Croutons are one of those things that my gluten free husband usually has to deny himself.  And inevitably croutons cause him some of the most frequent problems for eating out, as they invariably end up on soups or salads when someone doesn’t understand that croutons are made of bread and thus fall into the “no bread, pasta, or flour because I am allergic to gluten” request that my husband is so well experienced in asking.  This also means asking the server “yes can you please give me another salad prepped in a clean bowl” and “no, it is not ok to just remove the croutons”.

This has always been more of a problem for my husband in the U.S. than in Europe it seems – in Europe, while there may not be many gluten free options depending on the country and their culture of cuisine, it seems everyone we’ve come across knows what gluten means.  In the U.S., explaining that he actually has a problem with gluten, isn’t doing it just for a diet, and yes gluten does include anything made with bread, pasta and flour (including to check the sauces) seems to be a more common occurrence.  It’s almost so laborious to make sure everything is ok dining out that it’s not even worth it.

And on top of that, in the U.S. gluten free is becoming so popular for reasons other than celiac or sensitivities (some even use the word “fad”, despite the fact that for many like my husband staying gluten free will be a necessity for the rest of their lives), that the seriousness of the issue often becomes diluted – it’s been more than once that my husband has dutifully explained his intolerance to gluten at a restaurant and his requests have been ignored or forgotten.  Sometimes I wonder if some restaurants think people use “gluten free” as an excuse to cover up being a picky eater, and thus don’t know to treat an allergy request as an actual health issue could affect the safety of their customers (really, should a restaurant be questioning the motives of the diner?).

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One of my favorite things about writing here is getting the chance to explore.  Blogging and interacting with the community involved with food has led me into so many wonderful directions – I’ve learned a lot about cooking, tried new recipes, flavor combinations, experimented in the kitchen, and made some awesome friends.  And just about every culinary milestone I’ve shared with you, in hopes that my trials and failures as well as my successes can be helpful to others.

Usually, I am overly enthusiastic, anxiously waiting to push that publish button and share about my latest experiences.  But lately, I have found myself at a loss for words.  Why? Well for one, crazy awesomeness is happening in life that has kept me on my toes a bit the last few months, but also, I have been searching for my voice – what is it exactly that I want to say here?  Why am I writing this? Am I simply just sharing what I made for dinner and hoping you all enjoy it? Well, I do hope you all enjoy what I cook – but what is my purpose of writing in this space to you??

I found myself searching through my favorite sites to see what magic inspires me so – I love a variety of food blogs out there, and realized it’s not about the writing quality, snappy design, or the photos or even the recipes.  It’s that my favorites have something to say.

Something to say beyond “Hey, I made this, I liked it and ate it”.

Something to say beyond “Enter my giveaway now (and like me on facebook, twitter, etc. etc.) !!!”

Something to say beyond “I got this product for free so now I’m writing about it in hopes that you’ll buy it and the company looks favorably upon me”

While each of those things may indeed be very cool in their own right, if not surrounded by any substance then they aren’t really that exciting, now are they? Would you want to read some variation of those three phrases over and over post after post? I don’t.

I prefer something stimulating, that sparks conversation – that makes me think about food or myself or my life in some way I didn’t before.  Whether that be through words, photos, or recipes (I do not think the medium so important), it’s that voice that shines through – the personality, as if I can imagine them in the room communicating their story to me right then and there.

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Read the rest of Squash & Sausage Baked Rolled Lasagne

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Today I have the wonderful honor of guest posting on Prerna’s gorgeous food blog, Indian Simmer!  We’ve become lovely internet friends through sharing our passion for food, cooking, and photography, and I am so excited to be able to share on her site today.

One of my favorite things about the upcoming holidays is that essentially from now until the New Year for my family it is all about tradition.  Favorited treasured recipes that only get made once a year, as everyone eagerly awaits the familiar aromas wafting throughout the kitchen.  There’s always such a buzz of energy and excitement in the air, no matter what crazy weather/fallen trees/power outages Mother Nature decides to bring on my family’s New England home over the past Halloween, which they are have been heroically dealing with. Seriously well over a week later and my quaint little hometown is still a near disaster area, trees and wires lying in the road making several areas impassible, no cell service, many homes still without power and thus also without heat or running water, it’s absolutely nuts. But progress is slowly happening, and that is another story for another time – suffice to say while some of us are preparing Thanksgiving dinner this year, the rest of us may be outside chopping all the newfound firewood from the fallen trees…

This Thanksgiving seems like it will be full of all sorts of new experiences this year – so maybe it’s a good time to play with tradition as well. Why not try a holiday switch on some of our favorites? Every year that we’ve celebrated the holidays with my grandparents, Christmas dinner has involved baked chicken and noodles as the highlight of the meal.  It’s not so fancy, it’s not extravagant, but my grandparents have been making it for decades and it’s 100% pure happiness on the plate.  Seriously, comfort food doesn’t get any more satisfying than this.  But with every tradition comes the natural evolution of recipes, and while there may be a little pressure to keep a dish exactly how everyone remembers it, I cannot help but play.  This year, I’m taking our family Christmas dinner tradition and bringing it to our Thanksgiving table.

Changing the holiday isn’t the only switch I did with this tradition – I added in a little Thanksgiving essence by incorporating pumpkin, but I also made it completely gluten free so that this year, my husband will be able to enjoy it too.

Some traditions are meant to stay around forever unchanged, and some are meant to evolve – will this dish find a new home in the coming years on my family’s Thanksgiving table? Only time will tell. To find out my tips and recipe to convert this family favorite into a Thanksgiving inspired gluten free dish, you’ll have to go check out the rest of my post on Prerna’s blog, Indian Simmer. Happy cooking!

Also submitted to Gluten Free Wednesdays

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Pizza is meant to be eaten with your hands.  In fact, growing up in southern New England where the most amazing mom & pop pizza / Italian restaurants are quite abundant, I’ve always just thought that was how pizza was enjoyed.  A little bit of a mess, but that’s part of the fun.  However I’ve become very self conscious about picking up pizza with my hands when we eat en Suisse – everyone I see is always politely cutting into it with fork in the left hand, knife in the other, and all of a sudden me picking up a slice with my hands to eat feels a bit uncivilized.  Sometimes I can see where utensils would be used out of necessity, such as when toppings overtake the pizza and the crust can’t hold it anymore.  But that’s not my style of pizza – I prefer a pizza that isn’t overloaded, where the flavor of the crust really comes through – and if it has a good structure, it’s really just more fun to eat with your hands.

My gluten free pizza crust endeavors haven’t always been successful, often being just an under-layer for toppings, nothing much to speak of – so I was super excited when it became time again for another round of the Gluten Free Ratio Rally because this month, Karen of Cooking Gluten Free is hosting and the event is pizza! I have been wrestling with gluten free pizza for quite some time during the life of this blog, and made several variations, each time tweaking my recipe to try to improve it just a little more.  But I’ve never been really satisfied with my results – I’ve been proud when one pizza is the “best” I’ve made so far, but never really came up with a crust I was super excited about.  Until now.

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Read the rest of Gluten Free Moitié-Moitié Sausage Pizza

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Welcome to another gluten free ratio rally event!! This month I had the wonderful opportunity to host, and being the non-baker that I am, chose another culinary creation near and dear to my heart, pasta.  Pasta was one of the first things I learned how to cook from scratch, ever.  While in grad school (yes, I know, I was seriously a late bloomer when it came to the kitchen), I had visited my parents over a holiday and decided to take back with me my parents’ copy of Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.

My first trial back then was a bit of a mess, but not long afterwards my parents also gave me an extra pasta machine they had lying around – I went back and reread Hazan’s very detailed instructions, and gave it another go  – but this time there was success! And the pasta made with that pasta machine became one of my very first posts here on Jenn Cuisine.

Since then I learned how to get a little creative and try things like incorporating spinach into the dough, and just a little over two years ago I had gotten up the courage to attempt my first gluten free pasta ever by making ravioli.   That ravioli? It worked.  It wasn’t awesome, but it held together (sort of).  After all it was nearly 75% starch and had xanthan gum, there should have been enough stickiness to stay together!  And from that time I’ve been slowly trying to cut back on the starch content and refine the pasta recipe a bit to create something that has a better consistency, a better texture, and a little more flavor.  I figured it would be a perfect challenge for the ratio rally, as well as give myself a chance to work on an ingredient ratio I was a little more happy with.

My typical flour mix would include at least half starches.  And with that flour mix I was rather successful – and the more I made pasta (and the better my dough became), the better my technique became as well.  I made it often enough that pasta became something I could throw together, and it was great to feel like I had finally accomplished the basics of making gluten free pasta -

But it really is a bit bland if made with so much starch.  It always needed a really strong sauce to combat the blandness.  This month was the first time I’d made egg-based pasta by weight (not counting gnocchi which I view as more of a dumpling than a pasta), and I wanted to really incorporate some taste into the pasta.

So here we are, the first week of July, and the ratio rally participants have been cooking throughout the past month to create gorgeous gluten free pasta goodness for you!

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Read the rest of GF Ratio Rally Makes Pasta – Tagliatelle with Smoked Salmon

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If there were any dish the could compete with fondue as the most popular food in Suisse, I think it would be rösti.  Actually, I’m pretty sure rösti is probably more common than fondue in many places.  Rösti is essentially a fried potato pancake, and the possibilities for customization are truly endless.  Several regions en Suisse have their own versions, but the simplest is comprised of simply grated potatoes, salt, and some type of fat for frying.  In restaurants I have been to, it’s not uncommon to see rösti served with meat, or fresh green vegetables.  With the sight of beautiful asparagus finally reappearing again  I knew they would be perfect for our rösti.

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Read the rest of Rösti, a naturally gluten-free Swiss Tradition

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I was going to write you yet another post about how I love my husband so I made him a nice dinner.  When I first told you about my Valentine’s Day food that I made for my husband, I went a little backwards and started with dessert first.  I started the day making sweet orangettes and sabayon in the morning, not even starting dinner until much closer to the time we’d actually eat.  I wanted the day to not be about stress, but just having fun.  And despite my rather emotionally raw post about Valentine’s dessert, today was going to be a bit more lighthearted.

Then, nixing that idea, since you’ve heard it from me a gazillion times already, I thought I would talk about some memories of eating scallops during my childhood.  Or maybe how much I love citrus in the Wintertime.  But I’ve already done that too, and I seriously doubt you want to read those same stories over and over again anyways.

It took me a while to come up with what to talk about, and then I realized it is because other things are pressing on my mind.  Specifically about a certain beautiful city in New Zealand that has suffered so much.  I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to have two amazingly wonderful and life changing experiences in New Zealand.  I was so impressed by  friendly and upbeat nature of everyone I met, not to mention some wonderful food that certainly contributed to the charming welcoming atmosphere that is Christchurch.  Even though that was five years ago, the place won my a soft spot forever in my heart.  I cried seeing the destruction of the first quake back in September on the news, and I cried today seeing photos of the beautiful cathedral tower in shambles and learning about the unfortunate who ended up dying in the disaster.  Luckily all of my friends were out of the city at the time so are safe and sound, but that doesn’t lessen the pain for those who have to rebuild (again), or mourn their loved ones or are still looking for those who are missing.

So instead of some lengthy drivel about my life in calm and quiet (albeit a bit gray & dreary lately) Suisse, I’m dedicating this post to CHCH and sharing some of the things I love about Christchurch’s beauty.  There are great tasting scallops in NZ too, that’s enough of a connection for me at this point to the recipe at hand.  I’m not really going to talk about the scallops, other than last weekend I learned that saffron and orange work exquisitely well together (recipe below).  And y’all should make Dario’s saffron risotto, it’s perfect.

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Read the rest of Coquilles St. Jacques and Saffron Risotto, and thoughts for CHCH

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Sometimes I love Daring Cooks’ challenges, and sometimes I’m just “meh” about them.  This month, however, I knew right away that it was going to be a lot of fun.  We often make soba noodles in our house since we learned where to find 100% buckwheat noodles, and both of us love tempura (deep fried anything is usually a winner with most people).

I originally had a lot of commentary to say (I always have lots of commentary), but today I am going to keep things short.  I had a crazy busy trip to Zürich last week, and did a lot of deep thinking that I still have to process in my head a bit.  So instead, I will leave you with some photos of beautiful Zürich and the lake – Zürich really has nothing to do with the dish of this Daring Cooks’ post, other than the fact that I did have sushi one night while I was there, and well, that’s Japanese too, haha…. yeah a bit of a stretch eh?  Well sometimes we are stretched a bit thin – a bit like these soba noodles (ok, that was a terrible connection I know!) – so you’ll have to bear with me for the moment and just admire some pretty photos, and I’ll leave my comments on the recipe version I made below as well….

The February 2011 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by Lisa of Blueberry Girl. She challenged Daring Cooks to make Hiyashi Soba and Tempura. She has various sources for her challenge including japanesefood.about.com, pinkbites.com, and itsybitsyfoodies.com

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Read the rest of DC #22 – Soba Noodles and Tempura and a Quick Photo Tour of Zürich

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What makes a pizza, pizza? Is it the marinara sauce? The mozzarella cheese? The thick crust? In my mind, pizza is one of the most adaptable foods on the planet – you can play with just about every major component, which also makes it difficult to define.

This Winter en Suisse, I learned that you can have prosciutto and gruyère on pizza, with hardly any sauce at all. And in Zürich last weekend I went to a place where it’s perfectly ok to call it a tarte flambée instead of a pizza and turn it into dessert.  But really, it’s any flat baked pie with toppings.  The sauce, the crust, the toppings, all of them are totally variable options simply waiting for your creative palate to guide the way.

Sometimes we have tried simple variations at home – like using pesto instead of marinara sauce for my father-in-law who is allergic to tomatoes.  And other times we have gone a bit farther “out there” in our flavor selections, like when we decided to make this Carmelized Fennel, Beet and Orange Pizza.  And sometimes, like this one, a really different pizza just appears from nowhere in our kitchen.  Like Asian BBQ Pizza.

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Read the rest of BBQ Asian Pizza, Gluten Free

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Woohoo!! I did it!

My first successful gluten free potato gnocchi, ever!  I taught myself how to make conventional glutenicious potato gnocchi a few years ago thanks to the wonderful instruction found in a Marcella Hazan cookbook that my mother handed down to me, usually with great results.  Ricotta gnocchi work easily gluten free because the only flour is a mere dusting on the outside of the little dumplings.  I’ve attempted gluten free potato gnocchi in the past too – in fact several times, but every trial of potato gnocchi always ended in dismal failure, watching in sadness as my gnocchi dissolved away into starchy nothingness in the simmering water.  All that hard work cooking the potatoes, making the dough, rolling and cutting into those cute little gnocchi dumpling shapes, all gone to waste in about 30s of time in a pot on the stove.  It was discouraging and depressing.  In fact so much so that I haven’t even attempted gluten free potato gnocchi in over two years.  Until now.

One of my favorite food photographers, Dario Milano, recently posted on his blog a recipe for potato gnocchi.  And the measurements were in grams! I’d always wondered if the gluten free flour I had used in the past might have been the wrong amount, and this was my chance to try the recipe again, using a simple 1:1 mass substitution.  I took my favorite gluten free bread mix, and added in a little bit more cheese (because I like cheese), and went to work.  I was so inspired by Dario’s gorgeous step by step photos that I decided to show you a few more pics than usual, so you can see my gnocchi process…

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Read the rest of Gluten Free Potato Gnocchi with Truffled Pesto Sauce

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