Gluten-free cheddar scallion biscuits

Before my gluten-free days, I had an infrequent, periodic passion for biscuits. I was usually immune to their buttery charms, but once or twice a year, I would crave them something fierce, and only McDonalds sausage egg and cheese biscuits could make things right. I would order one of these monstrosities, devour it to the disgust of my companions, and be sated for the better part of a year. Let’s face it: my family originates variously from England and the Mid-Atlantic US – we just don’t eat a lot of biscuits. These are the first biscuits I have made since going gluten-free, except for a disaster more than a year ago in which I used coconut milk (??) for the buttermilk and created a tray of hockey pucks that somehow gave me a terrible stomach ache. But enough about all that. Let’s talk about these biscuits, because I promise you that these are best thing I have put in my belly in last few months. Sharp cheddar cheese and butter were always meant to be together, and the slight sharpness of scallions elevates this to another level. And by “another level”, I mean “a higher plane of existence.”

I tore the top off of one of these biscuits while they were cooling, and ohmygod, I nearly passed out with joy. I literally stood motionless in the kitchen massaging my belly in ecstasy. I didn’t know that people actually did that, but I do, so apparently they do. Ok, let’s try to speak intelligently about these biscuits. You rub some butter into a mess of gluten-free flours, add an enormous amount of cheese and a somewhat smaller amount of scallions, stir in some buttermilk, plop on a sheet, bake. But let’s elaborate on that little word “bake,” shall we? After ten minutes in the oven the cheese is melting and the scallions are softening, losing their sharp edges and becoming totes BFFs with all the other ingredients and you’re standing there in the kitchen, inhaling and feeling so smart that you invited all these kids to your party. After 15 minutes in the oven the cheese has oozed out and is rapidly becoming delightfully crusty, and the interior of the biscuit has hollowed out into a crispy shell, with tender crumbs and streaks of melty cheese and little morsels of scallion magic suspended inside and GOOD LORD. Just bake these. Please.

I came across this recipe in a familiar way, through Smitten Kitchen. Deb has this uncanny ability to sift through the vast reams of recipes in the world and tell you which ones you should use. Because face it, there are lots of shitty recipes out there. Deb’s passion for stellar ingredients and her dedication to finding the exact ratio or technique that will yield the most stunning results has led me to many delicious destinations. She reinterpreted these biscuits with blue cheese, but I went to the source, Epicurious, to find the original, highly flexible recipe she used. For flour proportions, I consulted Gluten-Free Girl. Shauna has got gluten-free baking down pat, and while I sometimes can’t use her recipes because of her reliance on eggs, her flour recommendations are usually spot on. I tweaked her flour combination for her biscuit recipe to fit into the measurements for the Epicurious one.

At this point, it would be dishonest for me to withhold the information that I ate 7 of the 8 biscuits my halved recipe produced within three hours of baking them. I have no justification for this behavior. In fact, the only reason I didn’t eat all 8 instantly was that I forced myself to save one for the morning so I could photograph it in daylight.

Gluten-Free cheddar scallion biscuits (adapted from Epicurious, with an assist from Gluten-Free Girl)

1/2 cup minus 1 tablespoon potato starch

1/2 cup sorghum flour

1/2 cup tapioca starch

1/2 cup sweet rice flour

1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt (omit if your margarine is salted)

6 tablespoons cold butter or margarine, cut into 1/2-inch pieces, plus 1 tablespoon, melted, for baking

8 oz sharp cheddar cheese, coarsely grated (about 2 cups)

3 scallions, finely chopped

1 cup buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 450 deg F.

Whisk together all dry ingredients in a mixing bowl until well-combined. Add the butter and mix with your fingertips until small crumbs form and you no longer have big butter chunks. Stir in the cheese and scallions. Pour in 3/4 cup buttermilk, and stir until just combined. If the dough is still stiff, add the remaining 1/4 cups.

Drop dough onto parchment paper-covered baking sheets to make 12-16 biscuits. Brush the top of each biscuit with a small amount of melted butter. Bake for 14-16 minutes or until golden.

Can be stored in a Ziploc at room temperature, but they are infinitely better right out of the oven, so eat as soon as possible. Like you needed an excuse.

These biscuits are ridiculously flexible. You can swap out the cheese for one you prefer. On commenter on Epicurious substituted rosemary for the scallions, which sounds so delicious that I am tempted to whip up another batch right now. You could sub any herb or onion-variant here. Garlic and cheddar? Mmm.

Southeast Asian chicken noodle soup

Sometimes I worry about categorizing something as a particular kind of ethnic cuisine when I don't actually know how people of that culture prepare the food. Sometimes I know that my preparation is not authentic in the least, and I think: do I need to qualify this with "Cheater's"? But then, I spent a couple months in Vietnam and Thailand joyously devouring every dish of food that came my way (ok, maybe not the fetal quail eggs), and I know that the flavors in this soup do accurately represent the flavors used in southeast Asian cooking. And with my tiny kitchen, Stateside location, and aversion to boiling carcasses for stock, this is about the closest I'm going to get.

Another reason for this soup is that I recently started a new medication that makes me chronically, constantly nauseous. It's at a pretty low level, but the loss of appetite is the biggest problem. This was when I realized how weird my body is. During my endless days of nausea, here are the foods that sounded good to me: caramel. pho. cheese. biscuits. dosa. beef. pho. caramel. did I mention pho? Ok, how about some brothy soup? Brothy SE Asian-inspired soup?(We'll get to the caramel obsession eventually)

So, here we are. This soup is fragrant from the lemongrass and ginger, slightly spicy from the chili and garlic, savory from the chicken broth. Fabulous. It's not very filling, due to the lack of protein or complex carbs, but it's a nice snack.

Southeast Asian chicken noodle soup

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1/2 inch segment fresh ginger, finely chopped

1 inch segment of lemongrass, finely chopped

Oil for sauteeing (I used coconut oil)

2 cups chicken broth

A few drops of fish sauce

1 1/2 - 2 cups cooked rice noodles

Chopped fresh cilantro and scallions

Lime juice

Heat the oil in a medium-sized pan over medium heat. Add the garlic, lemongrass, and ginger and saute until fragrant. Add chicken broth. Reduce heat to simmer. Add fish sauce. Cover and simmer for 15 or so minutes.

Put a big handful of rice noodles in your bowl, and pour broth over top, through a sieve if you want to avoid the awkward little pieces of lemongrass and ginger. Garnish with cilantro and scallions and add a squeeze of lime juice.

Scenes from Chicago

I was in Chicago with my boy this past weekend. I hadn't seen him since early July, so this visit was much-needed. We ate our way through the city, visiting a farmer's market in Wicker Park, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and a few tasty restaurants. Oh, and the biggest Whole Foods in the world. Seriously. I could move in there.

This Whole Foods had a dedicated GF bakery, where we purchased some very tasty eggless pizza crusts. Too late, I realized that these crusts contained dairy. And when I say "contained dairy" I mean milk was the first ingredient. Oops. They were extremely tasty, especially with heirloom tomatoes, piles of herbs, and fresh mozzarella on top.

Raspberry gratin (in praise of ugly food)

One of the problems I have with summer produce is that the making-too-much-work-for-myself, creative part of me wants to try new things, combine produce with genius ingredients and chop or bake or blanch until perfect. But then I start eating the berries or peaches raw out of their little green box and then doing anything to them except putting them in my mouth seems sacrilegious. So when Deb of Smitten Kitchen posts some terribly awkward pictures of some lovely concoction that elevates raspberries to their singing best while leaving them basically raw, I didn't hesitate.

Deb's recipe calls for three ingredients: raspberries, sour cream, and dark brown sugar. I recently inherited dark brown sugar from a friend who was moving out of her apartment and needed a loving home for her baking supplies. But sour cream? They don't make that out of goat milk. I barely paused a second, though, because even in the days before my allergies were diagnosed and I regularly sullied my system with dairy products of every persuasion, I often used plain full-fat yogurt as a sub for sour cream. The adorable goats came through again.
However, this yogurt is quite runny and I knew I would need something of a more Greek consistency for this recipe. I jury-rigged a draining apparatus: paper towels laid in a sieve, balanced over a mixing bowl. Spooned about 2.5 cups of yogurt in, covered with another paper towel, and let drain for a couple hours. This process is necessary because regular yogurt has too much water, and will make this a runny, soggy mess if you don't drain it beforehand.
After draining the yogurt you fold it together with raspberries and top with brown sugar, then broil for a few minutes. The brown sugar melts and caramelizes and the yogurt gets barely warm, but the raspberries are only softened the smallest amount and it all melts together and gah. It is so good. I hope you will forgive these extremely unappetizing pictures and just believe me that this is the simplest, tastiest thing to do to raspberries. Even if they kind of look like brains afterwards.

Raspberry gratin (adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

This recipe has very simple proportions, and they can certainly be tweaked. I actually didn't measure anything - I used the raspberries I bought at the farmer's market, the yogurt I had left, and enough brown sugar to cover the top.

2 cups fresh raspberries, washed and dried very carefully

2.5 cups of full-fat yogurt, or 2 cups of Greek yogurt/sour cream

1 cup dark brown sugar

If using regular (ie not Greek) yogurt, "Greekify" it by lining a sieve with paper towels, spooning the yogurt in, covering and letting drain for a couple hours. I left it out on the counter but you can let this process happen in the fridge if you want.

Position the rack in your oven so that one if close to the broiler. Turn on the broiler.

Once you have the appropriate yogurt/sour cream substance, fold it together with the raspberries in a shallow dish or pan. Sprinkle the brown sugar over the top, evenly covering the surface.

Broil until the sugar starts to caramelize. It's best if eaten immediately, but can be refrigerated, covered. It will look even more horrible after spending some time in the fridge.

Chilled cucumber soup with mint, dill, and yogurt

The farmers markets are full of cucumbers these days - big bins of knobbly dark green tubes, only surpassed by the enormous, baseball-bat-sized (seriously. like omg) zucchini. It's August. Late summer. My summer research project is due in about 2 weeks, but more importantly, cukes and zukes and tomatoes and stone fruit and berries will soon be gone, gone forever except for in mediocre incarnations in the produce section of Gin'Iggle. And by "forever" I mean next summer. But who knows where I will be next summer? Probably not here in Pittsburgh, with my beloved East Liberty farmers market.
Appropriately, the air is also full of a strange grey humidity -a stickiness that stops short of being truly hot. I expected this first week of August to be the most fierce in terms of heat, so I am grateful for the reprieve (no A/C in my third-floor walk-up). But the air is damp and heavy, and this is no time for stoves or ovens. Hence this soup - no heat is involved. You peel and chop some cukes, whirl them in the food processor with tangy yogurt and cool mint, refrigerate and eat. Refreshing and easy.
I mostly left this recipe as-is, since I can eat every ingredient and Shauna is a genius and her recipes rarely need tweaking. I adjusted the ratio of yogurt:cukes somewhat, upped the herbs because I always up the herbs, and played with a few other ingredients.
Chilled Cucumber Soup (barely adapted from Gluten-Free Girl)

3 cucumbers, peeled

2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint

2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

1 1/2 teaspoons rice vinegar

16 ounces plain yogurt, preferably full-fat

1 tablespoon grapeseed oil

1/4 cup soda water/seltzer

salt and pepper to taste

Chop up your cucumbers into pieces of a size that your food processor can handle. Toss these pieces in the food processor with everything else except the soda water/seltzer and the salt and pepper. Whiz until smooth. Add the soda water/seltzer and stir, then add salt and pepper to taste. Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour before eating (depends a lot on how cold your ingredients were to start with).

Gluten-free vegan pizza crust

I have a confession to make. I kind of cheat when I make pizza crust. I use.. a mix. Yes, I know; the ingredients of the mix I use are common, and I could easily sling together a slew of gluten-free flours and do this myself, and abandon the mix and my shame forever. But it is so easy this way! And... I have not been terribly successful on the GF vegan bread/pizza crust front, and I am afraid of failure and disappointment when all I really want is some hot, crusty, melty pizza. Yes, I am a baby.

The reason why I am posting this as a recipe is that over the course of my experimentation I have substantially tweaked the back-of-the-bag recipe for pizza crust, both to accommodate my additional allergies (hi, eggs!) and to improve the taste and texture of this crust. I think my tweaks are helpful enough that I feel justified in posting them.

In posting the pictures of the last pizza I made with this crust, I am also admitting another great shame: I used moo-cow mozzarella on this pizza. Let me explain. Goat mozzarella exists, and is sold both at the Whole Foods and Giant Eagle in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, someone is capitalizing on the desire of us cow-milk-sensitive folks for good pizza, and so these tiny bricks of cheese tip the checkout line at $7-9. Ugh. Trader Joe's, my go-to source for cheap staples, had a nice little bag of shredded goat mozzarella for less than $4, and though it tasted a little weird and didn't melt like moo-cow mozz, I was willing to compromise. Joe has not been holding up his end of the deal. Last week, after seeing the goat mozzarella's usual spot on the shelf empty for the fourth week in a row, I asked an employee, who confirmed that Trader Joe's had heartlessly discontinued the item. That night, my belly clamoring for some pizza, I stood bereft in the cheese aisle of Giant Eagle, looking at the $8.99 brick of goat mozz... and the $3.50 ball of snowy, elastic moo-cow mozz. I made my decision, and scurried to the cash register, clutching my contraband cheese and looking around furtively. I tried to lessen my misdeed by combining the mozz with some soft chevre, and oh... it was good. I forgot how beautifully mozzarella stretches, how gooey and lovely it becomes. I forgot about the mild salty tang of fresh cheese. Never again.

This crust is thin and crispy, with a bit of a chew to it. The only downside is that it seems to have a very slight bitter aftertaste, which is easily counteracted by quickly stuffing another piece in your mouth. I find that half of the dough makes enough pizza for two people. I usually freeze the other half, wrapping it tightly in plastic wrap then placing inside a ziploc bag.

Gluten-free vegan pizza crust (adapted from Bob's Red Mill)

1 package Bob's Red Mill GF pizza crust mix

1 package yeast (included)

1 1/4 cups warm water

2 tablespoons olive oil, plus extra for baking

2 tablespoon Ener-G egg replacer, plus 1/4 cup water

2 teaspoons flaxseed meal

2 tablespoons honey

1 tablespoon white wine

Combine yeast and water in a large bowl, or the bowl of a stand mixer if you have one, and let stand for about 5 minutes. Then add the flaxseed meal, stir, and let stand for another few minutes. Add the olive oil, Ener-G, honey, and wine and combine. Add the mix, and blend until well-combined, about 1 minute on medium speed in the mixer.

Split the ball of dough in half, leaving each half in the bowl. Cover and let rise for 20 minutes at room temperature (even better: place in the fridge and let rise for at least 3 hours).

When ready to cook, preheat the oven to 425. Generously sprinkle a baking sheet with cornmeal, and with wet or oiled hands, press one half of the dough onto the sheet, spreading it out to the edges as thin as you can. Don't worry about uneven edges. Brush the entire surface of the dough with olive oil, then bake for 7-8 minutes.

Add toppings, then bake for 15 minutes or until the cheese is melty and bubbly.

Blackberry peach cobbler (vegan and gluten-free)

Oh, East Liberty farmers market. I love your shady location by the defunct police headquarters, your sweet Mennonite women selling goat milk, your tables of salsa and cheese and smoked salmon and hummus to taste. But you have been sadly missing berries for the last few weeks, your tables bereft of those cute little bundles of black- and blue- (and straw- and rasp-) deliciousness. Or maybe it's me? Have I been arriving too late to appreciate your bounty?

Oh, but you made up for it this week, East Liberty farmers market. I was rushing, on my way to meet friends, but I stopped by because of my love for you. And what did you have? You had blackberries. All is forgiven.

This is my first cobbler. I have never made this variation on baked fruit before, and I'm not even sure if I've eaten it. Cobblers always seem shunted to the side for the more popular pies, crisps, and crumbles. Of course, I have instituted a Pie Crust Boycott after discovering that I could have baked fruit without rolling out a temperamental gluten-free crust. Crisps, crumbles, and cobblers are all wonderful in that there is no crust. Which of course means no rolling pin. Hallelujah.

I adapted this recipe from the original by hedging on the sugar and completely re-working the crumble topping. Oh, and adding peaches. Because peaches + berries = <3.

Blackberry peach cobbler (gluten-free and vegan) (adapted from Manifest: Vegan)

Filling:

Three ripe peaches, peeled and cut into 1/2-1 inch pieces

About 1 1/2-2 cups blackberries

1/4 cup sugar

Juice of half a lemon

1 tablespoon cornstarch

Dash cinnamon

Cobbler:

1/2 cup sorghum flour

1/4 cup tapioca or potato starch

1/4 cup white rice flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum

2 tablespoons sugar (preferably raw/turbinado)

1/4 cup soy-free margarine or butter, cold

1/2 cup almond milk

1/2 teaspoon salt (omit if your margarine is salted)

Crumble:

2 tablespoons sugar (preferably raw/turbinado)

3 tablespoons sorghum flour

3 tablespoons gluten-free oats

2 tablespoons soy-free margarine, cold

Preheat the oven to 350.

In a deep 9-inch pie dish, combine the fruit, sugar, lemon juice, cornstarch, and cinnamon. Stir well to evenly coat fruit.

In a separate medium-sized bowl, combine the dry ingredients for the cobbler and mix well. Add the cold margarine in small pieces and work into the dry ingredients using a pastry blender, fork, or your hands, until you have a crumbly texture. Add the almond milk and combine. You should have a batter with a thickness halfway between cake batter and cookie dough. Spoon this batter in large dollops over the fruit. Do not spread it out to cover evenly - each dollop will expand while baking to fill in the spaces.

Combine the sugar and sorghum flour for the crumble in a small bowl. Crumble in the margarine like you did for the cobbler, then stir in the oats. Sprinkle this crumble topping over the cobbler.

Bake for 40-50 minutes, until fruit is bubbly and topping starts to brown. Let cool somewhat before serving.