"We'll help you eat it all!"

Some weeks ago I made a delicious Banana Coconut Cake from a recipe that I found on Tropical Traditions. I thought it was good, but could be better. So I decided to tweak it, making it gluten-free and replacing the icing in the original recipe with a chocolate almond ganache filling. And after a day’s work, I was very pleased with the results, and was over the moon when my girls were ooohing and aaahing over the cake. I wiped down the counter-top and cut a good chunk of the cake to give to my friend K, who cannot eat wheat for now. I heard V exclaiming, “And this is gluten-free mom! And it’s so good!”

And I almost burst through the roof, all pumped up with pride.

Then V asked, “And there are no eggs either, mom?”

That’s when the roof came crashing down, and my pride, well, I think it went down the garbage disposal.

I had totally forgotten about the eggs!! I was so focused on the wheat I forgot about the eggs!!

You have no idea how sad I was, for it was a good cake. I could not tell K I forgot the other half of her allergy and give her half the cake. As I was banging my head against my very clean counter-top, I heard V pipe up: “Don’t worry, mom! We’ll help you finish it all up!”

Isn’t it sweet? And funny?! – I was not worried that the cake would not get eaten up, I was just agonized that I forgot to replace the eggs with something else! Such things take practice, I suppose. I am pretty sure the way this cake is made, the eggs can be easily replaced with applesauce, but I am no expert. What are your favorite ways to replace eggs in a cake recipe?? All ideas and suggestions much appreciated!

And below, the gluten-free but not egg-free banana coconut cake recipe. If you manage to make this egg-free, I would love to hear!!

Gluten-free Banana Coconut Cake

Ingredients

• 1 1/4 cup whole cane sugar
• ½ cup virgin coconut oil
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 cups Bob’s Red Mill Gluten-free all purpose flour
• 1 tsp xanthan gum
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup, about 3 bananas, mashed
• 3/4 cup chopped toasted almonds
• 1/2 cup shredded coconut 
• 1 recipe Chocolate Almond Ganache filling (recipe follows

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325. Grease and flour a 13 by 9 baking pan. (You can also bake in two 9-inch cake pans if preferred.)
2. Cream sugar with coconut oil (remember to measure in liquid state!) until well combined. Mixture will look thick, and creamy yellow. Add the eggs and vanilla, and continue to mix until fluffy.
3. Combine dry ingredients in a bowl and whisk to mix. Mash up bananas and add to buttermilk.
4. Reduce mixer speed to low, and add in dry ingredients alternately with buttermilk and bananas. Start with flour mixture, then buttermilk mixture, and end with the flour mixture. Stir in chopped toasted almonds and shredded coconut. 
5. Pour into baking pan and bake for about 40 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean. Cool completely on wire rack.
6. Run a knife around the edges of the pan. Cut cake into half cross-wise. Remove the two halves from the cake pan and then slice each half of the cake into half horizontally. Spread about 2/3 cup of the ganache filling on top of one layer of the cake, top with another layer, and repeat this with the next layer, finishing the cake by topping off with a last layer of cake. Enjoy!!

I love how the almonds look atop the ganache before being stirred in.

Chocolate Almond Ganache Filling

Makes 2 cups

Ingredients

·        ½ cup of almonds

·        8 oz bittersweet or dark chocolate, chopped

·        1 cup heavy cream

·        2 Tbsp amaretto

·        1 tsp vanilla extract

 Directions: 

1. Spread almonds on a baking sheet and toast in 350F oven for about 5-7 minutes, until fragrant. Cool completely and then chop into medium-fine pieces.
2. Add chopped chocolate to food processor and process until fine.
3. In a heavy small saucepan or pot, scald the heavy cream (heat to boiling point, watch for small bubbles forming around the edge of the pot).
4. With the motor of the food processor running, pour the cream through the feeding tube in a steady stream. Process until smooth, then pulse in the amaretto and vanilla extract. 
5. Scrape ganache into a glass bowl, stir in the chopped almonds and allow to cool for an hour. Cover the bowl and cool for several hours, or until it reaches a soft frosting consistency.

 

Go-to meal: Easy fish dish

We all have a few of these recipes up our sleeves, that we pull out when we do not know what to cook, is pressed for time, or just want to cook something familiar that we know the family is going to eat. I call it my go-to meal, or my reliable fallback, and sometimes it becomes my food rut, when I simply cannot get out of cooking the same old dishes over and over again. I am going to slowly post my go-to meals, and I'm actually curious to see how many I end up with!

Kicking off this series is an easy fish dish. We first encountered it at a buffet when vacationing at Rocky Point, Mexico. R tried the dish first and then set off to get us more, urging me to try it as it was really delish. Oh it was good, fresh fish, very flavorful, and I suspect the sunny blue skies and fresh oceanic breeze enhanced the savoring experience! When we got home, I decided to figure out how to make this easy fish dish, which can be named however you fancy, but we call it "That olive-tomato fish dish."

The beauty of this dish is that it uses few ingredients, and can be simply and quickly whipped up. You can of course fancy it up and I'm going to talk about that. You can use any mild flavored fish. I tend to use tilapia, which is normally farm-raised, and I have to say when you get it from a source that is responsibly farmed, you can taste the difference in quality and taste. Recently I bought some farm-raised tilapia when Whole Foods had a sale, after reading about why theirs was different, and we definitely enjoyed the pristine taste of the fish. I am always able to find some variety of wild-caught fish at Trader Joe's at good prices.

The other ingredients in this dish are: minced garlic, tomatoes, italian parsley, sliced black olives.

When tomatoes are in season, I chop them up and cook them down to a yummy sauce (with some sliced garlic added). But when tomatoes start to look pale and simply not appealing during the off-season, or when I want it all fast, I reach for a jar of tomato sauce. I try to avoid canned tomatoes (and canned food in general) due to the dangers of BPA in tin can linings leaking into the food. Instead I use pasta sauce in glass jars if I need tomato sauce quick for this fish dish. Sometimes I get the variety with mushrooms added, so I save even the job of chopping yet another item! For the olives, I also get those in glass jars from Trader Joe's and then slice them up, or chop them coarse and quick when pressed for time.

So, here's the recipe, with no absolute measures (that's how you cook it fast!):

Easy Olive-Tomato Fish Dish
Ingredients

• 2 pounds tilapia (or other fish)
• minced garlic (as much as you love!)
• 1 glass jar of tomato sauce
• sliced black olives (as much as you like)
• italian parsley, chopped (as much as you like)

Directions

1. Mince garlic, chop parsley, rinse the fish and pat dry, then cut into chunks (about 2-inch is good).
2. Season fish lightly with salt and pepper.
3. Heat olive oil in a large skillet (or pot if preferred), and when hot, add the minced garlic and saute quickly till light golden brown.
4. Immediately add the olives and continue to saute.
5. Add fish pieces, sauteing a minute or so, and then add tomato sauce. Add more salt and/or pepper if desired.
6. Let dish simmer for about 20 minutes. Adjust seasoning if needed. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve.

I serve this with steamed white rice. I do wish this is a one-skillet dish but the vegetables is rather lacking. I don't think those sliced olives count much towards the desirable daily vegetable quotient, and thought italian parsley do contain a multitude of minerals, you wouldn't want to be adding an entire chunk of it. So, what about the vegetables?

Sometimes, I put some vegetables (cauliflower, broccoli, sugar peas) on top of the steamer and let it cook at the same time as the rice. If I'm really tired, I just slice up a bowl of cucumbers and carrots and serve it raw or quick pickled. If I am lucky to have pickled beets or kimchi in the fridge I pull those out. Very often we do a easy vegetable dish, which is simply blanching green beans, cauliflower or broccoli, and then tossing with a good olive oil and sprinkled with good sea salt. It may sound bland, but I find that a good vegetable dish does not demand a whole lot of tinkering or even a plethora of spices or seasoning. Usually a good olive oil and sea salt brings the flavor out nicely, and I like that it keeps the palette simple so we can enjoy the fish dish better.

As for fancying up this fish dish, you can slice up some onions, and then slowly caramelize it in a separate skillet as the fish dish simmer, then folding the delicious caramelized onions with the fish dish before serving it up. You can also "beef up" this dish by sauteing some chopped mushrooms and zucchini in olive oil and herbs, and then folding it into the fish. This is a great simple dish to experiment with! Let me know if you do, and I would love to hear your simple vegetable dish ideas if you'd share!

Two ways to pecan

So I was burrowing through the fridge, weeding out unintentional “science experiments” and gathering up candidates for the big “leftovers medley” when I chanced upon an unopened bag of pecans. I must have bought it thinking I would use it, but didn’t. What to do now? ---

I went burrowing through my pile of to-be-organized recipes, and came up with: “rustic maple pecan cookies” by Carole Walter, a gluten-free “Pecan Sandies” recipe from "Incredible Edible Gluten-Free Food for Kids" and a Brussels sprouts recipe that included buttered pecans (yum!). I have made the first two recipes but not the last, as the Brussels sprouts season may be over (they can be harvested through June in some places though, so I am going to keep my eyes open!).

The Carole Walter recipe can be found here. I did not make any changes, but I did not have imitation maple extract and did not want to get any, so I increased the vanilla extract to 11/2 teaspoon, and added another ½ tsp of the Fiori de Sicilia extract from King Arthur Flour. Note that if you bake these cookies with your windows thrown open you will soon have neighbors knocking your door down! They smell divine, and taste delicious! Another thing I will change when I make it next time is to toast the pecans before hand, to enhance the flavor of the cookie.

I was happy to discover the Pecan Sandies recipe. I have friends who need to eat gluten-free and most times when I have them over I reach for the Pamela Product’s Chocolate Chip Cookie mix. They are very good indeed and I always stock up on them so we eat them not infrequently ourselves. Still, it is nice to be able to make something different from time to time. I had my friend K in mind when I made these cookies, which from the sound of the recipe, resemble Pecan Crescent cookies. Well, these turned out much better than I had expected! The ingredients are simple and the process pretty straight-forward too. The dough does seem to be rather wet and sticky, so I had to re-flour my hands with rice flour every time after I finish shaping one cookie. The recipe called for the cookies to be shaped into elongated balls but I decided to make them crescent shaped instead. The cookies spread out quite a bit during baking and became flatter. They are also rather fragile, so when I picked them up and tossed them in powder sugar, bits and pieces kept breaking off, so I kept eating them- yeah, they were scrumptious! For the second batch of cookies, I decided to leave the cookies on the baking sheet and dust them over with powdered sugar instead, and then left them to cool completely on the cookie sheet. That worked better!

I did feel the cookies were a bit grainy, though I guess that is why they are called “sandies”! No one else complained about the texture though! I gave K a tin of the cookies and she thought they were simply delicious. My picky husband also thought them good and the texture was fine by him. The girls wished there were more of the cookies. One said to the other, “Mmmmmmm, these were made in heaven!” and the other replied, “Mom made them in heaven!” I hope you will enjoy this recipe as well!

 Gluten-free egg-free Pecan Sandies

adapted from "Incredible Edible Gluten-Free Food for Kids"

Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 Tablespoon water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 cup rice flour
• 2/3 cup potato starch flour
• 1/3 cup tapioca flour
• 1 cup chopped pecans (I recommend toasting them first)
• 1 cup sifted powdered sugar 

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 325 F. Place rack in middle of oven.
2. Beat butter until soft, then gradually add the sugar, beating until light and creamy. Blend in the water and vanilla.
3. In another bowl combine the flours with the chopped pecans.
4. Add flour mixture gradually to the creamed mixture. Mix well between additions.
5. With lightly rice-floured hands, shape one-inch size balls of dough into crescent shapes, flattening a little. Place them at least one-inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet.
6. Bake cookies in oven for 25-30 minutes, until very light brown. Let cookies sit for 10 minutes on cookie sheet, then sift powdered sugar over the cookies.
7. Let cookies cool completely on cookie sheet before carefully removing with spatula. 

Make about 40 cookies.

 

And before I sign off, can I tell you about the series of unfortunate events that occurred in my kitchen last Friday? First, my toddler decided she wanted to help with baking, and before I could say “one”, she had pushed her chair to the counter-top, grabbed one of the eggs (set out to warm to room temperature) and smacked it flat on the counter-top. The lemon pound cake I made nearly burned when I had to run out to help my husband, and when I opened the oven, I discovered some of the batter had managed to seep out of the bundt pan and cooked itself on the oven floor. While preparing to make dinner, I opened the freezer to have a chunk of frozen lamb fall to hit a glass bowl of egg whites (fridge door was open as well and the glass bowl was close to the front) and shatter the bowl. There goes more macaroons, and another glass bowl! Dinner was late, with many interruptions from my toddler and during dinner, after three big gulps of red wine I announced that the kitchen gods wanted me to stop cooking, so I will not even boil water the following day! And with the trend of things, perhaps if I tried to toast a bagel I will manage to set our entire street on fire. And indeed I did not cook at all on Saturday! That was a bit long, but I thought some of you may commiserate! Share your kitchen disasters, if you will!