I have been so sick of making the same meals over and over again, I have been doing some exploring and have found a fun gluten free recipe and cooking technology to shake things up a bit. Specifically in the last year or so I have been making more foods from scratch and doing our best to eliminate processed food. Of course, we eliminated a lot of processed food when our 19-year-old was diagnosed with celiac disease nearly 18 years ago, but we still had a few habits that needed to go.
Back to my food frustration today. I am tired of making the same things. I want some flavor and more deliciousness out of the food we make. So here are a few new recipes and techniques that are making it onto our family table lately.
Anova Precision Cooker
This is the contraption “in action”
I did a quick post about this on The Savvy Celiac Facebook page earlier this year. This device uses the sous vide style of cooking. No. Anova didn’t send me a free device to use and promote. I bought this for my husband for Christmas after we had found that technique used at a favorite restaurant of ours. We LOVE it!
We have made delicious steak and chicken with it. Here’s how it works:
- Fill a big soup pot about 3/4 full and put the device inside and get it started. It warms the water to the precise temperature you set it to.
- You season the meat how you want, put it in a Ziploc bag (get all the air out) and clip the bag to the pot with the food submerged under water.
- We cook our steak to about 134 degrees for about an hour.
- Then, we finish the steak off on a super hot grill for about 30 seconds to a minute on each side.
Delicious steak after the sous vide and a quick grilling to sear the outside.
And you’re done! Seriously, we have put the steak in the water, gone and done our workout, and come back in time to put the steak on the grill. We have done this with top sirloin, NY strip, ribeye and filet mignon. Obviously the filet is the best, but his cooking approach makes even cheaper cuts of steak taste phenomenal! What’s even better, this is a very easy way to make a great meal and you don’t even need a gluten free recipe to do it. This device also helps reduce or eliminate cross contamination (if you have those concerns). Here is more information on the Anova Precision Cooker.
Soup
This is something that usually I wouldn’t have in the house (because let’s be real here, I don’t think soup really fills you up), and if I did, it would be some processed can of soup. No more. I make two different kinds of soup these days and I try to pack them with so much meat and vegetables, that the broth really is just keeping everything moist. That way it feels like a meal.
I have two soups I really like and they are generally pretty similar, but one is a cream soup or stew and the other is a broth based soup.
Chicken Vegetable Soup
You can make this one of two ways, use chicken breast, or in the case of this gluten free recipe, I use a gluten-free rotisserie chicken. I used to get these at Costco where they were labeled gluten free (as always, please check at your local store to confirm). But these days I buy them at Lucky’s Market. Usually someone in my family eats a little of the chicken first and then I pick apart the bird and set aside all of the meat and then cook down the carcass and skin in some water.
After about an hour, I drain the broth into a container and throw out the carcass and skin. I put the broth back on the stove and throw in the meat, and any vegetables I want. I also will add a little more chicken bouillon (I use Orrington Farms Broth Base Chicken Flavor) to taste. I usually put in onion, celery, carrots and riced cauliflower. And continue cooking for about another 45 minutes to an hour. It makes about three lunches for me.
Easy Crockpot Chicken Stew
I actually found this gluten free recipe from a friend who shared it on her Facebook page. It has many of the same ingredients I like in my chicken vegetable soup, but it uses chicken thighs and you don’t have to pre-cook them. It adds a bit of heavy cream and xanthan gum for a thickener.
This morning I made my second batch in a week and it took me about 20 minutes of prep work and then cooked in the crockpot for about 3 hours. This also will serve me for three generous lunches this week. The glute free recipe is by Gal on a Mission. I thank her for allowing us to use the photo from her website. Doesn’t it look good?
Hopefully, this inspires some of you who may be in a cooking rut like I have been. Next challenge is mastering the InstaPot (which I have a knockoff Farberware version). But I know it can work for me…I just need to practice more.
Tags: celiac, chicken, cooking, diet, dinner, disease, food, gluten-free, lunch, meat, recipe, soup, sous vide, steak, technology
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