Gluten-free Gourmand

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...

For my What's for Dinner? Wednesday blog carnival post I decided to do a dual product review/easy dinner idea: pasta with tomato sauce. I dressed mine up a bit with some sausage from New Seasons (they don't add any wheat or other fillers to their deli sausage) and some broccoli. However, this is always a go-to meal when I want something fast and satisfying. This has always been a favorite meal. For other GF dinner ideas, visit Linda at the Gluten-Free Homemaker . When I discovered Tinkyada pasta for the first time, I was pretty excited to try a new brand. They have a white rice pasta which I reviewed last month and thoroughly enjoyed. Then I realized that everyone else knew about Tinkyada pasta before I did! It's sold in most of the stores I frequent, including New Season's on NE 33rd and at Food Front on NW Thurman. (It's also widely available on the internet.) I read several blog posts about how good their brown rice pasta was, and I was eager to try it. ...

I don't exactly think of Carson City, Nevada as a gluten-free mecca. While my relatives there are very supportive of my diet and have made wonderful meals for me, when I travel back to Carson City to visit I always wonder what exactly I'm going to end up eating when I go out on the town. Well, no more! I found out by accident that Carson City has some of the best wheat-free, gluten-free bread I've ever tasted. The City Cafe Bakery at 701 S. Carson Street is the producer of this fine GF product. They make a whole host of gluten-free treats, including sandwiches, scones, and muffins. They bake the bread on-site, and they sell it by the loaf. Loaves come sliced, frozen, and unlabeled. My stepmother Penny helped me vet the bread, and she said that she tasted corn flour. I called to get the list of ingredients, and corn starch is definitely in there. The bread also contains eggs and milk. Penny noted that the bread is much lighter than most GF breads. In fact, I thi...

Last month I wrote a post about basic gluten-free flours : their properties, their uses, their virtues, and their downsides. Here is the promised extension to that original post, which hopes to shed some light on some other more specialized GF grains. Amaranth flour (also known as Inca wheat or quihuicha): This flour behaves quite a bit like sorghum flour, and has a lot of flavor. It is a grain high in protein and very nutritious. A dough made with amaranth is very delicate, wet, and tricky to handle. I only use a small portion of this flour in my all-purpose mixes for the flavor it adds. Buckwheat flour : a close relation to rhubarb, this grain is in no way related to the wheat family. It is a very dark flour with a strong, distinctive and pleasant nutty flavor. The flour has a very fine grit, and can be used in making whole-grain products. It does not behave well on its own, producing very dry and brittle product unless it is mixed with other flours. I usually recommend s...

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...