Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

Recently a fellow GF-mom asked me for my GF chocolate chip cookie recipe. (How flattering, right?) Well this is my favorite one. It was given to me by a good friend. I don't know if she ran across it online or saw it in a magazine or what, but she wrote it down on a 3x5 card and handed it to me--and I'm SO glad she did, because we love it!

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1/2 cup margarine or butter
1 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 box Jell-o vanilla instant pudding mix (don't add anything to it--just the powdery stuff is what you want)
1 cup white rice flour
1/2 cup potato starch four
12 oz. bag of GF chocolate chips
pecans or walnuts, if you like

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Leave your butter or margarine out until soft. Mix butter or margarine with sugar and vanilla pudding mix. Add eggs. Mix flours separately. Then add the flours to the wet ingredients. Mix thoroughly with a stand mixer. Hand-stir in the chocolate chips and nuts. Drop cookies by rounded teaspoon-fuls onto a parchment-covered cookie sheet. Bake for 9-10 minutes.

As with all GF cookies, let them sit for a while before you remove them from the cookie sheet, because otherwise they'll crumble. Most GF cookies are fragile when they're warm. It has something to do with the nature of rice flour, I think.

Quick and Easy GF Breakfast Ideas

I don't know about you, but this time of year, I feel like a cab driver in New York City. I taxi my kids to piano lessons, choir concerts, 4-H, a friend's overnight party, church, youth group meetings, and the play the'll be performing in after school.

So we find ourselves getting up too late to eat a good breakfast sometimes. That's okay. As long as we eat something--even just a grab-n-go meal--it's better than nothing. They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right?

So what does an experienced GF mom feed her kids for grab-n-go breakfast? Here are a few ideas:

Van's toaster waffles. You can find them in the frozen foods section of your health food aisle, but read the labels; some of their products are wholesome but not GF!

Peanut butter on toast with an apple. This covers three of the four food groups--protein is in the peanut butter--and kids love it.

Open a can of GF pears and serve it over cottage cheese. With cinnamon toast, this also covers three food groups. My daughter loves this one! (I've heard that some canned fruits can have gluten in them, but I've never had this experience myself. However, as always, read labels.)

Boiled eggs and OJ. Let's face it, they travel well, they're high in protein, and they only take 12 minutes to cook hard-boiled. Once you get to your destination and start munching down the eggs, though, you've got to have the orange juice to wash it down.

Egg sandwich. We just had this one for breakfast this morning. We fried a single egg (over hard), and slipped a slice of ham in there between two slices of toast. It's also possible to eat it with cheese. I like lettuce on mine, but my daughter doesn't.

Microwaved hot cereal. I realize kids don't like Quinoa flakes. There are other options though. Uncle Ben's now has a cream of rice that is labeled GF. You can also cook corn meal mush from your own corn flour, just like Grandma used to make.

Gluten-free cereal. And if you're dairy-free, I've recently discovered how much I like hemp milk. It doesn't have the bland flavor that soy milk has. But it doesn't exactly taste like dairy milk either. It has its own flavor, but it goes wonderfully with cereals. I'm definitely a fan!

GF cereal bars. Did you know that Fruity Pebbles cereal bars are labeled GF? Yeah! And you can buy them in a regular grocery store, usually in the cereal aisle.

Yogurt or Gogurts. Yoplait is now labeling their yogurts and Gogurts (the tubes of yogurt) with GF labels. It's a quick source of fruit, dairy, and protein.

Well that's it for today's post. I hope you got something useful out of that...

GF and Dairy Free Birthday Cake

We recently had two birthdays in my family. Since I'm both dairy-free and gluten-free, I adapted a recipe I found elsewhere on the Internet to make this birthday cake edible for me. Everyone in the family loved it!

You know how birthday cakes will sometimes sit around for a week before they get eaten? Well not this one. I think it took about 24 hours and that cake was GONE like the wind!

So here it is:

Ingredients:
1 c. white rice flour
1/2 c. potato starch flour
3/4 c. tapioca flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
3 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. xanthan gum
4 eggs
1 1/4 c. white sugar
2/3 c. mayonnaise
1 c. soy milk
2 tsp. gluten-free vanilla extract

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and rice flour two 3-inch round cake pans.
2. Mix the white rice flour, tapioca flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and xanthan gum together and set these aside.
3. Mix the eggs, sugar, and mayo in a mixer until they get fluffy (like meringue). Then add milk, vanilla, and flour mixture.
4. Spread the batter into the pans you greased and floured.
5. Bake cakes at 350 degrees F for 25 minutes. Use the standard "toothpick test" to decide if they're done. Higher altitudes usually require longer baking times.

I like to stick my cakes in the freezer before frosting them. At the very least, refrigerate them. They hold together better that way. (It prevents them from crumbling as much when you're frosting them.)

Betty Crocker now labels their frostings GF when they're gluten free, but if you're dairy free too (like me), then you need to watch out for dairy ingredients in frostings.

What about cake toppers and decorations? Check out party stores for cake toppers that are inedible (to avoid gluten). I've found a lot of the cake toppers at our party store come from outside the country, and therefore, they don't have to conform to our labeling requirements here in the US. I made the little flowers you see in this picture, using a simple cookie-decorating frosting press. I've provided a link to that tool on Amazon, so you know what to look for in your stores. They're usually found in the area of your grocery store where you can buy aluminum pie pans and measuring cups.

But what about toys and other plastic cake toppers for little children's cakes? I once went to a bakery and asked if I could purchase toy-like cake toppers from them, explaining that our family had food allergies and couldn't order their cakes anyway. Under the circumstances, they were very nice about selling us just the cake toppers. I hope you have just as much luck!

Spanish Potatoes (a Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Casserole Recipe)

Whenever my husband goes steelhead fishing (or hunting), I feel safe to experiment in the kitchen. Today's casserole dish is an experiment of mine that turned out pretty good (although the girls said it was too spicy). I call it "Spanish Potatoes" for lack of a better name. Here's how you make it:

Ingredients:

• 5 medium-sized potatoes
• 3 cloves of garlic (fresh, peeled)
• 1 tbsp. finely chopped cilantro
• 1 1/4 cup chopped cabbage
• scant 1/4 cup diced onions
• 1/2 can (3.5 oz.) La Victoria mild diced green chilis
• 1/2 cup Pacific Foods hemp milk
• salt and pepper

Directions:
1. Peel the potatoes. Quarter them. Boil them with the 3 cloves of garlic until soft (30 min. or so).
2. Drain potatoes and garlic with a colander. Mash potatoes and garlic. Add hemp milk until they form a sort of mashed-potatoes consistency. The garlic should mash right in with the potatoes.
3. Add cilantro, onions, chilis, and cabbage. Salt and pepper to taste.
4. Bake in a 375-degree (F) oven for 20-25 minutes, or until cabbage is al dente.

If you're not worried about cooking dairy free, substitute the hemp milk for regular milk or a milk/sour cream mix. In the last 5 minutes of baking time, sprinkle cheddar cheese over the top. It will look pretty and taste good too. It's possible to garnish with a sprig of cilantro. If you broil it for the last 30 seconds, you may get the spuds to have a crunchy, golden-brown top, but I'm not very good at that.

I served this week's casserole recipe with last week's chicken breast recipe.

Easy Gluten-Free Chicken Breast Recipe

It's hard to find a chicken breast recipe that I like, but this one is simple and quick. It takes no preparation. Just prep it in minutes, pop it in the oven, and wait for it to cook.

When buying frozen chicken breasts, as always, read the labels. Some frozen or packaged chicken is treated with broth which may not be gluten-free. So be wary of that.

Anyway, here's my easy-cheesy-lemon-squeezy recipe for chicken breasts:

Ingredients:

• frozen chicken breasts (careful not to cook too many at once--four is about right for a family of four)
• olive oil
• garlic powder
• onion powder
• salt
• California seasoning blend (mine is Kroger brand--but McCormick has a number of GF seasonings)

Directions:
1. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees (F). Use a basting brush to coat the bottom of a casserole dish with olive oil.
2. Place the breasts in the casserole dish. Don't pile them on top of one another, as it takes longer for them to cook thoroughly that way. Instead, just line them up side by side.
3. Baste each chicken breast with a coating of olive oil on top.
4. Sprinkle all seasonings on top, going easy on the garlic.
5. Bake for one hour or until all pinkness is gone from the meat.
6. Garnish with a slice of lemon.

This chicken recipe goes great with my "Spanish Potatoes", which I'll post next week. Corn is also a yummy side dish. You can also see I had a glass of strawberry lemonade with this dinner. (It was posted last week.)