a gluten free pie that really works

Lizzy made this beautiful gluten free pie last night and it actually worked! No way I would have tried it - I don't make pastry, let alone gluten free pastry - but Lizzy is an enthuasiastic cook.

So we hunted up these instructions from The Art of Gluten-Free Baking. They explain it all, even for baking dummies like me. It's actually easier to make than normal pastry - the instructions tell you why.

(We took out the sugar and added a bit of salt to make a savoury crust. Oh, and forget the fancy flours - we used a standard mixed gluten free flour - though this may change how much water you need.)

And away she went:
 
 We blind-baked the base using the white casserole dish in the picture above to weigh it down (it tells you how here).

I made the filling from this chicken and leek pie recipe. (Cut down the butter and maybe use milk instead of cream, plus some cornflour to thicken. Oh, and I added a little white wine, whole-seed mustard, plenty of garlic and chicken stock for flavouring.)

We added the top layer, painted it with egg, and pierced it in a few places. I pinched the edges (funny how these old skills come back to you) and Lizzy added a heart for Valentine's Day. Then into the oven.

Here it is. The chicken and leek filling was sensational, and the pastry worked a treat.

swiss chocolate tart

Turns out I posted the wrong picture on my post and recipe last week: it was actually a picture of Jess's Swiss chocolate tart. So I thought I'd better share the recipe. It looks even easier than the last one. No photo - sorry! - but Jess tells me it looks like this or this.

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
4 Tbs cocoa
150g butter
½ cup plain flour (GF works fine)
icing sugar and cream to serve

1. Mix flour, eggs, sugar, cocoa and vanilla.
2. Melt butter and add to other ingredients. Mix until well combined (takes a while).
3. Pour into greased and lined, round cake tin.
4. Cook for 30-40 minutes at 1750C. Should still be moist.
5. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve with whipped cream.

Jess's dark chocolate torte

Today, it's a recipe: my friend Jess's famous dark chocolate torte, easy, delicious and gluten-free. Tomorrow, it's a post about a recipe. Bet you can't wait! [Oops - turns out the photo below is actually of Jess's Swiss chocolate tart. Here's the recipe. Jess tells me the picture below should look more like this or this.]

100g (¾ cup) slivered almonds (or any other almonds with skin removed)
120g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
120g (2/3 cup) dried dates, pitted and chopped finely
3 egg whites
125g (½ cup) castor sugar
125ml whipping cream
2 tsps castor sugar, extra
30g dark or milk chocolate, grated, extra

1. Preheat oven to 180deg. Line 22cm springform tin with foil.
2. Blend almonds and chocolate in food processor until fine.
3. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Slowly add sugar and continue beating until dissolved.
4. Fold in almond and chocolate mixture and dates.
5. Spoon mixture into tin and level the surface.
6. Bake 30-35min or until set.
 7. Cool in tin before carefully placing on serving plate.

To serve, whip the cream and extra sugar until soft peaks form. Spread the cream over torte. Sprinkle with grated chocolate.

Serve with strawberries either on top or to the side.

Note: Torte can be make up 4 days in advance and stored in a sealed container without cream.

Serves 8

Storage: Torte keeps well, without cream for 5-6 days wrapped in foil. With cream, this is best eaten on the day of baking.

minestrone

We had minestrone for lunch today, made with bacon bones using this recipe (minus the beef and with extra bacon, 250g rather than 400g pasta, extra veges and salt & pepper - oh, and I left the bacon bones in an extra hour). It was super yummy - the whole family agreed! So I thought I'd pass the recipe on to you.

potatoes, potatoes, potatoes

Don't you just love a bargain?

A couple of weeks ago, I saw potatoes for half price at our local supermarket. There's 6 people in our family, and we eat a lot of potatoes. So I bought six 3kg bags of potatoes.

Ok, maybe I overdid it.

I came home, and piled the bags into the corner cupboard. Three days later, I opened one of the plastic packets (well, they were ventilated) to discover that the potatoes were already starting to go mouldy. So into a big cloth sack they went, and back into the cupboard.

Two weeks later, and as you can see, the potatoes are starting to grow roots. We are still eating potatoes.

Mashed potatoes.
Cottage pie.
Baked potatoes with topping.
Scalloped potatoes.
Potato pancakes.
Boiled potatoes.
Lancashire hotpot.
Roast potatoes.
Potato and leek soup.

Any other ideas for good ways to eat potatoes?

not-so-slow food

While we're on the subject of food, let me tell you about my friend Susan's beautiful blog. She and her husband are committed to the idea of slow food, taking time and care to prepare the food they eat.

Her delicious-looking blog shows bread dough kneaded on a board, home-baked goodies gorgeously displayed on pretty cake stands at a school fete, cafe latte in a glass accompanied with home-made biscotti.

Like us, they have 6mouths2feed, but they do it in style.

In our house, we're more into not-so-slow food: cereal from a box, home brand crackers, instant coffee, and ice-cream from a tub. We do make our own popcorn and porridge, the kids cook muffins (from a packet) for their lunchboxes, Lizzy loves to make a meal or dessert each week, and I create almost all our meals from scratch - take away is too expensive and unhealthy to be indulged in often. But our menu is more traditional than gourmet.

And I confess that many of our meals come straight out of a well-stocked freezer.

I often cook in bulk and freeze meal-sized portions in those 700 ml freezer containers you can buy cheaply at the supermarket. I developed this habit preparing for morning sickness and early babyhood. I do love a deep chest freezer overflowing with home-cooked frozen meals!! It makes life a lot easier for this mother of 4.

Here's my (non) recipe for bulk bolognaise sauce (like Sus, I prefer to cook without a recipe, although she does it with more panache):

Jean's spag bog
- splash of oil for the pot
- at least 3 kg beef mince (the most I ever cooked in one go was 6 kg)
- about 3 large carrots, 3 celery sticks and 3 onions for every 1 kg of mince, chopped fairly small
- a large can of tomatoes for every 2 kg or so (I roughly chop the tomatoes if they're whole)
- extra tomato paste if the sauce doesn't look tomato-y enough, or if I've run out of cans of tomatoes
- lots of red wine, beef stock, mixed herbs, Worcestershire sauce, and pepper to taste
- lots of chopped garlic (if I get around to it)

1. Brown the mince in a small amount of oil in an extremely large pot.
2. Throw in the other ingredients (sometimes I fry off the veges first; when Lizzy was averse to veges I fried them in a big pot in a little oil until they were soft and pureed them before adding them to the mince. Never puree the meat!! I tried this once and it was a huge mistake. Think sludge.).
3. Bring to the boil and simmer slowly for hours and hours.
4. Cool it in the fridge overnight, then skim off the fat.
5. Put in freezer containers and freeze (I once worked out that 6 kg mince fills at least 18 700 ml containers).

The main secret to bulk cooking is always to add a lot more flavouring - stock powder, sauce, herbs, pepper etc. - than you think you will need. Allow time to bring a huge pot to the boil, and for many hours of long, slow simmering. It's worth it: just think of all those busy, grumpy late afternoons it will saves you cooking from scratch!

And here are the easy speedy meals we make with our spag bog sauce (1 700 ml container per meal):

1. spaghetti bolognaise (well, duh!)
2. "giant pasta" - a fun variant on lasagna - cook extra large pasta, mix it with spag bog sauce in a lasagna dish, top with grated cheese, and bake in the oven until it browns.
3. shepherd's pie - actually, I think it's really cottage pie, but we call it shepherd's pie - put spag bog sauce in the bottom of a casserole dish, top with a large pot of mashed potato, put grated cheese on top, bake until hot and browned.
4. chili con carne - fry 1 chopped red capsicum in small amount olive oil, add spag bog sauce, 1 can drained, rinsed kidney beans, garlic, chili, cumin and coriander powder; cook until capsicum is soft; serve with pasta, cous cous or rice.
5. tacos / burritos - in tacos or tortillas with salad and chili sauce
6. lasagna - layer spag bog sauce with lasagna noodles, cheese or cheese sauce, and top with grated cheese; cook until pasta cooked and top browned.
7. spaghetti casserole - in a lasagna dish layer 1. spaghetti noodles, 2. spag bog sauce, 3. spaghetti noodles, 4. ricotta / defrosted frozen spinach / grated cheese / egg mixed together, 5. spaghetti noddles, 6. passata (Italian tomato pasta sauce) and 7. grated cheese; bake until browned.

And that's some not-so-slow food from the kitchen of Jean. ;)

dumplings tonight

Is is just me, or does everyone get excited by the way dumplings expand to more than twice their original size when you cook them? It's like getting something for nothing.

Two minutes to mix, three minutes in the microwave, and there they are, soft, puffy and delicious.

We're eating dumplings tonight, courtesy of Alison Holst's The Best of Home Cooking, a fantastic book which I bought second hand on AbeBooks from a bookstore in country Victoria, so close to my mother-in-law's house that she drove over to pick it up for me (ah, the joy of the internet, where you can source books all over the world, only to find them surprisingly close to hand).

Alison Holst is deservedly famous in her native New Zealand. She favours traditional home-style family food while catering for modern tastes, is completely non-intimidating (is anyone else terrified by those soft-focus photographs in trendy cookbooks?), and her recipes are easy, adaptable and wonderful. I use her cookbooks more than any of the others on my shelf.

And the dumplings? They were delicious.

Here is the recipe (unlike most of her books, this one's out of print, so it should be ok to reproduce the recipe here). You can use gluten free self-raising flour - my husband's a coeliac, so we usually make it this way.

1/2 cup self-raising flour
pinch of celery salt and garlic salt (I use salt)
1 Tbsp chopped parsley
other herbs to taste (optional)
1/4 cup milk

Combine ingredients in order given, stirring just enough to dampen flour. Pour 1/2 cup hot water in a 23 cm flat-bottomed dish. Drop mixture into water in about 12 small amounts, using two teaspoons. Cover. Cook at Full power for 3 minutes, or until firm. Sprinkle with paprika if desired. Add to individual bowls of cooked soup.

You can add the dumplings to stew as well as soup. And if you like your dumplings crunchy, put them (uncooked) on top of stew (cooked or nearly cooked) and bake it uncovered in a 180°C oven for 20 minutes.