Adopt a Gluten Free Blogger: Vegan Lemon Coconut Cream Scones

June 1, 2009 by Leave a Comment

This post is part of a gluten-free blog event that Sea over at the Book of Yum put together. For this month’s Adopt a Gluten Free Blogger event, I’ve adopted Gina at Gluten Free Gourmand. I was intrigued by her Gluten-Free Vegan Coconut Cream Scones. Like us, Gina lives in Portland, Oregon. She also sells photography on Etsy.

I have to admit that I was more intrigued by this recipe because it used coconut cream than I was by the fact that it’s vegan. The scones are very easy to make. Once you get your flour mix together, it’s just a matter of five other ingredients and getting the moisture content right. Gina’s recipe just specifies that you use your favorite gluten-free flour mix. I emailed her and asked if a bread mix would work. She said that just about any mix would work, but said that it’s better if the flour mix doesn’t have xanthan gum.

We have a bread mix we like, but I decided that it would be interesting to try this with Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free Baking Flour. Here are the ingredients: Garbanzo Bean Flour, Potato Starch, Tapioca Flour, White Sorghum Flour, and Fava Bean Flour. A quarter cup of the mix has 100 calories, 22 grams of carbohydrate, 3 grams of dietary fiber, and 3 grams of protein. On the plus side, it doesn’t have any xanthan gum. On the minus side, I figured that the Garbanzo and Fava beans were going to impart a lot of flavor into the mix. I debated trying Trader Joe’s Gluten Free Pancake and Waffle Mix instead, but decided to stick with the Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Mix.

Bob's Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free Flour Mix

(I bought a beautiful artichoke today.) Gina’s recipe calls for coconut cream. Specifically, you get a can of coconut milk and scoop the fatty cream off the top. By the time you get to the bottom of the cream, you’ll have about as much as the recipe calls for. Mmmmmm. Coconut. Here I’ve added the orange zest.

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Did I also mention that I decided to make half of the batch with Gina’s Kumquat Glaze? Here are some kumquats and lemon juice in an orange bowl.

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We ran into trouble with the amount of flour needed. The first time I made the dough disk to cut into scones, the disk literally sagged out of shape. I had to fold in a whole cup more flour to get the right consistency, which Gina specifies as “barely holding together.” I was panicking too, because I think with scones you’re supposed to mix as little as possible. I was actually kind of careful measuring the coconut cream out, so I’m thinking that the unexpected wetness of the dough was due to using a different flour mix.

We got it together, though.

Gluten Free Scone Pile

Here they are fresh out of the oven, eight minutes later.

Gluten Free Coconut Creme Scones

Lucky for us, the scones still turned out wonderfully light, flaky, and crumbly. They are really awesome broken into pieces with jam. As I expected, they do have a slight beany aftertaste, which does go OK with jam, but isn’t so hot when you’re eating the scones by themselves. (For the record, Sienna doesn’t notice the bean aftertaste, and between the two of us, she usually has the more discerning palate.) I think that the Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free Baking Flour would be a lot more appropriate for use with savory foods. So something like a dinner biscuit or a crust for a meat pie. Maybe I’ll try them again with the Trader Joe’s mix. As for the recipe, I think it’s very clever to come up with the substitution of coconut cream for butter and cream. We’ll be enjoying these scones all week.

We’ll definitely try more recipes from Gluten Free Gourmand in the future. Gina just posted a pancake recipe. Everybody here should know how much I love gluten free pancakes. I would definitely recommend both her site and Book of Yum to anybody on a gluten free diet. Thanks to Sea at the Book of Yum for putting this blog event together!

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Gluten Free Recipe: Fried Rice

May 20, 2009 by Leave a Comment

This is not exactly a case where it’s hard to make the recipe gluten-free, but I do have a good Fried Rice recipe and I thought that I would share it for this week’s What’s For Dinner? Wednesday.

The thing that’s really excellent about Fried Rice is that you can start with the basics and add about anything that you have the time and patience to cut into small pieces. Likewise, you can make excellent fried rice with a bare minimum of ingredients.

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Here are the basics:

2 cups old cooked rice, refrigerated
2 eggs
pinch salt
3 Tbs peanut or canola oil
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced or pressed
thumb sized piece of ginger, diced
1 medium sized green or red bell pepper, seeded and cut into short strips
1/4 pound mushrooms chopped or quartered
1/2 cup salted roasted peanuts
2 Tbs gluten free soy sauce or tamari

Here are excellent optional extras to add if you have them around and want to add them:

2 green onions chopped
1/2 pound cooked chicken, ham, shrimp, or pork, diced
head of broccoli, chopped
1/2 cup purple cabbage, chopped
1 Tbs toasted sesame oil
dash or two of Chinese hot chili oil
splash rice vinegar
few slices of cucumber for garnish
few tomato wedges for garnish

Take the rice and rub it between your hands to break it up. Set aside. Heat up your wok on medium.

When wok is hot, add 1 Tbsp of oil. Let oil get hot and then add eggs. Scramble them the way you like them. Remove eggs from wok.

Turn up the heat on the wok to medium-high. Add another Tbsp of oil. Let oil get hot and add onion, garlic, and ginger. Stir fry until soft. Add all the veggies, any meat or shrimp, and peanuts. Stir fry about another two minutes. Remove and set aside.

Add remaining oil to wok and let heat up. Add rice and stir fry until heated – about 2 minutes. Stir in the veggie mix and add soy sauce. Mix it up gently and taste it to make sure you have a good flavor. Add more ginger or soy sauce if desired. Add sprinkle of rice vinegar and/or Chinese hot pepper oil. Finally, add toasted sesame oil (if you have it.) The reason you add the sesame oil at the end is that it loses its flavor when cooked.

Gluten Free Fried Rice, Coming Up!

gluten-free-fried-rice-dscn4236

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News and 7 Things You May Not Know About Me

April 7, 2009 by 3 Comments

Sienna and I were out of Portland Oregon on vacation last week. We drove down to Los Angeles to visit her grandmother and also some friends we have down there. We stopped in the San Francisco Bay Area and a bunch of places in between. So the bad news is that I didn’t post much last week (I actually wrote some things beforehand and then scheduled them.) The good news is that we have some exciting gluten-free travel info coming up. We even found a great B&B where the owner cooked me some gluten-free pancakes! I’m sure you all know how much I love gluten-free pancakes.

While we were gone, we got tagged by Gina over at Gluten Free Gourmand, which is one of our fellow Portland gluten-free sites. She tagged us to do 7 Things You May Not Know About Me. So without further ado, here are seven things you may not know about me.

1. I was born in Albuquerque New Mexico, which is where Bugs Bunny was always missing a left turn. I grew up in Colorado, studied Fine Arts at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and then lived in San Francisco for 13 years before moving to Portland, Oregon.

2. My favorite place to be in Portland Oregon is at the Classical Chinese Garden. I love to go there, sit in the teahouse, drink tea, eat treats, and look at the pond and the trees.

3. Speaking of ponds, I created a 200 gallon goldfish pond in my back yard last spring. It’s one of my favorite things.

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4. I am a big fan of origami and paper models. I fold the kind of origami that can take hours to do. Insects and dinosaurs are my favorites. I keep a very small origami and papercraft site with lots of dinosaurs which I’m working on making bigger.

5. As I mentioned above, I studied fine art in college. Mostly painting. I continue to do art now and was in a small group show at a gallery in Portland earlier this year. As with everything else, I have an artist website that I try to update here and there. I also do a lot of amateur photography.

6. Travel is one of my favorite things to do. I’ve been to Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, all through Canada, most of the Western United States, and internationally to Japan and Bali. I might love traveling more than food.

7. I also read a lot. I read fast, will read anything, and have a book collection. Most of this is an enormous collection of sleazy paperback detective fiction from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Two other authors I collect are Edward Gorey and translated works of Natsume Soseki.

7 Things Rules

The rules are simple. Link to your original tagger and list these rules in your post. Simply share seven facts about yourself in the post. Tag seven people at the end of your post and let them know they’ve been tagged. And have fun!

Thanks again to Gina for tagging me. Here are the seven people I’m tagging, in alphabetical order:

1. Aleta who isn’t gluten-free but who does cooking, recipes, great photos with one eye on nutrition at The Omnomicon.

2. Allergic Girl who covers food allergies, health and worry-free dinners over at allergicgirl.blogspot.com.

3. Ginger over at FreshGinger who is always cooking up interesting gluten-free recipes.

4. Dana at Gluten Free in Cleveland, who does gluten free recipes and reviews for Cleveland Ohio.

5. Kab over at Good Stuff NW who isn’t gluten free but who covers food, restaurant reviews, and good stuff in the Pacific Northwest.

6. My pal, The Dark who is all about the book reviews and horror paper models over at Dark in the Dark.

7. Sea who creates and reviews gluten-free recipes and also hosts the adopt a gluten-free blogger at Book of Yum.

Thanks for stopping by. More to come soon!

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