Beef in Tagine sauce served on yellow rice, served with Moroccan Mint tea.
Gluten-free Red Velvet Pancakes with tea-infused maple syrup and cream-cheese icing
Now the annoying part..cleaning up after the fact.
Stir Fry Pork with Brown Rice Noodles and Kale
I used the Picle app to shoot this video. Belatedly. Mostly to test it out. Neato, etc.
The Art of Plating Food
One of the reasons I have a hard time posting pictures, is I realize they’re not that great looking relative to my own expectations. So I decided to do some homework, because I felt like there had to be some techniques I was missing. This 3-minute video shows us some quick and easy plating techniques. Hope it helps you as it helps me!
Gluten free Red-Eye Velvet Pancakes: Red velvet buttermilk batter topped with espresso infused maple syrup, a touch of cream cheese frosting and chopped pecans. Wake up and feast!
The best part of brunch yesterday is that it was today’s breakfast.
Gluten-free Red Velvet Cupcakes.
I hate gluten free baking with xanthan gum. It makes stuff taste odd and I’ve never had more problems getting recipes right than I do when I use it. So I search for recipes without it. I’ve had a lot of success making these cupcakes, so I wasn’t especially worried but…after a few failures in the kitchen attempting to improvise some recipes from regular to gluten-free, I was nervous.
But all was well. It helped that I whisked by hand rather than using my mixer for such duties, I think. I felt like I was overbeating my eggs the past few times, which is what a spiffy mixer might do. In any case, these came out pretty good and the recipe made about 9 cupcakes.
The recipe calls for almond flour. I did not use this. I just used Bob’s Red Mill All-purpose gluten free flour because it makes my life easier and nothing is more annoying than trying to mix and match flours and my local store didn’t have any almond flour. It wasn’t a problem and I’d made it before, so I wasn’t worried, but if you don’t have any almond flour don’t despair. I just wouldn’t go using rice flours because those I find burn super fast and might not be strong enough to hold this together.
Stir Fry Ginger Chicken & Kale on Brown Rice
Not a lot of science to this one. Rice in the rice cooker. I used a bit of rice vinegar (read: too much) but save for that, the kale was in a pot for about 5 minutes to boil.
The supermarket here sells chicken stir fry so I don’t have to cut it up, just cook it and it makes my cooking life a bit easier. So I threw that in a wok with some spices (ginger, pepper, salt, a dab of sesame oil) and cooked the chicken. Once it’s done, I put the kale in to mix the flavors together and after the kale wilts, it’s ready to go.
A quick easy meal. Kale is pretty underrated as a green and I needed some cream soda to wash it down. You can substitute that for beer, if that’s your thing as I’m sure it’ll work the same.
I forgot to mention that Thelonious Monk is great for cooking. I did this and make red velvet cupcakes and it was like flying on air with Monk in the background lemme tell ya.
What I’m doing: Finishing Chicken vindaloo.
What I’m avoiding: Packing for Kansas City tomorrow.
The vindaloo was pretty good. I should’ve bought basmati rice the other day though, it was the only thing missing from the meal.
Today
Brunch: Gluten-free Lättyjä (Finnish Crepes) with butter and powdered sugar. I meant to drink tea, but by the time I got down to business…I just had a bottle of draught head style vanilla cream soda.
Tonight, I’ll make Blackened Shrimp with Kale on Jasmine Rice with baked sweet potatoes. All I have left to do is bake yams and make the shrimp. Rice is done in the cooker and kale is also finished. It almost looks like that, except I’m not using the sausage from this particular recipe because well…that’s gross.
If I was feeling ambitious and was cooking for more than just one, I’d probably make a Cantaloupe Butterscotch Strawberry Balsamic Vinegar Ice Cream Sundae. I did laundry too.
Now just trying to get caught up on some reading, with Prokofiev as the soundtrack to that madness.
