Weeknight Quick Dish: Stuffed Chard Leaves

During the week we can't make elaborate meals. I usually down most of the leftovers for lunch, but occasionally the kids are left with leftovers on Monday night. What does one do with leftover lentil salad and quinoa salad? Mix together, wrap in steamed chard leaves, top with tomato sauce and cheese if desired, bake at 400 degrees until the cheese is melty and serve. You can fill with meat, beans, chili, rice...your imagination can fill in the rest.

Sunday Dinner: March 28, 2010 (THE VEGGIES ARE HERE!)

I am not sure I believe that what you eat when you are nursing influences what your kids like. I LOVE veggies. I eat massive amounts of veggies - green, orange, yellow, purple, red, white, bitter, sweet, neutral. You name it - I eat it. However, David Gabriel is the only one year old I know that can pick out every piece of vegetable matter from meals. Last week's Sunday dinner included a cabbage and smoked chicken slaw. He meticulously picked out every piece of shredded cabbage, ate the meat, then jettisoned the veggies off the side of his highchair. It was not even worthy of a place on his tray.

There is hope though. I wasn't always this way. I consciously worked to acquire a taste for all my food foes. If I could conquer turnips, maybe Gabriel will learn to like chard.

Pizza Party! Experimenting with gluten-free crusts.

I miss very little having to eat gluten-free. Since my diagnosis I adjusted to not having sandwiches and most fried foods. I have found how to make most sweets I crave gluten free, but pizza - pizza is a difficult beast. There's crispness and chewiness and tenderness all in one, not to mention well developed flavor. How to recreate that in a gluten free dough, at home? Most store bought gluten-free crusts just don't do it for me. They lack much flavor and texture. So, I have been forcing Jason to eat at all the wonderful pizzerias in the area to tell me how they are. This vicarious living has to stop. I have been on a quest.

Weeknight Quick Dish: Thai Butternut Soup

Every year by the end of August I start coveting the out of season winter squash in the grocery store. And the first week I see squash show up in the Two Small Farms box, I do a little dance (believe me - you don't want to see that). This week veggie boxes started again. I'll post more on that later, but for now let's just say this is the last winter squash of the season. It deserved something more than just a basic roast. The soup is aromatic and a kid pleaser. Both Aaron and Isaiah took two servings. The rice in the middle is Bhutanese red rice. You can get it in a par cooked form so it only takes 20 minutes. Nutty, firm and for some reason my kids think red rice tastes better than brown.


Thai Inspired Butternut Soup with Bhutanese Red Rice

Recipe by Sheryl Davies

• 1 medium butternut squash
• 1 small bulb fennel
• 1/2 small onion
• 1 teaspoon Thai green curry paste
• 1 clove garlic, sliced
• 2 stalks lemongrass, tender inner stalks only, sliced
• 3 1/4 inch slices of ginger
• 8 ounces chicken stock
• 1 can coconut milk (I used light)
• Fish sauce
• Agave syrup or brown sugar
• Salt

1. Par cook butternut squash. To make it quick tonight, I just pierced it a few times and microwaved it for 10 minutes. It was tender enough for the peel to come off but not completely soft. It doesn't matter how done it is, you can always cook it in the soup. Cut into cubes - the more tender it is the bigger the cubes can be. 
2. In a large sauce pan, saute fennel and onion in a small amount of olive oil over medium heat. Cook until it just starts to brown.
3. Add the Thai curry paste. Saute for a minute to release the aromas, then add in garlic, lemongrass and ginger and butternut squash. Again cook for a minute or so.
4. Add coconut milk. Scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan (that's flavor), and add in chicken stock.
5. Simmer until squash is tender, about 20 minutes. Meanwhile cook the rice according to package directions. 
6. Blend well in a blender. Remember this is a hot liquid. Don't put the full lid on the blender and hold a towel over the top or you will get a burning surprise! 
7. Return to pot and season to taste with fish sauce, sugar or agave and salt.

CHOCOLATE! The SF Chocolate Salon Redux

Nothing keeps me from my chocolate. Yes, when we lived in France for six weeks I did visit every single chocolate shop i could find. and there are a lot of chocolate shops in France.

I bought tickets for the San Francisco chocolate salon as soon as I heard they were on sale, I devised a system for testing the chocolate without getting too chocolated out, and contacted each chocolatier to see what was gluten-free.

And of course last minute Jason had to work. OK, MAYBE taking care of ailing brain surgery patients
is more important than chocolate...MAYBE.

But it left me with 3 kids and a the prospect of dragging them around a very crowded venue with other chocaholics clammoring for their free samples. Was this a good idea? But hey, it's chocolate and I had a duty to my tastebuds to try them.

Sunday Dinner: March 21, 2010

Jason wanted to open a restaurant called "World of Waffles" or WOW. Everything on the menu would have at least one component "waffled", which made my mind go to some strange diner with far too many objects arranged haphazardly about the room in an effort to create a 'quirky' decor. No, he said, it would be upscale, refined. Hmmm...refined waffles. Well tonight he proved that waffles and chili aren't just for diners...

Tasting GF Sandwich Bread: And the Winner Is....

In the case of gluten free bread often times it isn’t who the winner is, but which is the least loser-like. Everyone has their opinion, but at $6 for a loaf of bread, getting it wrong is costly. Why are there no blind tastings of gluten-free products? This has to change… so to the rescue is the Bay Area Raising our Celiac Kids (ROCK) group.

Sunday Dinner: March 14, 2010

I know it is pie day, and we really should have made pies. However, that didn't dawn on us until the dessert was set, and we didn't think of a way to incorporate a gluten-free pie into the savory courses.

Inspiration this week was a brisket that we have had hanging around, and of course the smoker. But alas, I am sick of barbeque, so Jason did a fabulous job making something different with the smoked meat.

First course: Purple potato feuillete, chinese broccoli puree, walnut pomegranate sauce, garlic confit.


Course 2: Smoked beef brisket, blueberry sauce, roasted asparagus, quinoa pilaf with egg, almond and fennel.


Course 3: Shamrock or grasshopper alaska. See post here.

Feature note: Most Sundays we gather together friends, and sometimes people we just want to get to know better, to share in our joy of food and friends. We will post what we made that week, as a little food inspiration.

Shamrock Alaska in Honor of St. Patrick's Day

OK, I am very aware that mint ice cream is not Irish, but my kids LOVE mint ice cream. On one walk home last week I let the boys help me brainstorm the dessert for this Sunday dinner, and this is what they came up with - a baked alaska with a Irish slant. I even threw them a bone and put in a bit of green food coloring. Of course, they wanted a grasshopper alaska with real grasshoppers inside. Aaron had read about chocolate covered grasshoppers in a bug book and swears he would like them. I don't put it past him.

Dining Brief: Tips on Lesser-Known Asian Cuisines and Shiok! in Menlo Park

Eating out gluten-free can be daunting, but it really needn't be. When I was first diagnosed, I was terrified to eat out, and rather depressed about what seemed to be the end of my foodie days. I have developed an arsenal now of strategies to dine out at all sorts of places.

Here are a few tips related to tonight's dining brief.

Tips for dining out at lesser known Asian cuisine restaurants

What do you do when you don't know the cuisine well enough to know which dishes are likely to be safe? Here are a few tips.

1. Call ahead, but don't be too discouraged if your questions confuse the person answering the phone. Explain your dietary restrictions in concrete terms. "I cannot have wheat, all-purpose or wheat flour, or soy sauce. Do you have any dishes on your menu that I could eat? Could you talk to your chef and call me back?" This screen is about helpfulness, not about accuracy. NEVER rely on the phone call for the final word.

2. If you can search for a few recipes from the cuisine of interest. Get a feel for what contains soy sauce and what doesn't.

3. At the restaurant ask right away to speak with someone that knows the food. Key words for Southeast Asian cuisines: no soy sauce, wheat flour, all-purpose flour, wheat noodles, kekap manis. I also ask them to check the labels of any pre-prepared sauces or items they use to see if they have wheat in the ingredient list. Many brands of Asian sauces do, and the restaurants often don't realize it.

4. Be prepared to have steamed fish. It can almost always be made gluten free : ).

Dining Brief: Shiok! Menlo Park
The Bay Area is blessed with amazing variety in Asian food. One needn't be limited to hum drum Thai, Chinese or Japanese. In fact each of these cuisines has regional variation reflected in the areas restaurants. Tonight we visited Shiok! in Menlo Park to nosh on some Singaporian food - a nice mixture of Chinese and Indonesian.

Product Review: Purefit Granola Crunch Bar

I am constantly forgetting to plan ahead. It always takes a zillion times longer to leave the house than I think it will while trying to pack up three boys. While I dodge the karate kicks, search out the diaper, and lose the keys...again...I fail to realize that it is 12:00. If I leave now, the kids will be starving. So we have a stash of bars to take along.

For a Celiac, the problem with bars is that most are not gluten free. The ones that are fall into two categories (mostly) - dried fruit and nut bars and nasty fitness bars. My kids love the dried fruit and nut bars, and I enjoy the taste, but they don't satisfy me. I want something with protein. A few years back I was introduced to the Purefit bar through the Stanford Celiac Conference. I love their almond crunch flavor - it tastes like cookie dough, and I like cookie dough (who doesn't?). Plus it has 18 g of protein, and some fat. It is a hardy bar. Since then it has become my favorite bar to hold me over until I can find food or to take while traveling. It makes a nice breakfast when you can't be sure whether you will find something GF.

Recently they released a new flavor, and I knew I had to tell others about it. Granola crunch! Yes, now there is a granola bar that is gluten free AND high protein. The bar is very much like their almond bar, thick, a bit chewy with slight crunch to it. It has undertones of oatmeal, and a fairly strong maple type flavor. My kids are addicted - they purposely now forget snack, so that on the way out the door they "have to grab a bar."

The Birthday Cake Obsession

I am systematically making sure that my boys become nerds. First step: Immerse them in a food lifestyle like few other kids have.

Splash Mountain Cake: 100% Edible

OK - maybe here in the Bay Area and some other places it isn't so uncommon for a child to have tried more different ethnic cuisines by the time they are six than I even knew existed by the time I went to college. Or to have fois gras be a favorite food, or to insist that we do a family dining review after every meal, homecooked or out. It's my fault, but it's also my obsession.

So here comes the birthdays. When I was little my mom made homemade birthday cakes. I remember a few, but as the baby of 5 there are no pictures to prove it. My husband however has a fully populated baby book with homemade birthday cakes flickering before a gleaming boy. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that I wanted to make custom cakes for my boys. A's first b-day was a bust, when I tried pate choux for the first time - pate flat... Second, well that was the flu - but I managed a quick easy 2-D Nemo cake. I's first birthday, I tried to make a car with leftover cake from A's birthday. Hmmm....not sure what it looked like. I spelled I's name wrong on his 2nd birthday cake. This was not a good trend.

But I couldn't let go, and by golly now I am having fun. So this year, my kids made their requests. After reminding them that it is not Ace of Cakes (no I couldn't make the inside of Splash Mountain along with the outside as well), I prepped, baked, kneaded and relaxed to make three custom cakes.