Posts Tagged Dairy free

Bread Machine

March 25, 2010 at 8:19 am · Filed under Recipes, What worked ·Tagged , , , ,

I’ve tried a few gluten-free breads from scratch, with ok results.  Soon, however, we’ll be able to try wheat again, and “regular” bread will be a possibility.  The problem, however, is that all of the store-bought breads I’ve looked at have either soy, dairy, or both.  We won’t retry dairy until July, and soy seems to still be a problem, so homemade bread is in our future.

My husband consented to me getting a new bread machine for this endeavor.  (He loves fresh bread, so it didn’t take too much convincing.)  My goal was to find a machine that had a traditional-shaped loaf, and that would work well for gluten-free breads, in case we need to continue on that road.

I settled on the Zojirushi BBCCX20 Home Bakery Supreme Bread Machine.  Several gluten-free websites said this was a good model for gluten-free breadmaking.  Although it does not have a preprogrammed gluten-free cycle, it can be manually programmed to work well with gluten-free blends.

To assist with programming and to find some good gluten-free bread recipes, I bought Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine.  The benefits of this book were two-fold for me:  the author explains exactly how to program this model of bread machine for gluten-free baking, and her flour mix of tapioca, millet, sorghum, corn starch, and potato starch makes use of ingredients my son can have (and that I had in my kitchen).  The only substitute I made was using almond milk in place of dairy milk, and it seemed to work out fine.

UPS dropped off my packages at 3:30 p.m., and by 10:00 I’d made my first two loaves of gluten-free bread, impressed with the results.  The white sandwich bread came out beautifully and was a hit with bothy my husband and son, who snacked on it before bed.  The cinnamon swirl bread left a wonderful smell in the house, and a slice went to school in my son’s lunch today.  Both loaves are much better than anything I had made by hand previously.

I also bought The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread: More Than 200 Wheat-Free Recipes, but that one’s going back.  It was written in 1999, before millet and sorghum flours were readily available, and relies heavily on rice and bean flours.  Since my son can’t have rice, this is not useful for me.  It does have a lot of recipes, however, so for bakers who like to use rice or bean flour it would be a good book.

Today I’ll try some traditional bread for the rest of the family so I can put the gluten-free slices in the freezer.  I need to get to the store and get more millet flour and tapioca flour so I can keep baking.  It’s nice to have good bread for my son to eat again.

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Chewy Brownie Cookies

March 20, 2010 at 9:18 am · Filed under Recipes ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

These are a modification of a recipe I’ve made before, and I think the gluten-free version is better than the original!

Chewy Brownie Cookies

  • 1 package Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free brownie mix
  • 1 1/2 c. gluten-free oats
  • 3/4 c. chocolate chips (opt.)
  • 1 c. water
  • 2 eggs

Mix thoroughly.  Drop by spoonfuls onto greased baking sheets.  Bake at 350 degrees for 13-16 minutes.

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Hamburger-Macaroni Hotdish

February 23, 2010 at 6:10 pm · Filed under Recipes ·Tagged , , , ,

One of the things I’ve missed most during this diet is making hotdish.  The rest of the world may call it casserole, but here in Minnesota, we like our hotdish.  For a busy mom, the prospect of making something economical, and having leftovers for the next night’s meal, is a happy one.

The problem with most hotdishes is that cream soups are a common ingredient.  I searched through my files and finally found a recipe that I could modify.

Here’s what I came up with, and the kids cleaned their plates.  (My growing nine-year-old had thirds.)  This one’s a keeper.

Hamburger-Macaroni Hotdish

  • 1 lb. hamburger, browned
  • 2 c. macaroni (before cooking) cooked until almost done  (I used DeBole’s corn macaroni.)
  • 2 cans (15 oz each) tomato sauce
  • 1 can whole kernel corn, drained
  • 1/2 c. ketchup
  • 1/2 tsp. chili powder
  • 1/2 tsp. onion salt
  • 1 T. sugar

Mix all ingredients and bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

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Sorghum Blueberry Muffins

February 16, 2010 at 4:29 pm · Filed under Recipes ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

These are the first gluten-free muffins I’ve made that had a regular-consistency muffin batter.  The others have had a thicker, dough-like batter.  This recipe was adapted from the Sweet Sorghum Muffins recipe by Valerie Wells at the Bob’s Red Mill website.

Mix dry ingredients in one bowl, wet ingredients in another.  Stir until just moistened; do not mix too much.

Fill 12 muffin cups 2/3 full.  Bake 13-15 minutes at 400.

My son says they’re a hit.

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Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

February 3, 2010 at 5:35 am · Filed under Recipes, What worked ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

These just came out of the oven, but I don’t think they’re going to last long.  I’ve already gotten a score of “Delicious!” from the “diet” child.

I adapted this recipe from one at Allrecipes.com, using my flour mix and some of the reader comments to come up with this combination.

First, mix up a batch of the flour mix that I got from the Gluten-Free Goddess:  1 c. sorghum flour, 1/2 c. potato starch, 1/2 c. millet flour, 1/2 c. buckwheat flour, 1 t. xanthan gum.

Mix the dry ingredients:

  • 2 c. flour mix (see above)
  • 3/4 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp ground cloves
  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

In a separate bowl, mix:

  • 3/4 c. brown sugar
  • 1/4 c. unsweetened applesauce
  • 2 eggs

Add:

  • 1 c. canned pumpkin
  • 1/4 c. water

Mix the wet and dry ingredients, then stir in:

  • 1 bag (10 oz)  miniature chocolate chips (I use Enjoy Life chips.)

Spoon into 18-24 paper-lined muffin tins.  Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes.

These muffins are moist and tasty.  This recipe’s a keeper!

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Chocolate Cake

January 4, 2010 at 11:28 pm · Filed under Recipes, What worked ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This is the chocolate cake I came up with today:

Gluten-Free, Soy-Free, Dairy-Free, Wheat-Free, Egg-Free, Nut-Free

Chocolate Cake

Mix of flours for cake

Mix all in bowl by hand; a whisk works well to get out lumps.  Batter will be runny.

Cake batter

Pour into 9×13 pan; bake 30-40 minutes at 350.

Chocolate Cake top

Chocolate cake side

I frosted it with icing made from butter (ok’d by doctor), powdered sugar, and vanilla coconut milk.

The verdict:

Texture is very good. The cake set up nicely and didn’t sink at all in the middle. This is quite a feat in my sometimes tempestuous oven. It is light and fluffy. The only thing a little different about the texture is that one of the flours is a little courser, so occasionally it seems as if there’s cornmeal in the cake.

Flavor has something strong about it, but I can’t pinpoint which flour makes it that way. With the frosting on, it’s less noticeable, but this isn’t the absolute-best-flavored chocolate cake you’ll ever have. Next time I’ll experiment with different flours, or perhaps put in more cocoa to mask this better.

Final verdict is from the kid for whom the cake was created. He’s licking the crumbs off his plate and just asked for a second piece. It gets a thumbs-up from the seven-year-old.

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Background

January 4, 2010 at 2:13 am · Filed under Journal ·Tagged , , , ,

My son, who is now seven, has had eczema since he was a tiny baby.  You know how babies usually have soft, cuddly skin?  He never had that.  My other kids also had infant eczema, but outgrew it by the time they were one or two.  This guy’s still dealing with it.

When he was three it was bad enough and puzzling enough that our family doctor sent us in two directions:  dermatologist and allergist.  The dermatologist calls him one of her moderate-severe child cases.  The allergist discovered a peanut allergy, but since we were waiting until age four to introduce peanuts, we knew they weren’t the culprit.  Still, we now follow a careful peanut-free diet.

We’ve tried all sorts of lotions and potions and other solutions.  This fall, we started with an upper-cervical chiropractor, and we believe we’re making some sort of progress there, but the eczema still hasn’t gone away.

After consulting with an osteopath (a doctor who focuses more on whole-life and alternative cares than an M.D. usually does) my son underwent bloodwork for ALCAT food sensitivity testing.  When we got the results, we found that he has intolerances to several foods.  We will now be eliminating these foods from his diet for various periods of time, depending on the severity of the reactions, and then gradually adding them back in and watching for changes in symptoms.

Suddenly, the peanut allergy seems very, very easy to deal with.

These are the foods that my son will be avoiding, and the length of time before reintroduction of each.

Avoid for three weeks:

  • Apricot
  • Artichoke
  • Asparagus
  • Basil
  • Cabbage
  • Caraway
  • Chickpea (garbanzo bean)
  • Chicken
  • Date
  • Goat’s Milk
  • Herring
  • Honeydew
  • Hops
  • Lamb
  • Lima Bean
  • Orange
  • Parsley
  • Pistachio
  • Scallop
  • Shrimp
  • Soybean (soy products)
  • Squash (yellow)
  • Fluoride
  • Blue #1
  • Red #1

Avoid for three months:

  • Beet Sugar
  • Kidney Bean
  • Pork
  • Rice
  • Sesame
  • Barley
  • Rye
  • Malt
  • Wheat
  • Oat
  • Polysorbate 80

Avoid for six months:

  • Blackberry
  • Black/green Tea
  • Cayenne Pepper
  • Cow’s Milk (although doctor specifically gave ok for butter)
  • Mint
  • Oyster
  • Sorbic Acid

Always avoid:

  • Peanuts
  • Tree Nuts (because of cross-contamination with peanuts)

This blog will be a journal in the adventure of finding things that he can, and will enjoy, eating.  Countless other people have lifelong multiple food allergies; we are fortunate in that we hope to find one or two culprits and will successfully reintroduce most other foods.  In the meantime, however, we will be experimenting with different types of flours and grains, and finding recipes that fit in my son’s acceptable list of ingredients.  It will be an adventure.

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