i've been having a bout of homesickness and all i crave is asian food. unfortunately, there is no decent chinese/straits cuisine to be had anywhere around here so i've had to improvise. unfortunately, chinese cooking seems to take more skill than i have and i have yet to make a decent dish other than congee/porridge. sigh.

anyhow, tonight i thought i'd give this recipe a try. i've found numerous pad thai recipes online and most of them looked far more authentic than this one (honestly, i never thought pad thai would have ketchup in it), but they all called for tamarind, and i haven't been able to get a hold of that around here. so this was the only recipe that i could remotely try.

i used a commenter's suggestion of 1/3 cup ketchup and 1/3 cup maggi sweet chili sauce. i also omitted the serrano chiles since i have 2 kids under 4 years of age eating the dish too. i forgot the cilantro, and substituted the bean sprouts with sugar snap peas.

i accidentally bought firm tofu instead of extra-firm and that meant that the tofu never really browned. it also meant that the tofu stuck to the bottom of my wok, and my wok is still soaking after my futile efforts earlier to scrub it clean.

the kids liked the recipe. M1 will eat anything with noodles and tofu. M2 picked her way through it. the hubby seemed to like it fine. i, on the other hand, was sorely disappointed. it really didn't taste like pad thai. AND my house reeks of fish sauce now. ugh.

probably not a recipe that i'll try again... =(

sigh, i typed this whole long entry and lost it.

here's try #2.

so, i was saying that i've been looking for GF oyster, hoisin and dark soy sauces but haven't succeeded .(light soy sauce is for regular cooking and dipping and dark soy sauce is usually for braising) . i use the wheat-free tamari as a substitute for light soy sauce. it doesn't taste exactly like the chinese light soy sauces but beggars can't be choosers. my MIL intro'ed me to Bragg's which does have the saltiness and works for western recipes that call for soy sauce, but somehow it tastes a little sweet and doesn't seem to quite work for chinese recipes. =(

of course, i had to take a looooong hiatus from cooking with any kind of chinese sauce since M2 was allergic to soy. however, she's since passed the soy challenge and soy is back on our "ok" list again so i'm rocking out!! i've been craving asian food so i started surfing the web to see where i could get my hands on some GF sauces. here's what i found out:

oyster sauce - Lee Kum Kee's Choy Sun Oyster sauce is GF
hoisin sauce - Premier brand's is GF (and supposedly Kame's too)

no luck on dark soy sauce though! =(

on a whim, i looked through the asian food aisle at wegmans when i went on my regular grocery run yesterday and came across not one, but TWO oyster sauces that didn't list wheat in their ingredients!!! Oriental Mascot's Oyster Sauce and Vegetarian Oyster-Flavored Sauce. i bought the first one and i'm going to have to give it a try to see how good it is.

so you know what this means, right? we're going to have ginger chicken with scallions on the menu for this week! i'm so excited! i'll have to let you know how that goes. i bought some snap peas too and think i'll just stir fry those on the side.

i'm also craving something soupy, so i need to go buy some pork and i'll make some pork with szechuan veggie soup (since i have a can of the szechuan veg sitting in my pantry)... mmmm.

once again, i've been lax in udpating this blog. my sis left, then we went away to charleston for a wedding and then my mom came to visit.. during which time she did most of the cooking (yay!!!!) and when i did take turns to cook, i turned to tried and tested dishes. so the food challenge took a brief hiatus. i guess i should have given you guys a little warning (but who am i kidding, i think my readership numbers about 5 right now, and that's optimistic!) regarding the little unscheduled break.

so anyhow, the other night, i tried Spaghetti with 3 tomatoes. was pretty darn good. i used Bole (sp?) corn spaghetti and it was good, except that i forgot that GF pasta doesn't expand as much as regular pasta and there wasn't enough to go around. =( the husband gave it 2 thumbs up and the kids lapped it up. it's all about being "noo-nos" with them! wonder why i don't make pasta more often.

then buoyed by that success, I tried Pasta with Easy Italian Meat Sauce. i paired it with Tinkyada's Rice Fettucine/Pad Thai. i also replaced the ground beef with ground turkey because even though any literature i've come across has said that beef is safe for GF diets, the husband has never had beef growing up (his family believed it wasn't GF) so i've just never cooked with it. the sauce was soooo good. reminiscent of the meat sauces you get at restaurants. the nutmeg was KEY. only problem was that the rice pasta clumped together in the pot and i ended up with inedible chunks of stuck-together pasta. yuck. the corn spaghetti was much better. i'm surprised because the Tinkyada pasta is usually awesome. it's really hard to screw up their short pastas. oh well, lesson learned.

the hubby didn't really like the meat sauce pasta though. and M1 kept on trying to pick around the ground meat. oh well. guess this one may not make it into the rotation which is a pity, given how much i liked it! =(

i apologize for the radio silence on the blog.. my sister was in the country for a few weeks and the past week and a half have been consumed with a trip to st louis to see her and a trip by her out here to see her nieces.

but never fear, i've continued the food challenge.. i've just not been that good about documenting it. somehow the evenings find me sitting in front of the tv aimlessly flipping through channel after channel of lame tv when i could instead be updating here! 

i made this dish about 2 weeks back. it was tasty and relatively easy to make. a couple of  notes though - swiss chard reduces significantly. a fact that i did NOT know when i was making this dish. the wegmans was out of swiss chard in their display so one of their very helpful employees went back into their store and pulled me out a gigantic bunch. i felt bad asking him for a smaller bunch, so i took it and guesstimated that it was much more than the recipe called for. the bunch was so big that i couldn't even fit it in the fridge! 

anyhow, back to making the dish... i chopped up a bunch of swiss chard and proceeded to start the pork. does anyone else but me hate to make any recipe that calls for "sauteeing"? because i sure as heck do! it usually results in a very greasy cooktop and lots of cleaning up after the fact, even when a splatter screen is employed.

so yes, i followed the recipe - i would say this was a little more labor intensive than some of the other recipes i've experimented with. largely because it calls for 2 different pots/pans to be in action at one time. and goodness knows i'm not that dexterous! hah. i started out with a medium skillet and quickly realized i couldn't even fit in half of the swiss chard i had chopped up. it looked like i had enough to feed an army so i discarded the rest. that  turned out to be a mistake, because as mentioned above, swiss chard reduces ALOT. so by the end of the cooking process, i had a measly amount of greens compared to the onions and meat. lesson learnt.

i also replaced the skim milk with rice milk due to M2's dairy allergy.

the polenta was reasonably easy to make. i had to eyeball how much polenta to set aside to make the next day's recipe - polenta with mushrooms and asparagus but that was the only tricky part to it.

the dish turned out pretty well. i was a little skeptical given that i've never had swiss chard and it looked rather ominous and tough when raw. the sherry vinegar gave the dish a nice little kick and the tenderloin was more tender than i had expected. the kids ate it, although M1 surprisingly didn't want anything to do with the creamy polenta which is odd since she's the starch queen of the household and lapped up the polenta when it was in a solid form. she ate the meat which was even more of a surprise. M2 ate the polenta and the meat. neither touched the chard, but that was to be expected. the hubby gave this one his seal of approval so i guess it's on the rotation. now if only someone could tell me how to avoid the oil splatter...

My kids love pasta or "nooo-nos" as M2 calls them. So I pulled this recipe out of an issue of Everyday Food and made it this past Sunday.

I substituted the orecchiette with Tinkyada's fusilli and omitted the parmesan cheese. I also left the chili flakes out because of the kids.

I unfortunately let the pasta cook a little too long and it got all mushy right at the end when I combined the sauce and the pasta. I should have heeded the instructions to cook 1 minute less than the package directions. Practice makes perfect, so hopefully it'll turn out a little better the next time I make it.

The kids liked it, although M1 tried to fish out all the onions. The hubby isn't a fan of mushy/stewy dishes, so I couldn't quite tell whether he didn't like this as much because it was mushy and overcooked or if he just didn't like the dish, period. I guess I'll just have to try it again in order to solve that mystery...

I made this dish last week.

The kids loved it. Finally a chicken dish that M1 will eat! Hallelujah!!! It was easy enough to make. I used a GF all-purpose flour for the seasoning. The best part? There was only 1 pot to clean at the end of it all! Woo hoo! My favorite kind of meal.

Simple review for a simple dish. 2 thumbs up! 

I wanted to try to make a pasta sauce from scratch as opposed to buying a jarred sauce off the shelf. And even though there's no literature that says that people with celiac can't have beef, my husband grew up believing he can't have beef and so we've just worked around that! So I decided to try a turkey bolognese as opposed to a typical beef bolognese.

Here's my attempt at Rachael Ray's recipe. In hindsight, it's not really "from scratch" since it does make use of canned tomatoes, but since there was considerably more work than opening a jar, it counts as "making sauce" as opposed to "buying sauce" in my book. (I don't have very high standards, can you tell?). Wegmans only sells their turkey in 1lb trays so I halved the recipe for all intensive purposes but only used 1lb of turkey so my version was a little less meaty than hers, I guess.

It turned out decent. The kids liked it, the husband ended up having seconds of just the sauce without the pasta so I guess he liked it. The husband is a man of few words, so I couldn't tell you what he really thinks of any of my dishes. Which really is too bad, since he's really my only adult taste-tester. My other 2 testers would eat only french fries if it were up to them.

I'd make this one again... it was easy enough, and like I said, it made me feel good that I didn't just open a jar off the shelf (fine, I opened a can off the shelf... details, details!)

I made this for dinner last night on the grill. The weather in WNY was cooperating and it was a balmy 50+F out and the kids were playing outside while I grilled the pork with some pineapple, sweet potatoes and 2 hot dogs for the kids.

Unfortunately the igniter on our grill conked out sometime between me lighting the first row of burners and the time my husband tried to light the 2nd row of burners so I was preoccupied and forgot to take pictures of the tenderloin before I served it so no picture. =( 

I took the advice of some of the commenters and marinated the meat in a ziploc bag in the fridge for 2 hours before grilling it.

I was worried that I'd overcooked it since we were fiddling with the igniter but it turned out decent. The marinade was delicious, and the tenderloin was juicy and tender. This is definitely a keeper. It was easy enough to make and you can prep the marinade ahead of time (e.g. during naptime).

Hopefully I remember to take a picture the next time I make this, because there WILL be a next time

So my friend Chris, a fellow allergy mom and the brains and brawn behind www.cleanoutthepantry.org posted about this blog on Facebook. So I guess this means I've hit the big  time, and I have to keep up with this blog now, huh? =)

As a brief introduction for the new readers who've popped by, this blog isn't like the typical cooking blogs out there. There aren't any original recipes on this blog. This blog's all about recipes that I've found online/in cookbooks that work for my family's food restrictions given my daughters' allergies and my husband's celiac. I'm a complete cooking novice so most of these recipes are ones that look non-intimidating enough for me to try! 

I sat down one day and figured that there are probably other moms out there who are in the same boat as me - looking for easy recipes that work around the various allergies in their families. And if I can help someone else find a recipe or 2 that they can use, then I'll be stoked! 

Oh, and for easy reference, we're currently on a gluten, dairy, egg, soy, peanut and nut-free diet. We were cutting out peas too until this past week. My younger daughter will be going for a soy challenge in 3 weeks, and if that goes well, we'll be able to add soy back into our diets which will be HUGE for me! 

If anybody has any good recipes, please feel free to drop a comment by so that I can try it out.. I'm always on a lookout for any easy recipes! 

We had this for dinner tonight. I know, I know, I'm efficient, huh? Cook it and then post about it in the SAME night? I'm on fire!!!! 

Ok, enough with the gloating... here's the review.

So, I went to Wegmans and bought a pack of "skin-on, bone-in chicken breasts". I try to stick as closely to the recipe as I can and she DID say that she recommended the skin-on, bone-in version. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell how many chicken breasts were in the package. Turns out there were only 2, but one of them was a HUGE, HONKING piece of chicken breast. So I figure I had enough meat in there to count as 3 chicken breasts. I didn't halve or 3/4 the recipe or anything like that, so I used the prescribed quantities of the rest of the ingredients.

Prepping the meal for the oven was actually pretty easy. The only exception was the halving of 2 pints of itty bitty grape tomatoes. I did it while M2 was napping, but I felt bad about neglecting M1, so I enlisted her help in cutting the tomatoes. Have to say that having a 3.5 year old cut tomatoes with a dinner knife is an interesting endeavour! =) I ended up scoring each tomato and having her saw through the rest of the tomato with her dinner knife. She felt very accomplished, and I managed to cut the whole 2 pints of tomatoes without having to yell "mommy's busy!!!!" once. phew.

The huge chicken breast took quite a bit longer than the 40 minutes to cook. Which sucked because I didn't discover that it wasn't cooked all the way through till I tried to plate it. This explains why the picture above only shows 1 chicken breast (the punier of the 2).

Overall, it was a relatively easy dish to make... even someone like me couldn't really screw it up too badly. My only complaint is that there's quite a bit of washing after - the skillet and the 2 cookie sheets. I managed to get away with only having to rinse the cookie sheets by lining them with aluminum foil. I'm not sure if that changed the way either the tomatoes or the chicken cooked (someone had better enlighten me if using aluminum foil does screw up the cooking chemistry, because it's something I do pretty often to prevent having to scrub out greasy, sticky pans).

The kids didn't really dig the dish. I was surprised seeing as how the kids usually love beans. M2 ate a decent amount of it but M1 wouldn't touch it. I'm guessing the presence of the tomatoes kind of turned her off the beans. The husband had seconds, so I'm guessing he liked it. I thought it was an ok dish. One that may make the rotation but I wouldn't consider it a superstar (does anyone else but me have visions of Molly Shannon every time I hear/utter that word?)