Week one - Gluten free adventure

It's been one week since I've shunned gluten, staved off milk products, corn products and several weeks since I've quit red meat and SWINE! I have to put emphasis on SVINE and spit on the floor three times. Kidding.

All is going well. Much easier than I anticipated, but I wonder how the hell I would do this if I wasn't willing or able to cook the food that I eat. My wife is certainly not on board with this endeavor and is far from interested in experimenting with negating all the foods that she lives for. Bread, butter, meat, among many other things that contain a lovely little thing called gluten. Anything from jam to that thick yellowy curry sauce that her Christmas herring is drowning in. Noo, noooo, NO as Amy Winehouse sings in her rehab song. Only in this case it's "...he try to make me quit gluten, corn, red meat, milk products and I say...nooo, noooooo, nooooo"

So some of the menu item this week have been as follows:

Seafood over quinoa

Mixed seafood cooked in the pan with lime, chillies, garlic, onion, olive oil, salt and splash of vinegar over a bed of quinoa. Freakin yummy!

Sesame tofu over vermicelli

Yes I'm using tofu. What of it? It soaks flavor nicely and I like the texture. Here's the tofu in cubes with broccoli, garlic, onion, chillies, sesame seeds, fish sauce over vermicelli. Delish!


Savory millet pancakes

Holy shit...it's getting better and better. Millet flour where have you been all my life??? It has a corn flour taste, but it won't freak my digestive system. These light pancakes are made with chillies, cumin, garlic, millet flour, eggs, salt and olive oil. For a nice sauce I crushed some chillies with garlic and cumin with honey, olive oil, salt and balsamic vinegar. Gorgeous, spicy, delicious. I can't wait to make Mexican tortillas with this flour.

The sauce described above

Pan roasted potatoes in a hummus aoili

This is a "FUCK YEAH" dish. Tastes so so so good. I get on flavor kicks when I'll use a similar set of ingredients for every meal for maybe a week or so, but varying the balance of ingredients to create altered flavor ensembles. This week it's been garlic, Thai chillies, cumin. These potatoes roasted slowly with garlic, red onion, chillies and cumin in olive oil.

I made hummus. We all know hummus...chick peas, tahini, garlic, lemon, cumin, salt basically. Perhaps chillies. I put some olive oil in this and actually a little tart orange instead of lemon. Being experimental and a bit brave I tried fusing this hummus into a dressing using real mayonnaise. When I say "real" I don't mean Kraft or Hellman's, but basically egg, oil, lemon, perhaps vinegar. In this case I didn't make my own mayonnaise as I normally would, but I bought the most basic mayo with no crap in it. So we end up with not quite a hummus and not quite aioli, but a marriage reminiscent of the two with a consistency of aioli and a texture of hummus. The flavors work nicely together and we have cumin and chopped onion dashed on top. FUCK YEAH!!!!

There's not as much of that stuff as it looks. Don't worry..I'm not crazy! It's just around the potatoes.