Gluten-Free Croutons and Chicken Caesar Salad

Gluten-Free Croutons

There's no need to fret over croutons if you are gluten-free. They are so easy to make. All you need is some gluten-free bread, any kind will do, and twenty or thirty minutes.

Just dice up the gluten-free bread and place in a bowl.

Here I used three slices Udi's Gluten-Free Multi-Grain Bread. This bread tastes good, but a single slice is pretty small. It is just barely larger than a quarter of a regular whole grain slice.

But the size of the slices doesn't matter when you are just going to dice them up anyways.

Sushi and Gluten-Free Thai Peanut Sauce

San-J Gluten-Free Thai Peanut Sauce

We had plans to watch the Supper Bowl during supper, but we knew we didn't want the typical party fare.

Really, I know the name of the game and we don't usually call our third meal of the day "supper". But my grandmother did.

Anyways, I started thinking hard. What would we all want to eat that was healthier than the standard offerings? And that we would want to eat during a football game and its commercials?

Something different. Not standard. Something we don't usually make due to lack of time.

Ah ha! That one is easy.

Sushi!

Making sushi requires a lot of time and preparation. But as soon as I mentioned it to my family, there was no looking back. We all love sushi!

But in addition to sushi, I wanted to make some spring rolls, since I have a new love.

San-J Gluten-Free Thai Peanut Sauce.

This stuff is divine. I wanted those spring rolls so that I would have something to dip into my gluten-free peanut sauce!

Here are a few of the spring rolls that we made.

Inside of each rice paper roll is shrimp, green onion, cilantro, lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumber, and some radish. These were very tasty, especially dipped in the gluten-free peanut sauce.

This peanut sauce also makes a great salad dressing. A little leftover chicken, lettuce, shaved carrots, roasted cashews, gluten-free peanut sauce and you've got yourself a great little salad.

Sashimi and Sushi

Eating Gluten-Free at the BWI Airport

Airports are Atrocious

Traveling through airports usually comes with plenty of challenges these days. Even more so when you need to eat gluten-free.

Have you ever looked around an airport and been faced with a plethora of fast food joints and prepackaged food stands and coffee shops serving only pastries? Have you ever faced all of that and not found a single place you can eat safely?

I can't count the number of times my heart (and stomach) sank in airports when I couldn't find anywhere to get safe food.

Whenever I travel, I try to research the airports that I will be traveling through, and I try to find a safe eatery ahead of time. I pull up restaurant websites. I print out menus. I plan and anticipate.

And sometimes I just get lucky.

The Silver Diner in the BWI Airport

The Beach on New Year's Day and The Kettle

The Beach, Year Round!

Who would have guessed that we would be at the beach on New Year's Day?!

But that is just where we were, and loving every minute of it!

This is Manhattan Beach, CA. I love this place.

This is an excellent place to surf, boogie board, swim, walk, run, bike, skate, wind skate, and play volleyball. But none of that is why we were there.

We were there to breathe the ocean air, play in the sand, hop over waves, dig up sand crabs, and generate some vitamin D. We were treated to an absolutely gorgeous day!

We didn't bring our swimsuits, since we knew the water would only be about 55 or 58 degrees. Brrrr! But would you believe others did? And wore them! And swam in them! In the water! In bikinis!

Crazy people.

I can understand the surfers better, in their wetsuits. Wetsuits in 55 degree water make sense. Bikinis do not. The waves were big and choppy, but that didn't deter the surfers and boarders! Quite the opposite.

I tried to capture the waves crashing into the pier, but this is the best I got.

It was a spectacular day at the beach. We got there on the early side, just after noon, and didn't leave until our parking meter was running down, 2 hours later. By that time, loads more people had shown up. The beautiful, warm weather was a big draw and with the holiday, everyone was ending up at the beach!

The Kettle

Eating Gluten-Free at Uno's Chicago Grill

Dinner and a Movie

Actually, in this case, it was a movie and dinner. In that order.

We decided we wanted to go see the new Hugo movie. Given all the constraints we had that day and for the rest of that weekend, we struggled to find a movie time that didn't impact other things.

Finally, we settled on a time that ran into dinner time. That would really squeeze us trying to fix a dinner and force us to eat late. Not desirable.

The solution: go out to dinner.

Ah, here we go again. Where can we go that everyone else likes and I can find something safe for me to eat?

This time it was easy. Both options on the table have gluten-free menus! Hurray! And we had just eaten at one of these a few weeks before, so the choice was really made for us.

After the movie, we were going to eat at Uno's Chicago Grill.

Uno's Chicago Grill

2011 Thanksgiving Gluten-Free Stuffing

Gluten-Free Bread

Stuffing. Ah, yes. My favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal, hands down.

If there is no stuffing, there is no Thanksgiving for me. Forget the turkey. Forget the cranberries. Forget the pies.

Yes, I wrote that. Forget the pies.

For me, Thanksgiving is all about the stuffing.

(Oh, and the family and love and being thankful. Really.)

But stuffing, people. It's the stuffing!

I've tried making cornbread stuffing and I've resisted wild rice stuffing. I just really, really like the regular, ol' bread stuffing too much!

I made this gluten-free bread specifically for the stuffing on Monday. I used my bread machine.

Planning a Completely Gluten-Free Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is almost here?

Oh, right. It is November and we've already had our first snow of the season and the leaves are still falling outside and the colors are gorgeous and I'm trying to dream up birthday gifts at the same time as Christmas gifts and it was pitch black on my drive home from work last night.

Right. It's time for Thanksgiving!

I love this holiday. It's all about food and being thankful and food and family and food.

It was only a few years ago that this holiday brought terror into my newly gluten-free heart.

Now, I know how to do this holiday completely gluten-free. It certainly helps when I'm doing the cooking. And that is exactly what I plan to do!

Don't think that this a cinch.  Don't think you can throw a few cans of this together with a couple bags of that. No, I'm talking about homemade.

Homemade everything. Homemade everything gluten-free.

Stuffing. Gravy. Biscuits. Green Bean Casserole. Pie. Another pie.

It is a lot of work, no doubt, making everything myself and making everything gluten-free. But the rewards are well worth it!

Gluten-Free Thanksgiving Dinner

Here are our plans for this year.  We are only cooking for four, so we've opted to skip a few dishes, like sweet potatoes and/or yams.  There is already likely to be far too much food.

Turkey

Gluten-free Stuffing
    gluten-free bread (based on gluten-free sandwich bread, but done in a bread machine)
Gluten-free Gravy

Mashed Potatoes

Gluten-free Green Bean Casserole
    gluten-free mushroom soup (can't find the recipe from last year --- bummer! It was so good!)
    gluten-free French fried onions

Gluten-Free Buttermilk Biscuits

Cranberry and Orange Relish

Green Salad

Gluten-free Pecan Pie
    gluten-free pie crust

Gluten-free C 'n' E Lime Meringue Pie (by request, for the birthday that falls on Thanksgiving this year)
    gluten-free graham cracker crust

Remaking Gluten-Free Leftovers

Eating Gluten-Free at Red Robin

Corn Maze

Fall is here and I had made up my mind that this would be the year for me to do my first corn maze. People from around here scoffed at me.

 "You've never done a corn maze?!!!"

"No..."

"Really?!!!"

Really.

They don't have them at every turn out west. Around here, yes. Out there, no.

But we are here now, and our time has come.

It also helped that I got an email that NASA has coordinated with seven farms around the country to make space-themed corn mazes. The Hubble maze is up in NY, six or more hours for us. Bummer. It's not likely we'll be able to get there.

But the closest maze was only about 2 hours from us. That's better. We can manage that.

Bacon, Beef & Bleu Salad

Summertime Salads

It's summertime and I like salads when it is hot.  Actually, we eat salads a lot in our house, year round.  Side salads, mostly.

But the summer is when we eat more entrée salads.  Salads that fill the whole plate.  Salads that have something other than our usual tomato, red bell pepper, and feta toppings.

Spinach Salad with Egg and Bacon.  Chicken Caesar Salad.  Candied Pecan and Dried Cranberry Salad. Greek Green Salad.

This is the time of plates full of salad, with all sorts of toppings.

Bacon, Beef & Bleu Salad

This is not a special gluten-free recipe.  This is just a salad that I really love and it just happens to be gluten-free too!

And everyone in our house goes ballistic for it!

It all happened rather by accident, when I walked into the kitchen one recent evening.

"Is that beef?"

"Yes."

I found that my husband had started marinating some beef.  Eye of Round steaks to be precise.  They had been really thick, so he had sliced them in half to make them thinner and they were marinating that way.

"What are you planning to do with it?"

"I'm not sure yet."

"Grill?  Were you going to grill it?"

"Yes.  Probably."

"Great!  Let's do that.  Then what?  Were you thinking anything else?"

"Just a salad."

"Really? What kind of salad?"

"Just a normal side salad."

"Really? Hmmm....  Well, instead of that, why don't we make that salad that has sliced beef and bleu cheese dressing on it?  Everyone loves that!"

"Ah.... Well...."

"Hey, we've got everything we need for it:  bacon, bleu cheese, potatoes, and you've already started the beef."

And we were off and running.

We always have romaine lettuce in our house.  It is, by far and wide, our favorite lettuce.  Butter lettuce is too soft.  Iceberg is too pale.  Sometimes we have baby mixed greens or spinach, but we always have romaine.  This is perfect as a base for this salad.  

He grilled the beef as planned.  When it was done, we just needed to slice it thinly for the tops of the salad.  Of course, any kind of cooked, sliced beef would work fine here.  Choose your favorite.

We almost always have some bacon in the freezer.  We pulled that out and popped it into the microwave.  A year or two ago, I bought a microwave bacon tray.  It has ridges that the bacon slices lie on, and a groove down the middle leading to a tray at the bottom.  The groove sends the liquid fat down to collect in the tray, and the bacon cooks on top of the ridges and out of the fat.  This is now my favorite way to make bacon.  Just be sure to cover the bacon with a paper towel before cooking!

After the bacon was cooked and crispy, I further drained it on paper towels and then cut it into small bits, ready for the top of the salad.

Potatoes.  Did I mention the potatoes?  I'm not usually a fan of potatoes on salads, but I have grown to love them on this salad.  That is, if they are cooked well enough.  I like them slightly brown and crunchy on the outside and well done all the way through.  That's why I cut them into very thin wedges.  I like the shape of the wedges, but the thinness is necessary if you want to get them done enough through the middle.  I dusted them lightly with sea salt and baked them for 20-25 minutes at 425 degrees.

These turned out perfect.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of them after they were done.  They were beautiful!

And actually, we didn't have bleu cheese.  We had gorgonzola.  Close enough.  Yummy enough.  Either works just fine for this homemade dressing.

To make the dressing, I just winged it, using a couple of heaping tablespoons of sour cream, a splash of milk, a bit of cider vinegar, a small wedge of gorgonzola, salt and pepper.  I would have used non-fat greek yogurt too, if I had had any at the time.  But I didn't.  I put it all into the food processor and it was done in a minute or two.  I added a touch more vinegar and milk, until the tanginess and consistency were just right.  Thick, but not too thick.  If you don't have a food processor, a blender works just fine too.  Or you can mash the cheese sufficiently small with a fork and just mix all the ingredients in a bowl.  Still easy.  Oh, and delicious!

Then I laid everything out on the plates:  first the romaine, then potatoes, bacon, beef, and finally the gorgonzola dressing.  Adjust the ratio of each according to your own liking.

This was our Bacon, Beef & Bleu Salad!  Everyone in our house fawns over this salad.  It is so tasty and so flavorful!  It really is a meal unto itself.  And it naturally doesn't have any gluten in it.  Fabulous!