Growing Your Own Bean Sprouts for GF Chinese Food Recipes

Since my GF menu website is all about recipes kids can eat, I think it might be fun for a summer project, to show kids how to grow their own bean sprouts.

As I said in an earlier posting, I was taking a nutrition course at my local junior college, and this is one of the things they taught us: how to grow your own sprouts.

For this project, I'm using Great Northern Beans (see the picture), but it's possible to grow your own bean sprouts using lentils, kidney beans, black beans, or whatever kind of legumes you prefer. They do have slightly different flavors, but all bean sprouts are fantastically nutritious! And for our celiac kids, that's exactly what we need, right?

So here's how you start your bean sprouts:

1. Pour 1/4 cup of beans into the bottom of a mason jar. Cover these with water--maybe 1/2 cup of water or so. Let them sit in a window (in sunlight) for about 6 hours. 
2. Drain the water. They should be slightly damp, but they should no longer be submerged in water.
3. For the next few days, at the same time every day, rinse the beans with water and drain. It's not necessary to keep them in a window anymore.
4. When the sprouts reach a fair length, you can eat them--bean and all--and bean sprouts are especially good in Chinese stir fries, egg foo young, and sweet and sour dishes. (See my earlier postings for those gluten-free Chinese food recipes.) Sprouts are also great in salads.

If you'd like to see a video of how to grow your own sprouts, here's one that's fun and easy to follow.

Gluten-Free Egg Foo Young Gravy Recipe

Last week I posted my egg foo young recipe; this week I'm posting the gravy recipe. It's thinner than most gravies like you might use on mashed potatoes, but you can thicken it up with more corn starch. I don't like it with too much corn starch, though, as extra corn starch can give it a starchy flavor. So here's what I recommend:

This little bit of gravy is enough for two patties.

Ingredients for Egg Foo Young Gravy:

Ingredients for sauce:

1/4 tsp. Tamari sauce

1 ½ Tbsp. corn starch

a little less than ¼ cup cold water

1/3 cup beef or chicken broth (read labels)

dash of garlic

Directions for Egg Foo Young Gravy:

1. Heat up your broth in the microwave for 30 seconds (this step reduces the cook time on the stove).
2. Add Tamari sauce and dash of garlic to the broth, to taste. You want to make sure it is salty, but not icky-too-salty.
3. Pour broth mixture into a fry pan. Let it come to a boil while you do the next step.
4. Add corn starch to water. (The water should be cold.) Stir these together until the corn starch stops clumping. 
5. Once the broth is boiling, stir in the corn starch with a wire whisk. Stir continuously until it thickens. 
6. When the gravy is thick, pour it over your egg patty (see last week's recipe).

Serves 2 (Because you have to make the patties individually, but the gravy can be made for both patties, if you're cooking for two.)

See how it's thinner than a gravy you might serve w/ potatoes?

As I said last week, I'm preparing to grow bean sprouts. My next posting will let you know the steps in growing your own, home-grown bean sprouts for Chinese food dishes.

Gluten-Free Egg Foo Young Recipe

I love egg foo young, but anytime I've tried to buy it in a Chinese food restaurant, it's got gluten in it. So here's my recipe for egg foo young, minus the gluten...

Ingredients for egg patty:
1 mushroom, chopped up into little pieces
1/4 celery stalk, chopped into little pieces
2 Tbsp. bean sprouts or cabbage
2 eggs
1 strip of bacon, sliced into tiny pieces (optional, if you want to go vegetarian, though it's not vegan)
1/4 tsp. minced ginger (dried is okay, but fresh is better)
1/2 tsp. Tamari sauce (GF soy sauce)
1 Tbsp. olive oil

Directions:
1. Mix all ingredients in a 2 cup mixing bowl. It's going to look like a lot of veggies and not very much egg, but that's okay. Set this mixture aside.
2. Heat the oil in a non-stick fry pan, on medium heat. Important: don't get the burner too hot, as that will scorch one side of your egg patty.
3. Once warm, add egg mixture and cook with a lid over it until solid on the bottom.
4. Use a flat spatula to flip the egg mixture and cook it on the other side until light brown.

Serves 1

Next week I'll post the directions for the sauce that tastes so yummy on top!

The week after that, I'm planning to show you how to make your own bean sprouts. I just recently learned this in a nutrition class I took at our local junior college. It's quite easy (or so they tell me). So watch for that post.

Gluten-Free Sweet and Sour Sauce (GF)

I've been looking for a decent GF sweet and sour sauce recipe for a while, when I ran across this one through a fellow teacher. (Thank you Mrs. Howard!)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup sugar
2 Tbsp. corn starch
4 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup ketchup
2 tsp. soy sauce (we use Tamari sauce--other brands are not GF)
20 oz. can pineapple

Directions:
Drain syrup off of a 20 oz. can of chunk pineapple. Add water to syrup to make 1 cup liquid. add all other ingredients. Cook on medium-low heat until mixture thickens. Stir constantly to avoid sticking.

This can be used over barbecued chicken as a baster. You can drizzle it over friend meats and veggies to make a rice topper. Whatever you prefer.

Gluten-Free Chinese Food Recipes

Kids love to go out for Chinese food, but for gluten-free kids, this is always a challenge. Our nearest PF Chang's Restaurant is 100+ miles away from where we live. So I've had to learn how to cook Chinese food from scratch for my family. During the next month or so, I plan to share my recipes. Some are quite easy to make; others are a little harder.

I'm also going to show you how to grow your own bean sprouts, at the end of this month. Growing your own sprouts can be done indoors any time of the year, but right now, if your kids are home from school for the summer months, this little indoor gardening project will give them something to keep them occupied. Watch for that post at the end of July.

What makes Chinese food especially fun, though? It's those wonderful cardboard boxes. Here's a pattern for a Chinese food box, and I'm going to show step-by-step instructions, so your kids can make their own Chinese food boxes to put their Chinese food into:

1. Trace this pattern or print it onto card stock paper. (Incidentally, that pattern comes from this website, called Stay Beautiful. They show a more crafty use for the box pattern (less food-related).
2. Use a pair of scissors or craft knife to cut out the pattern and score along all of the dark lines.
3. Bend the side flaps outward, as you see in this image:

4. Staple side flaps to one another, like you see in this image:

5. Once all side flaps are stapled, it will probably be quite small, as you can see in this image, but it might hold a child-sized helping of Chinese food:

6. You can have your kids decorate their Chinese food boxes with Chinese lettering or put their names on their boxes, or color them with crayons. The whole business just makes eating Chinese food that much more fun!

And how cool would this be in someone's lunchbox? I'm always looking for fun ways to spice up my daughter's school lunches. This project is ideal!

GF and Dairy-Free Hawaiian Smores

Sorry it took so long to get this one posted. My intentions were good, but I've been busy. Anyway, the pictures are of the Hawaiian s'mores my family made while camping. And hey, I'm posting this just in time for fourth of July grilling...

Ingredients:
4 bananas
1 bag of carob chips (or chocolate chips, if your family has no problem with milk)
1 bag of mini marshmallows
aluminum foil

The instructions are at the bottom of the page, because I couldn't figure out how to make the images set evenly with the instructions. Sorry!

Instructions:
1. Do not peel the banana. Leave it inside the peel for the most part, peeling back only a small section of the banana peel (see first picture).
2. Where the banana's insides are exposed (where you've lifted back one slice of banana peel), cut the banana right down the middle.
3. Stuff the banana with a carob chip at the tip, followed by a marshmallow, then another carob chip, then another marshmallow, and so on, until the banana is stuffed with chips and marshmallows. (See the second picture.) If you're using chocolate chips, just substitute the carob chips in this step for chocolate chips.
4. Replace the strip of banana peel that you peeled back, so that the banana looks sort of chubby but back to its old self.
5. Wrap the banana in aluminum foil.
6. Set the banana in hot coals, like in a fireplace or campfire (see third picture). I suppose you could cook it on the barbecue or in an oven.
7. Check the banana after a few minutes to see if the carob chips and marshmallows have melted. If not, put it back in the hot coals. If so, take it out! It's ready to eat! Carob chips take longer to melt than chocolate chips, I've noticed, so cook times vary according to ingredients and the heat from the fire.

Serves 4