Gluten-Free Comfort Food on a Frigid Day!

Soup and Corn Bread Make Great Comfort Food

I live in Minnesota and right now we’re having one of the coldest spells in about five years so I decided to make some comfort food!  Wild rice soup and corn bread muffins!  Are you craving them yet?

I used one bag of Fantastic brand Creamy Potato Soup mix.  I purchased it months ago and never got around to making it.  It was confirmed gluten-free on my bag, but as I looked online today for a picture, it looks like the packaging has changed with no ingredient list available online.  So please confirm its gluten-free status before you use it.

I make the soup up according to the instructions and then start adding in the extras.

Wild Rice Soup

Fantastic’s Creamy Potato Soup Mix*

1 cup chicken bouillon/broth

2 stalks of celery cut up

2 carrots cut up

2 chicken breasts

1/3 cup brown rice

1/3 cup wild rice

Directions:
Put together the potato soup mix as instructed on the package (which includes simmering for 20 minutes).  While soup is simmering, clean then pre-cook rice.  Wild Rice in particular should be rinsed thoroughly before adding it to any dish.  Then put both kinds of rice into boiling water to “pre-cook” a bit so they don’t suck up all the water in the soup.

Boil the chicken breasts in a pan with water covering the bottom.  When finished, cut them up and put them in the soup.

Tonight, I eventually transferred the entire soup into a crock pot so I could cook all the ingredients together without a burner on.  I added the broth, and veggies first and when the rice was about ½ to ¾ cooked then I put it in the rice.  Then I added the chicken.  All of these, however, can be done at the same time.

I left it on 250 degrees in the crock pot for about 2 hours and then we had dinner.

It was very good.  It was a little extra “potato-y” so I’m not sure if I should have added a bit more water, but it was good.

Then I made corn bread muffins right before dinner!  Yummy!

1 ¼ c. gf flour mix

¾ c. corn meal

¼ c. sugar

½ tsp xanthan gum

2 tsp. baking powder

1 c. skim milk

¼ c.  vegetable oil

2 egg whites or 1 egg, beaten

option: cut vegetable oil in half and compensate the rest with honey for a sweeter taste.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Pour muffin mix into greased or paper muffin cups and bake for 15 to 20 minutes until golden brown.

* As mentioned earlier in the post, please ensure the Fantastic Creamy Potato Soup Mix is still gluten-free for reasons mentioned above.  There probably are many other potato bases which should work with this recipe as well.  Find one that works for you.

Tags: comfort food, corn bread muffins, gluten-free, wild rice soup