Gluten free brown sugar coffee cake

It's recipe time again! If I were a good blogger, I'd also have photos. But I'm not. So it goes.

Gluten-free brown sugar coffee cake

1 1/2 cups Brown Rice Flour (or 3/4 cups brown rice flour, 3/4 cups millet flour)

1 cup tapioca starch

1/2 cup sweet rice flour

1/2 tsp xanthan gum

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 heaping tsp salt

Sift the above ingredients

3/4 cup butter

1 cup sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups sour cream

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs one at a time, followed by the vanilla extract. Add the sifted dry ingredients into the wet ingredients in thirds, alternating with the sour cream.

Topping:

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Put 1/2 of the batter into a greased 13x9 inch pan. cover with 1/2 the topping. Gently spread the remaining batter over these two layers, cover with remaining topping. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 40 minutes, until a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

NOTE: Updated 05.4.09 to adjust xanthan gum level

Crock Pot Chicken Enchilada Casserole

I got peer-pressured, yo.  On Twitter/Facebook, I mentioned I was making a chicken enchilada casserole. The public demanded (okay, like 3 people) a recipe.

I'm not great with recipes because I throw stuff in without much regard to measuring - it's a bit more intuitive.  Taste and add.  Here's the best I can do.

(Despite the use of the crock pot and the word casserole, it's not particularly one-pot. At least not if you make the tortillas when you get home.)

Enchilada Sauce Ingredients (based on Karina's easy enchilada sauce):

1.5-2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breast and/or thighs

1 28-oz plus one 14.5-oz can of tomato sauce (or puree, or crushed tomatoes)

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 large onion (or 1 small)

1 Tablespoon cumin

1 Tablespoon coriander

A few shakes of cayenne pepper to taste

4 Tablespoons balsamic vinegar

1/4 cup flour (Rice flour or tapioca flour will work fine if you're gluten-free. I like corn flour to impart the corn flavor from the tortillas)

salt

pepper

crushed red peppers (optional)

Plus:

16 corn tortillas (if you're insane like me and want to make 16 tortillas from scratch when you get home after being at work for 11 hours, use 2 cups maseca, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1 1/4 cups of water)

shredded cheese (I like jack and cheddar)

Gettin' Down to Bidness:

Mix sauce ingredients and pour over the chicken in the crock pot.  Cook on low for 7? hours (maybe more? I don't know - I left it for 11 hours on low because that's how long I'm gone for work).  Remove chicken from sauce, and shred it using two forks.  Remove about 1.5 cups of the tomato sauce from the crock pot and set aside.  Mix the shredded chicken back into the remaining tomato sauce.

Lightly oil a 13x9-inch baking dish, put 1-2 tablespoons of the enchilada sauce on the bottom of the dish.  Lay 4 corn tortillas, dipped in the enchilada sauce, cover with 1/3 of the shredded chicken and 1/4 of the shredded cheese. Repeat these three layers 2 more times.  Top with remaining 4 corn tortillas dipped in enchilada sauce.  Pour any remaining sauce over the top layer of tortillas and cover with the remainder of the cheese.  Stick in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes, or until it is melty and heated evenly through. 

Cut up into pieces (I use a pizza cutter) and serve hot.  Makes about 8 servings.  Take pictures to make your blog post less boring (optional).  Get someone else to wash all the stinkin' dishes you dirtied making this.

The Post-Mortem:

That's pretty gross to talk about a post-mortem on something you just ate, but it's late and I'm tired.  Anyhow, it was pretty good - basically I have grown weary of ground turkey/beef and wanted to do something else.  The chicken was lighter than the turkey but it sucked up tons of extra sauce after being shredded and mixed back in.  If you wanted to do a turkey or ground beef enchilada sauce, mix the liquid ingredients of the sauce in a medium sauce pan, following Karina's recipe.  Add the flour after sauteeing onions and garlic.  Use only the 28 oz can of tomatoes - you don't need quite as much liquid for the ground turkey.  Mix about 1 cup of enchilada sauce into your browned ground turkey, and use the rest to pour over each layer as you assemble.  Eat, clean up and go to bed full.

And we have bread!

I was all set to have a weeks, months, years long saga of the quest for gluten-free bread that would have the taste, feel, appearance of wheat, rye or otherwise gluten-y bread.

Two weeks ago I started a gluten-free sourdough starter (brown rice and water).

One week ago I made a loaf of sourdough from this recipe.

You see all the ingredients in that? Yeah, it wound up, uh, gummy.

(according to the comments, Annie likes gummy bread so I wish she had been here to eat it) It also wound up short with a fallen dome because, I guess one of the drawbacks is that gluten-free bread is, uh, short in stature and doesn't keep a nice domed top.

This week I decided I'd try a Bette Hagman honey sourdough recipe from this book. For among other reasons, it's one of the only recipes I've found that doesn't use ricotta cheese (I don't understand ricotta's role in it either...), and is entirely lactose free.

Me, not being much of a baker, decided I could make it better, too. Ha! The arrogance of naïveté. So, I omitted the egg replacer, the gelatin, and subbed 1/3 cup of water for the 1 and 2/3 cup water, and after mixing everything for 3 minutes, I added 2/3 of a cup of room temperature club soda.

I plopped it in a greased pan, let it rise for an hour.

(I may have forgotten to mention the last loaf didn't rise at all and that there was a decided lack of air bubbles in it and it was just gross. but the crust was okay!)

Then I baked it for 60 minutes at 350 degrees, and LO! There was bread.


It was the height of the pan, and it didn't fall down. It was airy, the crust was, well, crusty, like sourdough should be.


Now, it's not perfect. I'm hoping that the starter will get more sour the more I use it because, frankly it wasn't sour at all. Next time I'll try either drastically scaling back or omitting the honey because it's a bit more sweet than I can handle. I'm oddly encouraged by this, and hope that in future endeavours, scaling back the wet ingredients will improve ALL of the scratch baking... because every last one has been gummy. (If you're curious, I used a gluten-free flour mix that was 3 parts brown rice, 3 parts sorghum, 2 parts potato starch, 1 part tapioca starch)

I'm just looking forward to cinnamon toast for breakfast tomorrow morning.

You know, if I had a toaster...

(ps - i went to a bridal shower yesterday and they had personalized M&Ms! I also figured out how to work the macro on my new camera, so woo!
)

Stop and smell the bandwagon

I think this may very well be my fifth (and final) post for the month of February. It's a long month, I may as well have extra posts.

Of course five posts in February is a ballpark estimate. I could go and actually count my posts, but where would the fun in that be? There I go, justifying laziness as whimsy! Try it, it's fun.

This month has involved much contemplation on the topic of food. Not as in what should I eat to help me lose that 989123 lbs. I'd like to lose some, but more by way of feeding Pants and I healthily, thoughtfully, and deliciously. I've still been ever so obsessed by thoughts and chapters and meals in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Reading Sarah's thoughts and challenges on eating locally, taking the plunge and chucking all the processed food out to make room for the good stuff invigorates me. Even more so, reading her posts on the Dinner Guest Blog (especially this one) start to light a fire under me.

But...

And there's always a but. I'm looking at my checking account. I'm thinking of the time I spend waiting for the shuttle, then the Metro, then the Bus and the idea of going to the grocery store seems so horrifying. I see the free range, grass-fed meats and eggs and dairy products. I even found a dairy that delivers to DC, heard of a bodega selling local foods at 200 Rhode Island NW. My landlord says I can grow potted tomatoes and chiles in the back yard this summer! I think of the rows and rows of diced tomatoes and tomato sauce that I will have canned to last me through the winter.

But...

That threshold isn't easily crossed. My bargain hunter thinks of the half-gallons of milk that cost $3.50 that are from happy cows who wander around pastures eating grass and contemplating entropy and doesn't want to justify the purchase when I could get a gallon for $3.79. I see the organic chicken who eat worms and beetles and grass and peck at the dirt and wander around but notice that it's $11 for 0.80 lbs when I could get Purdue chicken for $6.00. I open my cabinets and see the lovely, healthy boxes of Pacific Organic broths and soups - organic and gluten-free that have been driven conveniently to Silver Spring, MD from the exotic, far-flung land of Tualatin, OR.

The gluten. That's the other issue. I don't have a lick of gluten in my house.

[Okay, that's a lie. Ernie's food (made of fish and potatoes since he, like his mama, has food and skin allergies) has salmon as the number one ingredient. However, he has barley as the number two ingredient.]

Going gluten-free is better for me. I feel better, I'm happier with my choices at home. i make more foods from scratch and experiment with alternative grain flours. (However, I'm not so gluten-free outside the confines of my humble abode. That's my other issue to conquer) The fact of the matter is Bob's Red Mill is, like so many other wonders, in the Pacific Northwest. 'Cause You're Special is also not all that nearby (Wisconsin). There's also the issue that if I want to bake cookies or bread or birthday cake without gluten, I've got to add xanthan gum to the mix or it will all fall apart. Xanthan gum. You may know it as a thickener in your processed food. That's not part of "natural." So, I can't go to a local grist mill and get some whole wheat, stone-ground flour. I need to get mixtures of rice and starch and exotic things called quinoa and amaranth and millet.

It's clearly not going to be all-local, all the time around here. But I'm trying. The urge is there. It's crossing over into my purchases.

I picked up some garlic, saw the "Product of China" label and put it back down.
I made chicken stock from the leftover carcass of my roast chicken the other night and used it in Esau's soup for dinner tonight. Instead of buying injera from the Ethiopian bodega around the corner, I made it (almost comically dismally) from scratch - I started fermenting the teff and water on Wednesday and by tonight it was wonderfully sour. My coffee is Brazil Organic Fair Trade from Peaberry (okay, it was "local-ish" because I was in Denver when I bought it).

It's a process, and it just won't be 100%. But for me, for us, it doesn't need to be. We have our vices that we're allowing. For me, the biggest is coffee. And until I can grow coffee beans in Columbia Heights, I will work hard to forgo the Dunkin' Donuts in the grocery aisle and support the small farmers who are paid a fair wage for their labors (and make a damn fine yergacheffe... business practices aside, Starbucks can do the right thing!) I will use less and less white rice flour and gravitate toward whole grain flours (sorghum, teff, brown rice, buckwheat, millet) and experiment and play. I will work hard to find a CSA to support local, organic farmers. I will sit down and make a budget that allows me to spend extra on healthy, organic animal products, even if that means - gasp - less yarn. I will clean out my friggin pantry and put some order into it and throw out what doesn't have an expiration date, to make room for the canning I will start this summer.

It's hard for me to recognize that it won't be 100% out of my own backyard all of the time, but I will stop and be grateful for what I can do.

Prevalent Themes

I'm writing a paper for work, and "Prevalent Themes" is one of the headers. So it seemed appropriate to address what has increasingly become a prevalent theme around Chez Caribou.

Hi! I forgot to blog for 3 weeks!

I finished knitting cabled purple legwarmers, but my camera's still dead, so you don't get to see them yet.

I'm working a lot.

Knitting not quite enough (although I am swatching for the Eunny's Deep-V Argyle vest right now and about to undertake some gift knitting).

Playing the guitar almost never which makes me sad.

Becoming increasingly fixated on local eating (due to dietary restrictions, locavore is not in my future) and thoughtful about food choices.

In a related vein, becoming very excited about cooking and experimenting and creating foods again.

Wishing I had a camera with which to photograph my knitting and food.

And snuggling Ernie, and making lagomorph noises in the proximity of Pants.