Cheese & Pasta Bites – Gluten Free

This was a godsend for Shavuot. We eat dairy on Shavuot, and it needs to be OK also when reheated, without drying. Most gluten free foods tend to be inedible an hour after preparing 😦 To top it off, I’ve got picky kids who won’t touch anything that doesn’t look good to them, depending on mood, appetite and the phase of the moon.

Yes, today I don’t like pizza and only eat fresh tomatoes.

These cheese and pasta bites were perfect. They are great also a few days later, especially warm; they are versatile and easy to make, and the kids loved them. Definitely a keeper 🙂

Ingredients

250 gr rice pasta
splash olive oil
salt
3 large eggs
250 gr cottage cheese 5%
250 gr grated yellow cheese, your choice (I used a mixture of parmesan and “regular” yellow cheese)
Olives (optional)
Mushrooms, cubed (optional)

Cook the pasta according to directions. Drain and mix with olive oil and a bit of salt so it doesn’t stick. Preheat oven to 175 °C. Mix the eggs, the cottage cheese, the yellow cheese and the pasta together. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add olives and/or mushrooms if using. Spoon into paper muffin cups or directly onto a baking dish lined with baking paper. Bake for 18-20 minutes until brown on the edges and firm in the middle. Let cool and eat!

They’re just standing there…

Enjoy!

Copyrights: Waxing Crescent Moon at Perigee – November 27, 2014 by Michael Seeley, creative commons

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Easy Gluten Free Muffins

To get good gluten free cakes and muffins, it’s usually necessary to whip the whites and yolks separately and then fold together. This gives it the fluffiness that the gluten would give it otherwise. That usually works, but it gets tedious. However, here is a recipe where you just throw everything together and bake. And it’s dee-licious!

Mmmm…

Ingredients:

1 cup Tami gluten-free flour
1 packet instant vanilla pudding (80 gr)
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
180 ml vegetable oil
chocolate chips (optional)

Just a little closer…

Preheat oven to 160°C. Mix everything together. Place into muffin cups. Bake for 10-15 minutes until brown and toothpick comes out clean. Let cool and eat!

Got it!

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Gluten Free Rolls

I’ve found the most amazing recipe for gluten-free rolls. I was searching for gluten-free baking powder on the net (how important is that? Does anyone know?) and came upon this recipe. It looked simple, and it uses the simple and cheap gluten-free flour of Conditor (cornflour with a bit of sugar) and it’s ready within 20-30 minutes – actually a type of soda bread.
For some reason, when I doubled the recipe the rolls came out more dense but still good. I’ll ask my SIL about it  😉

Ingredients: (for about 7 rolls)
2 cups Conditor gluten-free flour
1 packet baking powder (10 grams)
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup water
1 egg
1/2 tbsp honey
1/4 tsp salt
Olive oil for coating the bread

Mix the flour and the baking powder. Add the remaining ingredients and knead for about 2 mins until you get a very sticky dough (I used a food processor). Coat your hands thoroughly with olive oil, take a handful of the dough, pat into a ball making sure that it’s thoroughly coated, and place on a tray lined with a baking sheet.

Bake in a preheated oven at 180°C for 10 -15 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

My family loved these, especially when I pointed out that they’re kosher for passover 😉 Bon apetit!

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Gluten free shabbat cake

I find it ironic that a bit after Passover, when most of Israel eats gluten free, my son was diagnosed with celiac. It took some time for the final result, but it’s final: my son has celiac. So I started searching for a dairy free easy chocolate cake with no margarine that’s also gluten free. It took some trial and error, but here it is! It’s from the book “pashut lelo geluten” (simple without gluten) by Myriam Mor Yosef, with a few tweaks.

Ingredients:
180 ml oil
5gr baking powder (or one heaped tsp)
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar, unpacked (originally 240 gr white sugar, way too much brown)
1/2 cup potato flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup ground almonds
1 tsp vanilla

Baking dish of size 27×33 cm

Preheat oven to 160 degrees C. Mix everything together using a mixer. Pour into baking dish and bake for 30-40 minutes until toothpick comes out clean. Easy peasy, and so tasty!

Note: I haven’t written in a while as my computer died, phone problems, trip abroad and not least a shooting war. May we all have peace, amen.

Edited: Cake would sometimes fall flat, changed to 160°C and halved amount of baking powder thanks to excellent suggestions from my SIL who bakes like a dream. Thanks for the tips!

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Easy “Cheesecake”

It’s Shavuot, and Shavuot means cheesecake. I always make my MIL’s cheesecake, but this year I decided to make, in addition, a quick cheesecake to take to the Tikkun (all-night Torah study, see link above). I saw a recipe that I liked, tweaked it, and voila! Easy and tasty.
However, I can’t bring myself to call it a cheesecake as it doesn’t look like a real cheesecake – you know, white and creamy with perhaps some crumbs or fruit on top. In this cake the cheese is mixed with all the ingredients and everything is baked together. Easy? Definitely.  Real Cheesecake? Not so sure. 😉

Based on “Ugat gevina bhusha” (literally “stirred together cheesecake”) from Chef Magazine.

Ingredients
1/2 cup vegetable oil
110 gr sugar
125 gr white cheese, ricotta, cottage cheese, whatever (I used ricotta)
2 eggs
125 gr (1/2 cup) milk
Rind from one lemon, grated
10 gr (1 packet) vanilla sugar
175 gr (1 1/4 cup) self raising flour
1/2 cup blanched sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 175 degrees C. In a food processor, mix oil and sugar until light. Add cheese and process again. Add eggs one by one, mixing well between. Add half the milk, the lemon rind and vanilla sugar and process again. Add half the flour, mix, add the remaining milk and flour and mix again.

Pour into 18×18 cm pan,  sprinkle almonds on top and bake for 30 minutes or until toothpick comes out with a few crumbs. Let cool and eat!

I used a 22×22 cm pan, it came out excellent.

 

 

Couldn’t resist 🙂

Happy Shavuot!

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Orzo with Roast Tomatoes – the perfect side dish

I defrosted some leftover BBQ steaks for lunch, so all i had to do was the side dish. We love BBQ tomatoes, but obviously I wasn’t going to light up the grill only for that. So I tried out the grill setting on my new oven (when I opened the previous one last week I was suddenly left with the door in my hand 😕 ). Cherry tomatoes in a pyrex some salt, 5 minutes grill on each side at 300 degrees. I paired it with plain orzo, always a hit with the kids. 3 cups orzo in some oil, stir fry for two minutes, add 3 cups boiling water, 1 heaped tsp salt, mix, cover. Done when all the water is absorbed, 5-10 minutes. All done within 15 minutes 🙂

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Magic vanilla chocolate – chip cake

I posted before about my basic chocolate oil cake. Now I present the vanilla chocolate chip cake – no eggs, no dairy, no margarine. And universally approved.

Magic!

Ingredients
1/2 cup spelt flour
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour (I’ve used up to only spelt flour, it still comes out great, just more dense)
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
One heaped teaspoon baking powder
Pinch salt
1/2 cup chocolate chips or to taste
1 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 tbsp vanilla (I like a lot, a tsp is fine too)

Preheat oven to 160 degrees.
Sift flour into a mixing bowl. Add sugar, salt and baking powder. Add chocolate chips and mix.

All dry ingredients mixed

Add water, oil and vanilla and mix until combined. Pour into 25×25 cm baking dish.

Before baking

Bake for 25-30 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

wait until I take a photograph!

still some left here...

Bon apetit!

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“Instant” Tomato Sauce

I admit it, I’m spoiled. I like cooked vegetables, or at least some sauce with my pasta/orzo/couscous/rice. However, when you’re standing in front of the fridge 5 minutes before you need to leave the house in the morning packing food to take to lunch and you realize you’ve got small hamburgers and orzo without sauce, what’s to be done?

Eat your food dry, I hear your answer. Next time make something the evening before. I picked a different route.

I add a handful of cherry tomatoes to the box. When I eat lunch, I warm it in the microwave. The cherry tomatoes burst. I cut them up before eating, getting a nice fresh tomato sauce (you can’t get any fresher than that 😉 ). Granted, there are no fried onions in there and the tomatoes are still mostly raw, but it’s still a sauce, and that’s what’s important, isn’t it? And healthy! If you’ve got another few seconds to spare you can even add a dash of dried oregano or basil. Then you have Italian instant tomato sauce! 😛

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Ridiculously Easy Popsicles

This one goes to my eldest son, who asked, “Why don’t we freeze watermelon cubes?” And I thought, why not indeed?

So I put some watermelon cubes in a bag and stuck ’em in the freezer. A few hours later we tasted them for dessert. And they were fabulous!

All that was missing were some popsicle sticks. So next time I’ll stick some cocktail forks in them and we’ll munch away…

Notes: they didn’t stick to one another, so no problem there. They were sweet and not too hard, and were perfect. Easier popsicles than that are simply not possible 🙂

No pictures yet as we ate them, but next time I’ll photo. In the meantime, a picture of a watermelon:

Mmm…Watermelon…

And finally:

watermelon popsicles

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Quick Fennel

I had fennel to use up. My preferred method is to chop finely with onion in a food processor, and then sauté in olive oil until caramelized and sweet… mmm, yummy! But when I saw I had about 15 minutes until Shabbat came in  (at which point I need to stop cooking, preferably a bit before) I simply couldn’t use that option. What to do?

Microwave to the rescue!

I chopped the fennel, put in a pyrex with olive oil, and microwaved on high for 3 minutes. Checked the taste (I wanted it to be a bit sweet, still), and cooked for two more minutes. Then I added some salt, and the stroke of genius – balsamic vinegar. Another minute in the microwave, and voilà! Side dish done!

Balsamic Fennel

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