A Gluten and Dairy Free Week for Food Lovers

I've mentioned before that I love spending Saturday mornings with a coffee doing my menu planning. You know what I enjoy on Friday nights? Writing with wine. So here we go.

I'm going to share with y'all what I've been eating this week since going cold turkey on dairy and gluten for now. I hope that this will be helpful to any other food lovers who eat this way, whether by choice or necessity. I will not share the minutiae of what I put in my belly every week, I swear! This first week I was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn't cry myself to sleep for want of bread. Perhaps because I ate enough bread dipped in gravy (omg that is the best right?!?) to last me for months during Sunday dinner at my parents this past week. Anyway. Moving on.

Monday was not completely gluten-free. I was still on the fence about eliminating gluten but I felt super guilty eating toast and crackers knowing I was advised not to. 

Not included below is my morning coffee with almond milk and sugar. This is a given and a must every day. Yes, the almond milk tastes a bit different, but I still love my coffee. I also drink at least 2 cups of green tea a day at work.

Monday
Breakfast: Whole grain toast with avocado.
Snack: Smoothie with mixed berries, banana, baby spinach, cold green tea
Lunch: Carrots and red peppers with hummus, Triscut crackers, a hard-boiled egg topped with a little Miracle Whip and chopped spicy picked green beans.
Snack: Green tea. Apples with Sun Butter.
Dinner: Roast chicken with weeknight risotto (recipe below)

Tuesday
Breakfast: Overnight Oatmeal with almond milk, flax, mixed berries. (Oats are kind of debated whether or not they acceptable on a gluten-free diet. I'm allowing it. I'm the boss of me.)
Snack:  Smoothie with mixed berries, banana, baby spinach, cold green tea
Lunch: Leftover chicken and risotto
Snack: Apples with Sun Butter
Dinner: Quiche made with a shredded-potato crust with sausage, tomato, onion, basil. Water instead of dairy used in the egg mixture.
Snack (after boot camp): Smoothie with coconut water, ground chia seeds, cocoa powder, almond butter

Wednesday
Breakfast: "Breakfast salad". I was out of oats and decided I wasn't going to eat bread, so I wandered around my kitchen peeking in the fridge and cupboards until I had 5 minutes left to wolf down some food. I mixed up a chopped hard-boiled egg and avocado with kale and mixed in some balsamic dressing. This was not my best work.
Snack: Smoothie with mixed berries, banana, baby spinach, water
Lunch: Quinoa salad made with sun-dried tomatoes, avocado, red peppers, cucumber, chicken, balsamic dressing
Snack: Apples with Sun Butter
Dinner: Stir-fry with tofu and brown rice
Snack: Flourless Nut Butter Cookie with almond milk

Thursday
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs topped with chopped tomato and avocado. I didn't love this. The hot egg + cold avocado and tomato wasn't my favorite. Better than the "breakfast salad" though.
Snack:  Smoothie with mixed berries, banana, baby spinach, water
Lunch: Quinoa salad same as yesterday
Snack: Salt and Vinegar Roasted Chickpeas. Dark Chocolate.
Dinner: Twice Baked Sweet Potatoes (recipe below)
Snack (after training run at the track):  Smoothie with coconut water, ground chia seeds, cocoa powder, Sun Butter. Nut butter cookie.

Friday
Breakfast: The tomato-avocado scramble improves a notch. Notably better mixing the tomato and avocado in the pan with the eggs while cooking. My next experiment will be making a salsa from the tomato and avocado and putting this on the eggs. Stay tuned.
Snack: same smoothie as every other day. And green tea. Of course.
Lunch: Salad with chicken, canellini beans, carrots, red pepper, Asian Sesame dressing
Snack: Apples with Sun Butter. Roasted chickpeas. Dark chocolate. A couple Starburst candies (it's Friday, ok!?!)
Dinner: ActiFry chicken wings with sweet-chili sauce, baked potato wedges, raw veggies (carrots, cucumber, snap peas). Have we talked about the T-Fal ActiFry before? I don't think so. Fantastic appliance. Read up on it. Then get one. For example, I cooked a pound of wings in it tonight, they crisped up beautifully, and I poured off almost a quarter cup of fat (potatoes cooked in schmaltz anyone?). Talk amongst yourselves.
Snack: Is red wine considered a snack? And a cookie.

WEEKNIGHT RISOTTO

Serves 4

An Amy Original 

Traditional risotto involves a lot of standing by the stove and stirring. This quick and easy version is a good alternative when you don't have the time or patience for babysitting food. Or perhaps you are actually physically babysitting a child (aka parenting). Measurements are approximate. Tweak as needed. If you are not avoiding dairy, mix in an knob of butter and some grated Parmesan cheese at the end if so inclined.

• olive oil  
• 1 small onion, chopped finely
• 1/2 of a 750g bag Arborio rice
• small handful sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
• 3 cups good chicken stock
• salt and pepper
• 1 small to medium zucchini, chopped small
• fresh basil, julienned

Heat a glug of olive oil in a pot over medium heat. Add onion, saute, stirring occasionally, until translucent. Add rice, stir for 2 minutes. Add stock and sun-dried tomatoes. Bring to a boil. Cover and reduce heat to keep at a simmer until rice is cooked through with just a bite at the center (like al dente pasta). If the pot is dry before the rice is cooked add some more stock or water. If your rice is super watery with only 5-10 minutes left of cooking, remove the lid and increase the heat a bit.

Meanwhile, heat another glug of oil in a small pan over medium-high heat. Add zucchini, saute until golden-brown on all sides, stirring occasionally. Set aside.

Mix most of zucchini (plus butter and Parm, if using) into risotto once rice is cooked. Serve with a garnish of the remaining zucchini and the fresh basil.

TWICE BAKED SWEET POTATOES
Serves 3
An Amy Original
It's easiest to cook the potatoes and garlic the night before and refrigerate until ready to use.

• 1 head garlic
• olive oil
• 3 sweet potatoes
• 1/2 of a 540mL can of chickpeas, rinsed
• salt and pepper
• 1/4 cup water
• 4 slices bacon, sliced into lardons
• fresh basil, julienned

Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Cut top of garlic off to expose the cloves. Drizzle with olive oil and wrap in foil. Place on a baking sheet. Prick sweet potatoes with a fork. Place alongside garlic on baking sheet. Bake 45 minutes, or until sweet potatoes are soft all the way though when tested with a sharp knife and garlic cloves are soft and caramelized. Cool to the touch.

Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Cut sweet potatoes in half lengthwise. Carefully peel off skin, taking care to keep in one piece. If it doesn't peel off easily, scoop out the flesh with a spoon. Place skins on a foil-lined baking sheet. Place flesh in a food processor with a glug of olive oil, chickpeas, water, salt and pepper to taste. Squeeze half of the garlic cloves out of their skins and add to sweet potato mixture. Puree until smooth. Scoop onto potato skins. Bake 20-30 minutes or until heated through.

Meanwhile, cook bacon in a pan, transferring to paper towel lined plate once crisp. Serve sweet potatoes with bacon and basil sprinkled on top.

What's for Dinner

Photo Credit: LCBO

I've kind of lost my cooking mojo the last couple of weeks. For one, I was sick for a week. Tyler cooked dinner for most of that week. When I had an appetite I was treated to pierogis with a side of hot dogs. I am not even exaggerating for comedic effect.

The other thing is, the daily grind of getting home from working and getting dinner on the table is wearing me down. I had planned a bunch slow cooker recipes for last week, but even then, most take some prep either the night before or the morning of. So instead of using ground beef for slow-cooker meatloaf on Friday, I made pasta with ground beef mixed with a can of tomato soup and a can of cheddar cheese soup. Not my healthiest creation to be sure. And wouldn't you know it, Tyler and Parker ate two servings each. They literally shoveled it in. God help me.

I've rounded up some recipes for quick, easy, healthy recipes this week. Here's hoping all will go according to plan!

Western Omelette Sandwich with Root Vegetable Home Fries from LCBO Food and Drink

Fusilli Rosa from LCBO Food and Drink

Chicken Shawarma from T-Fal ActiFry in pitas with cucumber, tomato, hummus

Kale Salad with Apples, Bacon, Chicken, Pecans, Feta adapted from Lauren's Latest

Pretzel-Crusted Pork Schnitzel from Bon Appetit with Roasted Root Vegetables. I am making the brine for the pork right now so it's ready to go the night before I make this.

This Week's Menu

Every time I see a commercial for dishwasher soap where the woman takes dishes out of the dishwasher, holds them up, and gives a satisfactory nod before putting the glass away, I think, "How ridiculous, nobody does that." I totally did that today. I started using a different dishwasher soap and I kept looking at my glasses and utensils and thinking how sparkly they looked. Who is this person!? If I start talking about buying a minivan just shoot me.

Monday: Hoisin Glazed Salmon with Indian-Spiced Lentil Mango Salad I already posted this recipe I was so stoked about it.

Tuesday: Chicken and Cheese Enchiladas Tyler made these while I worked late Tuesday. Easy recipe, but I wasn't a fun of soggy tortillas.

Wednesday: Pasta with Roasted Red Pepper and Goat Cheese Alfredo Sauce  (photo above) I have made this dish twice now. It is fantastic and easy. We had Tyler's cousin over for dinner on Wednesday. He lives by himself and seems to survive on beer. I invite him over once in a while to get some vegetables into him. Oh, and we do enjoy his company too. This recipe is now in regular rotation in our house. You can roast peppers under your oven broiler or on the barbeque. I swap milk for cream in the recipe.

Thursday: Grilled Cheese with Roasted Tomato Soup I loosely followed this soup recipe. Usually I use a recipe from America's Test Kitchen for Creamy Creamless Tomoato Soup. Both recipes are good.

Friday:  Pasta with Slow Cooker Eggplant Tomato Sauce. Very easy to throw everything into the slow cooker, I did this in the 10 minutes I had before leaving for work today. Used white wine instead of red as this is what I had. Very good. The eggplant add chunky texture but picks up all the flavours of the sauce. If you use no-salt-added tomatoes add a teaspoon of kosher salt to the ingredients in the slow cooker.

What's Cookin' Hot Stuff

Falafel Wraps

 No seriously, it's freakin hot out (I love it), so we will actually not be eating much hot stuff. I'm going to try to avoid turning on the oven this week. Here's what I'm cooking up.

Falafel Wraps via Jamie Oliver I finally got around to making these. Yum! But of course, give me a recipe and I have a hard time following it exactly. I'm not big into rules. I scaled back the allspice by half, which was a good call cause it would have been really overpowering. Instead of the sides and sauces I made a slaw similar to the one I made for my birthday bbq. And I've recently crossed the line from cilantro-hater to cilantro-lover, so I sprinkled a liberal amount over my falafel.

Chicken, Green Bean, Corn, and Farro Salad via Bon Appetit I'm using bulgar instead of farro

Grilled Salmon via All Recipes with Black Bean Confetti Salad via Smitten Kitchen We hardly ever eat fish at home because I don't want to deal with the whining and complaining about it. From my husband. Parker and I love fish. Tyler will have to suck it up.

Chicken Korma via Jamie Oliver OMG can you believe I still haven't made this recipe? I just keep moving it along week to week. It's happening this week. I marinated the chicken today.

Malaysian Beef Curry via Bon Appetit Using the slow cooker is perfect in the summer. Doesn't heat up the house like the oven. However, there is nary a vegetable to be found in the recipe, which I didn't realize until just now, so I'll have to figure something out later. It may end up being corn and peas mixed into rice.

Week of June 30

Call me crazy, but I love planning out our meals for the week. I've always done it since Tyler and I first bought a house and moved in together (8 years ago!). Sure, meals have evolved from "Kraft Dinner with Tuna and Peas" but the process has not changed much.

I sit at the kitchen table, usually Saturday mornings, with my coffee and laptop (or a few of the multitude of cookbooks I own) and go through recipes, choosing what to make based on the season, what we have in the freezer, or just what looks yummy. These days Parker sits beside me and colours (or watches Thomas, I'll admit). I usually ask for his input, but at almost-three his contribution this week was "ummmm... I don't know... I don't like dinner", but we'll get there eventually.

Chicken Korma This is what I wanted to make most last week and I didn't end up making it. I have a problem remembering to take meat out of the freezer. We ended up having pizza last week instead- not because of the frozen meat situation, but because pizza on the Friday of a long weekend feels like the right thing to do. 

Courgette Carbonara via Jamie Oliver This is one of my favorite recipes from one of my favorite cookbooks- Jamie Oliver at Home. This book inspired me to start a vegetable garden. It turns out I can't keep flowers alive but I can grow tomatoes like nobody's business. Also, isn't courgette a cute word? Much better than zucchini.

Falafel Wraps with Grilled Veg via Jamie Oliver Doesn't that photo just inspire you to eat something delicious and healthy?

Grilled Zucchini Caprese Sandwiches via Cooking Light (pictured above) There's a lot of zucchini happening this week at my house. I didn't even grow it this year. I do have basil in the garden though. I modified the recipe and made a pesto which I spread on one side of the bread.

And this week in food...

Ok guys, week two of sharing my meal plan. Somehow a couple of meals got shifted to this week from last week. What did we eat in place of those two meals? One night we went to a barbqeue at my father-in-law's, the other...? I honestly couldn't tell you. How is it even possible that I don't remember making a random meal after work?

• Chicken Stew with Sweet Potato Biscuits from last week

• Pork Roast with Braised Green Onions and Couscous also from last week

• Souvlaki with Greek Orzo Pasta Salad I'll post the pasta salad recipe later in the week

• Turkey Burgers with Sweet Potato Fries

• something vegetarian with chickpeas maybe. We've been eating a lot of meat lately which is kind of weird for us.

• Chicken Korma

So, the burgers. I was going to make these burgers from Skinny Taste but they took another direction. They turned out to be about half meat and half veg since I kept just finding stuff in my fridge and chucking it in the bowl. Left over chopped up peppers? In they go. There was some cucumber in with the peppers, so that got mixed in. I have a giant tub of baby spinach and since it's usually up to just me to eat about a kilo of spinach since nobody else will touch it, I thought I'd sneak some of that in too. A hunk of feta cheese was found lurking in the fridge too. Ok... I have a theme now... Greek Turkey Burgers! Genius. Some dill, parsley, and garlic powder rounds these bad boys out.

Tyler barbequed the burgers since I am banned from the barbeque. This is a recent development that occurred when I set a spatchcocked chicken on fire. And I wasn't paying attention so it probably burned for a good 10 or 15 minutes. Whoops. But you know what? I may be on to something here. That chicken cooked through in 15 minutes and was wonderfully juicy and smoky. Once you dig through the char of course.

Where there are burgers, there are baked sweet potato wedges. In my house anyway. I've told you how I make sweet potato fries before, right? Hmmm... a search of Four Seasons Kitchens says no. "Recipe" below as well.

GREEK TURKEY BURGERS

Serves 4

• 1 lb ground turkey
• 1 sweet pepper, finely chopped (roasted red peppers would be good too- use a couple whole ones)
• big handful baby spinach, chopped
• 1 tsp dried dill
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• small handful fresh parsley, finely chopped
• 1/3 cup crumbled feta cheese
• 1/4 cup bread crumbs
• salt and pepper (go easy on the salt since you've got feta in there, big up on the pepper)
• buns, tomatoes, condiments (including Sriracha- turkey burgers always need Sriracha!) to serve

Preheat grill to high heat- 500 degrees F. Place turkey and remaining ingredients through to salt and pepper in a large bowl. Mix to combine (your hands are the best tool here). Divide mixture and shape into 4 patties. Grill over direct heat for 6 to 7 minutes per side or until cooked through.

BAKED SWEET POTATO WEDGES

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Peel sweet potatoes and cut into wedges. Pile on baking sheet lined with foil, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, toss to coat potatoes. Spread potatoes into one layer. Bake 10-15 minutes on middle rack. Flip wedges, bake another 8-10 minutes until potatoes are tender.

What Are We Eating

I shared in my last post how the daily grind of weeknight meals is sapping my cooking motivation. I'm going to try something new here. I always plan our weeknight meals anyway, so I will post what we my meal plan for the week. Hopefully this will inspire me to be more creative and share some ideas with everyone else as well. Please share in the comments your quick dinners as well... sharing is caring folks.

Here is the plan for this upcoming week.

• Chicken and Spinach Pasta Bake via Pinterest

• Mini Tacos via Pinterest (I made these last night. They were cute and really good. I sneaked about a 1/3 cup of pumpkin puree in to up the veg factor)

• Slow Cooker Thai Chicken with brown rice I'll use almond butter rather than peanut butter though as Parker is allergic of course. I've been meaning to use my slow cooker more, especially because I got a small appliance switch for my Rogers Smart Home Monitoring system specifically to be able to turn the slow cooker on/off from work (from my iPhone...that is so cool, right?!? George Orwell couldn't even conceptualize that technological breakthrough)

• Perogies with some kind of side vegetable, probably peas and corn thawed in the microwave. No, I'm not making perogies from scratch. This is my lazy meal for that inevitable day that I don't want to cook anything.

• Roasted Pork Loin with Braised Scallions and Couscous

• Chicken Stew with Sweet Potato Biscuits The chicken stew is from my freezer. I have no idea what's in it or what the recipe is. All I know is it is labelled "Chicken Stew Feb 2013" so we'd better eat it.

One Year Ago: Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Two Years Ago:  Panini Bar

Three Years Ago: Aloha Pork Kebabs