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Archive for September, 2010

Meal Plan Monday, September 27, 2010

Posted in Meal Plan, tagged , , , on September 27, 2010| 7 Comments »

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since I have done any serious meal planning. We’ve been eating a lot of whatever-we-can-come-up-from-the-cabinets and frozen stuff, not to mention the tamales in the freezer. I have been off my regular grocery shopping schedule. And I haven’t had any time to go to the Farmer’s Market. Boo. But this next weekend I am already planning to go to the Farmer’s Market and then I was hoping to head up to Dixon’s Apples, but it looks like they are already out of my favorite apple, the Champagne. They have only been open since Thursday! Wow! I knew I should have gone up today but alas, I needed to go into the office. Oh yeah, that’s the other thing that has been wreaking havoc on my meal planning. Unexpected overtime and late meetings.

Okay, enough whining already and on to the main purpose of today’s post – a meal plan! But first, one more thing…I recently got a few new cookbooks. Of course, this one:

Gluten Free Girl and The Chef by Shauna James Ahern and Daniel Ahern

I haven’t made anything from it yet but I will be sure to let you know when I do!

I also recently joined Paperback Swap and have a wish-list a mile long. (I love to read instead of watch TV.) I also love to browse through cookbooks. So I have wish-listed just a few cookbooks… This is one of the ones I recently received:

Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons

There are a lot of wonderful ideas in here. In fact, we have one of them on the schedule for this week.

And this one:


Fast Vegetarian Feasts by Martha Rose Shulman

So, you’ll probably be seeing some renditions of items out of these cookbooks. There are some great ideas in all of them.

Okay, for real, the menu plan. This week’s theme for the Gluten Free Menu Swap is pears. Unfortunately I don’t like pears. So no pears here this week. But there are lots of other yummy things on the list this week! If you do like pears (and even if you don’t), go check out the other ideas at the Menu Swap. This week is hosted by Cheryl of Gluten Free Goodness.

Our plan:

Peanut Noodles with Tofu (we had this tonight – recipe to follow soon)

Tex-Mex Lasagna with Salad

Penne with Red Pepper Sauce and Broccoli from Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons

Tortilla Soup with Tamales or Salad

Sushi Bowls

Tofu with Spicy Vegetables and Rice

Unfortunately there is a lot of tofu and pasta on the menu this week. I usually try to avoid eating tofu more than once, maybe twice, a week, as I like to mix up my protein sources. But apparently I wasn’t paying attention when I wrote this up and then went to the store. I am sure we’ll be fine this week but next week we probably won’t be eating too much tofu!

What’s on your menu this week? Any new cookbooks that you are enjoying?


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Falling Into Autumn

Posted in Cookies, Dessert, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 25, 2010| 19 Comments »

The nights are getting cooler and the days are not quite so warm. The sun is sinking low in the sky earlier. And the corn stalks in the garden are drying up.

Autumn is coming and with it, my food cravings are beginning to change. The past week or two I have been craving some of those autumn foods, like pumpkin and cozy soups. And it may be because I have a couple of pie pumpkins and butternut squash ripening in the garden. But those pumpkins can’t ripen fast enough for me, so I went to get some canned pumpkin…

Have you been able to find canned pumpkin lately? Normally the stores carry it year-round and I can get some anytime I want, but this past year was different. No pumpkin to be found. Did you know there was a pumpkin shortage this past year? Last year in Illinois, where most pumpkins are grown, there was excessive wet weather which caused a particularly bad harvest. But things are going better this year and they are expecting to have a good harvest. Thankfully! And thankfully there will be pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, no worries!

Since I knew pumpkin has been hard to find, I asked my buddy Heidi over at Adventures of a Gluten Free Mom, also known as Gluten-Free CNN, if she had seen any around town. She gets around to all the stores and I knew that if it was to be found, she’d know where! Sure enough, she said that Whole Foods had some this past week. It wasn’t Libby’s but Farmer’s Market brand, which I had never heard of – but it was pumpkin! Heidi said she had left me a few cans, so I ran over there and grabbed some.

I had plans to make my pumpkin chocolate chip muffins but thought I would change things up a little. I decided on Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies instead! If you have never tasted pumpkin and chocolate together, you have to try it – absolutely delicious!

Last night I was trying to decide what to make for our monthly celiac support group meeting/potluck and I knew I needed to use up some of the Gluten Free Pantry mixes that I had bought at our local Smith’s in the clearance baskets (I can’t resist buying gluten free items when they end up in there!). My favorite chocolate chip cookies are made with the Gluten Free Pantry’s French Bread and Pizza mix, so I figured I would start there. I looked around a bit and came up with the recipe below.

As I was making them, my husband stated that I had to leave half of them at home! He hates it when I make sweets for an event and take them for others to eat and leave him none at home. Oops! But oh-so-much-better for my waistline! So since I was playing with the recipe, I went ahead and ended up with almost a double batch. So he got some of his own. But there are still too many on the counter for my comfort, so I anticipate some will be going to work with one or both of us on Monday!

We had lots of delicious things at our meeting today. Heidi brought some delicious Raspberry Cheesecake Brownies that I am hoping she will post on her blog soon! These cookies were devoured at the meeting today, so I hope you will enjoy them too.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Inspired by many, but an original by Renee

Makes about 3 dozen cookies

2 cups of The Gluten Free Pantry’s French Bread and Pizza Mix

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

3/4 tsp cinnamon

a generous pinch of each: ground ginger, ground cloves, nutmeg

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened

3/4 cup sugar

1 egg

1 cup canned pumpkin puree

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Grease your cookie sheets. In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and spices. Set aside. Cream the butter and sugar together with your hand mixer. Add the egg and thoroughly combine. Then add the pumpkin and vanilla and mix well. Slowly add the flour mixture and mix until combined. Fold in the chocolate chips.

Using a teaspoon, scoop out small balls of cookie dough onto your greased cookie sheets. Use wet hands to smooth the cookie dough, if desired. Bake 12-14 minutes or until the edges begin to brown slightly. These cookies will be soft and more cake-like than most.

This recipe is cross-posted over at Slightly Indulgent Tuesdays at Simply Sugar and Gluten Free.

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Meal Plan Monday, September 13, 2010

Posted in Meal Plan, tagged , , , , on September 13, 2010| 2 Comments »

Did you know that today, Monday, is National Celiac Awareness Day? What a great day for a Gluten Free Menu Swap! Besides it being Monday and that’s what we do… But anyway, it is, and here’s how it came to be on September 13th:

“What is the significance of September 13? That is the date of Samuel Gee’s Birthday in 1839, who is credited with finding the link between celiac disease and diet. Gee felt that “if the patient can be cured at all, it must be by means of diet.”

Did you also see that in honor of today, P.F. Chang’s restaurant, one of the first restaurants to have a gluten free menu, has released a new gluten free dessert – Triple Chocolate Mousse Mini Dessert – and they posted some of their gluten free recipes on their website? How cool is that?!

But now, back to your regularly scheduled programming…Meal Plan Monday!

This week’s Gluten Free Menu Swap theme is beans and is hosted by Heather at Celiac Family. Surprisingly I am not doing too much with beans this week. Unless soybeans as tofu counts? Probably not. But if you’re looking for bean recipes, there are plenty of them around here. Check out Italian White Beans and Polenta, Sweet Potato, Quinoa and Black Bean Burgers or Three Bean Tacos for more bean ideas.

And be sure to check out the other menus at the Gluten Free Menu Swap and over at Org Junkie.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we have company coming to town and we are planning on traveling a bit, so I am not planning too much for meals this week. I will have a couple of things on hand to make when and if we want to, but nothing serious is planned. I will also make sure that we have appropriate road-trip food to take with us. What are your favorite road trip foods?

Otherwise, I’ll have ingredients for the following on-hand:

Spicy Tofu with Vegetables and rice and a Spicy Cucumber Salad– the tofu is a favorite recipe from The Complete Book of Thai Cooking by Linda Stephens

Homemade Tamales, of course, with Spanish rice, salad and guacamole.

Mattar Paneer and/or Saag Paneer with rice.

Grilling stuff – chicken, tofu, potatoes and mixed vegetables.

And as for traveling food, we typically take a cooler and bag with cheese, fruit (grapes and apples), crackers, baby carrots, granola/granola bars, KIND bars, M&M’s, trail mix and candied ginger. Sometimes we’ll also take hummus, yogurt and salsa and chips. And if we’re staying at a hotel, I’ll often throw in a bag or two of microwave popcorn and some instant gluten free ‘ramen’ noodles.

So that’s it for this week. Hopefully next week I will be back to cooking more and will post a more interesting menu!



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I’m Back!

Posted in General, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2010| 6 Comments »

Hello world! Sorry to be MIA for so long but we’ve had a lot going on. I think in my last post we were headed out-of-town to visit friends in Boulder, CO. The day before we left, my company laid off another 30 people. I, luckily, was not one of them. So it was a much-needed getaway after that chaos and we had a great time eating lots of yummy gluten free food and drinking some gluten free beer. But more on that later! Boulder and Denver are both very gluten free friendly. Check out the Boulder Farmer’s Market below.

After we returned from our trip we packed up our house (except for the kitchen and master bed/bath) and put everything in the garage in order for our concrete floors to be stained. It took the contractor quite a bit longer than anticipated – six days to remove the existing paint from the floors and then two days to stain, seal and wax it. Ugh. And during that time one of our dogs got kennel cough so he couldn’t stay at the kennel, making things a bit more complicated than they had to be! Isn’t that always the case? So we spent two days at the Days Inn down the street with two dogs. (Days Inn is one hotel/motel chain that allows dogs.) During this time we had no internet connection since everything was unplugged in the office and our laptop, when we had a connection at the hotel, is slower than molasses and about to croak. So I didn’t get a lot accomplished online during this time. Sorry!

And in case you’re ever thinking of doing it, can I just say, don’t ever paint your concrete floors!!! The previous owner ripped up all the carpet in the house and painted the concrete slab. And while they didn’t look horrible painted, they were starting to show some wear. But the amount of work to get paint off of concrete so that you can do anything to the floors is incredible. A couple of months ago we attempted to remove the paint ourselves. Can I just say that there were a lot of swear words and tears involved with that? Don’t. Do. It.

So I called a contractor I had met on the USGBC-NM Green Built Tour. We ended up paying him as much money to remove the paint as it cost to stain the floors. But now we have beautiful floors!

And now for the past week, we have been working on putting the house back together and purging some of the unnecessary stuff we’ve accumulated. My husband has also been working on sanding and refinishing the baseboards, which aren’t back on yet.

So…it has been busy around here and we’ve been eating a lot on the fly and simple stuff that doesn’t take too much time to prepare. Those tamales we made a while back and stuffed in the freezer sure have come in handy!

We also needed a new car. So we finally bought one! During the rest of the chaos! Yeah! Yes, we’re crazy to do so many things at once! A new Toyota RAV4 with plenty of space in the back for two pups and 4 adults! We already took it up to the mountains – to escape from the contractors working through the weekend at our house. We found a lovely stream to walk along where the pups could splash.

The wildflowers were gorgeous, the butterflies and dragonflies were flitting about and there were plenty of mushrooms for my husband to discover. We can’t wait to get out more and explore this beautiful state with the two dogs and our new car.

This week we have visitors coming to town, my mom and stepdad, and so we will be getting in the new car again and traveling south for the first time, down to Carlsbad Caverns and/or White Sands.

Do any of you have any recommendations for particular trails to hike, things to see, places to eat or stay in either of those areas?

I will be checking in tomorrow with a Meal Plan and I will post more now that we have our internet connection back and the house put together!

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