Wednesday, December 31, 2008

A new address!

To all who have followed this blog, please note that I will be discontinuing this site. You can continue to follow my cooking and gardening exploits at http://rieskitchen.blogspot.com/

Happy New Year to you all

Rie

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Gluten Free - overcoming the challenges!

As many of you may be aware, I have recently been diagnosed as Coeliac. This means I must remove all wheat, rye, oats and barley from my diet. For a keen cook this has provided me with a challenge.

Challenge 1 - create fresh, homemade pasta
After 3 failed attempts (or 3 successful attempts at making hot glue:) I have successfully created home made fettucine. The recipe still needs some tweaking as it did not survive a pasta machine, but after handrolling and cutting the fettucine, the results were very delicious. I will continue to refine the recipe so that I can get the pasta thinner, but here is the simple recipe

TIP: replace all plain and 00 flour (as per previous recipe supplied on my blog) with Orgran pasta flour (gluten free and contains GFG). Only use potato or rice flour for dusting.

Challenge 2 - create gluten free orange and cardemon shortbread for Christmas
First attempt at this looked to be a success, until I moved the shortbraed from the tray to the cooling rack. After 10 minutes, when I returned, the majority of biscuits had crumbled through the racks.

TIP: allow to cool slightly on the tray until beginning to firm, then place on the cooling racks. My "normal" recipe calls for 3/4 cup rice flour and 1 1/2 cups self raising flour. I was successful with 1 cup of rice flour and 1 1/4 cups of orgran self raising flour (contains GFG)

Happy cooking for Christmas :)