Fishy Business

This is long overdue. I hope you enjoy a little "fishy-ness".
Before we stepped into this new world of gluten and dairy free living, my guys loved fish sticks. They still do, I suppose, we just can't eat them. We're not really big fans of fish, mostly we like the kind that you probably shouldn't like, namely, breaded or batter dipped and fried. Yum! Give me some fried fish and hush puppies with yummy coleslaw at Long John Silver's and I'm a happy camper. In fact, when I moved out west, there wasn't a LJS anywhere near where I lived...I actually had cravings for it! When I visited my parents in the midwest we HAD to go to LJS, just to satisfy my longings. Then one store opened about 2-3 hrs. away from where I lived...I planned it into a trip that way so I could eat my lovely fried fish. Then one day last spring I came out of a restaurant and smelled fried fish. I thought it must be McDonald's making a lot of fish sandwiches because there wasn't any fish place near where I was (or so I thought)and then I saw it, a brand new LJS/KFC had opened just down the street from the local Wal-mart. Birds started singing, life was good, we ate dinner there that night. I think we ate there one more time (it was always crazy busy) and then we found out we needed to switch our diet. Such sadness.
Desperation leads to inspiration in times of intense cravings, so I have come up with some versions of my own favorite coleslaw, fish and hush puppies.
I hope you enjoy them as much as my family did. Just to be clear, the fish is not like Long John's, it's just tasty. Sometime, I'll have to tackle making batter fried fish similar to Long John's. I'll share it with you if I'm successful!
Happy Eating!

Updates coming!

I have some great new recipes to send your way. I know, it's been a while since I posted a new recipe. In my defense, it's May. If you knew what my May is like you'd understand. Somehow, every year, May explodes with activities! Most of them are for my son, baseball, AWANA, swimming lessons, piano lessons,etc. If that doesn't sound too bad, did I mention that only one of those activities is in my town?? The rest are in a town 30 minutes away from home and a town 45 minutes away from home.
I seriously love June when all the madness ends! I will be back to my blog as soon as I can. I have a great coleslaw recipe, a pan fried fish recipe and I played around to make some gluten free hush puppies. So check back soon for some tasty treats!
Happy Eating!

Happy Cinco De Mayo!

Okay, I realize that this "holiday" is really kind of made up here in America. Yeah, yeah there was some sort of historic event that happened in Mexico a long time ago, but guess what?! They don't celebrate Cinco De Mayo...to them it's just the 5th of May. So who came up with this idea? People who wanted a reason to drink Mexican beer or people who wanted a reason to eat tacos? Whatever the reason, we do celebrate this..uh, er...holiday. We celebrate it rather mildly, but we do celebrate.
In fact, my menu today is based on the fact that it's Cinco De Mayo. We will be having Spanish Rice and salad for dinner. Yes, I've posted this recipe before, but I'm changing it up a bit. To convert it from a side dish into a main dish, I will be adding 1 lb. ground beef, browned and crumbled and I'm also going add 1-2 c. corn.
This should be an easy "Mexican" dinner and since I'm still fighting a head cold, easy is a bonus for me! Plus, this recipe always makes leftovers and they're popular with the fam, so I don't feel guilty sending them off as lunches later in the week.
So that's my Cinco De Mayo plan. Have you thought about yours? Or did you forget about this "holiday"? Either way, why not have a Mexican meal and celebrate? This recipe doesn't take too long to prepare, so you'll have a Mexican treat ready in no time!
Happy Cinco De Mayo!
P.S. If you just really want a taco for Cinco De Mayo, here's a link to the recipe for my taco seasoning mix. Just make sure that your taco shells don't have any added gluten.

What Inspires You?

Lately, I've been watching Jamie's Food Revolution on the internet. I missed it while it was on TV, but have been enjoying watching the transformation of this town that Jamie Oliver has set out to revolutionize by educating the people who live there on how to cook and eat healthier and take better care of themselves.
We tend to try to eat very healthy around here, but sometimes it can be easy to slack off on the veggies. Fruit I don't need to worry about, at least for the guys, they're great about snacking on fruit (sometimes I need to be better about that, but they're great about it). Watching the show, though has inspired me to be a little more creative and purposeful in adding more vegetables to our every day meals. Even if it's just adding more vegetables to our favorite things. Like adding zucchini to our already vegetable full stir fry or tossing carrots and red pepper into my chili in addition to the onion, green pepper and green chilies. In fact, the chili turned out to be the first one I've made that my husband has declared that he liked (not that the others I've made weren't great but, he isn't much of a soup eater and doesn't like much spice, either). Of course, it didn't hurt that the chili also had some bacon and extra meat in it, but the point is, it had extra vegetables and the family loved it. So now I just need to think outside the box and add those veggies, I know we'll all feel better for it.

Happy Healthy Eating!

Product Review: Chicken Italian Sausage

I guess by now it should be obvious that sausage is popular at our house (especially if you look at my last post prior to this one). Maybe we can blame it on my husband's Austrian heritage. His aunt and uncle even own a little restaurant at the Olympia Farmer's Market called the Bavarian Wurst (devoted to selling all kinds of delicious brats and sausage, click the link and you'll even see a picture of my hubby's aunt and her daughter, his cousin). I think this theory might have some weight to it...well, if he did the shopping, but since I do the shopping, I think it's safe to say, we just love sausage!
Now that our diet is different, we also find it necessary to watch out for nitrates and nitrites (they can give us headaches if we aren't careful), so we look for sausages that don't contain those ingredients. Once again, we find Isernio's sausage fits the bill. Their products are also hormone and antibiotic free, which makes me very happy to see!
This time we tried the Chicken Italian sausage. I'd heard about it, but I hadn't seen it in the stores before, but I found it at Fred Meyer's in Lacey and it was at least a dollar cheaper than the other stores where I had purchased the pork Italian sausage before (the pork and chicken sausages were the same price at Freddy's). I made the New York Style Italian sausage stir fry that I blogged about previously, adding chopped zucchini to the mix. Overall, we really liked the sausage. I still prefer the pork, but I like that it's chicken because sometimes pork can make me feel tired or achy. I know we'll be getting product again and again...I told you, sausage is popular around here!
Happy Eating!

Chicken Sausage Gravy

I know, chicken sausage sounds like it might be too healthy to taste great, but it tastes wonderful! We tried Isernio Breakfast Chicken Sausage this morning for our breakfast. I didn't think ahead, so it was frozen. I decided to make sausage gravy over toast. I know, the traditional is gravy over biscuits, but I'm not much for biscuits, never really have been. My family is used to this, in fact, when we were on vacation a couple of years ago with my parents, my mom made biscuits and gravy and my son actually complained that he didn't have toast to go under his gravy!
I admit, I expected this sausage to taste, well like chicken and not as good as regular sausage. Boy, was I wrong! If I hadn't told the family that it was chicken sausage, they wouldn't have known. It's seasoned perfectly and really stands up to your typical pork breakfast sausage. It got an A+ from our family.
I'll share my Gluten and Dairy Free Sausage Gravy recipe with you, just keep in mind that it's hard to be exact in measuring when making gravy, so most measurements will be approximate, not exact. Just click on the title and it should open the recipe.
I served it over toast made from Pamela's bread mix.



Happy Breakfast!

A night at the Teriyaki Restaurant

I know, the title of the post sounds like we went to the local Teriyaki restaurant, but that just isn't possible with our new food requirements. I love Asian food!!! Love, love, love it! Growing up, we didn't eat Asian food often and when we did it was chow-mein from Chun-king. Not the real deal AT ALL. I wasn't very fond of it. We did have a couple of nice Chinese restaurants in our town and very rarely, we got to go one of them. I liked the food. A LOT! I think we didn't have Asian food much when I was growing up because at that time, my dad just didn't like it. I think it reminded him too much of Vietnam. Whatever the reason, we didn't have it often and my brother still doesn't like Asian food. My dad has gotten over it and loves it almost as much as I do.
Growing up in a town in Kansas didn't really expose me to much variety in Asian food (and yes, I know that it's really very American, not what true Asians eat). We had the two Chinese restaurants, House of Ma and New China and then Yan-Yan's opened up right next door to Pizza Hut where I worked. Yan-Yan's was revolutionary for me, they delivered. I was introduced to Crab Rangoon, fried rice, hot and sour soup, I loved it. My waistline did not, but my mouth was happy.
Then, I visited my aunt in Kansas City a few times and we tried a Japanese Steakhouse, a Thai restaurant and a little Chinese takeout place. Then came the west coast and I tried Teriyaki. Happy Teriyaki and a little hole in the wall in our new hometown, they were great, one of my favorite things. I even felt a little better about the fact that the food wasn't fried. And then, we had to cut out gluten and dairy from our diets. So long Asian food? Well, no. Mostly it was so long Asian restaurants. The soy sauce has wheat and if the food is breaded and fried, it has wheat. So, it was up to me if we were going to have Asian food. So far on our journey into this I have made egg rolls (I'm still working on perfecting that recipe, so you'll have to wait on it) using rice wrappers. I've made General Tao's chicken (I didn't have to change anything about that recipe except I used gluten free soy sauce). Last night I made Teriyaki Chicken with rice and salad with Asian restaurant salad dressing. It was fabulous! Colin made sure that he got to take the leftovers (a sure sign that dinner was a hit). The Teriyaki Chicken recipe actually came from a Japanese exchange student who was staying with some people we know from church. She shared the recipe with their family and the mom put the recipe on her blog. I took the recipe and tweaked it to make it gluten free and also to add a little bit more depth to the flavor. The Asian Salad Dressing recipe is something I just made up based on the salad dressing I've had from Teriyaki restaurants. Hope you like them.
Happy Eating!
P.S. As a little bonus, here's where to find my favorite fried rice recipe:
Benihana's Fried Rice
It should be simple to convert to gluten and dairy free, just use gluten free soy sauce and dairy free margarine instead of the butter.