My Gluten-Free Week

I have always dreaded the thought of one day having to go gluten free; I mean I love bread and baked yummies and the gluten free bread I see in the supermarkets always looked so sorry for itself (and I was later to find out almost invariably contained egg anyway). However, my new 10 week old vegan was having a hard time with colic and I had already tried other diet options which hadn't helped and gluten was next on the list. Typically I had just made some awesome looking seitan burgers (if you don't know, seitan is pretty much 100% gluten central!) so my one ended up going in the freezer and I was left salivating over my other half's burger as I ate some baked beans and veg I had managed to rustle up (for some reason I forgot that things like rice and potatoes were gluten free! i blame the baby brain!). Even more typically, that night my little vegan got a lot better and was nowhere near as bad the next day (too early for the diet change to have made a difference; a lot of babies just grow out of it). In spite of this I decided to persevere with the gluten free week challenge as a little experiment to see how hard it was and to see if it made me feel any better like other people often claim it does for them.

My first port of call was obviously BREAD! I looked through quite a few recipes online- there are tonnes and I can't even find the one I made but of the ones I looked at they were all quite similar. My bread didn't rise as much as normal bread does and I also think I must have underdone it slightly as it was still quite doughy inside but I have to say it was actually quite tasty and with a bit of practice would be perfectly adequate to be a replacement for my gluten bread addiction. I think I would have to buy a bread maker if I was to continue as making enough bread for me and my mr (he eats even more bread than me) would probably take half my week up!

Being a new mum, a lot of my daily meals were nothing much to blog about; I had baked beans on my gluten free bread, vegetables and rice, a few soups and the list goes on- when I am only cooking for myself it doesn't tend to be too exciting- especially when I just want something easy and fast.

At the weekend however we were having people round for dinner. I still really wanted to try those stuffed seitan burgers I had missed out on before. I remembered I had seen some gluten-free "seitan" (an oxymoron if ever I saw one!) on pinterest and the mushroom filling would be easy to deglutenise with swapping flour to a gluten free version so I decided to do this. The recipe for the seitan that I used (although there are others) can be found here from Wellsphere and the basic recipe I was making was from The Best Veggie Burgers on the planet. In addition to the mushroom, garlic and onion mixture for the centre I added some fresh spinach leaves and mozarella Cheezly for an even more decadent effect and added some red wine whilst cooking the mushroom mixture. Along with the burgers we served homemade sweet potato and normal potato wedges and salad. The other guests all had a bread roll as I decided my gluten free bread making was not quite perfected enough for guests yet! Everyone really enjoyed these burgers. There aren't proper measurements for the spices in this recipe so it was a bit of guesswork. For me, the end result was a very cumin tasting burger (which in my mind was awesome) and they also can out a lovely dark orange colour. The filling was a little overtaken by the taste of the burgers themselves but it was still lovely and the texture differences really made this burger special.

For dessert I made the most heavenly ice cream I have ever tasted- Peanut Butter Ice Cream!!! I have had a second hand ice cream maker for ages and haven't got round to properly using it properly so this was an awesome excuse. You seriously MUST make this recipe..it is so melt-in-the-mouth perfect! Along side it we had the gluten free cookies I had blogged about in December here.

With timings and people being late I was in such a rush to serve these things I forgot to take photos. Instead, this is the actual seitan burger that I hadn't got to eat taken my my darling other half with as much photographic skill as the next door neighbour's cat (although I can't say I am much better!)

If you look closely you can see the filling but it blends in a bit!

Add a lettuce leaf to boost up the healthiness!!

The next day we had my other half's godson and his mother over for lunch. You might remember that the cookies I had baked before were for a gluten intolerant boy; well this is that boy! We never got to go round and see him for his birthday as him and his mum were ill so we decided to have this lunch instead. For the main course we had homemade pizza and chips. I used a pizza dough recipe from What's Cookin' Chicago? which you can find here. It made a lovely thin pizza base and cooked perfectly. One side was topped with tomato puree, tomatoes and Cheezly mozarella and the other side also had mushrooms, fresh spinach and peppers.

For dessert we had cookies and ice cream again but I made a plain vanilla ice cream by omitting the peanut butter from the other recipe as the little boy had never had peanut butter before (and as it turns out he is not the biggest fan of ice cream- more for us though!). Once again I forgot to take photos *facepalm* but it is my mid-January resolution to do better at this from now on!

At the end of the week I realised I hadn't really felt any different on my gluten free diet so decided to not carry on completely omitting gluten however I will use these recipes again as all of them were successes and went down so well with our guests!

Christmas Gift #4- "Cheesy" Oatcakes

Well, it has now come to the last gift in my Christmas baskets. As the rosemary shortbreads were a little sweet I wanted to cook something very savoury. Oatcakes seemed a good choice but I wanted something a little different. Most recipes I looked at added things like cranberries which would make the oatcakes a bit sweet so didn't fit the bill. I decided to do "cheesy" ones as I am the only vegan in my family and cheese is almost always the thing that people say they would miss most when going vegan.

I took a plain oatcake recipe from delicious magazine website which you can find here. Other than swapping the butter for vegan margarine, the only change I made was to add 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast and then once I had cut out the oatcakes I grated a sprinkle of Cheezly Parmesan on the top of each one.

These were the perfect addition to my gift as they really brought a savoury touch to everything and was the first thing that people commented on with the cheesy flavour. These are really simple to make and I think make a classy present and a talking point for non vegans.

"Cheesy Oatcakes"

Christmas Gift #3- Fudge- Orange & Walnut and Rum & Candy Cane

I was actually looking for a fudge recipe for the type of caramel coloured vanilla fudge you think of when you first think of fudge but when I came across this recipe I had to try it and decided it would be perfect for the Christmas gifts.

The recipe is from Go Dairy Free and can be found here.

The changes I made were orange essence and crushed walnuts in the first flavour instead of vanilla and coconut. On top of the fudge I put one half of a walnut onto each piece that was going to be cut. For the second flavour it was rum flavouring with sprinkled crushed candy canes on top.

I thought the end result looked really impressive and the taste is just phenomenal. Very sweet but perfect for a Christmas indulgence!

Orange and Walnut Fudge

Rum and Candy Cane Fudge

Christmas Gift #2- Rosemary Shortbread

This is one of my savoury gifts in the Christmas hampers but in fact they have some sweetness from agave nectar and icing sugar. Rosemary must be one of my best-loved herbs (possibly even my number one) and coupled with me having a sweet tooth these turned out to be my favourite things in the gift. Now, "shortbread" might be a bit misleading- these turned out as soft, melt in the mouth biscuits rather than hard and crumbly but in my mind their texture was perfect! With the amount of butter and sugar in these they can't be very good for you but well worth it for a treat- and you can always treat yourself at Christmas.

The recipe I used can be found here from epicurious. I substituted the butter for vegan margarine and the honey for agave nectar. For those in the UK confectioner's sugar is icing sugar (that's what I used anyway!)

Enjoy!

Christmas Gift #1- Chocolate & Walnut Biscotti

For a lot of my family I am never sure what to buy them for Christmas- they seem to have everything they need and I always think my gifts will be wasted. This is why I have taken to making them food baskets as gifts (you may have seen a couple of posts from last year). This year I chose to do two sweet things and two savoury. The sweet things were Chocolate and Walnut Biscotti and 2 flavours of fudge and the savoury things were Rosemary Shortbread and "Cheesy" oatcakes. I have to say this has been my favourite gift basket I have done so far and I have had some really good feedback. Over the next few days I will be posting the recipes and pictures.

Today let's start with the biscotti. I did almond and cranberry biscotti last year and they were everyone's favourite thing in the present so I decided to do another biscotti this year but I wanted to do a completed different flavour. I perused my recipe books and the internet for hours looking for flavour inspiration. As we have just had a baby and so don't have quite as much money as usual to spend on ingredients I had to be a bit careful of what I chose- there were some wonderful sounding recipes but for the quantity I was making, the ingredients would have cost a fortune. Then I came across this recipe. The picture of them looked fantastic and I loved how instead of just being cocoa for the chocolate, there were also dark chocolate pieces inside and the biscotti was also flavoured with a little bit of coffee and cinnamon. This recipe isn't actually vegan due to the eggs and butter but I used an egg replacer and vegan margarine in place of these. I also didn't glaze them with anything before cooking- they really didn't need it. I trialled all my recipes a week before making them for the gifts to make sure I liked them and to see if any adjustments needed to be made. When I tasted these I was a little disappointed that the cinnamon didn't come through very well and I couldn't  taste the coffee at all. I decided to take out the coffee and double the cinnamon and when I tried them again they were perfect.

From the picture in the recipe it showed the biscotti with drizzles of white icing on. I really wanted to carry on the chocolate theme and didn't have any white chocolate to hand to make a contrasting icing so instead I did a dark chocolate one from this recipe (subbing the butter for vegan margarine instead). I tried to pipe the icing on a little like in the picture but I didn't have a thin enough piping insert so instead I coated one side in the icing. It didn't look quite as impressive (thinner piping bag insert is now on my shopping list for next time) but it took these biscotti to another level in taste! With a little creativity and time (four recipes in one day with a baby was very hectic!) I am sure these could have been made more pretty even without piping.

These biscotti are not difficult to make and really impressive as a vegan gift or as after dinner biscuits with coffee. I have had lots of compliments on these and many have asked for the recipe- so here it is!

**I either can't find my photos of these or I completely forgot to take them. Check out the images in the recipe though as they look very similar to how mine turned out minus the icing. Sorry!**