We were recently looking at cookbooks in Powell’s Books on Hawthorne. Specifically, we were checking out The New Best Recipe from America’s Test Kitchen, which also has a book that’s The Best Simple Recipes, which as the title would suggest, has the best recipes but for people who don’t have as much time. I checked out the simple book and felt like it isn’t exactly the kind of food we like to eat. Recently, someone gave us a subscription to Bon Appetit magazine, and there’s a section in the magazine devoted to recipes that are supposed to take 15 minutes or under. We’ve had a lot of success with those recipes, and just on a whim, we decided to see if there was something like it in the quick cooking section at Powell’s. Little did we expect, we found exactly what we were looking for!

I had to take a shot of this book from the side. Look at the size of this book! It’s giant! And it has 1100 recipes in it.

The Bon Appetit Cookbook: Fast Easy Fresh (2008) by Barbara Fairchild. Obviously, not all of these recipes are going to be gluten-free. But that’s what substituting is for. Also, the recipes are all supposed to take between 30 to 45 minutes to make. The book is divided up into different sections on soups, salads, sandwiches, different kinds of meat (fish, pork, beef, chicken, turkey, duck, and game), vegetables, breakfasts, sides, desserts, and even cocktails. The vegetable section is broken up by season so that you’ll actually be able to get the veggies for the recipes you want to make. One thing this book doesn’t have a lot of is photos, which is kind of disappointing, but still OK with me.

On to the recipe. It’s a quick cherry chutney over grilled pork tenderloin. This recipe takes advantage of the fact that cherries are available in stores right now, and serves four. Trader Joe’s has whole pork loins for a reasonable price. I added some things to it (marked in italics). These are: garlic & powdered ginger.

3/4 cup cherry preserves
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
3/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger (or to taste)
2 garlic cloves, pressed

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2/3 cup chopped onion
2 cups fresh cherries, pitted
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper (I substituted chili powder for more flavor and less burn)

1 pork tenderloin ( 1-1/4 pounds)

Obviously, the first thing you’re going to have to do is pit the cherries. If you don’t have a cherry pitting tool, you can do what I did and cut the cherries in half around the pip and then pop them out with a fingernail. If you cut it in half the right direction, you can get your thumbnail under the ridge that runs around the pit. Depending on how quickly your grill heats up, you may want to start it after you finish the cherries.

Make the Glaze: Mix the vinegar, allspice, ginger, garlic, and preserves in a small bowl. Pour 1/4 cup of this mixture into another container, and set aside for glazing the pork. The rest is going to go into the chutney.

The Chutney: In a pan over high heat, add some oil and let it heat up. Add the onion and saute for a minute. Add the chili powder, cherries, onion, and the reserved mixture from the preserves. Stir often and boil the mixture 8 minutes or until thick.

The Pork: Season the pork with salt and pepper, and then do your normal grilling and glazing routine. For a piece of meat like this, it means browning it in the hottest part of the grill, and then moving it to a cooler area to cook through. You’ll want to turn often and glaze it a lot. Cook until meat thermometer registers 145 F. You can speed up a pork loin by cutting it in half lengthwise. I did this to cut down on my cooking time.

At some point, put some kale in an aluminum foil packet with a little olive oil, a dash of salt, and some water. Put that on the grill 10 minutes before the pork is going to be done.

Serve!

One Last, Quick Note: This doesn’t have anything to do with gluten-free cooking, but recently Sienna went on a mission to find the best cooking thermometer made. She went to different stores and asked people for advice. She searched the Internet. After a long search, she was successful: the best meat thermometer ever. This is the Cooper Model DPP400W, and the nice thing about it is that it measures the temperature of the meat almost instantly. I kept trying to use other meat thermometers that would take like 5 minutes to read the temperatures and I was overcooking a lot of meat. This thermometer is awesome, and unlike the big meat thermometers that don’t really work unless you’re putting them into a roast or a whole turkey, this thermometer can be used to test the temperature of something as thin as a chicken breast. OK, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Blossome Pancake Recipe

First you make a batch of this flour mix:

1 cup brown rice flour
1 cup sorghum flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup tapioca starch

Second, you make this pancake mix. In a mixing bowl, stir together with a whisk:

1 cup of the above flour mix
1/3 cup soy flour
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup sugar (less if you like)

Third, in a smaller bowl mix together:

2 eggs
1/4 cup melted butter
3/4 cup almond milk

Add the liquid to the dry ingredients, mix till there are no lumps. Cook on an oiled griddle or nonstick frying pan.

For the almond milk, I used an unsweetened store-bought milk, so there was vanilla in it. I substituted canola oil for the butter and used half the sugar and only 1/8 tsp of salt.

The batter tastes like edamame because of the soy flour, but don’t worry: The flavor somehow goes away when they’re cooked, which is a good thing. It does bear noting, however, that undercooked pancakes will taste bad. Like any pancake, there are a few secrets to success. Number one, test the pan beforehand with some drops of water. If they sizzle, then the temperature is right. If the drops jump around and sizzle, the surface is too hot. Number two, after putting the batter in the pan, wait for bubbles to come up to the surface and then flip. Number three, it is a scientific fact that the first pancake will not turn out well. As the chef, it is your duty to eat this pancake and thus not cause suffering to others.

I found that these brown quickly, so you’ll want to cook them a tad lower than usual. (On my stove I usually use 5 1/2 for pancakes and I turned these down to 5.) I have tried these without the soy flour, and while they’re good without it, the soy flour adds flavor and heartiness to the pancakes.

Many thanks to Gaile for sending me this recipe and also for graciously letting me post it here!

Plums Ready to Go!

Everything Else You Need

Here’s what you need: Some fruit, sugar, lemon juice, pectin, and water. And a breadmaker. The pectin we use is Pomona’s Universal Pectin. As mentioned above, this is a special pectin which lets you cut down the sugar in the recipe. It uses calcium to activate it. We did it with plums, but you can use about anything. For jams, you can use kiwi, strawberry, raspberry, gooseberry, blackberry, currant, cherry, plum, pineapple, mulberry, blueberry, pear, mango, peach, apricot, fig, or citrus fruit (for marmalades). For jelly, you could use apples, quince, blackberries, pomegranate, raspberry, currants, grapes, or peppers. We used our Zojirushi bread machine, but most other bread machines also have the ability to make jam. You can get the pectin on Amazon, but we got ours at Whole Foods.

Here’s our recipe:

Low Sugar Plum Jam – Bread Machine

• 2 cup cubed, mashed plums (about 16 small plums)
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 1/2 tsp pectin powder
• 2 tsp calcium water

(The calcium water is some regular tap water with calcium powder that comes with the Pomona’s pectin. You make that beforehand.)

1. Cut up plums in 1/8ths and microwave for a few minutes to soften. Mash plums briefly.
2. Add lemon juice and calcium water to plums.
3. Add pectin to sugar.
4. Put all ingredients in bread machine, set on Jam Setting, and press start.

Plums and Ingredients in the Bread Machine

Program up the Bread Machine

It's Jam!

Spread that Jam on some Gluten Free Bread

• Resulting Batch – 2 1/2 c
• Prep Time – 20 min
• Cooking Time – 1 1/4 hrs
• Total Time – 1 hr 35 min
• Difficulty – Semi Easy

Here is a helpful card with recipes and instructions that you can download from Pomona’s website (it’s a PDF).

How is the jam, you ask? The jam is AMAZING! Also, Sienna went through the trouble to put the jam in canning jars. She had a lot of fun.

Yes. Yes. I am saying that in the past I burned a lot of food on the grill, and for no good reason. Now let’s just put this behind us and get on to how to make these awesome chicken thighs the right way. First off, you’ll need some BBQ sauce. For this recipe I used the Trader Joe’s barbecue sauce which I reviewed here.

I’m sure there are other gluten-free barbecue sauces in the world. The problem is that a lot of BBQ sauces have smoke flavor as an ingredient and that’s an item that may or may not be gluten-free. So you should check with the manufacturer to see before assuming that they’re safe.

1 pound boneless skinless chicken thighs (or skinned & boned if you prefer)
8 tablespoons gluten-free barbecue sauce

That was simple. Now take your chicken and put it in a bowl with 6 tablespoons of the Trader Joe’s BBQ sauce. Mix them up and let the mixture “rest” for at least twenty minutes. Even better, put it in the fridge for a couple of hours. (If you’re using chicken thighs with the skins on, you’ll want to use a turkey baster to “inject” the sauce under the skins. If you don’t have a baster, the next best thing is to peel some of the skin back by hand and use a basting brush to brush some sauce in there.) Some people will tell you to rub the chicken with oil first but I don’t do that.

Now get some charcoal going. What you’ll want to do is pile the charcoal over on one end of your grill. Let the briquettes get properly hot but don’t let them go too far because we’re in for the long haul. First, put the thighs directly over the coals to sear them. Depending on how hot your coals are and how high the grill surface is, you’ll probably only want to leave them on for maybe 30 seconds. We just want to sear them so they have the nice grill marks on them. I’ll usually check one or two as they go and then flip them all when one is done. Grill both sides.

(As a side note, I don’t know if this is true exactly for chicken pieces, but for burgers you only want to flip them once on a grill. The reason is that you lose more of the juices every time you flip them. I tend to think the same is probably true with chicken so I try not to flip them too much. The problem with this is that if you leave them too long they’ll burn and that’s worse!)

Now once you have your thighs seared, move them over to the other side of the grill and close the lid. Give them at least 20 minutes over there, checking them every few minutes to make sure they aren’t burning. Since they’re far away from the coals they shouldn’t burn but it’s still good to check. If you have a meat thermometer, you’ll want to keep grilling them until the interior temperature of the thighs is 165 degrees Fahrenheit. If you don’t have a meat thermometer, you can check for doneness by selecting the thickest chunk of chicken and cutting it open. If it’s still pink in the middle you’ll need to cook them more.

Depending on the heat of the grill and the size of the chicken parts, you may need to grill them another 20 to 40 minutes. At two points during the grilling process, you’ll want to brush on the other two tablespoons of your Trader Joe’s gluten-free barbecue sauce.

One thing that’s nice about this way of cooking the thighs is that you can grill your veggies over the coals because the chicken is off to the side. Shown in the picture is squash from our garden, grilled with mushrooms and red bell pepper. To keep veggies from turning to cinders on a grill you use lots of olive oil and salt. For three cups of veggies I use 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1/8 teaspoon of salt. I don’t know how it works but it does. The veggies turn out awesome, too!

This review was done to be part of What’s for Dinner? Wednesday, hosted by Linda at Gluten-free Homemaker.

In the comments, we had a bunch of people agree with us that the Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose Gluten Free Baking Flour mix was too heavy on the bean flavor. We also heard from Sea at Book of Yum, who recommended that we avoid the Trader Joe’s mix.

So a few weekends later we tried the same scone recipe with the main flour mix recipe from Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine by Annalise Roberts. Since we reviewed the book, we’ve been very happy with the flavor and quality of the gluten-free breads we’ve been able to make (although they don’t rise as much as we would like.) The scones I made with that flour mix were PERFECT and AWESOME. They tasted delicious and they stored really well. Obviously, they were at their best straight out of the oven! I would share the gluten-free flour mix recipe, but I don’t think it would be honest of me to post it here. This book can be bought from Amazon, here.

But I still had the nagging question in the back of my mind: “What would these be like with the Trader Joe’s Gluten-Free Pancake and Waffle mix?” So last weekend I decided to give it a try. Although with the Annalise Roberts gluten-free flour mix batch, I did the recipe exactly the same, this time Sienna requested that I leave out the lemon zest. Also, since the Trader Joe’s mix includes salt and baking powder, I omitted those. Otherwise it was the exact same recipe.

The Trader Joe’s mix scones were a disaster. First, the Trader Joe’s mix contains xanthan gum. This isn’t normally a bad thing, but in this case it was a problem. Xanthan gum imparts elasticity to gluten-free dough, which is good because the gluten in wheat flour is what makes regular dough elastic. The problem with xanthan gum is that if you get too much in a flour mix, it will absorb a lot of liquid and make a mix too runny. Then the baked result ends up being tough. So the dough ended up being too wet from the get-go. I kept adding more of the flour mix in, but it didn’t help. I finally gave up. Here’s how the scones made with the Trader Joe’s gluten-free mix ended up looking.

So they sagged all over and then puffed up as they baked. I also had to bake them about twice as long as the recipe called for. The bad news is that they ended up way too sweet. They also did not keep well at all. Three days later they were kind of tough.

The good news is that they taste EXACTLY like sugar cookies and have the same texture. So yeah, if you really miss traditional white sugar cookies, here is a gluten-free, vegan recipe that is an excellent facsimile. I’m posting this half-jokingly, but I’m sure someone could take this recipe and make some awesome cookies with a little bit more experimentation.

1 tbsp baking powder
1/4 cup sugar
2 cups Trader Joe’s Gluten-Free Pancake and Waffle Mix
1 cups of the “cream” spooned from the top of a can of coconut milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Some lemon zest if you like it in your sugar cookies.

Mix everything. Add more coconut milk if the mixture is too dry. Form the cookies and sprinkle sugar on top. If you like them sweet, you might try upping the sugar to 1/2 cup. Bake at 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

And there you have it!