As I have already shared how I adapted my Gingerbread Cookie recipe, now on to some other festive holiday treats. Sugar Cookies and fudge are favorites in our house. As with the gingerbread cookies, after my son’s celiac disease diagnosis, we wanted to find a way to continue our tradition of decorating cookies and enjoying plates of fudge and cookies during the holidays.
For the sugar cookies I have used King Arthur’s Gluten Free Baking Mix. There is a recipe on the back of the box for sugar cookies. I have used that for the last 2 years with great success, for gluten and gluten-free eaters alike. I keep it simple and use already made frosting (Pillsbury is gluten free). I may try a royal icing this year so I can actually stack cookies 🙂 If anyone knows of a good one, let me know!
Fudge is one of my favorite treats. I’m actually not a huge sweets person, but I love fudge in very small doses. Chocolate fudge, peanut butter fudge, caramel fudge, really any kind of fudge. I discovered this super easy recipe many years ago. You can make many variations.
Easy Fudge
Ingredients
3 Cups of your favorite chocolate chips (I like to use milk chocolate)
1 – 14 ounce can of sweetened condensed milk
1 Â teaspoon of vanilla
pinch of salt
Directions
Line an 8-inch pan with wax paper. In a large bowl combine all the ingredients and microwave for 1 minute. Take out and stir. Microwave for 15 more seconds and stir again. Repeat until melted. Pour into lined pan and refrigerate to cool. Once cool, cut into squares. Keep in an airtight container in your fridge.
There are many ways to change this basic recipe. After the mixture is melted, mix in about 1/2 cup of your favorite chopped nuts, crushed candy canes or crushed Heath Bar.
Add these two treats to your holiday plate and be ready for friends or family dropping by or bring as a hostess gift. I also bring some along in a separate container for my son when we go to holiday parties, so he can have some safe treats to eat.
More good food that is gluten free coming up every day in December! Let me know if there is something you would like to see.
Past post that will also be a good addition for your holiday treat plate:
Even though there are more and more gluten-free options on the market, there are some holiday treats that I have made for years that we want to continue to enjoy. Luckily some of the key ingredients are already gluten free: Hershey kisses, Nestle Chocolate chips, (some) candy canes, Chex cereal and more.
Crispy treats are a quick and easy dessert. They are also a blank canvas to make as simple or as fancy as you like.
Festive Crispy Treats
Ingredients
3 Tablespoons of unsalted butter
1 -10 ounce bag of mini marshmallows
2 cups of Chocolate Chex
2 cups of Cinnamon Chex
2 cups Rice Chex or Wegman’s Crispy Rice Cereal
Directions
Microwave butter and marshmallows in a large bowl for one minute and stir. Microwave for 30 seconds more and stir. Microwave more at 10 second intervals until marshmallows are melted. Once all the marshmallows are melted add cereal. Stir and put into a buttered casserole dish and cool. Cut into bars and serve.
TIP: Add a cup of chocolate chips, use all rice Chex or use colored marshmallows.
These are treats that even skeptical, gluten loving family members and friends will love! More treats to come as we get closer to the holidays.
Past holiday treat post (Remember posts before April 2014 make sure you use gluten free ingredients or email me if you need help adapting a recipe!)
Fourth day into the new year and we are sitting in the house with piles of snow outside warming up after the final round of shoveling. Feels like deja vu from all the storms we had last February. While my kids play bowling on the Wii and my husband is working from home, I am taking a few minutes to give you an update on my cooking bucket list of 2013…oh wait, Neil wants milk and Karina already wants a snack…So back to the bucket list…What’s that Paul? You want some juice?…and this is why I haven’t written a blog in a few months. If I get a chance before complete meltdowns from cabin fever occur, I also want to write my goals for my 2014 cooking bucket list and some new projects. 2013 Cooking Bucket list – COMPLETE!* (and I did 5 of them in December again)
I made 5 batches of this sausage tweaking the recipe each time. Over the holidays my dad and I made the best batch so far! That recipe will be a family secret for now 🙂
2. Souffle
I made a chocolate souffle using Martha Stewart’s recipe as a guide. Didn’t rise as much as I wanted it to, but it was gone in 10 minutes!
3. Melk tert (a South African milk tart)
I used my mother’s recipe and it was delicious. Instead of making a crust, I used the mini phyllo shells, which got a little soggy in the fridge overnight. Next time I would either serve them immediately or use the crust in the recipe if making ahead.
4. Pasta
I ended up make canneloni and filling it with ricotta and spinach and serving with tomato sauce. Delicious! Not as thin as they would be had a I used a pasta machine, but thin enough. Karina and I rolled and rolled and rolled until thin. I made a version of a dish I had last year when I went to Mario Batali’s Eatly in NYC.
5. Carbonara
This was delicious! The whole family loved it. I mean, bacon, eggs, cheese, peas and pasta. You really can’t go wrong. Traditional is with spaghetti or linguine noodles but the kids chose the orecchiette.
6. Filet a whole fish
I cleaned and filleted a red snapper. It wasn’t pretty, but I did it and turned it into the most delicious ceviche!
7. Ceviche
This was my favorite. “Cooked” the snapper in lime juice for 4 hours and tossed it with avocado, tomatoes, a little red onion, olive oil and cilantro and ate it with tortilla chips. LOVED IT! Karina even loved it. Now that I’ve done it once though, I will definitely ask the fish monger to clean and filet it for me. Make sure you tell the fishmonger that you are making ceviche and want a fish that was brought in that morning. Call ahead. It is worth it!
8. Paella
This was also a family favorite. I made some spanish chorizo from scratch, brined the chicken using smoked paprika and cumin. Everything came out great, except the mussels. I didn’t time those right and some didn’t open enough. I will definitely make this again!
So I may have copped out a little on this one, but I never said I would do canning 🙂 I just simmered a bunch of berries over the summer that were on the verge of going bad. Strawberries, blueberries and raspberries cooked with a little bit of water, balsamic vinegar and sugar. It was delicious on ice cream and on toast for breakfast.
11. Yorkshire pudding
This was delicious! I will definitely be making this again. It is super easy. So much easier than I thought it would be. I looked at a couple of recipes and used this one from allrecipes.com. I didn’t make a roast that night, so I replaced the beef drippings with beef stock and served it with some leftover sausage and squash.
12. Cream puffs
I used one of my South African cookbooks for this and it was fairly successful. The best discovery was the “mock” pastry cream recipe from the de Villiers, Cook it and Enjoy It. You just whip together a little butter with sweetened condensed milk and lemon juice. Amazing!
For 2014 I have created a bucket list for the year and I’m starting on an ambitious project of cooking a recipe from one of my cookbooks each week, that I have not made before. I have 50 cookbooks, so that gives me 2 weeks off 🙂 Hopefully I will have time to blog about it. If not visit my Facebook page to get updates!
Cooking bucket list for 2014:
1. Rusks (think South African biscotti)
2. Macaroons
3. Scones
4. Brussel Sprouts (I’ve never cooked them. My husband loves them, so I’m taking one for the team so my kids won’t inherit my food prejudices 🙂 )
5. Pretzels
6. Poached Salmon
7. Beef Wellington
8. Coq au Vin
9. Khachapuri (a Georgian cheesy bread)
10. Duck (not necessarily a whole duck, we’ll see how adventurous I feel)
Limiting myself trips to the grocery store is really helping our budget and my creativity 🙂 Life still happens when you’re on a budget however and I love to play hostess, so when we had a couple of evenings in one week where I was hosting a group of people for dinner, it was a challenge to stay in budget and still make good food, but I think I pulled it off! I based my menu around what was on sale.
One night I had the girls from my book club over and we wanted to enjoy the backyard, so I made grilled pizzas. I bought a veggie tray from Trader Joe’s as the appetizer so the girls could nibble while I grilled the pizzas. Here is the link to my blog about how to grill a pizza. First pizza was a caesar salad pizza, with chicken (marinated in caesar dressing and cooked in advance). Dough is topped with a thin layer of caesar dressing, light covering of mozzarella + chicken while on the grill. When you take it off of the grill, add the caesar salad and some shredded parmesan. Second pizza was a traditional magherita with fresh mozzarella tomatoes and basil. Third pizza was a caramelized onion and goat cheese pizza. Dough was topped with caramelized onions (made in advance) and goat cheese. This was the favorite!
Dessert was simple. 1 package sugar free white chocolate pudding, 1 package sugar free chocolate fudge pudding, chocolate chips, and sliced strawberries. Just layer ingredients and you have a trifle!
Another night we had a friends from PEPS over. I made a quinoa salad (thanks Jodi for the idea!!)and baked lemon chicken. I also was feeling very domestic and made oatmeal white chocolate chip craisin cookies. Cook the quinoa like you would rice. I used chicken stock in stead of water (you could also use veggie stock or water). Let the quinoa cool and prepare a vinagrette or use a salad dressing you like and have on hand and pour over quinoa (once cool). I used Paul Newman’s olive oil vinagrette and mixed in some pepper and lemon juice. Then add whatever you usually add to pasta salad. I used cubed colby jack, roasted zucchini and diced tomatoes. Chill and serve. [Another twist on pasta salad can be found at Family friendly food, a blog I follow.]
Baked Lemon chicken is something I have made for years and varies depending on what I have on hand. I cut the boneless chicken breasts into smaller pieces so they would cook faster and marinated them in lemon juice, white balsamic vinegar, thyme, salt, pepper, lemon zest and honey. Put the chicken into a baking pan, drizzle with honey, cover with foil and bake for 10 minutes in a 400 degree oven. Then take the foil off and bake for another 30-45 minutes (depending on size of chicken pieces).
Some weekend mornings I actually have the urge to make a big breakfast. I really wanted eggs benedict but have never made hollandaise sauce and didn’t have the time or energy to look it up at 8:30 in the morning (it was my morning to sleep in. Tim and I switch off each weekend day). I decided to make a cheese sauce (which I just learned from all of my mac n cheese experiments). I made a lighter cheese sauce (2 Tbsp butter, 2 Tbsp flour, 1 ½ – 2 cups of milk, 3-4 sprigs thyme, salt, pepper, yellow mustard powder, garlic powder, onion powder and 1 ½ cups skim mozzarella) and put that over the poached egg and tomatoes (diced and mixed with garlic, basil, olive oil and balsamic vinegar) on wheat toast. It was soooo good. I had enough cheese sauce leftover that I boiled some water while we were eating our breakfast and made pasta, mixed pureed pumpkin in with the cheese sauce, poured the cheese sauce over the pasta and baked it for 20 minutes. We spent the morning at home and then after Karina’s nap were able to go out for the rest of the afternoon and enjoy ourselves. We came home just before dinner. I reheated the mac-n-cheese and dinner was served in 10 minutes!
Luckily these meals provided leftovers again for lunch and dinners on the nights in between when I didn’t cook. Making cooking easier by giving yourself nights off is important. Those nights off don’t have to be about takeout (unless you want them to be). If you are trying to save money, make enough of one dish to have leftovers. If you don’t want to eat the same thing all week, freeze the food and then you can take different items out of the freezer and reheat on nights you don’t want to cook. But, like I have said from the beginning with this blog, everything in moderation. Not everyone is organized to cook every night and have freezer foods on hand, etc all the time. I know I’m not. Don’t beat yourself up about ordering pizza or going through the drivethru every once in a while. Taking the time to read this blog and other cooking sites shows you care about what you and your kids eat, even if you just think about trying the recipes. It’s the thought that counts J On that rogue day that you have some time and are in the mood to cook, you have an arsenal of recipes and methods in this blog, cookbooks (and more cookbooks)I mentioned and just by Googling. (Yes I think that is a verb now).
Happy cooking! Coming up…hopefully some recipes with food from my garden. My zucchini is not looking happy…
Sorry there are no pictures this week. The hard drive of our laptop died and our photos are on it! Luckily the Geeksquad was able to retrieve the info, but the computer I am working on now doesn’t have a dvd drive to read the info. Couple more weeks and the computer will be back and pictures of my garden will be up!
Karina had her 9 month appointment last week and the doctor gave me the green light to give her any food except shellfish, peanut butter and no whole milk to drink yet. Now I don’t even know where to start! Here is a menu of what she ate over the weekend:
Saturday Breakfast: whole milk yogurt with blueberries + cheerios Lunch: cheddar cheese cubes, left over grilled chicken (cubed) and some peach (cubed) Dinner: mini pasta shells with squash (leftover frozen puree – thawed in the microwave) with parmesan + some blueberries for desert.
Sunday Breakfast: Her first meal ordered in a restaurant! I ordered one egg scrambled and some turkey sausage. We kept her occupied while waiting for the food with a Zwiebek biscuit. She loved it! Lunch: yogurt with peaches Dinner: mini pasta shells with squash, a couple of cubes of cheddar cheese and some leftover grilled chicken cubed. Blueberries for dessert. I couldn’t find the strawberries I had set aside for her in the fridge.
I set them aside because I made a great, simple dessert the other night. I saw this on the food network, Barefoot Contessa I think. Take some fresh berries (raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries) pour a couple tablespoons of balsamic vinegar over the fruit and a couple tablespoons of sugar. Mix together and let sit while you eat dinner. After dinner, spoon into dishes with whipped cream or cool whip and some fresh mint if you have it. Soooooo goooood!
Karina tasted her first soft serve ice cream. Her face I’m told was priceless. I had her in a front carrier, so couldn’t see 🙂 She wasn’t too sure of the cold, but seemed to love the taste and asked for more.
She is still taking about 3-4 8oz. bottles a day. She has been a big drinker for a while now, but I was thinking this would slow down because she is eating so much food! But not yet…Karina is only 9 months though, so I’m sure this will start to slow down at some point.
I haven’t tried salmon yet..probably later this week when my parents come to town.
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