This month I have experimented with a few different gluten free items. Some have turned out successful…others…not so much.
The first was when my dad told me he really wanted pizza. No problem. But then I remembered that the gluten free pizza crusts from the Superstore actually aren’t very good. They come frozen, so when you cook them they’re kind of mushy and soft, and don’t cook evenly. So I thought I would try something else. Well, we’ve just discovered these brown rice tortillas. So I thought I would try using them for a thin pizza crust. I have found that if you put two together (to make it a little more sturdy), it works quite well. These tortillas come frozen, but they thaw really fast because they are so thin. I take them out of the freezer while I’m preparing the pizza toppings and they are thawed by the time I’m ready to top the pizza! And because they are so thin they cook really fast. As long as all of your toppings are pre-cooked, or are just veggies, then the pizzas only really need to be in the oven about 5 minutes, just until the cheese melts. Of course, they can cook longer if need be.
My second experiment was when my mom gave me a bag of fresh cranberries that a co-worker had given her. She said, “here, try and do something with these.” So I thought I would try to make a cranberry loaf. Should be simple enough. I decided to use my recipe for banana loaf, and just substitute the cranberries, with a little bit more sugar to counter the sourness of the berries. I was excited and thought it would come out well. So I put it all together, put it in the oven and set the timer. Normally my banana loaf cooks for about an hour. Well, at about 30 min I realized that while I followed my recipe well, I missed an important ingredient…butter! So I let the loaf cook the full amount of time and took it out of the oven to check it out. Well…it didn’t work! Not surprising, considering there was no butter! It was very very dense. My brave mom did try a bite, just to see what it tasted like; she said the flavour was ok, but clearly missing the butter! So at this point I am 1 for 2.
The third experiment was gluten free scones. Now these I was really excited about. I’ve looked at a few different scone recipes before, made a few different kinds, so I sort of combined the basic recipes, tweaked a few things, used my gluten free flour, and decided to make ham, cheese and green onion scones. When they came out I was very critical. My dad loved them, my mom thought they were dry and I ate them all up! The ham flavour didn’t really come through, so next time I think I would just do cheese and green onion. They weren’t very light, but they were flaky. They were kind of dense-ish flaky biscuits. Because they were more savoury then sweet, I thought they were more biscuits then scones. Next time I will try them with raisins or maybe cranberries (and remember the butter!). But, all in all a success, so now I am 2 for 3.
My last experiment was gluten free apple crisp. This one was great! My mom and I had been talking about different desserts, because normally it’s all the same, fruit or ice cream. So I thought, a gluten free apple crisp can’t be that hard to make. And it wasn’t. It was actually relatively easy. I just had to make sure that I had gluten free oats and good apples. So I put it all together and baked it during dinner one night so we could have it for dessert. We ate it warm from the oven with some vanilla ice cream on top, and it was fabulous! Any leftovers that we had were gone by the next afternoon. And I don’t think it tasted any different than regular apple crisp.
So my month of experiments has left me 3 for 4. If only I had remembered the butter in the cranberry loaf!
