A little bit of gluten free…

I know, I know. I’ve been away. I’ve been lazy, and this blog seems to be dying a slow and painful death. But I’ve also had a lot on my plate! My grandmother is still in hospital, I’ve still been without kitchen for the most part and not been cooking much. Yet this is an overdue post. In early December, I became interested in gluten free cooking. Now, I’ll admit I don’t have any reason to go gluten free….and I used to laugh at all those people who did it voluntarily without a doctor’s recommendation – yet I’ll admit, I was curious to find out what the hype was all about and to see if I would, in fact, feel much better on a gluten free diet as many of the gluten free advocates claim.

Last week I made gluten free pizza (base seen in first photo) and a few days back I attempted fresh gluten free pasta for the first time. Before that, I did some research and outfitted myself with gluten free flours – the standard ones (cornflour, rice flour) and some less commonplace ones – sorghum flour, tapioca flour and potato flour. I retrieved recipes for a gluten free pizza base and gluten free fresh pasta from Jim Boswell’s New Zealand Gluten-Free Cookbook, which was kindly lent to me by a friend. I expect to make both again and will post with the recipes, as I don’t have the book with me currently. But I can assure you, I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to make both the pasta and the pizza base. Making fresh gluten free pasta took HALF the time than making normal fresh pasta….true it made a smaller portion, but let’s not quibble, ok?

You’ll be hearing more soon. I didn’t have enough interesting ingredients to make a pretty pasta sauce or toppings, but I’ll make it to the supermarket eventually!

A Few Things: Rustic Vegetable Pie, Black Bread & Roasted Pumpkin/Parsnip Puree

I made this pie a few days back, but sadly it ended up getting devoured  before I could finish taking photos (slices). It’s quite a funny sort of ‘pie’ – definitely something in between a rustic pie/tart and a pizza, and incorporates potatoes into it too, surprisingly. That said, I have to say, it didn’t feel overly heavy and was quite a delicious and cheap meal. The recipe came from a NZ Home and Garden Magazine, I think – and was in my old recipe book of clippings. To save myself time, I decided to scan the recipe rather than type it out. A bit sloppy, perhaps but it saves time! I would definitely like to make this again and see if I can my base to explode like theirs does in the picture (I don’t know how they do that, they must have made it in summer).

Another day I made some black bread and served it with a roasted pumpkin and parsnip puree. Originally it was going to be soup, but essentially it was just a slightly thinned out puree of roasted parsnip and pumpkin with sauteed onion and garlic, and a wee bit of stock – so call it what you will! The black bread recipe came from 101 Cookbooks and once again gave me the opportunity to use my rye meal flour and molasses. It was slightly sweeter than I was expecting, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing!

Pizza Day!

I was supposed to be having some friends over to celebrate the end of semester over pie….but somehow that morphed into making pizza instead! And to jazz things up a bit, I made two different pizza bases…one regular, one with polenta. Ultimately I think the regular was still best, but both were tasty. It’s a bit hard to go wrong with pizza!

Regular pizza dough base

 

Polenta Base

 

Comparison...

 

A selection of the herbs we used - fennel, chives, parsley, thyme and oregano - apologies for the water, but the herbs needed washing

 

Pizza pre-oven; tomato paste, olives, herbs, beetroot, mushrooms and red onion

 

Pre-oven; tomato paste, olives, tomato, red onion, mushrooms, herbs....we were kind of running out of tomato paste at this point....

 

post-oven; mmmmmmmmmm!