Christmas Treats!

Ok, so I wrote this a month ago, and never posted it.... better late than never!  More coming soon!

Things have been a bit crazy during this holiday season, and my kitchen has been busy!  Things have been busy enough that I've done a very poor job of documenting my culinary adventures.  Maybe next year.

First, I made gluten free cookies!  I experimented a bit, and made some delicious lemon pecan shortbread cookies.  I was able to convert them from traditional to gluten free pretty easily, since I had read that rice flour is one of the secrets to a super crumbly shortbread to begin with.  So here we go:

Gluten Free Lemon Pecan Shortbread
(adapted from better homes and gardens)

•  1/2 cup all purpose flour (I used bob's redmill gluten free mix)
• 1/2 cup rice flour
• 1/4 cup almond meal
• 1/4 tsp xantham gum
• 1 cup butter
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp finely grated lemon zest
• 2 tbsp finely chopped pecans
• bunch of half or whole pecans

1. Preheat oven to 325
2. Combine everything in a medium bowl, until you get a crumbly ball of dough.  It will take a while, I don't have a pastry cutter so I ended up using my hands, which melted some of the butter, whatever, it worked.
3. If you  melted all the butter with your hands, refrigerate for a little while (30 min?).  Or not, in which case you'll probably end up with thinner but still delicious cookies!
4.  Roll out dough until about 1/4 inch thick, use a pizza slicer and cut up dough in a grid-like fashion.  Transfer dough to cookie sheet lined with parchment paper (or lightly greased), and press a piece of pecan into the top of each.  You can place them pretty close together, they won't spread much since they're so thin and no pouffy ingredients.
5. Bake for 15-20 minutes, then cool.  Voila!  Makes about 20 1.5" squares?  (fills a cookie sheet)

THESE ARE FANTASTIC!!!!! Some of the best cookies I've ever made!  I didn't take any pictures, but trust me they're delicious.  They're not very sweet, they'd be perfect for tea time, but i took them to a christmas cookie exchange party and they taste really weird after eating lots of sugary foods, I guess my tongue got overwhelmed by all that other sugar.  So if you bring these to a cookie tasting party, make sure everyone tries these first!

I also made these lemon-raspberry pinwheel's in a gluten free version, which some people really liked, but I was kind of indifferent to them.

And then I made these delicious nuts!!

Mason jars from Agway, and ribbon and fabric from Walmart... easy gifts!
The large one is for my boss since he's a nut-aholic, he ate the entire jar in one day.  That's a pint!

Liz's cinnamon sugar nuts 
(I dont know where the original recipe came from, I looked at a whole bunch and combined)

• roughly 6 cups of raw mixed nuts (I used almonds, walnuts, and pecans.  I also did once with just almonds, but the walnuts and pecans really added to it!  The walnuts are my personal favorite in this recipe :)
• 1 egg white
• 1/2 cup to a cup of sugar (depends on how sugary you want your nuts... I'd start with 1/2 and you can add more later)
• 1 tsp of cinnamon (again, you can add more if you're cinnamon crazy)
• pinch of salt
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp water

1. Preheat oven to... oh no!  I can't remember!  I'll look it up and post later...not very hot, something like 250, we're going for low and slow.
2. In the biggest bowl you have, whisk egg white, vanilla, and water until lightly foamy
3. Add nuts, and stir until all the nuts are wet.  (If they're really wet, you could add more nuts if you wanted to)
4. in a small bowl or measuring cup, combine sugar, cinnamon, and salt, then pour over nuts.  Mix well until all the nuts are coated, it's easiest to use your hand.  
5. Spread out on 2 large cookie sheets, I coated mine with parchment for easy clean up, I suppose lightly greased or possibly even aluminum foil would work too.  
6. Bake for roughly an hour, stirring nuts around every 15 minutes or so.  More often would be ok, if they start to burn it progresses pretty quickly!  Luckily, they still taste decent slightly burnt :)  Let cool before you eat, because they're delicious and addictive and I don't want you to burn your tongue! 

Mmmm.... now I'm hungry!

All out of OJ

I woke up this morning and decided to have a smoothie for breakfast, as I do many days.  Banana, strawberries or pineapple (frozen works fine), plain yogurt, and orange juice.  But, we're not at our house this morning, and there's no orange juice.  There is, however, some grapefruit juice.  It's citrus, it should work... right? 

WRONG!  Don't do it!!

It's been an interesting week!

We've been busy!  Exciting things like Friday night dates to Home Depot, Saturday work-work, and Sunday yard work.  And we decided to cut down some trees!  Two were already dead, and one turned our backyard into a hard hat zone starting sometime in August.  We didn't know until after we decided to cut it down that it's a somewhat prized Black Walnut... but I don't want to hear your whining because it's already been chopped down.  It tried to kill us!  Throwing down heavy tennis balls at our heads, and then trying to trip us with them, not cool.  They allegedly taste good, but a little research showed a huge amount of work, permanent stains, and potentially moldy nuts.  AND, it turns out this tree is toxic to lots of other plants! (So no composting the leaves or using them as mulch for your garden).  We decided that it had to go.  But... it didn't go easily!  Here's what we came home to on Wednesday:

This picture is deceiving.  The pile was like 3 times bigger than it looks!  It was as tall as me, and twice as long as it was wide!  There was definitely more than our 3 trees in there... I know for a fact that we did not cut down a cedar, but we sure shoveled a lot of it... at least it smelled good :)

But you're still missing information:  The forecast for Thursday was torrential rain.  And maybe ice.  Sooo... this giant pile blocking our driveway was about to weight 10 times more!  We scrambled, and came up with a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, broken tarp, and an empty garbage can... but we got the job done!  Only took us 7 hours... we're well warmed up for winter!  Here's what it looks like now:

It rained a little while we were clearing, so you can see the footprint

We wanted the mulch for back here, since one of the previous owners decided it was a good idea to put lots of glass in the way-back yard.  We tried picking it out, but it was impossible.  Now there's a layer of protection!

And it's a good thing we didn't wait, a giant snow storm is coming tomorrow! While I'm waiting out the snow, I might eat all of the halloween candy before the trick or treaters come. If they slip on the icy walkway to my front door while trick or treating, can they sue me?  Do you think I can pay them off with candy?  Maybe I'd better buy some more...  Or maybe I'll just give them black walnuts.

Rosemary Snack Crackers

I just tried these, and they're surprisingly good!  Surprising, because I had trouble picturing lentils with a crunchy texture and cracker-like taste.  But they've succeeded!  And allegedly, they're healthy too!

Fall is REALLY here!

How do I know it's fall? Because I made butternut squash soup!  And I was going to write a post about it, and then I realized that I posted almost the same exact recipe last year! I did a few things differently this year:

• No beer (still trying to do gluten free)
• 2 small apples (was the perfect apple ratio)
• No tortellini (again, trying to be gluten free... i used brown rice noodles)
• I kept the sausage in the whole time, and even blended it in with the blender
• For spices I used a bit of oregano, cinnamon, black pepper, and a dash of nutmeg and cloves.

And again, it was delicious!

I also spent some time this weekend scouring the web for an easy gluten free AND low sodium/sodium free dessert ideas, since I was having dinner with my parents and my dad is on a new low sodium diet.  The year-of-slowcooking-lady has been a really great resource for gluten free recipe's, and I found this easy (crockpot, always easy) recipe for cinnamon sugar almonds.  Beat an egg white with 1tsp vanilla, stir in as many almonds as you want (I used 4 cups).  Then mix with a whole bunch of cinnamon, sugar, and salt  (I think I used the recommended 3 tbsp cinnamon with 1.5 cups of sugar, with half the recommended salt), place in a greased/sprayed crock pot, and cover and cook on high for 2 hours, stirring every 20-30 minutes.  Let cool.  Voila!

Dad loved them, and so did husband :)  I will DEFINITELY make them again!