Gluten free recipe - asparagus & bacon risotto

This recipe is:

• Gluten free
• Dairy free
• Egg free

Last night's dinner was Roast Chicken - not blogged I'm afraid - too much to do cooking for guests.

So with the resulting stock, it's risotto tonight. Gorgeous, creamy risotto - possibly my favourite dish. Or at least one of the most regular features on the menu here at gluten free central.

So...

Asparagus & bacon risotto

You'll need a good amount of gluten free stock - a couple of pints / a litre. I boil a chicken carcass with onions and celery or carrot for a few hours and use that, but gluten free stock cubes are fine.

200g pancetta or dry-cured bacon lardons. These will usually be gluten free, but of course always check

400g risotto rice
1 onion - chopped
2 cloves garlic chopped
250g asparagus - blanche this in boiling water for 1 minute.
White wine or Extra dry vermouth
Olive oil
6 sage leaves - chopped


Fry the pancetta or bacon fairly hard in a little oil until it turns crispy and brown

Turn the heat right down and add the onions and garlic - fry very gently for 5-10 minutes until the onion and garlic are really soft and translucent

Add the rice and fry until it has absorbed the oil, then add about a cup of wine or vermouth. Boil off the alcohol then stir the rice until the moisture is absorbed.

Start adding the hot stock ladle by ladle, stirring the rice regularly. Continue for 20-25 minutes until the rice is 'al dente' - just a touch off ready. Add the asparagus, sage, a ladle of extra stock, take off the heat and cover. Leave to stand for 2 minutes.

Stir in a large handful of grated parmesan, season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

The final consistency should be creamy, not stodgy, not runny. Mmmmmm....

Risottos are great because they are naturally gluten free. You can sit down and eat and feel like a normal person ;-)

Gluten free lunch recipe - rice salad

This recipe is:

• Gluten free
• Dairy free
• Egg free
• Yeast free

I work from home, and there's nothing worse than coming to lunchtime without any ready-to-go gluten free goodies to fuel my afternoon's efforts, so it's great when there's a big bowl of something tasty in the fridge. And it's not bad if there's some rice salad. ;-)

Here's what I do:

Boil up some rice (for health go for brown, for lack of chew-like-a-cow-for-hours factor, go for basmati)
Run under cold water until cool.

Add: (any of the below)

Gently fried onion and garlic
Chopped Avocado
Pan roasted nuts like cashews, almonds, etc
Sultanas (good if soaked in warm water for 5 mins first)
Chopped spicy leaves such as rocket or watercress - you can add these when the rice is hot so they sweat down
Chopped fresh spinach
Chopped red or green pepper
Sliced raw mushrooms
Fresh basil
A couple of glugs of oil - olive or something more exotic like Macadamia or Walnut

Make your rice salad big enough and it will keep you in gluten free munchies for 3 days.

Millet porridge - Gluten free breakfast recipe

This recipe is:

• Gluten free
• Dairy free
• Egg free

You'll notice yesterday I was whinging on about not having anything sizeable to eat for breakfast. Well this morning gluten free wife (aka Lyndsay) was up with the larks (aka Edith the baby) and made a pot of millet porridge.

Millet porridge, now there's a hearty breakfast for you. Mostly because you almost always make way too much and so you can have as many bowls as you like.

Here's how...

Millet Porridge Recipe

Enough millet grain for one person - how much? Oh I don't know, a cup? A bucket?
About 4 times as much water
A pinch of salt
Loads of dried fruit - any types (optional but it does help add sweetness. You can go over the top though. This morning's millet porridge was more like dried fruit with millet.)
Alternative sweetener - syrup, or if you want to stay all GI-low, go for apple juice, or Agave Syrup - yep you read it right, syrup from a cactus. Just saw it in the shop yesterday and gave it a go. It's sweet.

Boil your millet for about half an hour adding more water if necessary. I often give it a little bit longer as the last few minutes make the millet porridge nice and soft.

You can add a spot of milk if you like, chopped nuts or whatever you fancy.

And if you have made too much, like I usually do, millet porridge is great the next day too.

Gluten free recipe - Seared tuna with rice noodles

I used to think fresh tuna was pointless - dry, chewy and tasteless. Then I tasted some that had been cooked properly. The trick is to sear it quickly on a really hot pan for no more than 2 minutes per side so that it stays pink in the middle. That way you get a tender, juicy, tasty piece of fish.

That said, I don't think we'll be having much tuna in the future. What with the mercury and limited stocks of tuna fish, the downsides kind of outweight the upsides I reckon.

So now I've sold you on the idea (!), onto today's gluten free recipe...

Seared tuna

Rub a little salt and pepper into both sides of the tuna steak, then a little olive oil. You can also rub with balsamic vinegar or add it when it's searing - it adds a nice sharpness.

If you do your tuna on a ribbed griddle you'll get those fancy black lines on it which look smart. :-)

Rice noodles

Prepare the rice noodles like it says on the packet - usually popping them into hot water and letting them sit for 3-4 minutes. Then mix up:
A couple of desert spoons of chopped pickled ginger
Thinly sliced spring onions
Half a finely shredded red chilli (or more if you like it hot)
A couple of teaspoons of sesame oil
Half a teaspoon fish sauce
Some thinly sliced spicy greens like pak choi or watercress

Mix it all up and stir it into your noodles. Pop the noodles onto a hot plate and cunningly balance your tuna on top. There, looks nice, tastes not half bad.

Gluten free breakfast recipe? Morning munchies!

Phew... back from the gym with a raging hunger. Feel like I need about 1000 calories just to get started. But what to eat? Last year, my standard gluten free breakfast would have been fried potatoes, tomatoes, eggs and bacon, but I've managed to develop food allergies to 3 of those now too. Work is underway to fix that... more later.

So this morning it's the polenta from last night and bacon. Not bad really. In fact, I'm so hungry I don't care. If it's gluten free I'll eat it. Watch out dogs.

Here another gluten free breakfast

Guilty Gluten Secrets

While the husband is away at the gym, I indulge in guilty gluten guzzling. Today's fair is hardly a crime by "normal" foodie standards - museli with extra sunflower and pumpkin seed, almonds and pistachio nuts. As I don't have coeliac disease, I can eat all the gluten in the world and it doesn't affect me. But because our gluten free regime is so strict, I eat my gluten goodies from special bowls and plates, and ALWAYS use a spoon to take honey from the jar (my gran would be proud). Plus I've got my own special shiny toaster!

The major upside is that unlike the majority of the Western world, I don't rely on wheat products to fill me up, so I get the benefit of a more varied diet. Also, as we cook about 95% of our food from scratch, we avoid all the nasties of processed food and are reasonably competent cooks. Is keeping the gluten free regime a pain? Sometimes, but the alternatives of a lazy diet that would kill the husband off sooner rather than later, really doesn't appeal.

(...... or not until he gets his life insurance sorted out..... then the breadcrumb poisoning will begin.....no-one will know..... no-one will suspect.........oooops - was that out loud!.... double oooops! The husband will read it and be wary!)

Gluten free recipe - polenta, guacamole and wasabi nuts

This recipe is:

• Gluten free
• Dairy free
• Egg free
• Yeast free

And tonight's gluten free dinner is... Fried polenta with corn guacamole and hot wasabi nuts

Yes, it's a bit of a crazy mix of food - some people call it fusion, we call it 'whatever's in the cupboard'. We're polenta newbies, which might sound odd seeing as it's a gluten free staple, but I've not had any polenta that excited me before, and I can't say this time is much different. I guess if you see it as a pasta or rice replacement it's not bad.

Anyway, less of the waffling and onto the recipe. Oh, before we begin, I'd better mention this recipe is vegan too. You won't see many of those on Gluten Free Food Freak - we're a bit fond of eating animals.

Gluten free recipe: Fried polenta with corn guacamole and wasabi nuts

The Polenta (sort of ground corn stuff you'll get down your local health food store)

1 litre water
250g polenta
Good glug olive oil or chunk of butter
3 cloves crushed or finely chopped garlic

How to...

Boil your water, add the polenta, stir for about 4 minutes, add the garlic and oil/butter and spread into a shallow oiled baking tray about 1.5 cm thick. Leave to cool for 20 mins or so. Then fry like crazy on a griddle. I must say I didn't have much luck with this depite getting the griddle to nuclear temperatures - I couldn't get the black lines they showed in the recipe book. more like light brown lines. Still, it went a bit crispy.

Update: on the second go I left it for ages, and we got our black tramtracks. So you just need to give it long enough for the polenta to dry out and burn basically :-)

One person who is well happy with it is our baby Edith. Mind you, she has a cold, so perhaps it's the snot that is adding the flavour.

The Guacamole

2 cloves garlic finely chopped
A large handful of frozen corn, defrosted
2 avocados
Half small red onion finely chopped
Half a lemon's worth of juice

Fry the living daylights out of the corn on a griddle pan, leaving it for too long so it burns a bit. Mix it all together and adjust for taste.

Hot wasabi nuts

Now when someone first fed me these I was a bit nervous. Wasabi is the green stuff that removes the skin from your tongue if you eat so much as a pinhead of it. But somehow, frying nuts in it removes all the heat. It also creates a punishing gas in the process, so get your extractor on full.

Nuts - almonds, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, pine nuts - whatever you fancy really
Wasabi paste - I used a packet of powder that just contained powdered horseradish (that's what wasabi is, even though you might be forgiven for thinking it was something forced on the human race by an evil alien invader).

Dry fry the nuts until they begin to brown, stir the wasabi in. Fry for a couple of minutes.

How does it taste?

The polenta I've already talked about - fine as long as you don't expect too much flavour. The guacamole is superb - the sweetness of the corn kernels really works and it adds the flavour the polenta is missing. And eating nuts with a knife and fork is a bit tricky, but vegans manage it, so I must be able to as well. What with my enhanced co-ordination from all the omega-3's in the meat I eat ;-)

Well, that seems to have been a reasonable first effort at this blogging lark - don't know whether you agree or not. I'll try getting a picture online next.