cookbooks Archives - Mamma's Cooking

Gluten-Free Blueberry Muffins

When my son was first diagnosed with celiac disease, I thought that meant saying goodbye to all my cookbooks. I definitely have learned that is not the case! So many recipes in my favorite cookbooks (like Mastering the Art of French Cooking) are naturally gluten free or can be adapted. The tricky adaptations come when I want to bake something and can clearly remember what the full gluten version tastes like.

Making these blueberry muffins from the First Edition of McCall’s Cookbook (1963) has been challenging, but I finally got it right! We have been housebound this school vacation week due to one kid with pneumonia, who is luckily on the mend, so the kids wanted to bake. In between marathon games of Monopoly, playing Angry Birds Star Wars on the Ipad and watching many, many movies, this recipe finally came together!

Gluten-Free Blueberry Muffins (adapted from McCalls, First Edition 1963)

Ingredients

1 ¾ cups sifted gluten-free Cup4Cup flour

¼ cup sugar

3 teaspoons of baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg

1 1/3 cup of milk

6 Tablespoons of melted butter

3 eggs, beaten

8 to 10 ounces fresh blueberries, rinsed and dried

Cinnamon sugar, optional for topping (1/4 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon)

Directions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and either grease muffin tin or line with paper liners. Sift flour, sugar, baking powder and salt into a large bowl. Add cinnamon and grate in nutmeg. In another bowl combine milk, melted butter and eggs. Add wet mixture to dry and mix using a fork, just until all dry ingredients are combined. Fold in blueberries. Using a 1/4 cup measuring cup, scoop a little less than 1/4 cup of batter into each muffin cup, around 3/4 full. Sprinkle about 1/8 of a teaspoon of cinnamon sugar over each muffin, if you like. Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

These muffins are not very sweet, so the cinnamon sugar on top helps give a little more sweetness to each bite. This usually makes 14 to 15 muffins each time. We made these yesterday and are already down to 5 this morning 🙂 I’ve only had one. These are great to throw in with school lunches or bring as a snack on a road trip.

If you want to try one of my other baking adapations, try these amazing Buttermilk Biscuits! You would never even know that they are gluten free.

I have started quite a cookbook collection, which I keep adding to whenever I go into a consignment shop or get a gift card to Amazon. I love cookbooks. I could sit and read cookbooks all day. What are your favorites?

Easy Thanksgiving Side Dish: My favorite! Acorn Squash

A question I frequently get from readers is whether my house is completely gluten free. Yes, it is. Except for my husband’s beer 🙂 It is a personal decision to make the entire house gluten free, but it is what works for us. I mixed the kids’ lunches up once while we lived in a shared household and after that decided to go gluten free. Too much work for me to keep it separate! Holidays at our house are also completely gluten free. I love the challenge to make traditional holiday meal items so that no one misses the gluten!

Most of the meal is naturally gluten free, except for the stuffing and the rolls. This year I am making my own stuffing. I am going to base it on this recipe, but use all the ends of the gluten-free bread that I have been saving in the freezer for the cubes. I will also substitute vegetable stock so that it is vegetarian for one of our guests.

I tested some recipes for rolls and decided that I am going to use the corn-based rolls recipe from Roben Ryberg’s book, You Won’t Believe It’s Gluten-Free! I will cook them just before we eat, so they come fresh out of the oven onto the table.

Here is my super easy Thanksgiving side dish recipe for acorn squash. The hard part is timing it for your oven space! This can be cooked while your turkey is resting and you are making gravy. Then keep it warm and covered while your rolls cook. Just prep it in the pan earlier in the day so that whenever you have time and space it’s ready to go into the oven.

acorn-squash

Chili Rubbed Acorn Squash

Servings 4 servings

Ingredients

1 Acorn Squash sliced into half moons
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon chili powder

Instructions

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Toss squash with the rest of the ingredients in a baking sheet (you can probably fit 1 ½ acorn squashes on each baking sheet).
Cover with aluminum foil and bake for 20 minutes. Take out, flip each piece of squash and return baking sheet to oven and bake for another 15 minutes.

Recipe Notes

You can easily double or triple this recipe for your holiday meals. You can also prep the squash ahead in the pan, ready to go in the oven when you need to cook it.

acorn-squash-cuts

Don’t try to over complicate your meal. I have done that many, many, many times and only you suffer for it. Thanksgiving is not the time to experiment with fancy recipes. Keep it simple with just a couple of seasonings and the fewer the steps for you to take the better! The more you can prep in advance, the better and the more help you can take from the store, the better.

If you missed it, check out my Holiday Mashed Potato recipe and ideas for easy sides, how to simplify your Thanksgiving meal and about the star of the show, the turkey.

Send me a message or comment below if you have any questions about making your Thanksgiving meal gluten free.

Recipe Resources and Easter Leftovers

After spending all day on the computer at work or because you just don’t like staring at a computer when you’re exhausted at the end of the day, where can you look for recipes? I like to look through cookbooks, magazines and get ideas from other moms. We are a great resource for each other.

Dust off some of those cookbooks on your shelves at home and look through them. Take pictures of the recipes you want to make with your phone or put a post it note on the page with the name of the recipe written so you can see it when the book is closed. Then add those recipes into your menu plan. Don’t have any cookbooks that excite you? Go to the library! Libraries are a great resource. You can take the books out and then use your camera to take a picture of the recipe so you’ll always have it. My local library is great. Each time I take the kids, I swing by the cook book area and pick out a couple of books for myself. Here are some suggestions of books I have recently checked out:

Deceptively Delicious, Jessica Seinfeld. Some of the recipes are bland, but gave me good ideas.

Double Delicious!: Good, Simple Food for Busy, Complicated Lives, Jessica Seinfeld

Feeding the Whole Family, Cynthia Lair. Great insight into making whole foods for your family

Great Easy Meals: 250 Fast & Fun Recipes, Food Network Magazine. A wide variety of recipes and a section on 10 minute desserts!

Kitchen Express, Mark Bittman. Seasonal recipes that are designed to be made in 20 minutes or less.

The new Mayo Clinic Cookbook. Great healthy recipes, sauces and ideas for making healthy taste good!

Wilmington 275^th Anniversary Family Cookbook, 2004. Simple recipes with (mostly) less than 10 ingredients that are easy to find.

From my own library (which you could check if they are at the library and even if not at your local one, the librarians can order it for you if it is at another one):

Busy Moms Weeknight Favorites, Southern Living. I LOVE this cookbook, but I replace the cream for fat free half and half or skim milk and don’t add all the butter J BBQ muffins, broccoli, ham and cheese soup, cheeseburger meatloaf = comfort food at its finest! (See recipe for soup below)

Mom-a-licious, Domenica Catelli. Great info on feeding your kids healthy foods that taste good. I swear by her hummus recipe!

Cooking with Trader Joe’s Cookbook. If you are like me and love Trader Joe’s, this is a great cookbook with easy recipes that contain ingredients all found at Trader Joes.

Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, 1996. This is a great cookbook to learn new techniques and cooking basics. It has really taught me a lot, like how to use fresh herbs v. dried herbs, how to select fresh fruit and veggies and what it means to beat an egg white until stiff peaks form. I love their Spinach Dip recipe, sauce recipes and basic meal plans that I can tweak for my family’s likes and dislikes.

Magazines are also a great resource. Parents magazine now has a section on recipes in every edition, Family Circle, Cooking Light, Vegetarian Times, etc. No matter what subject matter the magazine is, most of them now contain at least one recipe. Or try out that recipe you saw in the newspaper last weekend.

Talk to other moms about cooking or not wanting to cook because your 2 year old is throwing all the food you just spent your last bit of energy cooking. We are here to support each other and making food is one thing we all have to do. I got a great tip from a fellow mom, Becca, at a recent Cooking Crew night (mom’s who get together once a month and have a potluck and exchange recipes) where the theme was Italian. She made an amazing Chicken Parmesan. The breading stayed on the chicken. She said the key was the bread the chicken the night before and put it in the fridge. Then cook it the next day. It was delicious! I never would have thought of that on my own!

Here is a recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks if you have some leftover ham to use up!

Broccoli, Ham and Cheese Soup

from Southern Living’s Busy Moms Weeknight Favorites. Great way to use up your leftover ham, potatoes, and vegetables from Easter Dinner!

5 large baking potatoes, peeled and cubed (or 2-3 cups of mashed potatoes or boiled potatoes)

1 medium onion chopped

28 oz of chicken broth

12 oz of diced ham (or beef, lamb or pork)

1 1/2 cups broccoli florets

2tsp bottle minced garlic (or 1 small clove fresh garlic, minced)

1/2 tsp of salt

3/4 tsp pepper (I often use lemon pepper)

2 cups of cream (I use fat free half and half or skim milk)

2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese (or you can use your leftover cheese from a cheese plate).

Add everything except the cream and the cheese to the slow cooker and cook on high for 1 hour and then reduce to low and cook for 6 hours. (I also cook it on the stove in about an hour or when the potatoes are tender). Process half of the soup mixture in a food processor (or use a hand held immersion blender) and then pour it back into the pot. Add cream and cheese, stir and serve!

Cookbooks for kids

I was surprised at how few cookbooks there are on the shelves of various bookstores around the city. Most of the books (and baby/toddler food websites too) are from the UK. Online I found a lot more books, but how much time do us moms really have to go through cookbooks and find recipes? Not much, but there are those days when the little one’s (or ones’) nap lasts longer than usual and we find ourselves with a few minutes of time to ourselves. My passion is cooking, so I take that time to write this blog or go through my cookbooks (or search the web) and find some recipes (or watch Sex and the City on demand 🙂 ).

These are the cookbooks I have that I either bought or was given as a gift:

– “Wholesome meals for babies and toddlers: healthy foods your kids will love to eat” Parragon Books, Ltd, UK. ISBN: 1-40546-845-9. This book categorizes recipes by 6-9 months, 9-12 months, 12-18 months, 18-36 months, 3-4 years and 4 years plus as well as an introductory section and a sample meal planner for a week on each age group.

-“What to Expect the First Year,” Babies First Recipes, pp748-755. ISBN-13: 978-0-7611-2958-8. I’ve made the lentil stew, which Karina loved and we could eat it too. It has some great quick tips and also has a recipe for a first birthday cake with cream cheese frosting. (I had grand plans of making Karina’s first cake, but time was not on our side, so I bought Trader Joe’s vanilla cake mix and made buttercream frosting. She loved it! But was way too neat!)

-“Kid Favorites Made Healthy.” Better Homes and Gardens, ISBN 978-0-696-21750-0. This is pretty good, with healthy recipes for older toddlers and kids, but be sure to talk to your doctor before you start giving your child low fat, or non fat milk products. I am going to try the Turkey-Apple Sausage patties on pg26 this weekend!

-“Mom-a-licious: tasty. easy. healthy.” By Domenica Catelli. ISBN: 978-1-933754-14-7. This book is great. I have found some good tips. It has “reclaiming the pantry” + “facing the refrigerator”+ “facing the freezer” sections, telling you what to kick out and keep in that is healthier. Take it with a grain of salt. Everything in moderation! I definitely keep alot of frozen veggies and fruits on hand for quick additions to meals. My new favorite breakfast comes from pg. 29 – “skylar’s stinky cheese breakfast sandwich” – eggs with herbs with brie, camembert or Taleggio on wheat toast! Mmmmm. Karina loves it too! This book (and my friend Adriane) inspired me to use Almond butter on Karina’s toast, which she loves! I also put it on banana slices. Very messy, but good. I’m still dying to try the one dish dinner on pg. 84 – lemony chicken with vegetables and Parmesan and the sesame and soy-roasted fall vegetables on pg. 111. I did make the gingered rice and edamame on pg. 114. Soooo good! I keep frozen edamame on hand because it is a great source of protein too!

-“Yum-o! The Family Cookbook.” by Rachel Ray. ISBN 978-0-307-40726-9. Great, easy recipes that get the kids involved! Including some recipes submitted by moms and kids on her website. They are healthy and her aim was to make them cost conscious. I just got it, so haven’t made anything from it yet.

-“Cooking for Kids Bible.” ISBN-13: 978-1-4127-2346-6. This has some fun recipes, especially good for kids parties, classroom treats and if you want to take dinner fun! It also has tips for cooking with kids and teaching your kids to cook!.

-Betty Crocker’s Cook Book for Boys and Girls, Copyright 1957. This was given to Karina from her Ya Ya. It was her grandfather’s when he was a kid (aka Far Far). It has party ideas circa 1957 and even gives kids ideas on how to surprise mom for Mother’s day or Valentines day 🙂

There are many other books. (Look soon for my reviews on baby food books I got at the library – long wait lists…must be popular!) I also just use the “adult” cookbooks I have along with “google” and try to give Karina what we eat. We’re lucky she usually is a great eater. Tonight she was not, however. I took my luck too far 🙂 She ate all of her toast, but did not like the lamb and raita I made 🙁 she ate a little bit of the lamb when I mixed it in with some brown and wild rice (trader joes sells a great mixture). She didn’t like the cucumber, but liked the yogurt (mixed with lemon zest and greek seasoning – mint, oregano, and something else I can’t remember). I sauteed the lamb chop (which are on sale at Safeway right now) covered with coriander, cumin, greek seasoning, lemon juice, olive oil and garlic. I started a tradition tonight. On nights that Tim bowls I am going to make a “special meal” for me and Karina, that hopefully as she gets older, she will help me with (and we can eat things like lamb and scallops that Tim doesn’t like).