Jenn Cuisine

Basler Brunsli Cookies

December 7, 2011

in Dairy Free,Desserts,GF Ratio Rally,Gluten Free

Today marks another fantastic gluten free ratio rally day – this month, the theme is cookies hosted by the lovely Caroline of The G-Spot Revolution! Cookies, which have been my gluten free baking nemesis for years (along with puff pastry). Be it complicated macarons or simple chocolate chip, I can never seem to get them right. In fact, I have an entire category on this blog devoted to stories of my gluten free baking flops, and quite of few of them are taken up by cookie trials.

So when the theme was announced, a bit of anxiety overcame me – must I really face my long-standing baking foe? What if I can’t figure out a working version in time? Will cookies forever be my GF baking downfall?

But we all know where worry and negativity gets us in the kitchen. Nowhere. I think I need to come to terms with the fact that you are never going to see a chocolate chip cookie recipe on this blog, nor a beautiful macaron either. If you are ok with that, then I am too. Let’s just cut our losses and move on.

Thankfully, there is a whole wide world of cookies beyond macarons and “Tollhouse” style chocolate chip. So I started looking to other cookie traditions to see what other types of options there were – afterall, if there were only macarons and chocolate chip cookies in the world, then we would all be sorely missing out on a number of delicious treats in life. There are flourless cookies made from nut butters, bar cookies like these colorful seven layer venetians, and let us not forget the macaron’s totally unrelated but similarly named cousin, the macaroon, made with coconut and often dipped in chocolate, and much much easier to execute.

As it turns out, Switzerland loves cookies at Christmastime, and there are myriad lovely varieties that seem to turn up in stores and the markets about as soon as the roasted chestnut stands appear outside. Basler brunsli, zimtsterne, mailänderli, chräbeli, spitzbuben, berner haselnusslebkuchen, berner honiglebkuchen, and tirggel to name a few (and I am sure I am missing others).

I was looking through the various Swiss cookies, and noticed that a few are actually mostly made of nut meals which seemed like they would be very amenable to making gluten free – and nothing complicated like the infamous macaronage! So I decided this month, rather than continue to beat my head against the wall with failed cookie after another, I would try something completely new. Different. Let’s move on from chocolate chip cookies and macarons, shall we? :)

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Mango Avocado Salad

December 4, 2011

in Dairy Free,Diabetic Friendly,Gluten Free,Meats,Salads

It’s amazing how I can go visit my family for two weeks and come back to find that there has been an abrupt yet complete transformation into Winter. No snow here yet, but that nip is in the air and the wind blows with a chill that makes anyone want to bundle themselves up in a hat and scarf, maybe thinking twice before venturing outside.

Most would consider this the official season for warm Wintery comfort foods – baked potatoes, fondue, stews, and the like. However while it may not be so pleasant outside, inside our apartment is a sweltering sauna – we have yet to ever activate our heating, and most of the time often crack a window to help relieve us a bit – maybe our neighbors love the warmth too much and so their heat finds its way to our place? I don’t know – but when home, the last thing I want to eat is a thick hot meal.

So instead I have been stocking up our kitchen with my favorite fruits – mangoes, clementines, pomegranates, avocados, whatever looks refreshing when we go shopping. Dinners have been salads – something light to enjoy the fun tropical flavors that come out in Winter, that aren’t going to heat up our apartment so much (well more than it already is). On top of that, most salads that my husband and I make are naturally gluten free – that is, we don’t add in croutons or complicated dressings that require substitutions, we simply prepare fresh ingredients and dress with simple dressings for something easy that doesn’t require much thought.

This mango avocado salad is one such salad, and after making it more than a few times in the past month alone we have yet to tire of it:)

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{ 53 comments }

Apple and Caramel Dumplings, Gluten Free

November 28, 2011

in Desserts,Gluten Free,Photography

Every time a major holiday event comes around, I am not afraid to experiment. I hold on to the philosophy that if the dish doesn’t come out awesome, my family will still love me, and if it comes out great, everyone will be pleasantly surprised with a new taste to try. So I never view making a dish for the first time as a risky endeavor, and often see the holidays as an exciting time to see what new traditions I might be able to create.

This Thanksgiving was no different, as I decided to use our family event to create a totally brand-new-to-me dessert, gluten free dumplings. These dumplings were the feature recipe for Simone’s Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge (DHSPC) #3 – as is tradition with these challenges, the goal is to take an image chosen from the lovely Donna Hay magazine and recreate it. This rendition of the challenge was a cover photo by the ever talented William Meppem, of apple and caramel dumplings – perfect for the Autumn season! While I am usually all about making new foods, I have to admit after some of the other participants’ experiences I was a little hesitant! It seems there were a few errors in this recipe, and so it had the extra challenge of figuring out how to make it work – no matter, I’m usually improvising as I go anyways, we’ll just see what happens and hopefully there is an edible result at the end.

The first time I participated in Simone’s challenge, I had a bit of a philosophical challenge with the task of recreating an image. This time I decided to go for a more interpretation based approach, and as always had a few extra challenges to go with it

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{ 23 comments }

Pear and Apple Crumble, Gluten Free

November 23, 2011

in Desserts,Gluten Free

Thanksgiving is tomorrow.

Many people think Thanksgiving is a day to overeat filled with too much turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce, but really, Thanksgiving is much more than that.

Growing up in New England, the Thanksgiving story is one I’ve heard told many times ever since I can remember. The Plymouth settlers, i.e. those who sailed over from England on the Mayflower in 1620, suffered greatly their first Winter on the Massachusetts coast when nearly half didn’t survive to the Spring. But that next year they managed to form relationships with the native peoples of the area, a Wampanoag tribe (an alliance that would last some 50 years), as well as being helped immensely by the famous Squanto who helped teach them about the crops that could be grown and how to manage the harsh New England climate. That next Fall when the harvest came, the settlers held a large feast with their native friends to celebrate their alliance together – but the settlers, being a Christian people, also celebrated simply surviving and the good fortune that had befallen them through a harvest season and the help they received by giving thanks to God. After that, days of thanksgiving became practiced in other New England settlements as well. And while Lincoln may have been the initiator of the annual nation-wide feast day Americans partake in every November, even the early presidents had issued their own days of thanksgiving for everyone to express their thankfulness for the good things in life – including Washington, Adams, and Madison.

You see, Thanksgiving is about American a holiday as one can get, started from the very beginning. And even in our modern day, while we may not all be celebrating a harvest, everyone has their own life story. Those first settlers were survivors. They were resourceful, and they understood very well the value of working together and bridging new relationships. In our own lives, I’m sure we all have our own adventures to tell – and many of us are survivors in our own right. Maybe I view this holiday a bit idealistically, but whether it be surviving a hardship or illness, or you just want to celebrate a friendship or time with family, we all have something to be thankful for, to share with each other.

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Prepping for Thanksgiving

November 16, 2011

in Gluten Free,Tastes

One of my favorite things about New England in the Fall is waking up early while it’s still dark, sipping my hot tea, and watching the dim blue of nighttime fade into twilight and eventually watch the trees glow in yellow golden hue of the morning sunrise. Even in mid-november, there is still some color on a few trees and bushes (those that are still standing after Alfred), and even some fruit left hanging in the orchards.

This precious time spent home has been rejuvenating. Seeing all of my favorite places, people and food, enjoying independent little cafés with both internet and hot tea (something I desperately miss in Europe), and so many little details that just remind me how much I missed home.

It seems appropriate to be home at Thanksgiving, more so than Christmas even. Thanksgiving seems to be one of the few holidays that has yet to succumb to the cheapened commercialization that so often plagues many of the holidays of today. Because at its roots, Thanksgiving is about one thing that can never be put into a plastic box and sold for $5.99 – celebration with friends and family at a table, sharing food, laughter, and memories.

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{ 28 comments }

Baked Pumpkin Chicken and Noodles

November 8, 2011

in GF Substitutions,Gluten Free,Meats,Pastas and Grains

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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