hour before serving.

I had a lot of glaze that didn’t seep in, so I cut the cake into slices, let each side sit in the glaze for about a minute, and then arranged the slices nicely on a plate… Mmm, cake soaked in amaretto.

Gluten free amaretto cake

A few weeks ago, some friends and I participated in a trivia night fundraiser for Metro Lutheran Ministry. Part of the evening was a dessert auction, and one of the desserts was a “boozy amaretto cake.” We didn’t win – the trivia or the cake – but on Friday, MLM emailed out the recipe for that cake. It called for a cake mix, and luckily enough, Betty Crocker makes GF devils food cake mix. That was the only non-GF item in the recipe (certain brands of amaretto are GF, so that wasn’t difficult), and voila, we had the amaretto cake on Saturday. It was delicious. There is a LOT of amaretto in it, and less than half of it has any heat applied, so the alcohol is all there. I will post the recipe tomorrow, but I wanted to write about it tonight. I think it is a good example of how easy it can be to make something gluten free. Frequently, you can just do a straight substitute, and really, even when you can’t, adding in four other flours to get the right consistency is just not a big deal. The real problem comes from contamination, in my opinion. That seems like a good post for later this week. Carl thinks I should write more about cake, but I will let you discover its deliciousness for yourself. Tomorrow.