Category Archives: Food

Food

Winter/Spring GF Eats

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We’ve had a fairly cold start to the year with spring taking awhile to get started. Although we enjoyed a little warm weather in the past couple weeks, it went back to the single Cº digits, or around the 40s in Fahrenheit. Boo.

To keep warm, we’ve been eating lots of delicious gluten-free food! Here is a little highlights tour of some of our meals.

I’m slowly trying out GF oatmeal in my diet after over a year quitting oats completely while I flushed gluten out of my system. I need to double check if I have symptoms when I eat it. I did not feel feverish after though and that seems to be a common symptom on gluten for me.

Above was a delicious dinner from cooksmarts with garlic and rosemary cauliflower mash, spicy chard salad and roasted chicken thighs.

I do a lot of fish dinners during the week now because it’s so easy to throw them in the oven with some roasting veggies. Here we had avocado with balsamic cream on the side.

Kay made an Indian Cooksmarts recipe but mixed up “Kümmel” with “Kreuzkümmel” in German and accidentally used caraway (Kümmel) instead of cilantro. It tasted special… not bad, but a little strange. I’m not a big caraway fan. I should probably just chuck it all!

It made good leftovers though!

This Pineapple and Cashew Curried Fried Rice below sadly made me feel awful afterward. It has eggs in it and since this meal, I’ve pretty much been avoiding eggs. It makes me sad, but they are giving me horrible stomach pain.

Easy stir fry beef always goes down well in this house.

And again, filling out the week with an easy herb butter fish tossed in the oven with some veggies. Yum!

I was proud of this one below because I whipped up a random stir fry using random stuff in the fridge, including the sauce, which I normally use a recipe for. It was so tasty!

A friend posted a recipe to a tahini bowl that sounded really tasty, so I made that one day and Kay grilled up some steaks we got on special after Easter. We ate a lot of steak that week and both of us were happy.

Kay also started cooking for me a bit more lately, so he made this lovely garlic quinoa dish that another friend posted. I pinned it ages ago! It was also wonderful. As usual, Kay did the best job plating it. He makes all his recipes look so divine on the plate! 🙂

Right now I am branching back into dishes with lactose to see how I adjust, but we are staying away from eggs and gluten obviously. Sometimes I still get very frustrated how hard it seems to substitute things or know what to cook instead, but we still enjoy a lot of yummy food. I’m just pretty darn compulsive about our meal prepping and cooking. 😉

What’re you cooking lately?

Food, Travel

Gluten Free Madrid

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Again, I looked up a ton of different options for Madrid. For just a few days I had two breakfast places, some tapas places and dinner places so that we would have a wide range of choices and some backups in case places were closed or didn’t exist. Unfortunately like we discovered in Barcelona, sometimes places are closed when they say they will be open… or in the case of two different places in Madrid, they just didn’t exist anymore, even when they had been written about less than a year ago, had working websites and Google had no indications that they were permanently closed.

Breakfast:

OH!CELIA bakery: This place ended up not existing. It was not a big deal because it was a short walk from the next place.
Celicioso: Gluten free bakery with sit down option. We had the lasagna for breakfast as well because we were really hungry for just cupcakes and cake, but it was just reheated in the microwave.

Lunch/Dinner:

El Arrozal: Unfortunately, this place was also closed permanently, but luckily Bar el Taller was close by, so we ended up eating there instead.

La Crêp’: This was a crepe place that opened only around 2pm on Sunday. It was such a cold overcast day and all we wanted to do was go in somewhere warm to eat, but when the place opened up it was so cold inside. Spain is not made for cold weather! The food was very nice and I didn’t have any gluten reactions later. I ordered a mushroom and cheese crepe and later on a dessert crepe as well.

Bar el Taller: I loved this place! We arrived here because El Arrozal did not exist, which was frustrating that two of the places we tried to eat at on Saturday no longer existed, but I was really happy to find out that pretty much all the tapas at this place were gluten free and they even had gluten free beer, which has been very hard to find in restaurants on trips. I ordered two because I was so pleased and we all stuffed ourselves silly. 🙂

Mozzarella stack from Bar e Taller above.  Shrimp carpaccio below. Delicious!!

Complimentary strawberry dessert. Mmm.

Salad from a place near Kay’s brother below. In a pinch, we could do gluten free just by asking them to take care about certain ingredients and ordering the typical gluten-free salad with meat.

Overall, I wasn’t that worried about GF in Madrid. Spain is actually pretty good about celiac disease and they have a lot of options that you wouldn’t find in Germany, for example.

If you go, don’t miss out on the Serrano ham or the Iberian ham!

Food

First Gluten Free Cakes

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I am not a big cake baker because cakes are too much dessert for just Kay and myself, and it’s always tricky arranging Swiss expat schedules to help finish a cake off. (Surprising, no?)

Gluten free baking is also tricky because flour, baking, rising… all that acts differently without gluten, so I was a bit afraid to attempt my first cake. But I knew for my Swiss citizenship party that I wanted to make a real, chocolate cake!

I decided to make Blackbird Bakery’s chocolate cake and frosting, and as you can see, it did turn out OK. (I made a little mistake, so it wasn’t perfect.)

Most of the recipes in this book are pretty complicated and the chocolate cake had about seven different flours in it. This is by far the most complicated cake I had ever made and i was really nervous that the whole thing was going to turn out poorly.It had been over a year since I had made a real gluten cake and since then I had gotten rid of most of our cake pans in the de-glutening, so I had to buy another spring-form pan. I baked two pans of cake, although I could have left them in the oven even a little longer, because they were still a bit gooey in the middle when I cut them in half the next day.

The frosting is where I made my mistake… we don’t have cornstarch syrup in Switzerland, so I tried to substitute sugar and water, but I didn’t dissolve the sugar properly into the water before mixing it in the frosting because Kay and I were both in the kitchen trying to finish a million and one things the night before the party. Failing to do that made the final frosting a little crunchy from the sugar, which was a shame because I took so much care with all the other steps of the frosting.

It was still very yummy though and very chocolatey! This cake is brushed with chocolate liquor before frosting and it gave it a definite alcohol flavour. I loved it!

The party was a success and it was great showing off all the gluten free food we made for the night. We also had bite-size cordon bleu, bacon wrapped potatoes and dates, veggies with hummus and dill dip, guacamole and tortilla chips, dried meat, coconut and chocolate date balls, Kay made his gluten free tiramisu, and plenty to drink.

The next day, Kay and I were invited to his parent’s house for a lunch with some Brazilians from out of town who had attended our wedding. I told Kay’s father I could bring a gluten free dessert, which he was happy to accept because he always struggles coming up with gluten free desserts for me. I decided to try out Blackbird Bakery’s German chocolate cake with my own pecan coconut frosting.

I cut the cake recipe in half since it really called for three pans and I thought the final cake would be too tall for my cake carrying case, so I made a half recipe in one spring form pan and then cut that in half to frost.

On this cake I didn’t make any mistakes and it turned out pretty well. Success! Everyone thought it was really tasty and Kay has been going nuts for the pecan frosting ever since then. It is his favourite frosting of mine. 🙂

I was really pleased with my cakes. Even if I made a few mistakes, they turned out as well as my normal cakes would, or were even prettier in some cases.

Life gluten free is not the end of the world and even if I cannot have the office birthday cake, they don’t know how much of that chocolate cake I devoured every evening as we finished the cake after the party. It was so rich that even with 20 guests, we still had half of the four layer cake leftover afterward!

Food

Green Smoothies

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Now that I’ve been using my Tribest blender for a few weeks, I wanted to show what my prep setup looks like. I’m still testing out different mixes, but it’s possible for me to prepare four smoothies ahead of time at once.

Each cup contained a mix of:

  • Frozen apricots
  • Frozen raspberries
  • Frozen cranberries
  • Fresh spinach
  • Chopped almonds

I’m fine putting my frozen fruit in the night before, but even doing it on a Sunday evening was fine. If the apricots are still frozen, they don’t blend very well and honestly I don’t like my smoothies to be too cold during the colder months. I’m already cold enough when I get out of my warm bed to get to the gym. Brrr!

To finish the smoothie, I use a separate small jar to grind up some fresh flax seed and then I add that and some milk or water to my smoothie mix and blend.

On weekends, I make smoothies for Kay as well, usually with some of our weekend juice. We only buy juice on the weekend, so it’s usually a treat, but I definitely think it makes the smoothies tastier sometimes. Here we were celebrating Valentine’s Day with some of Kay’s homemade gluten free chocolate buns! (NOM).

I mainly stick to milk or water during the week for the extra protein from the milk and to avoid too much sugar from the juice, but mostly it’s because we are not in the habit of buying juice for use during the week.

With this setup, I prepare my flax seed to be ground the night before. In the morning I give the flax seed a quick pulse before grabbing a smoothie cup from the fridge. The whole process of blending and drinking takes about five minutes. I try to pack a protein, vitamins and iron from the spinach in so that I’m not too hungry before my post-workout snack at work.

If you drink smoothies, how much prep do you do the night before?

Food

Tribest Personal Blender Review

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In another effort to get more protein, fruit, vitamins and more in my diet at breakfast, I was keen on buying a personal blender in January. I debated between the Nutribullet and what I now know is the Tribest Personal Blender.

I say “now know” because at the time, the blender’s manufacturer on the Personal Blender’s pages was listed as Vitamix, which is a little wonky and they have since changed it and added a link pointing to a Tribest page. Seeing as Kunzvital printed their own user manual with Kunzvital branding on a folded A4 paper, I think they were trying to market the Tribest blender as their own creation, which it is not. It ships in a box with Tribest labeling for heaven’s sake.

(Tribest blender re-branded by Kunzvital)

I was a little annoyed that the same blender is available for $89.95 on Amazon with a US plug, while I had to pay 165CHF ($171) to get it. It’s a big, fat, Swiss markup.

I have mixed feelings about how it works, but I like the blender alright. Sometimes I feel like it does a great job of blending and other times I really feel like I am eating my smoothie, which is not cool when it’s spinach leaves or nuts. Last week I was on a date kick and the blender just whirled the dates around the whole time, knocking into the blades, but not breaking down at all.

The blender also advertises that it cuts up ice, but if you stick only ice in here… one cube for example, it does not do well with either the grinding or the mixing blade. But if you put an ice cube in the mix with your spinach, fruit, juice or water and more, it does fine and grinds up well.

In the end, I’m still happy I bought this for now, because my other option was spending over 1000CHF for a Vitamix, which are also a lot more expensive in Switzerland than the US. Maybe I will still get one one day, but I do really like the convenience of washing and using single-use mixing cups for work every morning. I think the Vitamix would be annoying to clean every day. Who knows!

Do you have a special blender for breakfast smoothies?