Gluten Free Friday: Things I Stockpile #glutenfreefriday

Welcome back, Gluten Free Friday! I missed you. A lot. This week I'm going to chat a bit about the groceries that I stock up on to make cooking gluten free at home easy. Some of these things might be weird! Some might be predictable. And hardly any of them are specialty products. This isn't a foo foo list of fancy gluten free products: it's more of a survival-of-daily-life-list of naturally gluten free products. Once you can start including as many naturally GF things on your grocery list, you can start saving booku bucks.

Alright. Let's rock.

Rice

I buy my rice by the 25 lb bag at this cute little Asian market. Most grocery stores sell bulk rice, too. Some days I'll just pop a whole bunch of rice in the steamer and snack on it all day. I use it as a side, as a snack, as a main dish, as a boat for carrying other food. Don't want to boil gf pasta and regular pasta for stroganoff? Serve it on rice. It makes it easy to cook one meal for my whole fam. Less pans. Less crying. More eating. If you are going to start investing in that much rice (which, really, it's a lot cheaper in the long run) I'd suggest getting a rice steamer. Mine's awesome and I use it nearly daily.

Corn Tortillas

My cast iron skillet doesn't get put away. It just lives on my stovetop. Not only is it a handy, easy-access weapon against monsters, it's always ready to make me a quesadilla at a moment's notice. Corn tortillas have been another go-to snack for me. I make quesadillas like it's my job. They're a great, GF snack/meal you can make really fast. Here are my fave variations:

 Cheddar, paprika, onion powder, leftover chicken

Mozzerella, tomato paste, pepperoni, oregano

Peanut butter, banana, honey

Which brings me to my next item:

Peanut Butter

 I also am majorly in love with peanut butter. I just bought a mega tub of it last time I was at the store. I eat it by the spoonful when I start feeling wibbly wobbly. I make Peanut Butter Cookies when I want to pretend I'm eating a protein-packed snack. I put it in smooties. I dip apples in it. I put it on rice cakes. It's versatile and yummy.

Canned Beans

A problem some people with Celiac can run into is a lack of fiber. If you relied on bread products to make up most of your daily fiber count, you are going to have to adjust. I sure had to! One way I got more fiber back into my diet was with beans. I never used to like beans as a kid, but now I'm putting them in everything: soups and tacos especially. I try to always have a few cans in the house so I can quick add a bit of fiber into a meal if I see the potential for it. 

Apples

I pretty much always have apples in the house for packed lunches and snacking. I know you can't really stockpile apples unless you have a cold cellar, but I do try to keep them in the house.

Mushrooms

Same as apples, you can't really stockpile produce (unless you get the dried kind, which I don't). But I do buy a box every time I'm at the store. I'm serious. File this in the weird pregnancy category, but I hated mushrooms until after Ernest was born. Now I eat them like crazy. I even made (and scarfed up) stuffed mushrooms on Sunday. Who knew?? Mushrooms are a great source of Vitamin D, another vitamin Celiacs frequently are deficient of. Mushrooms can find a place in almost every meal, so they are a great little supplement.

Tortilla Chips

I love Snyder's of Hanover's GF pretzels, but they are pricey when you end up eating the whole bag in one sitting. Heh. So I try to only buy them once every two weeks, and instead go for tortilla chips. Almost all tortilla chips are gluten free, but my faves are Milagros or Mission. Personal preference, I'm not getting paid or anything. I wish. ANYWAYS. I eat these buggers with hummus like nobody's business. That makes them a healthy snack, right? Hummus is healthy. And they make a good snack that you can share/take to parties and not make everyone feel awkward about eating the stuff you brought because it's "gluten free so only you should eat it." Been there. Done that. Ended up eating a whole plate of cheese dip with my own sad rice crackers because nobody else would touch it. 

Corn Flour

I pretty much always have a big bag of this on hand in case the mood strikes me and I want to make corn bread. When this mood does strike me, it strikes hard and we have about forty pounds of corn bread on our hands. 

Corn Starch

Recipe calls for a sauce to be thickened? Send in the corn starch. If we run out of corn starch, it is guarunteed that I will need it within the next 24 hours. Better to stock up than have runny, sad sauce. Or worse, sauce that is nice because you gave in a thickened it with flour but now that means you have to watch sadly as everyone else enjoys the sauce. Except you. Been there, my friends, I have been there.

That wraps up GFF for this week. What do you stock up on in your house? What items make managing Celiac at home easier for you?

Have a lovely weekend!

-Carolyn

A Day of Canning

Last week I had the honor to share the kitchen with two very talented women: +Pyper Jean, my dear friend, and Barbara Salsbury from Solutions for Preparedness. On a day that Pyper and I were supposed to spend making our planners for next year, we ended up having an all out can-a-thon and calling Barbara over to assist.

Both Barbara and Pyper have been canning for years and years and years. While both my Grandmas can from their gardens, their productions are not on the scale that Barbara and Pyper undertake. That is, my Grandmas haven't canned on this scale during my lifetime. So, seeing what we could put up in just one steam-filled day (and knowing that Pyper never sleeps and has been canning stuff each week since about June) was astounding to me. It still blows my mind!!

Grape jelly!! That actually jelled!!

We started out with beets and ended up with 8 1/2 quart jars. Though I'm not fond of pickled beets, Pyper's grandma's recipe sure did sound interesting. It involved cloves. I'm not sure whether my Grandma uses cloves in hers, but like I said, it was interesting.

After the beets were done, I thumbed through Pyper's canning book for a while. I found a recipe for "Thanksgiving" jelly: apple, raspberry, cranberry. Well, there were raspberry bushes and apple trees in the yard, and Pyper just happened to have a bag of cranberries. We set out and picked raspberries and apples and canned that jelly fresh off the vine/tree. What an experience!! And I tell you what, that stuff smelled SO AMAZING. Like tart, cinnamony, holiday cheer. We got 8ish 1/2 pints of that yumyum stuff.

Next up was grape jelly. That's where Barbara came in. She and Pyper have known each other for quite some time. Since Barbara literally wrote the book on canning, Pyper enlisted her to help make sure the grape jelly actually jelled: something I also struggle with. Syrupy jelly. Runny jelly. Apparently, the trick is you add lemon juice and pectin and BAM. Thick, gooey, jelled jelly. Who knew?! Well, Barbara did, apparently.

And you have to boil it until, "it looks like it's going to turn into hard candy!" Stir constantly. Like, constantly, constantly. Like, don't stop stirring while someone takes your picture, constantly.

Me stirring under the supervision of Barbara

I don't remember how many pints we got of grape jelly, because we had a lot of odd shaped jars that we used. I do remember that our one batch was the exact perfect amount to fill up all those oddball jars. Amazing!!

After jelly, it was time for tomatoes. We blanched, peeled, stewed, and canned 8ish quart jars of 'maters. We has some tomatoes set aside for tomato basil jam. Unfortunately, we were completely out of sugar so the jam had to wait for another day.

My haul. Yumyumyum.

Pyper stopped over on Sunday to drop of my haul of our canning adventure.  I am beyond excited to have such a full pantry!! I feel like such the little homesteader. I cannot wait to get out of apartment living and into a house so that I can have my very own garden yet again. Siiiiiiggghhh.

I just love self-sufficiency.

Something I Never Thought I Would do...

These last few days have been full of activities I never really thought I would do. As you know, I debuted on Twitter yesterday which is something I never really thought I'd be into. But I did it, and now @LastinLineShop is a real-deal Tweet factory. The other major "never woulda thunk I'd be doing this" activity is drying berries.

That's right. Dehydrating dem yum-o red, red Raspberries.  Raspberries that apparently produce fruit here until it snows. Crazy! But yummy.

 
I was kind of adverse to the idea of drying fruit-type stuff. Why not just eat it all? Drying seemed like extra, silly work in my mind. Oh how wrong I was.

I found myself once again the recipient of the benevolent +Pyper Jean's produce and was a bit overrun with fruit. Which is by no means a complaint. I seriously cannot get enough raspberries. But seeing as my freezer is currently packed to the gills with other produce courtesy of my friend, I needed to either eat them all or....

...dry them.

Now, Pyper reassured me that the berries are amazingly wonderfully delicious once dried. To convince me 100%, she had me try some she had dried. I will admit, I was skeptical; but, holy moly, mother of sweet berry goodness were they delicious!! They start out tasting a tiny bit bitter, then the flavor blossoms into this deep, tart, concentrated berry bomb in your mouth. No exaggeration.

Well, maybe a little exaggeration, but they are yummy, and that's what matters.

So, thoroughly convinced that drying the fruit was the way to go, I was sent on my merry way with a dehydrator to borrow and a bucket of berries. 10ish hours later, my sweet treats were ready. Mhhhhhhh.

Who'd a thunk?

Super easy, super yummy. In my mind that's a win.

Have you ever dried berries?