Food Haul

When I went to The Good Food show in Glasgow, it’s fair to say I went a little crazy and bought quite a lot.

We had seen this stall in previous years, but thought the sausages were meat. I managed to drag mum up to it and we found out that they were actually vegetarian sausages, and they were gluten free!!! They have several other flavours, but we went for Rosemary and onion, Lincolnshire and Chilli and Coriander.  Fair to say that was a good choice. They were delicious, full of chunky vegetables and lovely flavours.

Orkney Smoked Cheddar makes lovely cheese. We have previously had cheese from them so went straight there to buy the dark smoked flavour. They have lighter smoked ones, but I prefer the more intense flavour. They had a deal where you got three cheeses, a garlic dip and the smoked garlic for £10. We decided to get it all. The cheeses were as good as we remembered and the smoked garlic smells amazing and I’m really looking forward to cooking with it.

Mrs Crumbles are a gluten free company that sell their products in my local supermarket and I regularly buy their products. When I went looking around the ‘free from’ stalls I saw that they not only had a stall, but were selling any 5 items for £5. This may seem a lot, but for gluten free it’s really cheap. Usually they cost a lot more. Obviously I begged mum to get some things, she was easily persuaded. We bought some crackers, potato bites, cheese bites and peanut cookies. The cheese bites are my favourite so far, especially the tomatoes and olive flavoured ones.

Punjaban Curry Sauces are amazing. There are varying spice levels such as mild medium and hot. AS my sister doesn’t really like spice we didn't

get any hot spiced ones. They are all gluten free and taste amazing.

Mum and I managed to book into a master class and see Paul and Mary, it was great and some lucky members of the audience got to go up onto stage and taste what they both had cooked.

Poached Pears

Recently The Great British Bake Off has been on television. During pudding week, Louis made a pear dessert, I can’t remember it exactly, but this gave me the idea to make poached pears for the first time. It was actually easier than expected and tasted like heaven! My family and I ate it up too quickly for me to take a photo, so instead, I’m going to give you the recipe! I found this recipe in ‘Dangerous Desserts’ which is a cook book full of recipes from the Good Food magazine.

Poached Pears with Chocolate sauce.

Serves 4 people.

Ingredients

·         

       4 firm pears, peeled

·         50g/2oz golden caster sugar

·         Juice and pared rind of ½ lemon

·         100g/3 ½ oz plain chocolate, broken into pieces

·         3-4 tbsp double cream

1.     Slice the pears in half, leaving the stalks intact, and scoop out the cores. Pour 450ml/ ¾ pint water into a shallow pan, add the sugar, lemon juice and rind and heat gently until the sugar dissolves.

2.       

      Bring the liquid to the boil, then add the pear halves and cover with a dampened disc of non-stick baking paper. Simmer for 10 minutes, or until the pears are tender when pierced with a knife. Leave to cool in the poaching liquid.

3.      

            Place the chocolate in a small pan with 6 tablespoons of the poaching liquid and melt over a very low heat, (I did this in a glass bowl over a pan of boiling water) stirring continuously, until smooth(you need to keep stirring, even though it may look like it is going wrong). Remove from the heat.

4.       

        Divide the chocolate sauce between 4 dessert plates. Spoon little dots of the cream on each plate and feather with the tip of a skewer. (I didn't do this as my mum doesn't like cream, instead I poured the chocolate sauce over the pears and didn't use the cream). Remove the pears from the poaching liquid, pat dry with kitchen paper and arrange on top of the chocolate sauce, serve at once.

Overall I loved this recipe, but my mum didn't like the sauce as it was slightly too bitter. However I prefer dark chocolate so I liked it. If you have a sweet tooth, you could try substituting the plain chocolate for milk chocolate and see how it turns out.

Later on this week me and my mum are going up to Glasgow to see the Good Food show. There will be lots of stalls selling cooking tools and food. Also we have booked into the theater there to see Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry doing a master class, so keep your eyes peeled, as I will be putting up a post about it and there will hopefully be some pictures.

I'm Back!

It appears that I forgot I actually had a blog for the last 6 months, I’m sorry. I have been busy cooking and baking, but they were gone to quickly to take photos! Also, I have mastered making gluten free pastry at last!! I will try to upload a picture next time I make it! 

Soup

As the weather has been colder mum said that for dinner I could cook soup....I LOVE SOUP!!!

We didn’t actually have a recipe as we thought we could just use up what was in the fridge.

I started off by chopping and peeling carrots, sweet potatoes, parsnips and leeks into chunks as we would whizz it up after cooking. When mum got home I had to re-chop all the vegetables as apparently they were ‘too big’. We cooked the veg with coconut milk, vegetable stock and garlic. Near the end we added a tbsp of ‘Simply Add Chilli’ which is a sauce/ chutney, which would add even more flavour to the soup.

It was served with Gluten free rolls for me and baguette for the rest of my family.

Coconut cake with Lime icing

CAKE!!!!

Everybody loves cake, well in my house they do. So I thought to myself, why not try baking your first gluten free cake??

I chose to make coconut cake with lime icing (the only recipe my mum and I could agree on).

What a great choice it was! The recipe was exactly the same to a normal cake recipe apart from the fact that I was using gluten free flour.

The sponge turned out lovely and light and fluffy, it did have coconut cream in it which I had never used before, it was basically just extra thick coconut milk. The icing was really really good. It had the zingy lime flavour and was sprinkled with toasted desiccated coconut, which gave a lovely flavour.

This recipe came from ‘The Gluten Free Cookbook’ by Heather Whinney, Jane Lawrie and Fiona Hunter.

SAD NEWS!!

Firstly, I would like to apologise for not blogging for ages. I haven’t really had time.

Now, down to the reason why I’m writing this. I have recently been diagnosed with Ceoliac disease.

This is a life changing condition which limits what I can and can’t eat. Being Ceoliac means that I’m ‘allergic’ to gluten, wheat contains gluten, so that means no more wheat for me.

From now on I won’t be able to eat the same kind of flour as everybody else. Also I will have to start cooking with meat instead of using the vegetarian option Quorn, which the rest of my family use. This is not a problem, as unlike the rest of my family I am not a vegetarian.

Being Ceoliac has really made me aware of what I eat. I now have to use gluten free flour, or special flour, as my friend Emily calls it. The NHS has been really helpful and I now get a prescription for the food I need as it isn’t widely available.

If anyone out there is Ceoliac I would highly recommend the recipe book ‘The Gluten Free Cookbook’ by Heather Whinney, Jane Lawrie and Fiona Hunter. It helps you with everything, from how to properly clean your kitchen when you are first diagnosed to making pasta.