IKEA and Gluten free

We popped into IKEA for some bits at the weekend.. yea right like it's possible to just pop in for something, even if you only go to the item you want it will take half an hour of walking.! Actually on that score I am waiting very interestedly to see how the new Coventry store works. In some ways I'm dreading the possible traffic problems espacally round the time our two universities start their new years but in other ways it will be interesting to see how it differs from an out of town store. You see the Coventry one isn't just off a motorway junction like the rest it is slap bang in the middle of the city ! It is over several floors and I am really hoping they make it easier to just pop into one section rather than being lead by the nose as the other stores do.. I think they would be stupid not to as a lot of their potential trade is people on their lunch break and you can't brose a whole store in that time but we will see.

Anyway back to our shopping trip. As it was lunch time we decided to go to the cafe and I was pretty much expecting to have chips or salad or maybe a cake as they do a GF one.. however as we waited in the queue we spotted the kids fish and chips had a big GF symbol on it but somewhat strangely the adult one didn't and neither did the meatballs which seemed a bit daff as most Swedish meatball recipes over here are GF.

Still we asked when we got to the counter and yes the kids fish was GF but the adults wasn't and neither was any other main meal! The fish was however at the far end of the counter meaning it was a lot less likely to get contaminated so I end up with two kids meals as it was cheaper than them trying to make up an adult one and I ended up with more chips! I am happy they are trying but I think I might chat to the cafe when they open in Cov and see if they could change the meatball recipe or at least do the adult fish GF as well. It was nice to have battered fish for once but the portions were very small even with two kids ones.

As to the actual shopping, we got the small one a place in the crèche much to his delight and so had 3/4 hour to look round. We got the cupboard doors and drawers to finish the units in the utility room and some new plates and bowls from their 365+ range.. we got 6 new bowls which will be good for soup, stew etc and then one each of the rounded off square dinner and side plates to see if they went with my Reflex Denby which is now discontinued. I think they will actually go quite well and we have been thinking of swapping our everyday china to white as the current black stuff can't really be mixed with the Denby. That wasn't the only things we picked up but the main ones of relivance on here I think.

Weekly Menu post

(Edited to add what I actually did)

Any Daring Bakers.. look for the next post down. !!

This week I remembered to post on Monday.. and after a weekend away as well how organised am I!!



I will be linking to both the gluten free menu swap and Menu Plan Monday.

Unlike our friends over the pond we didn't have any celebrations last week so it was business as usual and I even pretty much stuck to my menu plan

I have decided in future bean stew will not have sausages in. It doesn't need it and just lost my nice expensive gluten free sausages in it..

The chicken noodle soup was a big success so much so we have bought a few more soup bowls from IKEA this weekend so we have plenty to go round.

We swapped Thursday and Friday. I wrote up the lasagna which is here and Friday we had cauliflower cheese with extra bits in it.

This weeks menu

Monday - Pizza because Jon found Sainsburys now do their own gluten free version so got me one to try. Everyone else gets ready made normal ones.

Tuesday - Pork chops and oven roasted vegs.

Wednesday - Lasagna, second one I made last week from the freezer.
(edit - also made Ginger Lemon Girl's corn pudding because I thought the small one would dislike the amount of green. The lasagna had gone rather soggy from being frozen so will try and only do fresh in future. The corn pudding went down very well with the boys, I liked it OK but I have less of a sweet tooth than they do.)

Thursday - veggy soup and cheese scones (edit - post added with scone recipe)

Friday - Moracan style Chicken and apricots with Quinoa (instead of cous cous.)
(edit did on Sunday in the end.. recipe posted here )

I'm not really doing anything with ginger but the soup might end up with some in depending what vegs are left by then. Also I just got a big bag of crystallised ginger to do baking with so that might happen this week if I have time..

Daring Baker Challange - Tender Potato Bread

So my third challenge and the second one involving yeast, however it's savoury this time which I was quite happy with. Our challenge from Tanna was for Tender Potato Bread from the book Home baking by Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford. and you can find the recipe she challenged us with is here.

Bread is something I've toyed with since giving up gluten, I used to love kneading real bread before that as it was a great tension release but gluten free mixes tend to a) be wetter and b) don't have the satisfaction as there is no gluten to make it bounce back. I have made the occasional loaf for other people but if I'm not careful I find the skin contact can be enough to set my hands off and I like having the use of my hands.. I spent several years having to use both hands to pick up anything even vaguely heavy as I had so little strength in either one of them so I am wary about going back to that. One advantage I suppose of that symptom is that if I do accidentally eat something with gluten in I start to feel the ache across my knuckles in moments which stops me eating to much. Any way I digress back to Potato Bread.

I tried this recipe twice this month. The first time as close to the published version as possible and the second with a few more tweeks. I managed to forget to add Xanth gum both times but I think it will get made again and I'll report back if that makes much difference when I do.

Bread the first.

I used a generic baking potato as I didn't have a named variety of suitable type available and on the first try used about 14oz, we were told to use between 8 and 16oz. Flour wise I substituted my standard Dove Farm gluten free flour for the basic general purpose flour and millet for the wholewheat. I wasn't that happy about the millet but we were waiting on a bulk order of flour and other things and I didn't want to buy extra expansive bags in when I'd have loads in a few days. It proves I was intrigued enough to try it that I didn't wait till later in the month.

The dough went together well, being used to gluten free mixes the wetness didn't really phase me and I only added a couple of extra cups to the dough before it seemed stiff enough. I didn't knead it anyone than needed to incorporate the flour as this really serves no function without the gluten as the main reason for this is to develop the gluten chains. I left it to rise in the oven which has a special bread rising function as the kitchen was a little cold and after two hours it was wonderfully risen and full of bubbles as you may be able to see in the picture.

However when i came to shape it the dough was extremely sticky and pretty much poured out of the bowl so I added about another 2 cups of flour to get it workable. The shaped bread was put back to prove but it seemed to have run out of steam rather and only rose a small amount. I baked it anyway as I am fairly used to a mediocre rise on gluten free bread. Now I must admit to a couple of mistakes. I baked the focaccia to long and burnt the onion on it but much worse is I think I forgot to take the plastic wrap off first and that resulted in a plasticy glaze on parts of the bread!! We only eat a bit of it and from the underside to see what it was like then the rest went into the bin!

The loaf was better, rather heavy but quite edible though it had a distinctly bitter edge which was worse once it got a little more stale the next couple of days.

However it showed promise and after some discussion with knowledgeable members of the daring bakers I decided to try again. This time I decided to only rise the dough once as I was told that the second rise is mostly for developing taste and that as my flour has no gluten in it there would be less to sugars to feed the yeast.

Bread the Second.

This time I used a similar potato and cooked up nearly 16 oz. Instead of millet I used buckwheat as my flour order had arrived and indeed I added about 1.5 cups of that in total which gave the bread a distinctly wholemeal look. As I was only doing one rise this time I made sure I incorporated a bit more flour at this stage and in the end used about 6.2 cups out of the 8.5 max suggested in the recipe. I wouldn't expect a gluten free bread to use all 8.2 cups as most none wheat flours soak up more liquid than wheat does.

Once I had a nice dough I divided it into three. One third as put in muffin tins to make rolls, then one third was flavoured with tomato puree and a bit more flour added to counter the extra liquid. The final third as flavoured with cheddar cheese. These two flavoured doughs were roughly recombined so the two types swirled through the bread and then the whole lot was put in a bread tin. Both sets of bread were put to rise in the oven as before.
After two hours a good amount of rising had been done and after carefully removing ALL plastic wrap I cooked them, the rolls got about 30 mins and the loaf 50, the last 10 mins of which I removed it from the tin to allow the crust to develop all round.

This time round the texture was much better and the gluten eating members of the household actually asked if they could have some several times over the weekend meaning I didn't have my usual problem of worrying it was going to go off before I finished it. The cheese and tomato bread was espacally good and will be done again I am sure.

One final thing I decided is I want to develop my own general flour mix as my mum would have liked to try the bread but she has similar arthritic reactions to maize as I do to gluten and Dove farm's mix has maize in it. I like maize flour for some things but in a generic mix I could happily do without especally as there are becoming more flours available.

You can see how other Baring bakers got on by checking out the blog roll, out of something like 400 members I only know of two other who are gluten free they are Naomi at Straight into bed Cakefree and Dried and Sheltie Girl at Gluten a go go

Spinach, ricotta and pumpkin Lasagna

Inspired by posts on Ginger Lemon Girl and Book of Yum I decided to do a lasagna. I had several packets of gluten free pasta sheets and love spinach and ricotta lasagna so adding pumpkin sounded a idea worth a try.

The basic ingredients were as follows (for one tray, I made two so I have one for another day). I'm afraid I can't do exact measurements as I do much of this by eye.

1 packet of gluten free lasagna sheets (boiled for 2 mins to make sure they were nice and soft.)
1/2 a packet of frozen spinach, thawed
1 tub of ricotta
1/4 a largeish pumpkin, roasted and mashed to a puree.
About 1 pint of fairly thick white sauce made from gluten free flour, milk and butter.
parmesan cheese

I flavoured the white sauce with a little nutmeg and the pumpkin with a shot of roasted pumpkin and sunflower seed oil.
Then I layered it as follows, a little sauce, a layer of pasta, layer of pumpkin and a tiny bit more sauce. More pasta, layer of ricotta, layer of spinach, more sauce, pasta then a good layer of sauce. Finished off with a topping of parmesan cheese, then cooked till golden.

The dish tasted very good, was just right moisture wise and was very filling however the pumpkin got rather lost against the spinach and ricotta, next time I might try pumpkin with something else but it isn't a veg we cook much so I'm not sure what might go well. This is the one meal the small one hasn't eaten with us this week, partly as he was hungry when he came in from school and partly because I knew he would not like the green part!

(edit, pasta goes rather soggy when frozen. still edible but much better fresh)

The weeks menu

Well I've be organised to sort a menu but not organised to post it in time for the Monday round ups.. However I think it's a start and as we are all under the weather with colds I will let myself of. In future I want to join in the Gluten Free Menu Swap and if I'm doing that I might as well do Menu Plan Monday as well. The Gluten Free menu swap has an ingredients of the week. This week it is mushrooms, I do have some in the fridge and will probably do a mushroom side dish but one of the family as mild problems with them and as he is under the weather I will not be adding them to the main dishes as when his system is low the tends to react to them badly.

So this week the menu is as follows.

Monday Pasta and mince.
Gluten free pasta of course and mince means something more like a bolognase sauce than straight mince, so some vegs, tomato etc and in this case a little bacon that needed eating to supliment the mince as I was feeding more than expected.

Tuesday Sausage and bean stew
A few gluten free sausages, lots of black eye beans, chickpeas, potatoes, parsnip, carrot, an onion and two tins of tomatoes. Plenty left for lunches.

Wednesday Chicken noodle soup from Use real butter because it sounded wonderful.

Thursday either veggy stew or mixed roast vegs with either cauliflower fritters or cauliflower cheese. (Thursday is the day the veggy box is delivered so it depends what is left from this week's box by then)


Friday Lasagne possibly with pumpkin like the one Ginger lemon Girl did but certainly with ricotta and spinach because I love that combination.

Looking at that, all the meat is at the beginning of the week and it's quite a few pasta dishes but we haven't had much pasta recently as we had mostly run out. We got a new bulk order from Suma last week so I am making the most of having a selection, all gluten free of course.

So far this week we have eaten the evening meal before the small one's bedtime which means we can eat together. This works better when Tom is on an early shift but he is this week and next so will make the most of it by eating at the table.

Choc Sponge Pud

I love British puds and traditional food in general so when I found out about a new blogging challenge called the Great British Pudding Challenge I had to consider joining. The first challenge is a chocolate sponge pudding. Such a hardship !

I haven't made many sponge puds since I stopped eating gluten and the few I have were done by the microwave method which while it is fast didn't give me that good a result. However when I started cooking gluten free anything resembling the real thing was good enough so they filled a gap but now I am more picky as the flours are available to do better than that and my confidence has grown to try adapting recipes.

This recipe is done by the traditional steaming method which takes much longer but all the best things take time and once the mix is made up all you need to do is make sure the steamer doesn't run out of water so can be getting on with other things which in my case was cooking tea, we had lamb chops with a salad. For a steamer I used a large pasta pan, one of those with an internal pan like a colander which can be pulled out to drain the pasta or in this case to lift the pudding basin away from the steam.

The original none gluten free recipe is here. All I did was to replace the flour with a gluten free general flour mix and it worked very well. The mixture is easy to make up and the resultant pudding is very chocolaty indeed. I used Bornville Chocolate for the chunks as I love dark chocolate. The texture was very good and light though I think from seeing pictures of a couple of others mine might be a little more crumbly than a gluten version but not so much it spoilt the feel in the mouth.

We all ate it with cream though I suspect had Tom not been feeling low with a cold he would have made custard to go with it as well.

My small one insisted on being pictured with the pudding as well sorry it's rather dark it was getting close to his bedtime so I wanted to get it served up.

Quince Apples and menu planning

I have got a lovely box of fruit off Freecycle yesterday. The lady referred to them as quince apples, having looked on the internet a bit and smelling them, which is a wonderful smell, I think they are real quince.. there is a variety called apple quince which look very like these. Either way I plan to make them into jelly, though I might use a few with some apples to make a pie or similar because the fragrance is wonderful.

I have also decide I really need to get back to doing weekly menu planning. I did do this quite regularly before I was feeling sick all the time and it is a good thing to do. The best day to do it is Friday as we get the veggy box Thursday evening and planning the meals round that is a good idea.

There is a weekly gluten free menu swap which I would like to join in with and a bigger general one, Menu plan monday run on orgjunkie which has lots of people joining with all sorts of eating styles. Angela, from Angela's Kitchen uses the monthly menus at familyfun.com which look worth considering. I don't think I'd use them all the time as I need to use the vegs we get and so forth but at least they are mostly based on basic ingredients not mixes and such like some I have seen.