Author: elizabeth

Coconut Cream Chocolate Cake

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You ever need a dessert that doesn’t take a lot of time and comes out looking presentable for company? I don’t often have that need, but I’m eating Christmas at someone else’s home this year, and one of the ways I like to contribute (and ensure that there’s a dessert I can eat!) is to volunteer myself to bring a cake, or some cookies, or a couple of sides, a chicken, and the left hand side of the menu.

Look, I get nervous when I eat out, okay? Two weeks ago, I had half a sandwich at Panera and wound up with a tight throat, three days’ worth of hives, and a depleted Benadryl stash. This is through no fault of the company of course! I had told the servers I have food allergies. This is just the risk I run when I eat outside my own kitchen, even when I’m eating foods I haven’t reacted poorly to before.

So to make myself feel better, and to help me gear up for the holiday cooking marathon, I decided to make a cake. A chocolate cake to be precise, using gluten free flours, and more cocoa powder than is probably good for me. It also let me test out an idea I had for a cake without all the fake butter, which I didn’t have in the fridge, and nut milk…which I had forgotten the night before.

But what makes a cake? The reason we use butter and milk is because we need liquid and fat to create something more unctuous than sugar and flour can provide; it’s the difference between cake and enriched bread. So I vaguely remembered a friend passing me a cake recipe without eggs, butter, or milk that only needed coconut cream (I have looked and looked, but I cannot find the recipe! So thank you, anonymous cake maker, and if I ever find that link again I will be including it here).  I needed to make one big enough to share, but not overwhelming and—since I had the idea that all that coconut would make it way to rich, be able to stand on its own without frosting.

Most cakes, especially gluten-free and plant-based cakes, are just as delicious as fully dairy, egg, and sugar cakes are. Unfortunately, none of those are guaranteed to be allergy-friendly, much less allergy-free!  Like many people, I can’t have baking powder or eggs, vanilla extract, or xanthan gum. But I can have coconut, and that’s all the delightfully fatty goodness I need to make a cake.

The result is a chocolatey delight, rich enough to satisfy anyone’s dessert cravings. It’s quite dense and rich because of the coconut cream, but I didn’t taste any coconut when I tried a piece. Or the morning after, when I tested it again. Or the day after that. Look, I ate a lot of it, and had no complaints.  I made three 5″ cakes, and popped one in the freezer (that’s what I do with practically everything) and it defrosted well. To make it fancy, I shook some powdered sugar over the top, but I think it holds up well on its own. Maybe next time I’ll add an edible flower or two?

You’ll Need (serves 6-10):

1 1/2 cups white sugar

1 13oz. can coconut cream, shaken well and at room temperature

½ tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 Tbsp. cold water

4 flax eggs

1 cup cocoa powder

1/3 brown rice powder

1/3 millet flour

1/3 sorghum flour

1/2 cup arrowroot flour

Preheat your over to 375F. 

Make your flax eggs fifteen minutes before starting your cake, and then mix all the ingredients except the flours and baking soda together. In a different bowl, stir the flours and the baking soda together, and then slowly add it into the wet mixture. Stir the cake together until there are no lumps and make sure you’re incorporating some air (try counting to 360 while stirring, if you’re doing it by hand).

Grease two 8”-9” pans, or three 5’ pans (like I did). Pour the cake batter up to a little over the halfway mark in each pan, and let them rest for about twenty to thirty minutes.

Decrease the temperature in the oven to 350F, and put your cake pans in!  Cook for about 30-40 minutes, or until a fork stuck in the middle of the cakes comes out cleanly.

Cool the cake in the pan for ten minutes, before turning the pan upside down on a cooling rack and letting it complete cool.

Additional Reminders:

  • Don’t be alarmed if your coconut cream had tiny white chucks floating in it! Those are okay.  If you open the can and the coconut cream is too hard to mix, spoon it into a microwave safe bowl and warm it up in the microwave for fifteen seconds.
  • If you’re making this cake with regular AP flour, then you don’t need to let the batter rest, and you can take out the eggs entirely. The flax eggs in the gluten free recipe are to provide structure for the GF flours.
  • If you’re in a rush, turn this into cupcakes! They’ll cook faster, and they’re more portable. After about twenty minutes, stick a fork in the center cupcake to test the doneness.

Building Block: Homemade Tomato Ketchup

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If you have an allergy, shopping at the supermarket can be a little more fraught with pitfalls than your average consumer, and you can’t always escape that desperate scroll through a laundry list of ingredients by going to a farmer’s market or signing on for a CSA. A lot can depend on how a food item is stored or processed, what it’s been sprayed with, and even what field the food is near (I’m looking at you, raw honey!). In short, finding food that’s safe for you and your family when there’s a food allergy in play can be a lot of ‘trial’ as well as the horrible frustration of a whole lot of ‘error.’

How this works out for me, is that there are many store-made foods I just can’t have, even when the ingredients list works in my favor. Soup stock, alternative milks, and many condiments are on this list, and even though I’m still trying to find some of these items, there is simply no guarantee that I’ll succeed.

Thus, I have brought to you today….a recipe for ketchup! No, I know! Actual ketchup! It’s a thing you can make!  I was also surprised. There are just some foods that you don’t think about cooking up until fate or craving sort of forces you into scouring your bookshelf for incredibly old recipes.

Many of those recipes resembled something more like the Brown Sauce you find in the UK, or like a thickened version of Worcestershire Sauce which wasn’t what I wanted at all. In my head, ketchup is a tomato-based delight, slightly sweet, but with an underlying tart saltiness and a smooth thickened texture. I wanted a sauce I could drag a fry through and have it come out clinging to the potato rather than drip off the side, if you know what I mean.

Finally, I settled on an approximation of all the recipes I had seen, only drastically reduced because if I failed at this recipe, I didn’t want to be saddled with cup after cup of some nasty tasting marinara. So I made some substitutions, did some highly suspect math, and complained endlessly to my friends via text that I was going to burn my ketchup like some city slicker who just arrived on the prairie. I could sense the ghosts of my ancestors rising up to judge me (my grandmother, in particular, just wanted me to keep trying with store-bought.)

Short story, I did not burn anything! (I did take about a ½ inch of skin off my ring finger, but that’s an unrelated incident). And the result was…ketchup! Actual, real-tasting, tried and true tomato ketchup! I felt so accomplished, I can’t even tell you.

But it also impressed upon me how much time and investment making ketchup is. A little over two pounds of tomatoes produced ½ cup of actual ketchup. All the recipes I found called for immense amounts of ingredients, at a cost today which most people (including me) might honestly find prohibitive, not just in money, but in time spent cooking. That’s the trade off with a lot of allergy-friendly products: what others can just pluck off the shelf, we have to devote time and thought and money to achieving.

So this is my admittedly delicious, but scaled down recipe for tomato ketchup. It’s easily adjusted to create more, but I honestly recommend creating a small batch of the stuff—as I did—to make sure you like the flavor and want to devote the time to making the product. I think making this recipe greatly increased my confidence in the kitchen (I made a condiment! Me!). It feels really good to know that I can still have something, even if all the store-bought varieties so far make me itch.

You’ll Need (serves 1):

~2 lbs. tomatoes

water, for boiling

¼ cup apple cider vinegar

1 large clove garlic

1 tsp. white sugar

¾ tsp. salt

1/8 tsp. nutmeg

¼ tsp. onion powder

1/8 tsp. paprika

Wash your tomatoes and add them to a large pot with a lid. Pour in enough water to cover the tomatoes, and then bring them to boil on the stove top. Once the tomatoes have split, remove from the stove and drain the water.

Using a fine mesh strainer and a spoon, or a berry press, press the juice and pulp out of the tomatoes back into the pot you just used. Make sure to scrape the bottom of the strainer to get all the good stuff!  Add in all the rest of the ingredients, and then reduce the sauce on low to medium-low for three hours, or until the sauce resembles ketchup. It should be thick enough to part with a spoon and it should definitely stick to the back of said utensil. Stir frequently to make sure that the sugars don’t burn. Allow it to cool completely before putting it into the refrigerator.

Additional Comment:

Around 2 lbs. of tomatoes yielded ½ cup of ketchup.

If you’re scaling up this recipe, please remember that this is a heavily reduced condiment so all the flavors will be quite concentrated. Less is definitely more!  Also, if you’re worried about the amount of nutmeg, try substituting with mace instead.

Roasted Sweet Potato Bites

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I love sweet potatoes, let’s just begin there. They’re sweet without being cloying, they’re delicious, and you can make them with a minimum of fuss which I deeply appreciate in a root vegetable. You scrub ‘em up, oil ‘em down, stab them a few times, then stick them in the oven until they pop out steamy and fluffy and delicious. Sweet potatoes: They’re great!

But sometimes I want to be fancy, like on Thanksgiving, and when I want to push the boat out a little I go to this recipe for diced, roasted sweet potatoes. They take a little work, but they come out sweet and tangy, and so entirely worth it.

Just remember, if you don’t have a food processor, it’s perfectly fine to cut the sweet potatoes into larger chucks. I find the safest method for me is to turn the potato over by a half or a quarter turn (depending on size) each time I make a cut while holding my knife firmly at an angle.

You’ll Need (serves 2 – 4):

2 – 4 sweet potatoes, cleaned, skinned and diced

1 – 2 tsp. ground ginger

1 – 2 tsp garlic

2 – 3 tsp. sugar

2 tsps. Rice vinegar

1/2 – 1/3 cup of oil

Salt and Pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 375F

Clean your sweet potatoes with cold water, and then skin and dice them. Use either a food processor or a good sharp knife. Take a large bowl and put the ginger, garlic, sugar, rice vinegar, and oil, salt, and pepper into a large bowl.  Toss the sweet potatoes in the mixture and then pour it out onto either a large baking dish or a roasting sheet lined with aluminum foil.

Put the sweet potatoes in the oven, and decrease the temperature to 350F. Keep an eye on them in case the sugar starts to burn. They should cook, depending on size and amount, from forty minutes to an hour, but make sure to try and turn the potatoes at least once. Once they’re cooked through (you should be able to stick a fork easily in the largest piece) take them out, and spoon them into your serving dish.

Rice Stuffing For the Rest of Us: Gluten-free and Allergy-Friendly

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In my family, the side dish you’re always going to see is rice. I can eat it, my mother can eat it, my little brother can eat more of it, but he is only smaller than me in years so that makes sense (seriously, it’s so difficult to be so much older and yet so much shorter!) Even when I could eat practically nothing without reacting to it, I could eat jasmine rice.

But on Thanksgiving—at least in my family—there was never a grain of rice to be seen. It just wasn’t a part of my grandmother’s traditional menu, and changing that line up required an Act of Congress and a two-thirds majority of Aunts. When I was younger, it wasn’t so much of a problem, but now that my food allergies outlaw so many commercial brands and ingredients, putting together a meal that both tastes good and reminds me of my childhood Thanksgivings takes a little bit more ingenuity. Enter Rice Stuffing!

I knew two things I wanted when I set about putting this recipe together: I wanted it to taste like regular stuffing and I wanted the whole dish not to take forever and a day to cook. I think I’ve succeeded on both fronts with this recipe, which creates mound after mound of flavorful rice stuffing dotted with vegetables and herbs. It’s easily adaptable to whatever stuffing recipe you hold dear to your heart as well, and it’s absolutely no muss, no fuss.

You’ll Need (makes 6 servings):

2 cups cooked white jasmine rice

2 carrots, diced small

2 celery stalks, diced small

1 medium-sized onion, diced small

2 – 3 Tbsps. Olive oil

2 cloves roasted garlic, either smushed or chopped

2 tsps. salt

2 tsps. black pepper

1 tsp. red pepper flakes

2 tsps. thyme

2 tsps. sage

1 tsp. rosemary

2 tsps. parsley

1/2 – 2/3 cup broth (use mushroom broth to make it vegan!)

Optional:

1 cup crumbled sausage meat for a heartier dish (cooked with the vegetables)

1 cup button mushrooms, chopped (cooked with the vegetables)

Make the rice ahead of time. When you put the rice into the mix, it should be room temperature, but not cold. You’re also going to need a metal spatula to scrape the bottom of your pan.

Put your oil into a deep frying pan and heat the pan to medium. Dice up your vegetables and add them to the pan, making sure to also add in all the herbs and spices, except for your garlic.  Let that cook down, stirring occasionally, the vegetables soften and the onions become translucent. Add in your garlic and stir until you can smell it.

Push all your vegetables to the sides of the pan, and make a well. Add in your cooked rice, and break up any clumps with your spatula. You want the rice to warm through, so carefully stir it in with the vegetables. When the rice mixture begins to stick to the bottom of the frying pan, creating a sort of brown skin, slowly begin pouring in your broth. You want to add enough liquid that the rice plumps up a bit and comes away from the bottom of the pan, but not enough to drown the rice and make it a solid mushy mess.  Keep turning the stuffing in the pan until every grain of rice shines with the ‘sauce’ you’ve created and the food has begun to stick again. Then, transfer to a serving dish, and it’s ready to go!

Roasted Turkey Breast with Assorted Vegetables

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I know, I know! Leftovers from a US Holiday are part and parcel of American food culture, they’re how we extend the warmth of the holiday into the homes of our family and friends. They’re an indication of friendship and love, because it’s our way of showing care.

When the leftovers are simply for ourselves in a small family, however, I feel that the best way to avoid wasting food is to limit the amount of leftovers to a manageable level. After all, with my allergies, I tend to eat the same foods again and again, which can become too monotonous. (When I’m eating with all my family, though? All bets are off!  Hope you like that gallon of stuffing coming your way!) This turkey breast recipe is something I make when it’s not Thanksgiving but I believe it’s perfectly adaptable to any holiday celebration!

Also, a word about turkeys and brine. I don’t brine things, because I don’t trust store bought mixes. So this is an unbrined kosher turkey breast which came out to about two pounds.

You’ll Need (serves 2 – 4):

1 turkey breast, around two pounds by weight

2 tsps. Thyme

2 tsps. Sage

3-4 cloves roasted garlic, smushed or chopped

2 tsps. Parsley

2 tsps. Paprika

2 – 4 Carrots, chopped into thirds

2 – 4 Celery stalks, chopped into thirds

1 Onion, chopped into chunks

¼ cup Sunflower Oil

Salt and Pepper to taste

If frozen, thaw your turkey breast in the refrigerator, and keep it in there until it’s ready to be put into the oven. The Butterball company is a <a href=”http://great resource for timings and methods!

Preheat your oven to 375F.  Chop up your vegetables, and get out a roasting pan big enough to hold all your ingredients without creating too much space. Cover the pan with aluminum foil for easy cleaning, or leave it open, and use the drippings for gravy later! (NB: I am horrible at gravy. So bad it’s a family joke. Mom handles any and all required gravies in the family, because when I make it, she usually winds up salvaging them anyway)

Put the vegetables and a splash of the sunflower oil first. Then, get out a small bowl and combine all the herbs, spices, garlic, and leftover oil into a gooshy mess. Carefully open up space beneath the skin of your turkey breast, but slowly inserting your hand between the skin and the meat. Then, using that same hand, pour in and smooth out the garlic herb mix you made underneath the skin of the turkey breast. This will help your turkey stay moist, and help keep the skin from burning. Once all the mix has been added, put the turkey breast in amidst the vegetables, and add any leftover oil to the top of the turkey breast (doesn’t have to be much!)

Put the turkey in the oven and decrease the heat to 350F. At two pounds, it should cook for about an hour and a half. Once out, let the meat rest for at least ten minutes before cutting it up and serving.

Hot tip: Does the turkey’s skin look a little strange? For crispier, cleaner skin, rub the turkey breast with kosher salt, and then wash it clean in cold water. Make sure to pat it dry before cooking.

Thanksgiving: Let the Eating Commence

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It’s Thanksgiving! Well, in the United States anyway (the Canadians get an early march on us by holding theirs in October). It’s a holiday designed specifically around American food culture, where no one is supposed to walk away hungry, and leftovers are the language of love we all speak. For people like me with allergies, however, a major holiday with lots and lots of food can turn into a minefield of potential tribulation.

Most Thanksgiving meals in the US are handled buffet-style. When I was a child, every year we’d say grace and then line up single-file, clutching our plates, to tread alongside the kitchen counter, scooping up turkey and side dishes before looping through the front room to make it back to the dinner table. When you have food allergies, as much as these are fond memories, they also contain a certain amount of stress. Will someone put the green bean casserole spoon in the wrong bowl? Will someone have ‘helpfully’ added butter to the peas and onions dish? Has an inattentive aunt allowed her Waldorf salad to touch the turkey fork and then not cleaned it off?

Getting right with the holiday meal took a really long time. It started with an honest and frank conversation with my family about what I needed to avoid, and how I needed my food kept away from the food and utensils used by people without my allergy. When I was younger, my mother had to be quite firm on my behalf. Now, if I visit someone else’s home for Thanksgiving I will bring one or two side dishes with me. Fortunately, the potlach aspect of Thanksgiving makes this very easy, and it also helps alleviate the isolating feeling that Eating While Allergic can instill in you when in a group.

If you’re not in charge of holiday preparations (and with a major holiday, younger family probably are not) then don’t be hesitant to go to your grandparent or parents, or your aunt or cousin, and explain your allergy needs. Do you need to bring your own meal completely? Do you want to skip the meal and just eat dessert? What part of Thanksgiving is so important for you that you want to be in charge of it?

For me, I want the full package, which means I tell people what brands I can eat, and what ingredients I can’t have. If I can throw together some vegetable dishes that make everyone happy, then I’ll do so, and gladly. If someone is willing, I’ll make the turkey, too. Part of making a holiday special is putting in the degree of work that makes everyone happy.

Source your food carefully! If you’re going for any kind of turkey, speak to your butcher about the type of meat you’re buying. Is it corn-fed? Do they wash the meat in any kind of solution? Do they butcher in house or get it from elsewhere? I can’t recommend a brand, but these are important questions to ask. Knowing your allergy, means knowing what questions you have to ask to purchase meat and vegetables that are safe for your holiday table!

This week, I’ve got a complete savory Thanksgiving meal, which I and my family eat ourselves. It’s got turkey, it’s got a green vegetable, and there’s not too much clean up afterwards. This meal is the basis on which you can begin to build your own Thanksgiving feast, allergy-free and delicious.

Turkey with Roasted Vegetables

Rice Stuffing

Roasted Sweet Potato Bites

Oh My Maida! Gluten-Free Vegan Cowboy Cookies

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vegan, plant-based gluten free chocolate chip cookies

I think in almost every child’s life there exists The Cookie. The One Cookie to Rule Them All.

Maybe it wasn’t baked by their parents or caregivers (I have very fond memories of eating Oreos at my grandparents. Oreos! The LUXURY!). Maybe, looking back, it was something so simple and pleasant that you forget it entirely until the sudden need for a cookie consumes you, and nothing less than the closest approximation to said Cookie will do.

So it is, dear readers, in my home, where Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts reigns supreme.  Other authors may entice, but La Heatter remains steadfast, consulted for every serious dessert undertaking and never far from reach on the cookbook shelf. And the cookie recipe most used in our house?  Cowboy Cookies on page 178. Falls right open to the page without any need to consult the index.

They’re gorgeous oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with optional walnuts or pecans and my mother makes the best ones. I’m not prevaricating, she’s the best baker in the family and it’s by a very wide margin.  If we ate cookies (not often, butter was expensive!) these were the ones we ate. Of course, now I’m actually allergic to a ton of the ingredients but that’s not the memory I prefer to hold on to! 

What I like to do, at least cookie-wise, is fix what’s not working for me, and away with all the rest! So when I was suddenly seized late at night with an urge to sink my teeth into something chocolatey and delicious, I followed ancient tradition and pulled out the good ol’ Heatter, page 178.

Baking powder, vanilla extract, and butter, oh my!  Not things I can have, but fortunately I could omit the first two and substitute the third. The flour I abandoned, because Mom is trying to cut down on gluten for health reasons, and I sure can’t eat thirty-six cookies all by myself.  Since oats make me itch, I decided to up the flour in order to get the right consistency.

I am a huge novice when it comes to gluten-free baking, so I’m always trying to figure out how to bake things correctly. From the little bit of America’s Test Kitchen’s website available to read without paying for a subscription, they stress that letting gluten-free food rest and re-hydrate will make your food bake better. (Baker’s note: Mom informs me that resting cookie dough is actually pretty common. Guess who’d go farther on GBBO?) Always let your gluten-free bakes rest at least 30 minutes, including cookies and other things that don’t normally need to rest.

Mine assuredly did, because at that point, I realized that it was 9:30 at night and I needed to go to bed.

So, I slung the bowl into the fridge (covered with plastic wrap) and let it alone until the next morning. It was perfectly fine! Nothing separated or anything.

Heatter’s recipe uses regular AP Flour, so I tried a mix of different flours on my own. Sweet white sorghum to make up for the oats, coconut and almond flours for sweetness, millet for protein, and arrowroot for cohesion. It also only has instructions re: baking times for regular AP flour, so I experimented with the cooking time in the oven. I have learned to my cost (and the suspicion of my smoke alarm) that GF food just takes longer to cook, so I tried low and slow and high and fast, and you know what? Perfectly cooked at 350F.  Just leave them in for 40 minutes and try not to stare through the oven door like you’re in the Bake-Off. I also let them cool on the cookie sheet for ten minutes before transferring them to the cooling rack.

For everything else, I followed the recipe instructions to the letter, baking them on the top rack because there’s only one cookie sheet, and remembering to set my timer because I’m a flake. So, if you feel like a chewy chocolate chip cookie with slightly crisp edges and nicely pliant density, then follow the recipe below!

Gluten-Free Vegan Cowboy Cookies (adapted from Maida Heatter)

Makes 36 cookies

1/2 cup super-fine almond flour

1/2 + 1/3 cup coconut flour

1/3 cup millet flour

1/3 cup arrowroot flour

1/3 cup sweet white sorghum flour

1 Tbsp. tapioca flour

1 Flax Egg

1/2 tsp Baking Soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar (I don’t eat brown sugar, and instead sub in more white sugar)

1 stick (1/4 lb.) Miyoko’s butter, or 6 Tbsp. oil

1/2 cup chocolate chips

~1/2 cup broken walnuts or pecans (optional)

~1 cup water or cashew milk

It’s always good to cream the butter and sugar together, but if the butter’s too hard, stick it in the microwave for thirty seconds and then stir in the sugars in a separate bowl. Add all the flours, sugars, and butter into the flax seed bowl and stir them together before you add the chocolate and nuts. Slowly add the water into the bowl as you mix until it looks like cookie dough. You might not need the whole cup of water; it should be thick and scoopable, not like a pancake batter.

Cover the bowl and stick it in the fridge for at least thirty minutes. When you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to 375F. 

I use a small ice cream scoop to put the cookies on the tray, and then just press them flat with my fingers. You should be able to fit at least nine on the cookie sheet, they don’t really spread much.

Once the cookies are in the oven, decrease the heat to 350F, and bake them for 40 minutes. Once baked, cool on the cookie sheet for 10 minutes, and then transfer to the cooling rack. Scoop and repeat!

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Building Block: The Flax Egg

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One of the more difficult parts of baking and cooking when you’re allergic to a staple is finding a reasonable way to salvage the binding capabilities of the egg into something less likely to make your throat close. Fortunately, there’s flax. The flax egg is a workhorse in the world of food substitutions: It does its job and it does it well.

Flax is also known as Linseed, and it’s an herbaceous plant used for food and for clothing. I used to see it dousing cut up banana pieces at the supermarket in a misguided attempt to get two sales for the cost of one free sample, but I never indulged. The very things that make flax a good healthy food ingredient are the same things that make it incredibly unappetizing to look at. To whit, it’s brown, it’s gummy, and it sticks to things.

Ground flax really shines in baking, where I can whip together a flax ‘egg’ and set it aside to gel while I put together the rest of my ingredients. It works for pancakes, cookies, casseroles and sauces, though there are alternatives such as tapioca or arrowroot powder if you don’t want the little brown flecks it leaves in the food. I store my ground flax in the freezer (it keeps longer) after opening, and dole it out as needed!

Making a vegan, gluten-free, plant-based egg to cook with turns out to be incredibly simple! It’s a 1:1 substitution for traditional eggs, and I’ve never had any trouble baking with them. (I don’t recommend it for things like Pavlovas, or as a substitute in mousse however. There simply isn’t enough air in a flax egg for those types of dishes)

You’ll need (1 egg):

1 Tbsp. ground flax

3 Tbsp. cold water

Put the flax and the water into a small bowl, give it a little stir, and then set it aside to congeal into a gel for about 10-15 minutes. After that, you can add it to cookies, cakes, and pie crusts with no problems at all! Once you have this basic substitution in your wheelhouse, you’ll be cranking out the baked goods in no time.

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Shepherd’s Pie

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Not surprisingly, when I made lamb stew, two days later I had leftover lamb stew, about enough for one person to have a small bowl, and no inclination to be athletic in the kitchen. This isn’t surprising on a Saturday, so as I stared at the insides of the fridge, vaguely warning myself that I was letting all the cold air out (did your parents tell you that, too, as a child? Some things you can never quite leave behind you), I sort of aimlessly decided that lamb was too expensive to go to waste. I had a potato, and I had some fake butter, time to make a pie!

Well, not a real pie. I mean ‘pie’ like the British make them: savory and with potatoes. Shepherd’s Pie is one of those recipes that everyone should have on hand to make up a warm, solid meal without too much fuss and to get rid of all those leftover vegetables you wind up with. It’s tasty, it’s easily stretched from two people to a feast with barely any math involved, and it stays in the oven, heating your entire house and making it smell like a medieval kitchen. Culinary cosplay is nothing to be ashamed of! Sure, technically, I wouldn’t have survived the Middle Ages with my allergies, but this is my pretend world, and if I say Eleanor of Aquitaine ate allergy-free, she did!

If you don’t hang around a state with a lot of sheep, Shepherd’s Pie is a meat dish, full of vegetables, topped with a crispy, buttery, mashed potato topper that you cook separately, and then bake into a textural melting pot in the oven. It takes a lot of (fake) butter, not as many potatoes as you might think, and uses up all those vegetal odds and ends you wind up with after a while. Texturally, I think you get more for your buck with chopped meat than you do with ground, but it’s perfectly acceptable to substitute one for the other. If you’re a vegan or a vegetarian, jettisoning the meat means introducing more root vegetables than just the mashed potato, such as rutabagas, turnips, or parsnips. You could also use lentils, chickpeas, borlotti or kidney beans. It’s winter! Think like a Hobbit.

The prep for this recipe comes from the fact that you cook the pie filling before you make the pie. That makes less clean up and cook time in the oven later on, because it decreases the amount of water that has to steam away in the oven. The enemy of a good pie is too much liquid!  Trust me, you don’t want anything boiling over in there; this is supposed to decrease your work, not cause you back pain from scraping out the oven. So cook it down for a little bit before you put the pie together.

I also have to make my own mashed potatoes since I don’t want to try a commercial ready-made brand that might come into contact with a variety of my allergies. For a corn allergy, I know I’m pushing it because people have gotten a reaction from root vegetables that grow in corn-treated soil (the fertilizer, the sprays, take your pick). So far, I’ve done very well with the root vegetables I’ve used from my local grocery store, but always be safe! Substitute what you can’t eat with things you can!  Remember, everyone reacts differently to food when you have an allergy.

For those of you who don’t have leftover stew (probably most of you) I wanted to share my recipe for Shepherd’s Pie starting from the top. This is one of those hurry up and wait dishes, perfect for the weekend with leftovers for lunch the next day, or for when you have to feed many people all at once with a minimum of complaining.

You’ll Need (Serves 2-3):

Pie Ingredients:

2 carrots, chopped small

2 celery stalks, chopped small

1 cup lamb, chopped or ground, or an equivalent amount of root vegetables or legumes

1 onion, chopped small

1/2 cup peas

2 cloves garlic, smashed and chopped

1 small bay leaf

2 tsp. rosemary

2 tsp. thyme

2 Tbsp. parsley

2 tsp. paprika

Salt and Pepper to taste

2 tsp. olive oil

1-1 1/2 cups lamb broth or water

1-2 tsp. tapioca flour (optional)

To Make:

Heat olive oil in a large pot at medium-low and add in the herbs/spices to fry them up a bit. Add the meat to brown it and make sure to add salt and pepper as well. Lamb has a lot of fat to it, so if you don’t want it all, remove the meat from the pot, and drain out the excess oil before returning the pot to the stove, turning it on and starting to soften the vegetables.

Add all the vegetables except the peas in with the meat and cook them, stirring sometimes, until the vegetables start to feel soft and the onions are translucent. I always add the garlic about two minutes before I add the broth to keep it from burning. Once a little scrapable stuff develops on the bottom of the pot, deglaze the whole thing with the broth or water, and leave it to cook down for about twenty minutes.

If you’re adding the tapioca flour, keep a little broth back to mix the flour into a slurry before adding it to the pot. That way you won’t get little lumps of flour in the pie filling.

Turn the heat to medium and let the mixture bubble up a little bit. No violently roiling boils here! Just polite penny-sized bubbles easily broken by your spoon as you stir it to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom.

Once the filling has reduced enough that it looks like meat and vegetables in a gravy that covers the back of your spoon, take out the bay leaf. Choose an ovenproof casserole dish big enough for your filling and carefully ladle the stew out of the pot. The ideal amount is that the stew hits the halfway mark on the dish, but don’t worry about it. Add the peas, and leave the pie filling alone as you make your mashed potatoes for the topping.

Mashed Potato Topper:

1 large russet potato or sweet potato, or 4 small potatoes

5 Tbsp. fake or real butter (I use Miyoko’s)

4 cups water to cook the potatoes in

Salt and Pepper to taste

To make:

First off, give your potatoes a good wash in the sink. I’d say scrub, but since we’re in the army now and peeling these potatoes, it doesn’t really matter. Peel the potatoes and dig out any dark spots or eyes. Set a pot with the four cups of water on the stove at medium. To make the potato cook faster, chop it up. Potatoes are really slippery, so in order to be safe, I hold my knife at a forty-five degree angle, and turn my potato over and over each time I make a cut, which makes the pieces of a uniform size and shape.  Add the potatoes and salt to the water and let them boil, stirring occasionally so it doesn’t bubble over. The potatoes are done when you can stick a fork in them without resistance.

Drain the potatoes, leaving a tablespoon of starchy water in the bottom. Add salt, pepper, and 3 Tbsp. of fake butter to the pieces, and then mash them smooth. Do not be afraid!  Use a masher, use a fork, and just smash those potatoes into submission.

To assemble the pie:

Preheat your oven to 375F. Spoon heaping portions of mashed potato on top of your filling, and carefully smooth the top out to the sides to make it look more like a pie and less like a savory ice cream sundae. Quarter two tablespoons of fake butter and push the pieces strategically into the top so that it will melt and make a crispy, buttery texture. Take a butter knife and make four steam holes in the top of the pie, then set the dish on to a baking sheet covered in foil in case it boils over, and put the whole shebang into the oven.

To make:

Decrease the temperature of the oven to 350F, and cook until the pie is brown and bubbling and you can see crisp bits on the top and smell the cooking food. Once cooked, take it out, and let it cool for a few minutes or serve immediately. Takes about 45 minutes to an hour.

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Hearty Lamb Stew

elizabethLeave a comment

A good soup or stew is the perfect all day meal during the cold season (by which I mean, any month after August), and I make them constantly. Lamb stew, however, is considered something of a treat in my family. My grandmother cooked lamb (or rather, mutton) and my mom does too. I got the basis of this recipe from them, and then added my own tweaks to call the recipe my own.

I have a hit or miss relationship with red meat, to be honest, and so we don’t eat a ton of it in the house. That’s why this lamb stew is special to me; I have to make the most out of it, because it’s not coming back around again! And this stew is something else, let me tell you. I’ve eaten it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and never been left feeling unsatisfied.

You’ll need (serves 4-6):

1-2 lamb shanks

4 carrots, chopped roughly

4 celery stalks, chopped roughly

1 onion, chopped

2 parsnips, chopped

2-3 large potatoes, peeled and chopped

3-4 garlic cloves, crushed or chopped

1 cup red wine (think Bordeaux, tempranillo, or malbec)

4 cups water

1 Tbsp cooking oil

1 large bayleaf

3 tsp parsley, chopped

3 tsp rosemary, crushed

Salt and black pepper to taste

1 Tbsp tapioca flour (optional)

Get out a good pot with a lid, and add in your lamb shanks. Brown them with the cooking oil at a medium heat, and then remove the meat to rest on a plate, while you add in all your vegetables except the potatoes, salt, pepper, garlic, spices and herbs.

Cook down your vegetables until a light brown crust forms on the bottom of the pot (the scrap-able bits!) and then deglaze the entire pot with the red wine. Don’t stand over it, unless you want a face full of alcohol-scented steam! Take a good spoon, and scrape up all the crust on the bottom of the pot, and then add in the lamb shanks, and the four cups of water. Lamb is such a flavorful meat that you don’t need to buy broth, this makes it for you!

Peel and chop the potatoes and add them into the stew. I think potatoes make the stew hearty enough not to need a thickener, but if your stew is looking a little thin, here’s what to do: Ladle out one cup of the broth into a soup bowl and add one tablespoon of tapioca flour. Whisk them together to avoid lumps of flour in the stew, and then add the slurry back into the pot.

Bring the pot to a bubbling boil, and then reduce the heat to a simmer (usually I put it on medium-low or low). Cover and let it cook for at least an hour, if not more. The longer it cooks, the more rich it will taste! Stir occasionally, and let it reduce down by about a quarter.

Before you want to serve up, take some tongs and pinch out the lamb shanks. Set them on a plate and cut off all the meat. Don’t worry about being too savage with your knife cuts! This is a stew, and you want to have nice chunks of meat to go with those big vegetable pieces. Add the meat back in to warm it up, and then ladle out into a gigantic bowl to facilitate gulping it down with your biggest spoon.

Tip: If you’re making this ahead of time, I like to add the potatoes into the stew thirty minutes to an hour before serving, because I don’t want them to completely disintegrate. If you don’t have the time, add the potatoes when you add in the lamb shanks, and let them all cook together!

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