Festive Preparations

I've never made any pretenses about my organisational skills. In fact I quite regularly go on about my extreme lack of them. So, I had a little heart attack when my co-contributors to "At the Failsafe Table" decided to have a Christmas edition this week. It's a truly great idea and I'm sure you would all like to be a bit prepared and maybe even have a trial run of what you would like to make. For me this week is last minute birthday party preparation for my daughter's 4th birthday - Christmas is not even on my radar until next week.

I have managed to fit something in this week though, so this year you get a Christmas recipe from me before Christmas instead of in March.

While I was deciding what to make I was thinking about all the different yummy foods that are usually eaten over the holidays and one of the things that came into my mind was those rolled pieces of pork that are stuffed with fruit and nuts and are sweet and moist with that naughty bit of crackling on the top. I have done a failsafe version of that. "How is that even possible?" you say. "Massive substitutions" I say; that and a bit of imagination.

Christmas Chicken Roll
Ingredients

• 2 large Chicken breast doubles
• failsafe oil

Stuffing

• 3 Tbsp ground raw cashews
• 1 pear, peeled, cored and diced smallish
• 2 shallots, finely sliced
• 1 Tbsp maple syrup
• 1/4 cup crumbs
• 1 tsp salt
• few sprigs parsley

Glaze

• 1 Tbsp Maple syrup
• 1 tsp whiskey (optional)
• 1 tsp failsafe oil
• 1/4 tsp salt

All tied up

Don't worry about being neat, just make sure it is tight.

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C and lightly oil a roasting tray.
2. Leave the cartilage that joins the breasts intact, but trim any other sinew or excess fat from the chicken.
3. Mix all the stuffing ingredients together in a bowl.
4. Lay out the breasts rough side up and spread one half of the first one with about a third of the stuffing. Lay the second piece so half of it covers the stuffing of the first. It's best if you do it with the thicker part covering the thinner of the first ("top and tailed") so it is not really thick at one end once it is rolled.
5. Spread all of the second breast double with the remaining stuffing and then roll carefully so the cross section is like two interlocking "C's". 
6. Tie it tightly with kitchen string and place into roasting dish.
7. Push any bits of stuffing that have fallen out back into the end of it.
8. Mix the glaze ingredients together and brush some over the chicken.
9. Bake for one and a half hours (or until cooked through - depends on the chicken size). Take it out at intervals and brush with more glaze.
10. When ready remove from oven and rest for 10 minutes, then remove string and slice.

Ready to be sliced

Variations

• Nut free - No problem, just leave them out and add a little more crumbs or substitute for chicknuts as they could add another bit of flavour.
• Salicylates - Apples would be nice instead of pears as would some herbs like sage or thyme.

Served with crispy herbed baked potatoes and steamed beans and cabbage  tossed with nuttelex, salt and sprinkled with crispy fried deli chicken.

We all enjoyed this, it really did remind me of the pork ones. Hubby said he would like to have more stuffing. It would be nice, but it would also make it trickier to roll.

Highly Strung

Having people over for meals gives me the opportunity to try new things out, things that I wouldn't necessarily cook for just any old dinner.

My mum recently celebrated a milestone birthday and that seemed like a good reason to do something a little bit fancy. So I flicked through all my cook books searching for inspiration and came across a recipe in my French book that I have been wanting to try for ages. It is so incredibly close to failsafe to that few changes were needed and the end result was really quite special. The meat is cooked for a very short time, which suits the amine sensitive and the cut is so very tender when it is done. Unfortunately the cost of the cut will relegate it to "special occasion" status.

Boeuf à la Ficelle
(Beef on a string)

Ingredients

• Beef fillet (allow about 200g per adult, less for kids - I cooked for 5 adults and 2 kids and used 1.2kg)
• 6 cups liquid (this could be stock, water, whiskey or a combination - I used 1/2 cup whiskey and 3 tablespoons of vegetable stock concentrate with 5 1/2 cups of water). If you are cooking less meat you won't need as much liquid.
• 1 large swede, cut into batons (sticks)
• 1 celery stalk, cut into batons
• 2 large potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
• 1/4 cabbage, sliced
• 6 shallots, trimmed and cut into long lengths
• A few sprigs of parsley

Method

1. Trim the beef of any visible fat and sinew and cut into portions. Tie a length of cooking string around each piece so that it holds shape leaving enough string attached to lower the beef into the pot.
2. Pour the liquid into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Add the vegetables and parsley and cook at a medium boil for about 8 minutes or until the vegetables are tender. Remove the vegetables with a slotted spoon and keep warm. Discard the parsley and skim and fat or foam from the surface.
3. Season the beef with a little salt and lower into the boiling stock. Tie the string around the pot handle or to a wooden spoon resting across the top of the pot. Cook for 6mins for rare, 10 mins for medium rare, 15 mins for medium and 20 mins for well done (for those who can't bear the sight of pink in their meat).
4. Place each piece of meat on a plate or shallow bowl, add the cooked vegetables and ladle some of the broth over to serve.

Variations

• Salicylates - Add a carrot cut into batons with the other vegetables (moderate) and a bay leaf and 2 sprigs of thyme (very high).
• Amines - use beef stock for the liquid.

We didn't eat all the cooking liquid on the night, so I reserved it and froze it. Normally beef stock would be too high in amines to use, but as the beef was only cooked very briefly it make a nice, mild beef stock that I would happily use again.

This dish was so succulent and was happily devoured by failsafers and non-failsafers alike.

Bread Success!

Some of you who follow my facebook page may have seen me cheering and sharing a dodgy phone photo of some bread I made the other day. In the real world making a successful loaf of bread is no big deal unless you are seriously challenged in the kitchen, but making an edible loaf of failsafe, gluten, dairy, soy, nut, egg *and* gum free bread is a different story. When I cut open that little roll and had a bite I honestly did a dance of joy.

After a few early attempts at my own gluten free bread I had given up in favour of packet mixes and more recently had been using Kersten's recipe with reasonable success. Our latest restrictions (no gums) meant that I had to ditch that recipe too, and start getting creative.

As a gluten eater I am highly critical of gluten free bread, but I devoured the whole roll with nothing on it and then waited very impatiently for the loaf to cool so that I could slice it and see how it turned out. The crust was soft, the bread bent, and it didn't have that gelatinous texture that I've come to expect from gluten free bread.

How do you think it looks?

I made some (flat) rolls a day later and took them along to a failsafe picnic. There was loads of food, so I didn't bother to get them out until the end when some of the other mums wanted to try. They passed that taste test too (or those lovely ladies were being very polite). The other big test was my daughter who has never willingly eaten gluten free bread. She ate an entire roll with her dinner last night and that is all I really need. There is nothing worse than slaving in the kitchen and no one wanting to eat it.

So after trawling through the internet for inspiration I decided to use a 'Gluten-Free Girl' recipe as my starting point, but that's where the help ended. Now I'm incredibly chuffed to present to you my very own bread recipe.

Bread!
Ingredients

• 2 cups warm water
• 2 Tbsp psyllium husks
• 5 Tbsp boiling water
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 3tsp yeast
• 1 Tbsp failsafe oil
• 100g brown rice flour
• 100g sorghum flour
• 170g white rice flour
• 170g tapioca starch
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp baking powder

Method

1. Put the psyllium in a small bowl or cup and pour the boiling water over them. Give it a quick stir and set aside.
2. Pour the water, sugar and yeast into a big bowl (preferably in a mixer, but this should be fine by hand) and leave while you measure out the rest of your ingredients.
3. Add the oil, the psyllium sludge and the dry ingredients and mix for a few minutes until it is all very well combined and smooth, like a thick cake batter.
4. Tip into an oiled bowl and cover with glad wrap and leave stand somewhere warm for about an hour. It will rise in that time and become a lot more like dough and less like batter.
5. While it is resting preheat your oven to 190°C
6. Tip into a greased loaf tin (my tin is 20cm x 11cm) or using wet hands roll balls for rolls use pie tins for large rolls, muffin trays for dinner rolls or place them in a slice tin for flatter hamburger style rolls.
7. Bake the loaf for about 50 mins and rolls for about 25mins.
8. Cool on racks.

As this is a very new recipe I haven't had a chance to try different things with it or check how long it lasts. The rolls I made yesterday were slightly dry today, but still edible. The loaf I made the other night was sliced and went straight into the freezer and toasted beautifully for dinner tonight.

The next steps for me are to play with different flour (as I realise sorghum isn't the easiest to find) and to experiment with other styles of bread. But I couldn't make you wait any longer for this recipe. If you try anything that works leave a comment, it would be great to hear what things you can come up with. My next thought is brown sugar scrolls or white baguettes.

Take Two

This elimination road has been a very long a windy one and baseline has been very hard to hang on to. What started with me telling my boy that we would cut out food for a few weeks and slowly add things back has actually been over two years and nothing new has been added, but more has been taken away. Because baseline has been hard to come by it has been really difficult to pin point exactly what causes these reactions even when we were being super strict.

The sudden realisation that citric acid was looking like the culprit sent me into a spin. It seems that the way it is made means that it is contains glutamates which lead me to some more research which bands them into a group called excitotoxins. And now we seem to have our missing link. A few weeks of reduced excitotoxins and we have a new found baseline that has actually been sustained for more than a couple of days. For our family this is brilliant, for my cooking adventures it has been quite traumatic. Now we are trying to minimise citric acid, gelatin, corn, extracted pectin, anything with malt in the name and all vegetable gums.

So now I am relearning to cook gluten free and without gums. There are quite a few recipes floating around the internet for this type of cooking, but trying to find things that are failsafe is nigh impossible. People use ground chia or flax - Not failsafe, but there is also a few that use psyllium which is failsafe. So now the conversions begin. I apologise to those who avoid eggs as I am going to be using them a bit more now.

The first conversion is the iced biscuits recipe. I just made this a triple batch straight up as the dough still freezes well, so this makes a good quantity of biscuits.

Iced Biscuits - Take two

• 300g nuttelex
• 1 1/2 cup caster sugar
• 3 egg, lightly beaten
• 1/2 tsp vanilla (optional)
• 2 1/2 cups white rice flour 
• 2 cups tapioca flour
• 3/4 cup sorghum flour (if you can't find this brown rice would work fine too)
• 2 Tbsp psyllium husks
• natural sprinkles (optional)
• bamboo skewers (soaked for half an hour and with the sharp end cut off if you prefer)

Royal Icing

• 1 egg white, lightly whisked
• 1 1/2 cups pure icing sugar, sifted

Methid

1. Cream nuttelex and sugar together. Add eggs and Vanilla. Beat to combine. Sift flour over mixture. Stir to combine (or if you have a stand mixer use a slow speed until dough comes together) Place dough onto plastic wrap. Knead gently. Shape into a disc. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill in fridge for a couple of hours or until firm. If after this time your dough is still to sticky add flour one tablespoon at a time until it is less sticky (this is still a little softer than the other ones) little things like the size of your eggs can make this adjustment needed.
2. Preheat oven to 170°C. Line baking trays with baking paper. Roll dough out between 2 sheets of baking paper until 5mm thick (don't get carried away and roll it too thin as the biscuits will be too hard). Use whatever shaped cookie cutter you have to cut shapes form the dough. Press remaining dough together and repeat.  Place on baking trays leaving a little space around them. If you are putting them on stick, carefully slide the skewer at least halfway into the dough. Bake for approx 12 mins (depending on the size of you shapes) or until slightly golden on the bottom edge. Stand for 3 minutes. Cool on a rack (biscuits firm up when they are cooling, so don't think they are not done because they are soft straight away).
3. Make icing. Place egg white in a bowl. Gradually add icing sugar, whisking until smooth. Spread over cookies. Top with sprinkles. Set aside for 20 minutes or until set.

These taste good! The texture is slightly different, but I've finally had a gumless baking success. The next thing I need to get my head around is bread, just when I had finally got a good handle on making Kersten's recipe...

Taking Stock

There are a couple of recipes floating around for vegetable stock paste. The Diva has one and so does Frilly Pants, but they are both done for the Thermomix and those instructions are double dutch to anyone who doesn't have one. So I gave it a whirl and was really happy with the results, but had to wait until I ran out so I could make more and actually measure what I did.

The good thing about stock is that you can use all the bits of your vegies that aren't too pretty - the celery that went floppy in the bottom of the fridge, or the upper bits of the leek. A good habit to get into is to freeze your vegetable off cuts. I have a zip lock bag in the freezer that I add to all the time. The light green bits of leek that can be a little on the tough side to cook with get thrown in the freezer ready to be made into stock, so does the odd bit of celery too.

Vegetable Stock Concentrate
Ingredients

• 350g celery 
• 4 shallots
• 350g leek
• 3 cloves garlic
• small handful parsley
• 1/3 cup salt

Method

1. Roughly chop and wash all the vegetables and place in a large saucepan.
2. Sprinkle the salt over it all (it will start to draw the water from the veg quite quickly)
3. Put pan over a low-medium heat and cook, stirring often to begin with. As more liquid comes out of the veg less stirring is required.
4. Turn it down to a simmer and reduce until most of the liquid is gone. It took me about 1hr from turning the pan on to get to this point.
5. Cool and puree. Pack into a freezer container and freeze. (It doesn't freeze solid and can be scooped straight from the freezer)

This made 1 1/2 cups. Use one tablespoon to make one cup of stock. That is almost 19 cups of stock and it doesn't take up the entire freezer. Genius!

Variations
- You can use whatever quantity of veg you have, just make sure you don't over do any particular thing or it will dominate.
Salicylates - Add carrot or onion
Celery tops - I've heard that the celery tops may be higher in salicylates than the stems, I use the tops, but you may chose not to.

Use it to add flavour to risotto, stews or soups, just about anything really.

Sweet, Sweet

These are something that I make a lot. It seems that most recipes call for egg yolks and the only recipe that wants the white bits is meringue. I asked my mum if she had any other ideas what I could do with them, she suggested an egg white omlette and the thought of that makes me want to puke. Taking all the nice flavour and texture the yolk adds and leaving you with something resembling rubber. No thanks. So I keep on making meringue. And since I regularly make mayonnaise, I regularly have egg whites, so I regularly make meringues too.

This is a simple recipe, two ingredients, that is it. It bothers me that the commercial ones can contain so many ingredients.

Meringue
Ingredients

• 4 egg whites, preferably at room temperature
• 1 1/4 cups of caster sugar

Method

1. Preheat oven to 110°C
2. Place egg whites into a very clean, dry bowl of a mixer (Stand mixer is easiest, hand held electric is alright anything less is doable, but tiring).
3. Beat/whisk the egg whites until they are stiff.
4. Add the sugar a tablespoon at a time until it is all incorporated and the mixture is thick and glossy and the sugar has dissolved.
5. Pipe or spoon the mixture onto lined oven trays leaving a few centimetres between them.
6. Bake for approximately 35 mins. Leave them longer so they are crisp through or take them out sooner for a gooier centre. It depends on how big they are too. Half the fun is testing them during cooking to see if they are done yet.

Variations: Make them large and flat to use for a pavlova.
                   Add 1-2 teaspoons of sifted carob just before piping for variety.
                   Add a small quantity of vanilla seeds before piping for flavour.
                   Sprinkle uncooked meringues with natural sprinkles for a special occasion.
Dairy/soy - After they are cooked and cooled dip the tips in melted white chocolate or carob.

These make great afternoon tea treats or are lovely for a party.

Breakfast Biscuits

Breakfast can be tricky when you are gluten free and dairy free, especially if you don't really like milk substitutes and have trouble reconciling the "white brick" with being bread.

I saw a new product in the supermarket the other day - Breakfast Biscuits. Really? Biscuits for breakfast? I knew they would never be an option here, but checked the ingredients out of curiosity. Except for the sugar content they looked reasonably healthy. Surely I could make something like this that my son could eat. I made a batch and he was really happy to eat them. I thought them to be less than stellar. Batch two was tweaked a bit and now I'd be happy to eat them too. The boy likes them as they are easy to get himself and since he has recently come around to drinking rice milk he likes to have a glass for dunking them in.

Healthy Breakfast Biscuits
Ingredients

• 125g Nuttelex
• 1/3 cup pure maple syrup
• 1/2 cup of brown rice flour
• 1/2 cup white rice flour
• 1/3 cup millet flour
• 1/4 cup puffed amaranth
• 1/4 cup buckwheat flakes
• 2 Tbsp quinoa flakes
• 1 Tbsp psyllium husks
• Small handful of freeze dried pears, broken up (optional)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160˚C
2. Beat nuttelex and maple syrup together in a large bowl until well combined.
3. Beat in the flours and psyllium.
4. Stir in the remaining ingredients
5. Take about a tablespoon and roughly shape into a short log. Place on a lined baking tray and flatten with fingers.
6. Repeat for the remaining mixture (mine made about 24)
7. Bake for 10-12 mins. They are ready when you can see them starting to brown on the bottom edge.
8. Cool on the trays for 5 minutes before moving to wire racks.

Variations

• These would work well with any tolerated flour. It does affect the taste.
• Rice malt syrup would also work instead of maple syrup.
• I'm also sure that other things could be substituted for the buckwheat, amaranth and quinoa. Just keep the quantities similar. You'll know when you try to shape them if they are too dry and need more syrup or are too sticky and need a little more dry stuff.

Lucky Dip

I added a picture to my facebook page the other day that generated far more interest than I expected. Or maybe I should have expected it as a platter of failsafe, dairy, gluten and soy free dips is hard to come by. Yes there was the standard failsafe hommus, but there were three more there.

L-R Parsley pesto dip, caramelised leeks, Cashew cream cheese and hommus

Besides my intolerant son, there was another guest who is lactose intolerant, so the normal cheese platter and something else for the kids was not going to cut it. So I invented and hoped for the best. I still have some cheese left over, but these were demolished.

I bought one of those pesto dip thingys, so wanted to make a failsafe equivalent. Since the only herb available is parsley, that's the one I used. Parsley is still high in salicylates and it is only recommended to have a sprinkle. This is a little more than that, but with three other dips to have there is no need to pig out on that one alone. This recipe only makes a small quantity, as much as you can see in the picture, so that also makes it hard to go overboard.

Parsley Pesto Dip
Ingredients

• 3 Tbsp chopped parsley
• 1 long green part of shallot, chopped
• 2 Tbsp chick nuts (commercial roasted chick peas)
• 2 Tbsp failsafe oil
• 1/2 clove garlic, crushed
• 1 tsp citric "lemon" juice
• salt to taste

Method

1. Put all ingredients except salt into a mini food processor and blend until a nice dipping consistency.
2. Taste for salt - add a little at a time.

Caramelised leeks
(this makes a reasonable amount, but it keeps well and is nice with roast meats, on sandwiches or as a condiment for anything, really...)

Ingredients

•  1 large leek
• failsafe oil
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp brown sugar

Method

1. Remove harder green parts of leek and split the leek lengthways, make sure there is no dirt caught in it, rinsing if you need to. Slice finely.
2. Heat a medium frying pan over medium to low heat and add enough oil to coat the base. 
3. Add the leeks. Your pan may be very full at this point, don't bother changing pans, it won't stay this way for long.
4. As they start to heat sprinkle the salt over them to help draw out moisture.
5. Cook slowly stirring frequently
6. Add sugar and keep on stirring
7. They will be slowly reducing and turning a slightly golden colour (with a bit of a green tinge if you had a fair bit of pale green leek). Keep stirring occasionally, making sure they don't dry out and catch on the bottom. If they start to brown or dry out add a small quantity of water.
8. Once they are gold(ish) and look like a small pile of soggy string (this takes about an hour), they are done. They should be very sweet when you taste them.

Cashew Cream Cheese
There are a lot of recipes floating around the internet for raw cashew cheese, but not one of them is failsafe. They pretty much all contain nutritional yeast which is glutamates, not just a little bit of glutamates, but "you may as well be eating MSG" type glutamates. So that is out. What I have made is probably not even close to tasting like those ones, but it was incredibly good.  My son, who hates nuts, scoffed it and I've had to make more for the week.

The nuts require soaking, so a bit of forethought is needed. I've read that soaking doesn't increase the amine levels in the nuts, but there are a lot of cashews in this one, so moderation may be required for amine responders.

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cup raw cashews, covered with cold water and soaked overnight (or for a few hours if that works for you), drained and rinsed.
• 3 tsp citric "lemon" juice
• 1 tsp whiskey
• 1clove of garlic, crushed
• 1 1/2 tsp salt flakes (if you don't have these use a smaller amount of salt and add to taste at the end)
• 2 Tbsp rice milk (or water)
• 2 tsp chopped parsley and chives.

Method

1. Put all ingredients in a small food processor or blender and blend until smooth.
2. Taste for seasoning and adjust to taste.

This was particularly good on a cracker with the caramelised leeks.

This was particularly good on a cracker with the caramelised leeks.

I don't actually have a recipe of my own for hommus. I make it to taste every time, sometimes using canned chickpeas, sometimes dried ones. I usually make a huge batch and freeze it in smaller portions as we go through a lot of it. Next time I make it I'll write quantities down.

I served these dips with rice crackers, broken buckwheat crispbreads and mini cracker sized rice cakes. You could also use celery sticks which have been my son's vessel of choice for the cashew cheese this week.

More Soup.

I'm totally loving this cold weather. There has been frost in the mornings in the reserve next door and this evening I watched fog rise up there too. This weather just makes me want meals like this. Soup that is thick and heavy and warm, that warms your belly and is just good for your soul.

This recipe is almost a straight rip off of a Jamie Oliver recipe from his first book. There were minor modifications to make it failsafe and due to ingredients I had on hand. It is incredibly easy and has few ingredients. Hubby is very soup critical and he gave it a big thumbs up. Unfortunately it seems Miss 3 has decided she doesn't like soup and mostly ate toast. Mr 7 also scoffed the lot.

This made enough for us with a little left over, so would probably happily feed four adults for dinner.

Chickpea and Leek Soup
Ingredients

• 3 medium leeks, split lengthways and sliced finely
• 2 cloves garlic, sliced
• 1 large potato, peeled and chopped
• 2 400g cans of chickpeas, rinsed (you could soak dry ones for 24hrs. I was not that organised)
• 2 Tbsp failsafe oil
• salt
• 1L home made stock (veg or chicken or water with a bit of whiskey if you don't have stock)

Method

1. Cook the potato until tender (boil or steam)
2. Warm oil in large pot. Add the leeks and garlic and a big pinch of salt. Cook very gently until very tender (about 15mins)
3. Add the chickpeas and potato. Stir in and cook for a minute.
4. Pour in the stock and simmer for about 15mins. Add salt to taste.,
5. Now you can serve as is, or puree the lot, or puree some and mix back together (this is my preference as you get the lumpy bits as well as the thick creaminess)

  
Variations- Salicylates - Add a grind of pepper

It really doesn't need any other variations. It's great as is!