New favorite – homemade granola bars

I started making these gluten-free granola bars a few months ago for Chris, but I quickly started eating them too as they are so good. If I would have known homemade granola bars were this easy to make I would have started making them years ago!

This recipe comes from the glutenfreegirl’s website.  It is the main website that I have been using to find gluten free recipes. They have all been great and easy to follow.

Granola Bars (adapted from glutenfreegirl.com)

Ingredients:

• 2 cups oats (I’ve used both rolled and quick-cooking)
• 1 cup walnuts (or hazelnuts or almonds)
• 1 cup honey
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup sunflower seeds
• 1 cup puffed rice cereal
• 2 cups mixed dried fruit (I usually use raisins and cranberries, but any dried fruit would work)

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 325.
• Line a small casserole dish with parchment paper (I find my 9×6 stoneware baking dish to be the perfect size).
• Add oats and almonds (or hazelnuts) to casserole dish and toast in oven for about 10 minutes. Turn once in a while.
• In a saucepan, add honey, brown sugar, butter, vanilla and salt. Bring the mixture to a slow boil on medium heat.  Once it starts boiling, set aside.
• In a large bowl, mix together toasted oats and almonds (or hazelnuts), sunflower seeds, puffed rice cereal, and dried fruit.
• Add honey/sugar mix to bowl and stir until everything is evenly coated.
• Pour mixture into the casserole dish.  Smooth out with a rubber spatula.
• Bake 15 minutes (up to 30 minutes if you like your granola bars crunchy).
• Cool for at least an hour before cutting them up into bars.

Enjoy!

Gluten-Free Update

For the past two months Chris has been trying out a gluten-free and dairy-free diet. I’m still eating some dairy and gluten for my lunches so I can’t comment on how it feels to have switched to a completely gluten-free diet, but in terms of meal planing and preparation it hasn’t been too difficult. From day one, I looked at it as an opportunity to search out new recipes and try out different foods.

As I wrote last month I started baking gluten-free muffins following a recipe from the Gluten Free Girl  I am also using one of her recipes to make granola bars, and boy are they tasty!

One of our favorite discoveries has been homemade corn tortillas. I made them one night to go with a beef and rice dish that we’d normally eat with store-bought crispy tortillas.  Well, no more.  The homemade corn tortillas were so easy to make and very tasty.  All I did was buy a bag of corn masa mix (the brand sold here is “Maseca”) and follow the instructions on the bag – simply mix flour with water and salt, roll out, and cook in frying pan. So easy.  The instructions say to use a tortilla press, but I just rolled them out between two sheets of parchment paper.

Another hit is a creamy gluten-free dairy-free pasta that I made for lunch this weekend. I found the recipe on the From Scratch Club website and substituted buttercup squash when I couldn’t find pie pumpkins.   Chris has been eating dairy-free for over two years and had not eaten a  creamy pasta since then. The dish was amazing.

The most difficult has been eating out.  We have not gone out to as many restaurants as we usually do and have mostly had friends over to our house to eat gluten-free meals.  We went to Pizza Delight to try out their gluten-free pizza and Chris said it was very good.

I’m looking forward to trying out some new gluten-free recipes this month!

Do you have any great gluten-free recipes to share? 

Great-grandmother baking – Gateau a la Tibodo

I visited my aunt and uncle a few weeks ago on our cross-country ski trip to Charlo.  It was a very nice visit and at one point during the visit my aunt offered me a recipe book that had belonged to my great-grandmother Annie. The recipe book was given to my great-grandmother in 1968 by her daughter-in-law, my grandmother Imelda.

I don’t remember my great-grandmother as she passed away while I was still a little girl, but I’ve heard lots of stories about her, especially how she was a great gardener with a large vegetable garden and beautiful rose bushes.

Yesterday I decided to try her recipe called “Gateau a la Tibodo” which is a fruit cocktail cake.  Since we’re still trying out a gluten-free diet I substituted the wheat flour in the recipe with a mixture of quinoa, almond, and all-purpose GF flours.

The end result was very tasty – just enough sweetness and a nice crunchy top with the walnuts.  Chris gave it two-thumbs up!

I loved following a recipe from Memere’s recipe book.  I was thinking of how she would have baked this same cake in her kitchen and shared it with her family.  It made me feel close to her, even though she passed away more than 30 years ago. I’m looking forward to trying out more of her recipes.

Gateau a la Tibodo (from great-grandmother Annie)

Ingredients: 

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 cup flour (to make it gluten-free I used 1/2 cup quinoa flour, 1/2 cup almond flour, 1/2 cup all-purpose GF flour)
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1 egg, beaten
• 14 oz. can fruit cocktail (including juice from fruit cocktail)
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts (or more, I used 3/4 cup)

Directions: 

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Combine sugar, flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl.   Mix in egg and fruit cocktail.
3. Pour into greased 9-inch square cake pan (or similar size pan).
4. Sprinkle brown sugar, then walnuts on top of mixture
5. Bake for 45 minutes (top should brown, but not burn).

Merci Grand-Memere!

Do you have a favorite family recipe? 

Gluten-Free Meat Pies

Along with the regular meat pie crusts that we made with my mom we also made some gluten-free pie crusts for the first time.

For the past month Chris has been trying out a gluten-free diet and I’m trying to make it as easy for him as possible.  I’ve been trying to make gluten-free products from scratch instead of buying them pre-made.  I found a great muffin recipe on glutenfreegirl.com  and have been making those. The initial search for 10 different flours (almond, brown rice, corn, oat, quinoa, teff, sorghum, arrowroot, potato starch ) to make the gluten-free flour mix was time consuming, but now that I have it all mixed up  it’s as fast and easy as making regular muffins.

For meat-pie making day we decided to try the glutenfreegirl’s vegan pie crust recipe. (because Chris is also dairy-free –  the meat pie is obviously not vegan 🙂 )

The process was a bit more time consuming than making the regular pie crust as the dough had to sit in the fridge for at least one hour.

Rolling out the first dough was pretty difficult as it kept breaking up. The recipe suggested putting the dough between two sheets of plastic wrap which helped, but it was still a difficult dough to work with. I soon found out why. I had misread the recipe and had not been adding enough water.  That made a difference in the next pie crusts!  It was still breaking up a little bit, but not as much.

We cooked the first pie (with the missing water) for dinner.  I was pretty nervous! We’d made seven pies and  I didn’t want to have to eat seven tasteless or inedible pie crusts.

Thankfully, the crust turned out great.  It was pretty crumbly because of the lack of water, but hopefully the correct ones will be less crumbly. The taste is very different than our normal pie crust, but it’s a good taste.  I was describing it as “rustic” – for some reason it makes me think of a pie crust that would have been made by a farm family in rural France.

Have you tried making a gluten-free pie crust? How did it turn out?