Unexpected treats: Chocolate marshmallows

Remember to keep your eyes and mind open, because sometimes if you're paying attention you can find ready-to-eat items that fit in within your food allergy restrictions...hooray! I ran across an unusual sweet treat the other day: handmade chocolate marshmallows from Whole Foods. I do have quite a sweet tooth, and chocolate is an FAQ food group, so this was right up my alley -- smooshy, chewy and fresh chocolately goodness. They tasted like a hot cup of cocoa with marshmallows, except smooshier. :)

Ingredients are: sugar, corn syrup, water, cocoa powder, gelatin, chocolate and vanilla extract, cornstarch, confectioners sugar, kosher salt. They did list that some nut allergens are processed in the same factory, so please check the label if you're severely allergic.

Yummy!

Tomatoes on my mind -- aka tomato-free chili

Oh my, has it been a month since I last posted? Life keeps you pretty busy, doesn't it? Hope everyone had a happy Fourth. Lately I've had tomatoes on my mind. It's summer, and they used to be one of my favorite things...naturally sweet and ripe, juicy and bursting with flavor...especially the heirloom varieties with just a hint of salt for flavor...mmmm. NOT ANYMORE for the FAQ. *sigh* Tomatoes now, unfortunately are one of the more problem foods to avoid. They're in fricken everything. Soup, salad, sauces, stock, pizza, ketchup. And let me tell you, turning down ketchup in America makes people look at you funny....like you're an alien or French or something. :)

Anyhow, I've been able to get around them in some ways, for example I use roasted peppers when I need some color in foods that usually require them. But for other things that are traditionally made with tomatoes, like chili, what to do? Up until now I've whipped up a tasty white bean turkey chili, which holds me off for a little while, but I've really had a jones going for some hearty, meaty old-fashioned chili. And who would have thought that I would have found it in Washington DC of all places?

While on a business trip a few weeks ago, I left the hotel and took a walk, looking for a diner. Nothing more depressing than expensive and dull hotel food when you're on a miserable trip already. I stumbled onto this tiny little place that specialized in traditional chili in Old Town Alexandria (the Hard Times Cafe on King Street). Lo and behold they had a "Traditional Texas chili" based on a genuine cowboy recipe that was 100 years old. It was slow-cooked and only made with spices...not a tomato in sight. Hallelujah! I had the option to add beans (blasphemy in some parts) and onions on top. It was rich, smokey and hearty.

I'm now on the search for a traditional Texas chili recipe. Anyone have one to share? I'll report back with pictures, hoping to recapture that tomato-less goodness. And get back in the chili saddle, so to speak. Yeeha.

The hot dog from heaven

Sorry if the title of this post is misleading, the hot dog didn't TASTE like it was from heaven, it just LOOKED like it came from heaven. It was tasty though, a Chicago-style dog (little peppers are part of the style, but it was missing the poppy seed bun, which I wouldn't have eaten anyway) from a little place in Hollywood called Molly's Hamburgers in Hollywood. All the goodies on top made it a mess to eat (I used a fork and knife), but tasty.

This has become our go-to place after seeing a movie around the corner at the Arclight Theatre. The Arclight is a great place for a movie, but the concession stand charges you almost as much as the ticket!

The only food allergy tip I can add here is that those with dairy or soy allergies should be careful with any type of prepared meat (hot dogs, salami, cold cuts, etc.), a lot of these use one or both as filler. Kosher dogs don't have dairy, but some have soy. When I buy hot dogs for cooking at home, I buy the Boar's Head brand, which is more expensive, but doesn't have any fillers, just beef.

Okay, I'll confess. I just liked the hot dog picture and liked the place (I'm a sucker for diner-type places) and thought I'd share it. That's all.

The Essential Gluten-Free Guide

A few months ago,the lovely people at Triumph Dining sent me a copy of "The Essential Gluten-Free Restaurant Guide" to review. It's a handy dandy guide to finding gluten-free restaurants when you're planning to eat out, or out of town.

More than ironically, I've been traveling so much in the past month, I haven't had time to read it...and then when WAS I out on the road, I was pretty much restricted to walking distance from the hotel or convention center, so it wasn't as much help to my immediate needs. Oy vey!

So how did I rate it? Still very helpful. There is a great section up in the beginning about how to communicate with the restaurants...by being informative and helpful vs. hysterical. Then I looked up California, and rated the spots in my hometown, Los Angeles. It has a few very solid GF places, like Fritto Misto in Santa Monica, who can make "pasta" from steamed vegetables. Less helpful was that they listed "The Old Spaghetti Factory" as GF even though they serve....spaghetti? And could cause some pretty serious cross-contamination issues for celiacs. Puzzling. Although this book can't begin to cover the thousands of restaurants in each state, I think the most helpful info is the covering of chain restaurants like Claim Jumper, Outback Steakhouse and Cheesecake Factory, which are more likely to be in all neighborhoods, along with phone numbers to check the menu ahead of time. And it'll also help spur some ideas for TYPES of foods that are GF....like Indian and Mexican food.

There is also a "Gluten Free Mall" section in the back, which offered some new vendors that I have yet to explore, but am excited about. (Anyone tried Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Oats? Who knew? Oatmeal cookies, here I come!)

I thought the coolest part of the package were the laminated restaurant cards, which detailed in several languages (Spanish, Vietnamese, French) your food allergies so that you can share them with the servers and chefs.

Like with all food-related information, please keep in mind that menus and ingredients constantly change, so don't rely on this as gospel, more as a very detailed travel guide.

Thanks again Triumph Dining Guide, for helping to make eating out a little easier for food allergic folks.

Frying food without flour

Every once in a while I get a fierce craving for something fried -- hot, salty and greasy enough to leave oilstains on the paper napkins. To quote Sara Moulton (one of the few REAL chefs left on the Food Network), "fried is my favorite flavor." Amen to that! I do eat french fries, which usually does the trick. Prior to The Discovery, my mom's fried chicken was my standard birthday-dinner-requested-dish year after year. She made hers with Dixie Fry, which is a pre-made seasoned flour mix. (Heaven only knows what's really in there besides 'spices'.) I remember that mom would pull out this scary-looking electric skillet with a dodgy-looking frayed electrical cord (I'm surprised we didn't all die a fiery electrical death) and would fry enough to last us for several days...I would eat it hot, cold and late at night in front of the fridge. *sigh*

One evening after work, the craving for fried food hit me like a ton of bricks. Since I'm allergic to chicken, that immediately killed any thought of going out for some fast-food fried chicken (Popeye's spicy version was my former favorite). Even if I could eat fried chicken, most commercial frying is done with flour and who knows what else bad for us allergic people...too many unknown factors out there to even try. Cooking from home would still eliminate using Dixie Fry, which is flour-based, or a traditional recipe, some of which call for soaking the chicken in buttermilk (!) and dredging it in flour or breadcrumbs. Yikes. What to do?

I remembered a great frying technique that I pulled from one of the Cooks Illustrated "Best Recipe" series. (BTW, not a fan of the cookbooks, I can't stand reading about all the ways they failed before getting to the winning techniques...seems kinda whiny.) It called for dry dredging the meat first, THEN dipping it in egg, then the final coating to get the best crispiness. I ended up improvising a recipe for fried turkey fingers (for some reason the dish doesn't sound as sexy as chicken fingers, does it?) It worked GREAT. They were light, crispy and flavorful, and boy, did they hit that grease spot. It didn't taste heavy at all...we ate them with our hands, mmmm. I was doubly fortunate in this venture that the BF was formerly in charge of grilling and frying at a resort in a previous lifetime, and he managed the deep-frying job...he is more patient than me and turns everything more frequently. (I did this once without him and only turned them once, and they were fine...just not as pretty.)

I dipped mine into my fave Rasperry Chipotle sauce, and he had his with the more traditional Ranch and hot sauce. He loudly declared that he liked these BETTER than chicken fingers. I say "HA!" to the universe! Now I'm off to see what else I can fry as summer comes up. Maybe I'll try some veggies next.

This will not work as well without the eggs, so to the egg-allergic, I apologize in advance. I would still do the double-dredge though, maybe with milk as the protein agent to replace the eggs.

Note: use a cast iron frying pan if you have one (something heavy with sides is the best to evenly distribute the heat). There's a reason they've been around so long, they work GREAT.

FAQ Fried Turkey Fingers (of course you can use chicken too)
four servings

- Frying oil (peanut oil is best for deep frying, but you can also use canola or vegetable oil. Just don't use olive oil, which doesn't get hot enough)
- 1 lb turkey breast cutlets, sliced into 1" strips (if you can't find cutlets, just slice turkey breast thinly, then into strips so that they are of uniform width and depth to cook evenly)
- 1/4 c cornstarch
- 2-3 eggs
- 1/2 c cornmeal
salt
pepper
1/2 t. paprika
1/2 t. onion or garlic powder
1/2 t. dried chile powder (for this recipe I used ancho chile powder)

Preheat the pan to help seal the pores in the metal before pouring in enough frying oil to 1/4". Heat oil on medium heat until it gets to about 350 degrees F.

In the meanwhile, dry the turkey strips on paper towels (water is the enemy of crispness) while you prep the frying ingredients.

Season the cornstarch with a little salt and place in a flat dish (I use pie plates for this process). Scramble the eggs in a shallow bowl. Season the cornmeal with salt, pepper, paprika, onion powder and chile powder and mix well in a flat dish. Line them all up in that same order with a clean plate on the end of the assembly line for the strips ready to fry.

Take a turkey strip, and dredge lightly in the cornstarch, shaking off excess. Dip into the scrambled egg, shaking off the excess. Then dredge in the seasoned cornmeal. Once completed, these stay pretty dry, so you can make a frying pan's worth at once before you fry them. Don't make too many ahead of time or they'll get soggy and won't get as crisp.

Place the strips gently into the hot oil, making sure that they're not crowded or they'll steam instead of fry. Turn over after 2-3 minutes when they look brown, then fry another 2-3 minutes. Because these are breasts with very little fat in the meat, they fry quite quickly. (This goes quickly with a two-person team, one to fry while the other preps.)

Drain the strips on paper towels, then gobble up!

Substituting eggs...in muffins.

In an earlier post, I noted the difficulties in baking without eggs. I'm following up with a little more research, this time using a gluten-free apple muffin recipe from my go-to baking book, Gluten-Free Kitchen by Robyn Ryberg. To make this completely friendly to the FAQ, this was gluten free and dairy-free.

The experiment was to use the recipe with eggs (left), and with Ener-G egg replacer (right with pearl sugar). Ener-G is made with potato and tapioca starches with a leavener, and is really for baking purposes, not other egg usage.

The result? The Ener-G muffins rose higher, and therefore looked little nicer and more muffin-like. However, they were drier, and didn't have as nice a chewy texture as the with egg version. I guess the proteins in the egg really do show up in baked goods.

I would venture to guess that these would be best in cookies and things that didn't rely heavily on the eggs for texture, like cakes, but will continue to test.

Anyone out there find any better products for baking without eggs? Please share!

Battling boredom...with tapenade

One of the things that I'm sure everyone experiences with their diet (not just food allergy people)is boredom. You have the same three things for lunch, you go to the same restaurants, you make the same recipes. For those of us on restrictive diets, it gets even more tiresome since you're allergically restricted from wandering too far off the path. I eat a lot of meat, veggies, Mexican and Thai food and sometimes I'm just bored silly with my choices. So for tonight's protein of choice, lamb chops, I decided to jazz it up a litle. Traditional cooking treatment for lamb is garlic and rosemary, but the FAQ is ixnay on the garlic. Plus it's, well, boring. One of my fave recipes pre-Allergy Discovery was from the Dean and Deluca cookbook, where they paired an tapenade (French black olive spread) butter flavored with orange peel on top of the lamb so that it melts onto the meat and makes it seem unique and different. It's so simple and elegant, yet interesting enough that I use it as a standard for dinner parties.

Tonight I made up an FAQ version of the tapenade spread without the butter -- kalamata olives, capers, Bronco Bob's raspberry chipotle sauce (my new favorite ingredient available in the BBQ sauce dept at Whole Foods) and some hot mustard. Mmmm. Made the lamb taste totally brand-new. Afterwards, I really thought about all the ways I could use it in addition to lamb. I could put on hamburgers, and turkey sandwiches if I could eat bread. Lighten it up with some olive oil and put in on fish or chicken. Add some red onions and a little vinegar and make a salad dressing. Certainly puts a whole new twist on the everyday everyday stuff.

A traditional French tapenade is made with oil-cured black olives, anchovies, capers, olive oil and salt and pepper. Depending on how adventurous you feel, I recommend starting with chopping the olives (they can be regular canned olives), then adding a savory (onions, garlic or shallots, or anchovies if you like that taste), capers if you have them, something a little sweet (jam or jelly), mustard and then a little vinegar or lemon juice. Roasted red peppers? Orange or lemon peel? Finely diced cucumbers? Taste for what you like/what your diet allows and be creative. Go forth and conquer!

PS. I'm also including a picture of the nastiest candy bar I've had in a while. Picked up a bar of sugar-free chocolate at See's Candy, and literally had to spit it out after one chew. Bitter, nasty aftertaste, wooden texture, truly awful -- I had to wipe my tongue afterwards. I wish I was kidding. Also for those allergic to corn, note it's sweetened with malitol, which is corn-based (and scarily has a warning that it might have laxative properties...double yikes.)