Reading Reports

I meant to write about this ages ago, but it’s not very glamorous, so I kept putting it off. However, I think it’s a very helpful thing for Canadian Celiac’s to know about, and I bet you most of you don’t.

What am I talking about? Well sometimes the Canadian Food Inspection Agency does random surveys to test for allergen contamination, sulphites, melamine and other food related issues that come up. Once the surveys are complete, the results are published to the public here: http://www.inspection.gc.ca/about-the-cfia/newsroom/news-releases/eng/1299850547388/1299850604574. Look for any headlines that have the word “Tests” or “Tested” and go from there.

For instance there is one in December 2012 for testing sauces for undeclared allergens. In it the CFIA states, “The CFIA analyzed a total of 250 sauces, marinades and dressings for the presence of allergens (soy, milk, egg, peanuts, almonds, hazelnuts and sesame) and gluten. For this survey, products collected included BBQ sauces, vinaigrettes, hot sauces, steak marinades, salad dressings, sweet and sour sauces and dipping sauces. Of the 250 samples tested, 11 contained one or more of the undeclared allergens. Broken down by allergens, five tested positive for milk protein, four for gluten, one for hazelnut and one for egg. There was no undeclared soy, sesame, peanuts or almonds in any of the samples.”

The headliners are fairly brief and not that detailed, but they usually contain a link to request the full report. These reports can be very interesting. They do not tell you what product was contaminated, but they will say by how much. It’s just good to add to your arsenal of knowledge if you are ever trying to track down a culprit for your current symptoms. If everything you’ve eaten appears to be safe, perhaps you can see trends in these reports that may help you narrow your search. For instance one BBQ sauce in the above mentioned report was found to contain 920 ppm of Gluten. The allowable limit is 20 ppm.

Another report was published in August of 2012 for testing of gluten in ground spices. In the executive summary the CFIA states “Of the 268 samples analyzed, 63 samples (24%) contained detectable levels of gluten ranging from 5 ppm to 20,000 ppm. The majority, 62, of these samples had a level of gluten that would not pose a risk to a sensitive individual. One sample of mace was determined to be in violation of the Food and Drugs Act and Regulations and was recalled.” Again you can request a copy of the report and see for yourself what the results are. It may help you see a trend as to what types of foods may be making you ill. For instance a sample of Cloves was found to have 590 ppm. Also, samples of Coriander, Fenugreek and Cumin were found to contain gluten … some samples just above 20 ppm and some well above 100 ppm. Spices are generally used in small quantities which would be mixed in with other ingredients diluting the final parts per million outcome; but if you are making a curry or festively fall dessert and like me, tend to use heaping tablespoons of many different types of spices, and you are super sensitive, it may just be enough to cause a reaction in you. So take advantage of these reports, request the free detailed versions and get an idea of what it is that might be making you sick, if you just can’t seem to figure it out. The spices report helped me decide to start buying whole spices and grinding my own as often as possible!

Creamy Salmon and Dill Pasta

I love cream sauces, but they are often hard to find without wheat added to them to thicken them up. So I mostly, and sadly, go without. However, having tasted a glorious salmon with capers gf pasta at a restaurant I wanted to imitate it at home. At the restaurant they actually just served the dish without the cream sauce and used olive oil and capers to flavour it, which was surprisingly pretty good. However, sometimes you wish you could just have the item as it was listed on the menu. So this is my attempt to make it at home. I think it is pretty tasty, with a lovely fresh spring feel to it. The next step will be to find a dairy free alternative. Any suggestions?

Creamy Salmon and Dill Pasta

GF Pasta

1-2 salmon fillets (or canned salmon)

1 lemon (for juice and rind)

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 sweet onion, chopped

1 heaping tablespoon minced garlic

1-2 tablespoons of capers

1 cup fresh beans, chopped (or use frozen peas or asparagus)

½ cup gf chicken stock

¼ cup sour cream

1-2 tablespoons fresh dill, finely chopped

salt and pepper to taste

grated parmesan cheese (optional)

To start, preheat your oven to 350 degrees F. Then place some foil on a cookie tray and place your salmon fillets on the foil. Salt and pepper the fillets and drizzle with the juice of half a lemon. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until light pink and flaky.

Meanwhile prepare your gluten free pasta as the package directs.

While the salmon is baking and the pasta is boiling, place a few tablespoons of oil into a frying pan and turn to medium-high heat.  Place the onions, garlic and capers into the pan and fry until the onions are golden. Next add beans or other optional vegetables and cook for 3-5 more minutes. Next add the chicken stock and sour cream and stir until creamy. Lower the heat to medium and allow it to simmer. While it’s simmering you can add the rind of half a lemon, freshly chopped dill and salt and pepper to taste.  Now flake your salmon fillet(s), leaving the skin behind, into the sauce and stir.

Once the sauce has reached the consistency you like and your pasta has cooked, strain the pasta and add it back into the pot. Pour your sauce over the pasta and mix well. Plate the pasta and top with freshly grated parmesan cheese and pepper. 

Chocolate Doughnuts with Peanut Butter Glaze

You wouldn’t know it from the activity or lack there of, on here, that I bought a doughnut baking pan after Christmas. My family tried to find something local for me, but couldn’t find one anywhere. So I went to my trusty old Internet and bought all the stuff I didn’t get for Christmas and could actually afford after. That includes a lovely new doughnut pan.

Lately I have not been doing very well health wise. All of a sudden I have no energy and a bucket load of other not so great symptoms of who knows what. I’m getting a bunch of tests done and starting to feel somewhat better, but it doesn’t make me want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Or come up with fantastic recipes on my own.

So out of a little effort to do something over the weekend, other than sleep, I made a recipe from Easy Eats Magazine. It’s a great electronic magazine that comes out bi-monthly and is full of great information and recipes for those of us who have to be gluten free. The only thing I modified in this recipe is the type of sugar I used, gluten free flour blend and the topping … only because I didn’t have any roasted peanuts on hand.

The doughnuts turned out pretty well, but they are doughnuts so after a day or two they start going a little dry. I’d either eat them up quick or microwave them before eating them once they are a day old. Also, I’m not a fan of the icing. I think I would prefer vanilla bean glaze or to go all out with a chocolate glaze and just indulge in a double chocolate doughnut. But you have to find out one way or another! What icing would you pair with this?

Chocolate Doughnuts with Peanut Butter Glaze

-Based on Easy Eats Magazine Recipe        

Chocolate Doughnut

¾ cup cocoa powder

1½ cups boiling water

2 large eggs, at room temperature

1/3 cup grape seed oil

1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

1½ cups Bob Redmill’s Gluten Free All Purpose Flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

¾ teaspoon salt

1 cup coconut sugar

Peanut Butter Glaze

½ cup peanut butter

¼ cup unsalted butter

½ cup confectioners’ sugar

¼ cup agave syrup

1 cup nuts.com butterscotch crunch 

Preheat the oven to 350ºF.  Grease two nonstick 6-doughnut baking pans with cooking spray. In a medium bowl, whisk together the cocoa powder and boiling water; let cool completely. You can place it in the fridge to speed this up. Whisk in the eggs, oil and vanilla.

Next in a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and granulated sugar. Whisk the egg mixture into the flour mixture until just combined; fill the prepared pans with about ¼ cup batter in each doughnut mold. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 15 to 18 minutes.

While the doughnuts are baking, melt together the peanut butter, butter, confectioners’ sugar and agave syrup in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring until smooth. Dip the doughnuts into the glaze and top with the butterscotch crunch.

Thai Seafood Soup

My freezer is chocker block full of food I don’t eat. It’s a horrible habit that I have. I buy meat and fish when it’s on sale and put it in the freezer to use later in the week. Then I find other food to make. The next week, instead of using what I just put in the freezer the week before, I go and buy new stuff that doesn’t require the forethought to defrost it. I don’t like defrosting food in microwaves because it usually half cooks it. The other methods all require time. I am a very lazy person at the root of it all.

However, the other day I was determined to make something healthy and something that used up some of my freezer stores. I have a lot of seafood in there, so I decided to try and make a delicious soup that a friend makes for me whenever I visit her in Prince Rupert. It was her sister’s recipe and I quite liked it. I had it written down somewhere, but do you think I can find it now? No. So I browsed the Internet for something similar and I found Thai Seafood Soup … sometimes known as Tom Yum Talay Soup. It is very tasty and I highly recommend you try it.

Thai Seafood Soup

-based on a recipe by Darlene Schmidt

6 cups gluten free chicken stock

12 medium raw shrimp, shells removed

2 fillets of black cod (also called Sable Fish), cubed

2 fillets of salmon, cubed

1 stalk of lemongrass

2 kefir lime leaves

1 heaping tablespoon of minced garlic

1 tsp of ground ginger

1 red chili, sliced and seeded

1 - 28 oz can of diced tomatoes

1 bunch of bok choy, finely chopped

1 - 14 oz can of coconut milk

4 tblspn of Braggs Soy Amino’s

Juice of one lime

1 tsp. sugar

Cilantro (to sprinkle on top)

Directions:

First pour the chicken stock, lemongrass and lime leaves into a deep soup pot over medium heat and bring to a boil. Next add ginger, garlic, and chili and reduce heat to medium. Simmer for a few minutes. Next add the seafood, tomato and bok choy. Simmer until the shrimp turns pink and fish becomes flakey. Reduce the heat to medium low and add coconut milk, soy amino’s, limejuice and sugar. Continue to simmer for a few minutes. Remove lemon grass, kefir leaves and chili from soup. Then ladle into bowls and sprinkle with cilantro and serve.

Note: You can switch up the seafood component as you like. You can use crab, mussels or scallops instead of fish or shrimp. 

Tidy Drawers

Lately, I’ve been on an organizing kick. Well, actually, it’s been more like the past year. You can’t really tell by looking around our house on any given day, but I have been slowly trying to organize or update or cut back on things.

I think the biggest kick started after I went for yoga teacher training. When I went to the training I had no intentions of actually teaching yoga. I just wanted to improve my personal practice and some how decided those 6 days a week of 8 hours a day of yoga for four weeks straight was the best way to do that. Sometimes I am a bit of a sucker for self-punishment, although I don’t think of it like that until I’m in the middle of it. You may see this reflected in what I call a “vacation” when I go on 5 day hiking or kayaking trips where I end up working harder then I do at my day job. Ha.

Any ways, after yoga teacher training I actually wanted to teach yoga. I love teaching yoga. I love the idea that I can help people discover how awesome it makes a person feel and I get to feel good too. In order to teach though I needed some room. As my day job’s schedule doesn’t allow me to be reliable enough to go to a studio I brought a studio to me. We emptied our spare room out and I converted it into a very small studio.  Then I decided that it was too small so I switched the studio to the master bedroom and we moved into the spare. It’s a bit squishy in our bedroom, but now I have a studio to teach.

In order to do all this we (mostly my bf) had to sell a bunch of stuff and take a bunch of stuff to our local thrift stores. It felt great to get rid of all these extra things that we didn’t need. This cleansing feeling has continued as I slowly find things that we don’t need anymore or I replace with better quality items. Or in one case (this was a few years back) I switched 3 kitchen appliances for one that did all 3. It got the Hulk Hogan Grill that grills, does pancakes, Panini’s and waffles.  So I saved a little bit of space.

Recently in my quest to be tidier, organized and have fewer things, I discovered a wonderful idea on how to put your laundry away. Now I have folded my laundry and stacked it in neat little piles in my dresser drawers all my life. Then I go to look for something to wear and dig through the neat piles making a big mess. I can never find shirts at the bottom of the pile, because it’s too dark to see and I forget I even own certain shirts because who can find anything when your dresser drawer looks like this:

Well, thanks to my regular blog wanderings, I discovered a new way to put my clothes away.  Of course, I didn’t do it right away because it meant re-organizing all my clothing and I had much more fun things to do. So when I finally got around to doing, I had to go by memory. I cannot find the original blog that inspired me. I have a sneaking suspicion it was Shelterness or Sqwakbox, but I’m at a loss. Whoever wrote the original post; I owe you a debt of gratitude. It’s a simple idea really, but who would have thought stacking your clothes horizontally instead of vertically would make all the difference in the world? It is amazing. Each morning I open my dresser drawers and simply gaze … my eyes dart from the long sleeve section, to the yoga section, to the t-shirt section, pick a colour and voila I have something to wear for the day. So much easier than the old dig and find way. It’s also a whole lot easier to look at:

Upside Down Apple Cardamom Cake with Salted Caramel Sauce

Recently I fell in love with a new gluten free bakery, Cloud 9 Specialty Bakery. For the last few months, I’ve had several people ask me if I had heard of the new gluten free bakery in New Westminster, as it’s been in the news a lot lately. I may go to Vancouver a lot these days, but I don’t venture out that far. So when I was sent to Burnaby for two weeks for work training recently, I made sure to make a token visit to this new bakery (as it was 8 minutes drive from my hotel). Well I made my token visit and then several more because it’s so good! They make mostly dessert treats, but so far everything has been delicious. Their Nanaimo bars, peanut butter brownies, and cupcakes are all perfect. They don’t make a lot of breads, but the ones I tried were what kept me going back. They have an amazing cheese/onion bun and piccalo mini loaves, which go so well with melted butter and soup/chilli. Yum.

On my last visit (sad face) there before returning back to home base, I noticed that they were having a baking contest. Since it’s small and local I thought I’d give it a shot. Here is my contest entry:

Mini Upside Down Apple Cardamom Cake with Salted Caramel Sauce 

(can be turned into cupcakes or doubled to make one large cake)

1 1/2 cups Cloud 9 All Purpose GF Flour

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup coconut sugar

1/2 tsp ground cardamom

1/4 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened

2 eggs

1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

1/4 cup grape seed oil

1 apple, sliced or rings

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. Mix first 8 dry ingredients together in a large bowl. In a small bowl whisk together remaining 4 wet ingredients. Pour wet into dry and mix until evenly incorporated. Get out a 4-6 ramekins and grease them. Place slices or rings of apple on the bottom of the ramekin and then pour in cake batter on top. Bake for ~45 mins. Once cake springs back upon touch and toothpick comes out clean, remove from oven and allow to cool for 5 mins. Then place upside down on a wire rack and cool further. Remove from ramekin. 

While cake is baking you can make your salted caramel sauce.

2 cups granulated sugar

12 tblspn unsalted butter, cut into pieces

1 cup heavy cream

1 tablespoon Himalayan pink salt

Add the sugar in an even layer over the bottom of a heavy saucepan. Heat the sugar over medium-high heat, whisking as it melts. Continue to whisk sugar as it turns a deep amber colour and reaches 350 degrees F. Once the caramel reaches temperature add the butter and whisk until completely melted. Then remove from the heat and whisk in cream and salt. Set aside and allow to cool for 10-15 minutes.

Pour caramel sauce over cake and serve.

Homemade Pasta Sauce

Well folks, I only made it 17 days out of 21 on my sugar free diet kick. As I mentioned before, the first time I did the diet the first week was hell but after that it was pretty good. This time was different, this time I only got better for a bit and then went straight back to feeling unhealthy. I was showing all the signs and symptoms of hypoglycemia. As soon as I went back to eating normally (with a few less sweats) my headaches, nausea, lightheadedness, exhaustion, etc all went away. I still think the diet is a good one if you are trying to break the habit of eating junk food all the time; it just wasn’t working for me. I get that you are supposed to detox and get similar symptoms for the first bit, but I was pretty sure you were supposed to feel better at some point. 

Once I brought some of those lovely carbs back in, like quinoa pasta I was able to create some relatively healthy homemade food. One dinner recently was just spaghetti sauce and quinoa pasta but I’m starting to enjoy making my own homemade sauces. I can’t trust most of the prepackaged sauces as the creamy ones upset my stomach, and other ones usually have something in them that’s not quite right. So today I bring you home made pasta sauce. The basic recipe is simple and you can do all sorts of variations with it.

HOMEMADE PASTA SAUCE

Base:

1 – 156ml can of tomato paste

75 ml water

1 – 796ml can of diced tomatoes, drained

2 tablespoons (or more) of Italian Herb mixture or Herbs Du Provence

¼ teaspoon of sugar (optional, takes away the bitterness of the tomatoes)

Salt and Pepper to taste

Optional:

Olive oil

1 onion, diced

1 sweet pepper, chopped

2 stalks of celery, chopped

1 – 398ml can of black olives

1 package of Hertel’s gluten free hot Italian sausage, sliced into bite size pieces

Instructions:

In a large deep skillet, pour enough olive oil to lightly coat the bottom and prevent anything from sticking. Next place sausage and fry at medium high heat until almost cooked and then add the onions. Once onions are golden and soft and the sausages are cooked, place a lid or plate over the pan and strain any excess grease away. Place the skillet back on the stove and lower to medium heat and then add your can of tomato paste. Fill the can half way with water and add that to the skillet. Stir in the water and paste until it comes to a saucy consistency. You may need to add more water, but wait until the diced tomatoes are added (doing that now) to see how much water they add to the mix.  Next add herbs, salt and pepper and remaining vegetables. Allow too simmer (you may need to lower the heat even further) until vegetables are tender (approximately 10-15 minutes). Scoop finished sauce onto gluten free pasta of your choice and top with fresh grated Parmesan cheese. Enjoy.

If you want you can just do the base recipe and add any other ingredients you like or keep it plain.  Make this base thicker by adding less water and cutting out the diced tomatoes and you’ve got a nice pizza sauce as well.