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.)

Strawberry Lemonade Recipe--Gluten-Free and Great Fun for Kids!

This is so simple, I can't believe I'm even bothering to post it. But I've had people ask me, "How do you make that?" So here I am, showing everyone how easy it is.

INGREDIENTS:
1 pkg. frozen strawberries
1 pkg. gluten-free frozen lemonade concentrate
water

DIRECTIONS:
Read the ingredients list on your frozen concentrated lemonade to make sure it's truly gluten-free, but honestly, I have yet to discover a brand that isn't. Again (like I said in last week's post) though, give people a chance to contaminate your food and voila! It happens at the snap of your granny's leathery fingers.

Once you've determined that the lemonade is fine, just mix it according to the package directions and plop about four or five strawberries in there with it. Let it sit for 20 minutes until the strawberries start to thaw.

Put some ice in your glass before you pour the strawberry lemonade into your glass, so it's nice and chilled.

That's it. Simple as can be!

Perfect Potato Salad--Gluten-free and Dairy-free

I know, I know. It's kind of a stupid title, because really, most potato salad is gluten-free and dairy free. But believe it or not, people can screw this up. The main problem is with the GF status. How do you screw that up? Using mayonnaise that has been contaminated with gluten-bread crumbs.

See, every time your grandmother comes to visit and she dips her knife in the mayo to spread it on her regular bread, then she dips it again, little bread crumbs end up in the mayo.

So whenever we go to someone's house for a big dinner, we bring our own potato salad. That way we can be sure the mayo is completely crumb-free. We also use a squeeze bottle of mayo at our house, to prevent double-dip contaminations.

I don't even know how you can manage to screw up a potato salad with dairy, but give people an opportunity to contaminate your food, and they'll manage to do it every time! ;)

Anyway, here's the potato salad recipe I use:

INGREDIENTS:
5-7 medium potatoes (I tend to lean toward 7 unless the spuds are huge)
1/4 cup chopped onions
1/2 cup chopped celery--more if you like it crunchy

2 hard-boiled eggs, diced into small pieces
1 scant tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
dash of celery salt (to taste)
1/4 cup Italian salad dressing (we use Kraft Zesty Italian)
1/2 cup mayo

Boil clean potatoes on the stove for 35 minutes after the water reaches the boiling point. Once they've chilled in the fridge for a couple of hours, skin them and dice them up into small cubes. I usually add the onions, celery, and eggs at this time.

In a seperate bowl, I mix the remaining ingredients. Taste this dressing to see how much celery salt you need. It's a tough call sometimes, but less is usually better than more.

Add the dressing mix to the bowl of spuds. Mix thoroughly. Chill for at least two hours in a covered dish before serving.

I think you'll really like this recipe. It's truly fantastic!

Dairy-free and Gluten-free Coleslaw Recipe

I love cole slaw with fried chicken or hot wings, and it's relatively easy to make, even gluten-free and dairy-free. Here's what it takes:

INGREDIENTS:
1/2 head green cabbage, minced
1/4 cup minced white onion
1 celery stalk, minced
2 tablespoons minced green pepper
2/3 cup mayonnaise
1/3 cup white sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/3 cup soymilk mixed with 1 tablespoon lemon juice (to make "buttermilk")
1 capful of apple cider vinegar
2-3 tablespoons lemon juice (to taste)
1 teaspoon celery salt

Take the first four ingredients and mix them together in a bowl. Then put all other ingredients in a seperate bowl and mix them together to form the dressing. Finally, combine the vegetables with the dressing and chill for at least an hour. I find it's tastiest the next day though, because it allows the dressing to really seep into the veggies. YUM!

Creamy Jello Knox Blocks -- A fun, easy, GF dessert!

Again, this is one of my mother-in-law's recipes. My whole family loves it--even the folks who aren't on a GF diet.

INGREDIENTS:
1 six-ounce pkg. of Jello
1 three-ounce pkg. of Jello (same flavor)
2 pkgs. Knox unflavored gelatin (this is found in the baking aisle, near the Jello, but usually on a top shelf or away from all the other Jello products)
1 cup cream for whipping (not the same as whipped cream--this is thick cream that comes in a milk carton and says, "whipping cream" on it)
water

DIRECTIONS:
In a large, heatproof bowl, mix unflavored gelatin with Jello. Add 3 cups boiling water and stir until gelatin is completely dissolved (two minutes). Stir in whipping cream.

Pour the whole mixture into a 13x9 inch pan and chill until firm--about four hours. The cream will rise, chilling to form layers. To serve, cut it into squares or rectangles of desired shapes. Makes about 20-30 squares. (They go fast though--my kids LOVE these.)

If you're not allergic to strawberries, I recommend it for your first try. Everyone seems to like that flavor best. Our second favorite flavor of Jello for this recipe is orange. But you really can use it with any flavor of Jello.

Gluten Free Tartar Sauce Recipe--Great with GF Fish Sticks!

My mother-in-law makes the most incredible tartar sauce. She doesn't exactly use measurements for the spaces--she mostly goes by taste, but I'll try to duplicate the recipe here for you. I use Kraft mayo for my GF recipe, but I'm sure there are plenty of other GF brands. For dill pickles, I use Vlassic, but again, there are lots of GF brands. Just read labels and be aware that pickles use vinegar. If the jar says "vinegar" it's probably distilled vinegar, which some celiacs can tolerate but some can't. The distilling process supposedly lowers the gluten in the vinegar, but it doesn't completely eliminate it. So if you're a very sensitive celiac, I recommend buying pickles at your local health food store--ones that are made with cider vinegar, not distilled. Okay, so here's the recipe:

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup Kraft GF  Mayonnaise
1/4 cup finely diced dill pickles
1 tbsp. pickle juice (from the jar)
1/4 cup very finely chopped onions
dash of garlic
dash of onion powder
salt and pepper to taste--more salt than pepper
1 tsp. dill
1 tsp. fresh-squeezed lemon juice

DIRECTIONS:
Mix all ingredients. Sample. If it needs a little more salt, a little more dill, an extra pickle or more onion, add whatever is needed to make it taste just right. (That's how my mother-in-law does it. Sorry I can't be more specific!)

Now, what can you do about the fish sticks? Yes, there are fantastic fish sticks out there, that are gluten-free. My highest recommendation is for Clear Springs gluten-free fish sticks, but they don't seem to have their information available online yet. My husband brought some home though, and they taste FANTASTIC. So if you can get your hands on these, they're better than Ians (which is another company that makes GF fish sticks).

One other possibility is to fry up your own. There's a fabulous GF product out there called "Choice Batter" which claims it's a low oil-absorbing recipe, and I believe them. Whenever my husband goes fishing and comes home with some fresh perch or trout, we use this breading to make home-fried fish, and YUM! It's good stuff! Click the link to see it online.