Menu - 20th to 25th Sept 2010 and birthdays

As you will see from the tickertape at the top of my blog Noddles was seven a month ago but over here that is at the same time as the August bank holiday which is one of our main national holidays and we have learnt his friends all tend to be away so we schedule his party for after school gets back. Therefore last weekend we had a football party !

 The cake was iced by Noddles himself with a little help and we have a football game between the girls and the boys with a adult ref ! For those americans in the audience that is real football or what you call soccer :)

For the cake I used this easy vanilla cake from BBC good food and just subbed in a gluten free flour mix, I didn't even add any Xanth gum or similar and it was great. Good texture and quite moist. Has lasted well too though Treestump feels the way to eat it is to lick the icing and jam off it and then try and pass off the actual cake to someone else !

 Blowing out the candles.. which made him jump as the additional ones were sparkler candles but they didn't really get going till he tried to blow them!

Today in contrast is my birthday which I am spending quietly at home waiting impatiently for my Kindle which I have treated myself with to turn up.. trouble is it isn't due to be delivered for a week or so yet which is a down side of buying the new hot product !

Now the next question is do I spend the rest of my birthday money on a dehydrator?

Anyway on to the menu which is late this week.
Oh I should also mention it is British Food fortnight so I may possibly have a few extra traditional British dishes this week such as Chip shop fish and chips and dumplings :)

Monday - boys had chicken dippers, smiley faces and peas, I had Dietary Specials sausage rolls instead of chicken dippers. I know not a great meal but the boys love chicken dippers !

Tuesday -Home made chip shop style Fish and chips cos I love then and it's my birthday :) Again very unhealthy but yar boo to that !

Wednesday - cauliflower cheese (which generally involves more vegs than just cauliflower)

Thursday - Chicken noodle soup

Friday - Nice big veg and bean stew - exact ingredients to be decided later ! Served with dumplings.

Baking - cheese scones and I am really tempted to try and make squashed fly biscuits otherwise known as Garibaldi biscuits.

Gluten Free Cooking Videos

Dietary Specials have done a bunch of gluten free cooking videos with some very interesting recipe suggestions.

Unsurprisingly they mostly focus on using their products but that doesn't stop them being good recipes particularly for those not wanting to cook from scratch. I thought the Speedy chocolate Profiteroles rolls was quite inspired using as it does their ready made yorkshire puds as the pastry.. after all the texture and so forth of both is really very similar. Obviously they aren't exactly the same but I still think it's a great substitute which doesn't need you to try and make full blown chow pastry and even the most willing of cooks sometimes want an easy option.

I may well try their bread and butter pudding recipe. It is a pudding well liked here and their version includes peaches. I've never tried it with peaches in though one with apricots and marzipan is Tom's favourite so I'm guessing peaches would go down well too!

They are also a very friendly and helpful team. When I sent them a bit of a stroppy email because they said suet isn't suitable on gluten free diet in the Christmas pud recipe I got a very nice and pleasant reply and they changed the written recipe to include that you can get suet from the butcher. To be fair processed suet is unsuitable as it has flour to keep it sticking together but as you will know from my previous posts the raw stuff from the butcher is fat straight from a cow or sheep and therefore fine.

Also I have finally got my hands on one of their new fresh loaves. The nearest ASDA isn't stocking them and the couple of times I tried the other one previously I was late in the day and they were all gone. This time there were plenty on the shelf though so I will by trying it out later.. so watch this space for my views on them.. first impressions are good though, nice and soft feeling and a good size for a gluten free loaf, which is to say still smaller than wheat bread but big enough to make a good sandwitch..

Daring Cooks - Sushi English style.

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen. They chose sushi as the challenge. As Audax does even when he isn't hosting he has done a whole host of varieties and as he is in Australia he was also first to post this month so if you want to see a wider range and indeed a blog version of all the very thorough instructions they gave us check out his blog.

Our Challenge was to make three specific forms of sushi and in that I failed as I never made the dragon sushi but I did make several types of the other two.

I've struggled to find Nori as it's a bit random who will have it in around here and didn't end up with any wasabi but I knew I'd have to leave that out for most of the family though I like it so that was not a major loss.

My rice did burn a little on the bottom (I never get rice cooked this way right) but the rest of it was fine. It has a very nice taste once the dressing is added I must say and we all enjoyed it though it was quite a faff to make compared to standard rice.. but then you can't make pretty shapes with standard rice!

I started with a British fusion idea I had so here is an English Breakfast roll served with tomato sauce as that is what you get with breakfast, though brown sauce would be fine as well and closer to soy in flavour.. I just liked the colour better of the tomato! for the photo! I think actually they would work with soy sauce too.

Filling is egg, bacon, mushroom, tomato and black pudding (blood sausage). I only did one sheet of nori so it isn't really a spiral but they were still great.
Then I did tuna and sweetcorn at the request of my 6 year old. Again one sheet and pretty much all eaten by him, he came back for seconds and thirds!

Next came Nigiri sushi which I did find harder as the rice didn't like sticking together firmly enough, though it liked sticking to me if I didn't keep my hands quite wet! As Audax had done vegimite and cheese I felt I had to do Marmite and cheese, I also did some with a cheese that has branston pickle added to it. The small one loved them but the older ones of us decided that grating the cheese and doing it in a roll would work better. The Marmite does as a lovely savoury taste though again it is quite like soy sauce in that regard. I also did ones with smoked salmon. No raw fish for us not because we don't like it but we live as far from the sea as you can get in this country and so I didn't feel any of the fish on offer was fresh enough.

Finally I did some plain rolls wrapped in Nori with toppings. Do they have another name? We had prawns and cucumber and black and white pudding. The puddings are the same recipe but the black one had blood and the white doesn't. They are a sort of oat based spiced sausage and actually made really delicious sushi, Black pudding sushi will defiantly be on our list in the future.

I have promised  Noodles I will make him some egg wrapped sushi as he wasn't totally struck on the seaweed.. this he tells me after eating about 6 pieces ! I also really want to have a go at the more complicated rolls with faces and flowers and so on. I figure I can make canes in Polymer clay and it's basically the same technique give or take :)  So watch this space for my alien faces when they all go wrong!!

Book Review - Seriously Good Gluten Free Cooking

Seriously Good Gluten Free Cooking by Phil Vickery.
ISBN 978 1 85626 828 8

This is a new book by Phil Vickery in association with Coeliac UK. Most people in the UK will probably know Phil Vickery as he is one of our many TV chefs, probably most well known on day time TV but he has done programs on British Puddings and is generally a well known and talented chef.

I rarely buy Gluten Free cooking books, the way I see it most of them are mainly re-doing recipes I probably have elsewhere as they are most general everyday recipe type books, quite understandably as most people want everyday cooking. However with the exception of baking I can normally do any adjustments myself so why buy another book that is mostly naturally gluten free recipes as I don't struggle with those sort of dishes?

With that said why did i buy this one? Mostly because it was by a good BRITISH chef and backed by Coeliac UK. Most of the books out there are American or very basic and some of the commonly used flours etc in America are not found here easily. Also Phil Vickery is known for his love of British food and I was interested to see a proper British gluten free cookbook.

So what did I think? Well this is not a book to buy if you want specifically to learn to cook with gluten free flours and replace all those banned foods. He does do some baked products including some British classics like Bakewell tart but they are not the focus of the book. If however you are looking for a book that celebrates all the wonderful food we CAN eat this would be a great one to get. The recipes in the book are a very eclectic mix inspired by many regions of the world and in that it feels very British and there are plenty traditionally British dishes in there as well. The book is very strong on fresh ingredients and uses lots of herbs, fruit and veg, there are many really tasty sounding dishes mostly naturally gluten free, it is a really uplifting book in many ways. He does use frozen and packaged things as well where they are easier and still safe so it is quite a practical book for normal people, which is not always true of chefy books.

This is a book I would have happily bought even if it wasn't Gluten Free as there are plenty of recipes that had me thinking "Oh must try that" and in some ways that is great as it makes being gluten free feel less 'odd'. From the way the introduction is written I get the impression that is what he was after and it's a good thing. It doens't make you feel that cooking gluten free is difficult or that you will need lots of new and difficult to find ingredients and for most people I think that will be very helpful. This is a book I'd happily suggest to someone new to eating gluten free which isn't true of all gluten free cook books.

From a personal view point I would have liked a little more in the way of adaptions of gluten based recipes, I suppose I did slightly hope he'd cracked yorkshire puds and when he says in the blurb for the one bread in the book that he could write a whole book on the subject of gluten free bread my reaction was "yes please!!" Though to be fair he does do scones, various cakes and pancakes etc so the the book is not without such things and indeed probably has as many as a normal cooking book that is covering everything from breakfast to puds..

The picture at the top is of one of his breakfast dishes I did my boys for tea a couple of nights ago, salt and pepper eggs on rice waffles. The waffle mix was very good and easy to make though fairly bland on their own.. Good as a base for other things though which is the point and I had one topped with garlic soft cheese and it was very good that way. I will certainly be trying some more recipes soon. His onions rings I'm definitely trying soon and some of the salads, juices etc will be on the list for later in the year when I have the main ingredients fresh on the allotment.

In summery, really attractive, and interesting book that just happens to be gluten free !