This is the year! We’re finally going to do an actual traditional Thanksgiving Dinner.
Category: Sides and Condiments
Quick and Easy Gluten Free Side Dishes
Gluten Free Corn Relish
So, my daughter took this amazing picture of the Target Brownie she bought from an antique shop. It’s one of those dark moody pictures, with the Brownie camera sitting on a dark wood table with a black backdrop. It looks mysterious and smokey. I loved it so much I made it my computer desktop. And I was thinking, you know what would look great like that? Corn relish. Corn relish is such an incredibly boring looking food. It looks like corn in a bowl. Lets add a dash of irony and take a picture of it as artistically and mysteriously as possible. Continue reading
Gluten Free Roast Chicken with Apple and Sweet Onion Stuffing
The best part about a roast chicken?
In my gluten eating days it was the stuffing.
I especially liked the way it flavored the chicken with it’s salty, savory goodness.
A roast chicken without stuffing seems a little bland, doesn’t it?
Today I’m going to show you a way that you can add a beautiful stuffing flavor to your chicken that’s so fast and easy that roast chicken will move off your special occasion menu and on to Thursday’s dinner plate. Continue reading
Salmon and Sweet Potatoes with Cucumber Peach Relish
This is a great meal for those crazy weeknights when I’ve forgotten to take something out for supper. Continue reading
Roasted Winter Vegetables, Vegan, Gluten-Free
Meeting multiple dietary needs in one family (or one person) can be a challenge. In our house, I’m gluten-free and my daughter has recently gone vegetarian, for health reasons. She’s always struggled with just not feeling well, and by experimenting a bit with the food she was eating she has been able to identify meat, fat and sugar as the main culprits. Her decision to cut out meat has changed things up in our kitchen. When we all have dinner together as a family, I make a main dish that is both vegetarian and gluten free, usually a fancy vegetable dish, and then have sides of meat and vegetable based proteins (legumes, soy). Continue reading
How to make Polenta
We started eating polenta when we moved back to the United States from Malawi, Africa. In Malawi we ate a corn mush called Nsima with a sauce made of fresh tomatoes and onions. Nsima flour is hard (but not impossible) to find in North America, but Polenta is in almost every grocery store. Even though polenta has a grainier texture than nsima it is an excellent taste substitute.
Polenta is also a great pasta substitute, especially if you use pasta simply as a vessel to transport sauce to your mouth. It’s amazingly easy to make, keeps well, and is even better fried in oil the next day.
click here to pin this guide for later
Basic Polenta
Click HERE for a printable recipe: Basic Polenta
Ingredients
- 3 cups water
- 1 cup polenta
- 1/2 tablespoon salt
Directions
- In a medium saucepan, bring water to a boil
- Reduce heat and whisk in polenta
- Continue stirring with the whisk until polenta thickens (this takes about 5 minutes)
- Pour into greased or Pam-sprayed 9″ round cake pan or pie plate
- Let set 10 minutes, polenta will become firm enough to cut slices
- Serve with your favorite pasta sauce or as a side to fried eggs
1 cup dry polenta
Reduce heat and whisk in polenta
Polenta, starting to thicken. Not quite ready.
Polenta, finally thick enough!
Pour polenta into a cake pan. Let it sit at least 10 minutes. It will set as it sits.
The polenta is set, serve and enjoy! I like mine in a bowl so I can spoon on LOTS of sauce.
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How to Make Quinoa
Here’s a quick easy tutorial on making Quinoa. I’m not a huge fan of plain quinoa, but I cook it ahead and use it in other recipes with !FLAVOR! as a side dish or a breakfast cereal.
Basic Quinoa
- Measure out quinoa and place in a strainer. You will cook it in twice as much water. (1 cup raw quinoa, 2 cups water makes 3 cups of cooked quinoa).
- Rinse the quinoa in a fine strainer. This removes naturally occurring bitter soapy stuff that the plant produces.
- Place quinoa and water into a sauce pan.
- Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for about 15 minutes.
- Quinoa is done when the balls are translucent and the half moon shaped husks have separated. It will still have some chew, like al dente pasta, and the balls will pop in your teeth.
I use a really fine metal strainer so it doesn't fall through the holes.
Here I have 1/2 cup quinoa and 1 cup water
Cooked Quinoa