Slow Cooker Sundays: Bacon, Chard, and Shallot Risotto

4 1/2 cups chicken broth

1 pound bacon, cut into 1 inch slices

2 large shallots, peeled and chopped

1 bunch rainbow chard, washed and coarsely chopped

1/2 cup dry apple cider

2 cups arborio rice

3/4 cup manchego cheese, grated

2 tbsp butter

In a medium pot, bring the broth to a simmer with the lid on, set aside and keep warm.

In a large pan, cook the bacon. Be careful not to burn it and transfer the pieces to the slow cooker.

Pour the majority of the bacon grease out of the pan, leaving only about 1 tbsp.

Add the chopped shallots and chard, cook until shallots are translucent and chard is soft.

Add the dry apple cider and stir until the cider has reduced by half.

Stir in the rice and cook until most of the cider has been absorbed.

Scrape the mixture into the slow cooker.

Add the hot broth and cover.

Set on high for 1 hour and 15 minutes, stirring every 20 minutes or so.

The risotto is done with the rice is soft and most of the liquid has been absorbed.

Stir in the 2 tbsp of butter and the cheese until melted.

Slow Cooker Sundays: Baby Back Pork Ribs

We bought some ribs during the week and had planned to make them on the grill this weekend, until we found out that a burn ban was in effect. So I did some quick research on the internet and put together a recipe to make them in our slow cooker.

They turned out quite good and reminded me a bit of the pre-cooked ribs that you can make in the oven, I think the brand is called Lloyds, very tender and very flavorful. We also unfortunately ate them all before we got a chance to take a picture...

2 tbsp olive oil
1 half rack of baby back pork ribs
1 bottle Bards Gluten Free Beer
1 1/2 bottles of Organicville Original BBQ Sauce
Additional BBQ sauce for dipping

Pour the beer and BBQ sauce into the slow cooker and whisk together.
Heat the olive oil in a skillet on the stove top at medium.
Cut the rack of ribs in half.
Quickly brown the ribs in the skillet and then place in the slow cooker.
Flip the ribs around, coating both sides with the beer and sauce mixture.
Cover and cook on high for 1 1/2 hours.
Continue to cook on low for another 3 hours.

The First Seattle Thanksgiving

Our first Thanksgiving in Seattle was wonderful!  The first turkey we've ever cooked was a success and we had Mary, Zeke's mom, in town visiting. We made pretty much all of the traditional dishes with just a few tweaks to them to fit with our tastes and my food issues, you can find all the recipes we made at my Gluten Free Travelette Blog.

The day before, we brined our turkey in a maple sage brine that we concocted.

We cooked up a pecan pie in a gluten free whole foods pie crust.

We also cooked up some eggnog which stayed cool in the fridge overnight for us to enjoy later in the evening on Thanksgiving.

The day of we got a nice fire going and had the house all cleaned out.

We got all of our recipes lined up and ready to go for the day.

The turkey ended up being done about 2 hours early, so we ended up pushing our whole dinner to more of a "linner". We set the turkey aside under tinfoil for awhile, so it stayed warm until it was time for Zeke to start carving. Which he did with excellent skill!

Our Thanksgiving spread, minus the turkey, of gluten free stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes with all the fixings, lingonberry, and gravy.

We had our table set up in the little breakfast nook we've got, with some hot mulled cider.

Slow Cooker Sundays: Bean and Potato Chili

This was fully experimental chili as I've been feeling a bit meated-out as of recent but they had a chili cook-off at my work which left me craving some chili and cornbread!

Perfect timing too as today was our first snow of the season here in Seattle!

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 large sweet onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup chili powder
1 tbsp ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 1/2 tsp ground allspice
1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp ground coriander
1 1/2 tsp oregano
1 tsp ground ginger
2 cans kidney beans
1 can pinto beans
1 28 oz can crushed tomatoes
2 green bell peppers, chopped
2 large yukon gold potatoes, scrubbed and chopped with skin on
1 1/2 cups chicken stock
3 1/2 tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 bay leafs
1 tsp salt

Heat the olive oil in a skillet and add the garlic and onions.
Cook on medium low heat until translucent and softened.
Add the chili powder, paprika, cumin, allspice, cinnamon, coriander, oregano, and ginger.
Cook on low heat until fragrant, about 5 minutes.
Transfer the mixture into the slow cooker.
Add the crushed tomatoes, green peppers, potatoes, beans, chicken stock, apple cider vinegar, bay leafs, and salt.
Set time for 5 hours on high.

We'll be serving this tonight with the same cornbread recipe we made here along with honey butter.

Slow-Cooker Sundays: Turkey Chili & Cornbread

So this is actually the first time I've ever made chili from scratch and it turned out pretty well! It had just the right amount of spice and flavor but it lacked body, if that makes any sense. I based my recipe off of the Cuisinart Slow-Cooker Cookbook, but made some changes based on the things we like and don't like. I keep reading that "real chili" doesn't have beans in it, but that's always been my favorite part! You can't have chili without cornbread and honey butter, so we took this recipe from Gluten Free Girl and altered it just a bit.  Recipes are below...

Turkey Chili

4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 1/4 lbs ground turkey thigh meat
3 large garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1 1/4 medium sweet onions, chopped
1/6 cup chili powder
1/2 tbsp ground cumin
3/4 tsp ground allspice
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp ground coriander
3/4 tsp ground oregano
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 28 oz can of diced tomatoes
1 15 oz can of kidney beans
1 green bell pepper, chopped into 1/2 inch squares
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp fresh ground sea salt

Heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a medium skillet on medium-high heat. Add the ground turkey and cook until browned.
Transfer turkey and any remaining liquid in pan to the slow-cooker pot.
Add and heat remaining 2 tbsp olive oil to the skillet on medium heat.
Add the garlic and onion to the skillet and cook until translucent and softened.
Add chili powder, cumin, allspice, cinnamon, coriander, oregano, and ginger to the skillet and heat on low heat until fragrant.
Transfer the onion mixture to the slow-cooker pot.
Add and stir in the diced tomatoes, green pepper, chicken broth, apple cider vinegar, bay leaf, and sea salt to the slow-cooker pot.
Cover and set the slow-cooker for 6 hours at low heat.


Gluten Free Cornbread
From Gluten Free Girl's Website - with my changes in Blue

1/4 cup sorghum flour
1/4 cup tapioca starch
1/4 cup potato starch
1/4 cup corn flour
1/4 cup sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon xanthan gum
1/4 cup butter, melted
2 large eggs
1 cup coconut milk
1 cup yellow cornmeal


Preheat the oven to 425°.
Combine the flours by sifting them into a large bowl. Add the remaining dry ingredients and stir.
Combine the eggs, melted butter, and coconut milk in a small bowl. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the liquid. Stir with a rubber spatula until everything is combined.
Stir in the cornmeal, whisking fast, until it is just combined. Do not over stir.
Pour into a greased 9 by 9 by 2-inch pan. Slide it into the oven. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the sides of the cornbread are slightly shrinking from the pan and a toothpick comes out clean.

Our Food

I'm working on another blogging project, Gluten Free Travelette, that I'm hoping to really make something of.  I don't know what my ultimate goal with the project is yet, but I have at least a general concept for it right now.  Anyway, I wanted to do a post about the food at our wedding which was tailored to my food intolerances.  In some ways having an almost entirely gluten and dairy free wedding seemed like a brave move at the time and we are so glad we were brave enough to do it. 

And getting back to the topic at hand, here is the post about our food that I wrote for my other blogging project;

Our wedding was approximately 97% gluten free and 95% dairy free. The majority of our vegetarian dishes were also vegan. So if you ever get married in the Monterey Bay Area and you're looking for a caterer that can accommodate a specialized diet, I would highly recommend Classic Catering in Pacific Grove, California. 

The only items with gluten were the blueberry and applies pies that we bought from The Buttery Bakery  in Santa Cruz, California and the beer we bought from Costco and BevMo. The story with the pies is that we tried to find a local bakery that would make gluten free pie's but we had no luck what-so-ever. And while I was prepared to make a couple of gluten free pies myself the night before the wedding, I certainly wasn't prepared to make 13!  

The only items with dairy were our tray passed apricots stuffed with goat cheese and pistachios, the honey butter to eat with the gluten free corn bread muffins, half of the stuffed portabella mushrooms which had some shredded cheese in them, and both the gluten full and gluten free pies which contained butter. 

I think the corn bread muffins were perhaps my favorite part of the whole meal and I think they were the favorite of the other guests that avoid gluten as well.  When I asked Classic Catering if they could make gluten free corn bread muffins I suggested to them that the mix by Bob's Red Mill is quite good. I don't think they used that mix though, because Classic's corn bread muffins were way better, and I find that impressive.  Gluten free baking from scratch isn't exactly easy to master, so I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the corn bread muffins. 

All of the food was truly amazing and we received lots of positive comments from our guests on how yummy it all was.  It's funny though, just like with our flowers the unseasonably cold weather of the year also affected our food.  We were supposed to have persimmon and blueberry skewers but Classic's Chef didn't feel the quality of the persimmons he had were quite worthy.  (Which frankly, I am impressed with because of the level of quality he gave us.) So the skewers became cantaloupe, blueberry, and persimmon skewers. 

Like I mentioned at the beginning of the post, we bought our gluten full blueberry and apple pies from a bakery in Santa Cruz.  But I made 3 gluten free pies after the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding. To make it easy, I premixed the GF flour mix I developed earlier in the year in individual zip lock baggies.  Then I used thawed out gluten free pie crusts from Whole Foods to use as the crust.  I had originally planned on making 2 rhubarb pies and 1 blueberry pie, but I ended up not having enough rhubarb, so I improvised, again, the night before the wedding.  We ended up with 1 rhubarb, 1 rhubarb blueberry, and 1 blueberry. To be totally honest, the rhubarb pies didn't turn out so well and that was probably because I used frozen rhubarb.  The gluten free blueberry pie turned out amazing, but that was with fresh blueberries. To ensure that the gluten free pie made it to the gluten free guests, we gave the caterers little toothpicks tied with navy blue bows to stick in the gluten free pies to identify them.  (The toothpicks were another DIY by the lovely wife of our officiant and our groomsmaid.  

Toasts presented yet another opportunity to try something different to accommodate my specialized diet. Since I'm allergic to grapes, champagne was out of the question. So we ended up ordering a keg of pomegranate cider from Two Rivers Cider in Sacramento, California. It was wonderful as well. 

When we would tell folks that the food at our wedding would be almost entirely gluten and dairy free we got a lot of confused looks.  Sure we only had a couple of folks at our wedding with specialized diets that we knew about, but for anyone that knows anything about eating gluten and dairy free ... you can eat darn well without those ingredients and we wanted all of our guests to know that too! 

I would highly encourage anyone planning a wedding with guests on specialized diets to look for a caterer that can meet your needs.  One caveat to that though, I would encourage you to do a tasting with your caterer of the dishes you plan to serve at the wedding, just to make sure they really understand the special diets you are looking to cater to.  We went to two different caterers for tastings and explained my dietary restrictions prior to the tastings.  Classic obviously impressed us, but the other caterer actually served us dishes that I couldn't eat. So as always, do your research and don't be be afraid to go entirely gluten or dairy free (or anything else for that matter) for your wedding!

Slow-Cooker Sundays: Black Bean Enchiladas

Thanks to one awesome groomsman, we are now the proud owners of a Cuisinart Slow-Cooker, and thus have decided to start a new tradition; Slow-Cooker Sundays!

This week we decided to make the Black Bean Enchilada recipe that I found posted on Apartment Therapy a while ago.

Since the recipe contained cheese we decided to use a couple of varieties of sheeps milk cheeses, a manchego, a gouda, and mitica. We also omitted the peppers, because I just don't like cooked peppers.

Overall, it was a super easy recipe to put together and just forget about for about 4 hours.  However, the enchiladas broke up a lot, so it was hard to actually pull out one individual enchilada at a time. But it still tasted great.  I think we might try this recipe again but next time include some shredded chicken.

In Case You Were Wondering...

Source

All the food at our rehearsal dinner and reception will all be gluten free!  And dairy free, with the exception of some possible goat and/or sheep milk cheese in one dish. As a person with so many food sensitivities and allergies I not only want to show how easy and tasty it is, but I know that there will be other folks there that have some of the same dietary needs. So we might as well make it all more allergy friendly.  We could probably take out soy and nuts as well, but I don't know of anyone coming to the wedding that have allergies to those two. 

For some reason, I think this comes across as a bit shocking to some folks, but having a gluten and dairy free meal is actually remarkably easy. It's mostly all about the quality and purity of the ingredients you use and just substituting when necessary.

We have selected a caterer and we do have a menu, but I don't think it's going to be the final version of our menu. So more on that later once things get firmed up!

Our First Seattle Scouting Trip

While we didn't find our new home yet, we did get a better sense of the areas we want to live in. Fremont and Phinney Ridge are at the top with Wallingford and North Ballard coming in next.

We looked at 3 places and were interested in two of them, but not for a long term rental. One had an amazing view....




We also did some scouting on good GF/DF places to eat out. We went to Cafe Flora, Blue C Sushi, and the Flying Apron Bakery.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone