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!