Gluten-free Gourmand

I like to eat big.   When I was a kid, just a skinny little thing, family and friends would marvel at the huge piles of pasta I would heap on my plate and top with meatballs.   I mean, I would really pile it on – and at 10 I would pack away more of the dish than most adults.   Italian food was a staple growing up and my mom taught me how to make my grandma’s spaghetti and meatballs, as well as other hearty meals like fresh pasta and home-made bread.   Whatever I loved to eat, I would learn how to make it. My home-made creations weren’t always perfect.   I am still teased for the time I tried to make eggplant ravioli without a recipe when I was 16.   It took 5 hours.   When we finally sat down to eat at 10 pm, everyone was famished, but I had made some miscalculations.   Each person got about three ravioli.   They weren’t even good!   That was when I learned that eggplant, while delicious, can be spongy and bland when not cooked...

It's summer, and everyone is trying to think of ways to keep their kitchen cool but still make decent meals.  The best thing about fresh pasta is you only need to cook it for 2-4 minutes.  Easy!  Top it with cilantro pesto if you don't want to cook a sauce.  I've made fresh pasta with my amazingly versatile  Deluxe Pastry Flour  several times and thought I'd share the recipe.  This pasta is strong enough to make ravioli with, or any flat pasta shape, rolling out or in a machine.  I prefer to roll it out - I think it's easier and faster. I've heard it's a saying that "If you want to taste butter, eat a croissant .  If you want to taste grain, eat pasta." Well, this recipe puts my  Deluxe Pastry Flour  to the test.  You can really taste the blend of flours.  And it tastes beautiful. I decided to make a tagliatelle style hand-cut pasta with extra-wide noodles.  I love wide noodles!  Next time, I won't go qui...

To my faithful readers who have been patient with me, I'll finally explain why I took a long break from blogging. My grandfather recently died and my life has been in a bit of a frenzy with work, love, family, and a funeral. In memory of my grandfather, who loved this tomato sauce recipe so much, I am going to share with you my version of my grandmother's spaghetti sauce. My grandmother usually used a mixture of stewed tomatoes, tomato paste, and tomato puree from a can to make this. However, I have multitudes of fresh tomatoes from my garden to use for this. I have adapted the recipe to call for fresh tomatoes, which was probably the origin of the recipe anyway. You can use a food mill (pictured right) or tomatoes concasse as explained in my gazpacho recipe to make this. For ideal texture, use both. I chose to essentially juice my tomatoes this time, since most of my harvest was made up of small tomatoes which don't produce much flesh after skinning and de-...

I just happened to see a new gluten-free pasta at one of my favorite little grocery stores today, City Market in NW Portland. It's an imported Italian penne rigate pasta. It's made from white rice flour. Italians make the best pasta, of course. This is especially true when we're talking gluten-free pasta. There are a lot of celiacs living in Italy, and they are more aware of the condition in europe compared to the US. I'll try this pasta out for you and let you know if it lives up to my very high expectations, considering I spent $8 on an 8.8-oz package! I think this officially qualifies as the most expensive pasta I've ever bought at a store. The brand name is Rustichella D'Abruzzo. It carries an organic farming seal as well as a gluten-free seal, neither of which I'm familiar with. They also had two types of corn pasta, one from the same company, also imported from Italy. Has anyone else seen this or any other brand of imported Italian pasta in...

You may know by now that I'm into pasta. I've done several reviews now, including Ener-G White Rice Spaghetti , Tinkyada White Rice Spaghetti , Tinkyada Brown Rice Fetucini , and a round-up of the Best and Worst of Gluten-free Pasta , in which I declare my favorite gluten-free pasta to be Ancient Harvest Quinoa and Corn pasta. This is still my favorite. However, I was glad to find a new quinoa pasta to try because I was pretty sure I'd like it. I did. This is a very good pasta option, and perhaps the only quinoa pasta available for people who can't tolerate corn. The look, feel, and flavor of the Andean Dream quinoa pasta are all very neutral - even more natural than the Ancient Harvest, which tends to look a little yellow. The Andean Dream is almost semolina colored, but it may have a touch of gray to the color which I don't find overly noticeable. The flavor is surprisingly neutral without being bland. The texture is the stand-out feature of this quinoa pas...

For last week in my What's for Dinner? Wednesday post I made Pasta Carbonara on some Ener-G White Rice Spaghetti that I'd just found. I promised to write a review of that pasta, and here it is! For more ideas and recipes visit Linda at the Gluten-free Homemaker . The pasta size is more like spaghettini or thin spaghetti, which I have always liked. It's a difficult size to find gluten-free, so you can understand my excitement in finally coming across it. In addition, I've been trying to seek out more white rice pastas here in the U.S. - they have some really good ones in Italy. The only other white rice pasta I've found was the Tinkyada brand that I reviewed a while back. My very first blog post was a review of several different kinds of gluten-free pasta , but none of them was a white rice pasta. Overall, I liked the Tinkyada white rice pasta a little better, in spite of the fact that Tinkyada's pasta doesn't come in a thin spaghetti style. I foun...

I used to have a roommate named Rosaria who is from Naples. She really enjoys cooking and she was nice enough to show me how to make a few traditional Italian recipes. Pasta Carbonara was one of them. Pasta Carbonara (also known as Spaghetti Carbonara) is a fast, easy, and extremely filling dish. It's basically bacon and eggs for dinner.  It's delicious. Rosaria and I went through a few tries before we got this dish to work gluten-free. The trick is to use a pasta that can withstand a lot of handling after it's cooked. I recommend using either a quinoa pasta, a corn pasta or a white rice pasta. Both fresh pasta and brown rice pasta gave poor results. I used Ener-G brand white rice spaghetti for this meal, and it worked rather well. I have a full review of this pasta in another post. Traditional recipes are very specific for Italians, meaning that if they call it pasta carbonara, they do not experiment with substituting ingredients or techniques when ...

I had a good weekend. Saturday morning I went to the Portland Farmer's Market , where I scored some great lamb steaks from SuDan Farm , ate some habanero caramel chocolates from Alma Chocolate , and bought some vegetable starts for my garden. Then I went to the Gluten-free Food Fair, which I heard about through the Gluten-free Portland website. New Cascadia Traditional was there, as well as numerous other vendors. The highlight was sampling the gluten-free pizza from Mississippi Pizza Pub , which I hadn't tried before. The crust was really good, kind of like an herby foccacia bread, but not too thick. I'll have to go down there and do a full review of the place soon. I hear they also serve GF beer there. After the fair I went to Bob's Red Mill for the first time. They have a good selection of GF pastas and other products in the store. I bought some Ener-G White Rice Spaghetti that I'm excited to try, as well as some Tinkyada spinach spaghetti that look...

Now with a new addendum! Whenever I go to a grocery store in another town, I always try to peruse their gluten-free options to see if they have any products I haven't seen in Portland. Last weekend I was excited to find a gluten-free pasta I hadn't seen before called Tinkyada White Rice Pasta. I have been looking for a white rice pasta since I went to Italy last spring. They have excellent gluten-free pastas there, and all of them are made from white rice flour. I haven't been able to find one like the Italian version in Portland. Imagine my surprise when I found a white rice pasta in Carson City, Nevada! The Raley's supermarket there has an excellent health food section. The ingredients listed on the pasta are: stone ground white rice and water. The cooking instructions should be taken with a grain of salt: the package tells you to cook it for 16-17 minutes! I know GF pasta takes a bit longer to cook, but I didn't boil it for nearly that long and it came ou...

I hold fast to the belief that going gluten-free doesn't mean eating meals that a person with normal digestion would never tolerate. However, in my quest for gluten-free alternatives I have braved many a meal some would qualify as inedible. In all my days I can't think of anything I've eaten that was worse than soy pasta. Not only is soy pasta not a standard grain substitute, but it hardly deserves the label "food." The texture is so far removed from what one expects from a pasta that it is disturbing to eat. The texture is so wrong that it is useless to ruin your favorite sauce by placing it on top of this noodle product. It is experiences like eating soy pasta that might convince a gluten-free novice to give up on experimenting with new brands or substitutes. However, I personally have not considered giving up on food as a practical option. And what I must consume to live I will find a way to enjoy eating. After the soy pasta fiasco I was determined to f...