GFCF/Dairy-free (vegan) ranch dressing

My kids have gone through dipping and non-dipping phases many times.  We had a mercifully brief stretch where Boy #1 wanted ketchup at every meal and dunked everything from peas to strawberries in it.  While the kids aren't (yet) interested in MY personal dipping fave (blue cheese dressing), they do occasionally want something like ranch dressing (also one of MY personal favorites).

Since ranch dressing is buttermilk-based, I needed to find a substitute.  While it doesn't have to be vegan for my household, the recipe I decided to try was nut-based and therefore vegan.  My go-to homemade recipe for ranch dressing calls for mixing a blend of herbs and spices (given below) into equal parts mayonnaise and buttermilk.  While you can mimic the acidity of buttermilk by adding a little lemon juice to a non-dairy milk, I thought the flavor might still fall flat and that the cashews might help return a bit of richness to the dressing flavor.

Also I have a bottomless bag of chia seeds that I need to use up.

My first attempt at following this recipe exactly as written was underwhelming.  My results were on the thin, runny side and rather bland for my taste.

The consistency issue is likely a two-pronged problem...I prefer a thicker, more commercial consistency (the better for dipping, yo) and also I'm using a food processor rather than a Bone Crusher 6000 blender.  I have a blender that makes a decent daquiri, but it can't reduce raw carrots to sub-atomic particles.  The food processor does better, but it's also no cell-phone grinder.  I'd maybe get a thicker, creamier dressing with a higher-powered blender.

In lieu of heavier-duty equipment, I went with heavier-duty ingredients.  I doubled the amount of nuts and chia seed, reduced the liquid and went with my personal tried-and-true blend of herbs and spices for what *I* think ranch dressing should taste like.  It's a little heavy on the garlic and dill, but that's what I like and I'm not apologizing for it :)

I'd like to try this nut-and-chia recipe head-to-head with an acidified non-dairy milk plus mayo base to see if I prefer one to the other, but for now here's the nut-and-chia vegan version.

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Chocolate Peanut Butter Flourless GFCFDF muffins

In our expedition into the world of GFCF cooking, I've been looking for recipes that don't try to mimic gluten-based baked goods.  I've been looking for recipes that are natively gluten- and dairy-free, that don't use a ton of substitute ingredients.

This is one of them. Yay!

These are incredibly delicious.  And sneaky with the veggies.  You seriously would have no idea that there was a vegetable in these guys.

The only tricksy part here GFCF-wise is the chocolate chips...if you want a totally dairy-free recipe, you have to find specialty dairy-free vegan chocolate chips. Which exist. But not at my regular grocery store.  I chose to use regular white chocolate chips because we still had some hanging around that needed to be used up, and our need for dairy-free foods is not as absolute as it might be with, say, a true food allergy.  You could leave them out altogether (though you'll lose a muffin or two in terms of yield), or use something like chopped nuts instead.

As always, do what works in your kitchen and household.

A note on butternut squash puree...I actually did see this in a can on the organic-and-other-oddments part of the canned vegetable aisle at my grocery store.  I personally used 2 cups of boiled butternut squash, which was about 1/2 of a medium-sized squash.  The main difference I suspect is the remaining moisture content of the two...the homemade puree will likely be moister than the canned, and will possibly take longer to bake (this was my experience).

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Back to Basics: Sandwich Bread (GFCF)

2014 has brought evolution to our family and to our kitchen.  We're trying out a gluten-free, casein-free (read: pretty much dairy free) diet in addition to the dye-free efforts we've made over the last year or so.  Between my daughter's dairy sensitivities and my oldest son's ADHD/potential spectrum issues, we're trying whatever might work.

Initially, when we decided to try this GFCF thing, I felt...well...overwhelmed.  Like I might have to quit my part-time job (which I LOVE) and pull Boy #1 out of preschool (which we DID NOT want to do) to make it work.  Because it means giving up my easiest, no-work meals, it means having practically no backup take-out options when I, say, forget to put dinner in the crockpot, it means cooking and providing every single bite my kid is going to eat whether he's at home, school, a birthday party, soccer practice, what have you.

 <--this was me thinking about all of that

Given a few weeks to plan however, I'm back on the prep-ahead, freeze-ahead horse with some new recipes in tow, confidence that we can make this work and hope that it helps my kids and their various *stuff*.

There are many, many, many blogs out there dedicated to GF/CF/Whatever-F cooking out there.  I do not intend to duplicate those efforts.  My focus, as ever, is the prep-ahead aspect.  What works to make in advance. What works to prep in advance to finish later. How to plan and shop and work ahead to make dinner (and lunch and breakfast and snacktime) happen on time, healthfully (as we now define it), and without making your brain explode.

So here we are.  In some ways, doing the same-old-same-old (there are an awful lot of natively GFCF/DF recipes, many on this very blog...if I get a chance to breathe, I'm going to try to go back and add appropriate tags/pins), and in some ways relearning the basics.

Like bread.  The Holy Grail in many ways of GF baking.  When you think of "bread" (yeast breads in particular), you probably have the sense-memory of the chew, the toothsome pull of each bite.  That's the gluten.  Even with a soft yeast bread like a Parker House roll, there's a particular flavor that comes from the wheat.  Yes, wheat has a flavor...you don't realize it until you're eating a roll made without wheat, but wheat has its own distinctive flavor.  Wheat is such an omnipresent grain in our cooking culture that it's like wallpaper...you don't notice it until it's gone.

So the downside to GF baking is that it's just not going to be the same.  It might be close with a really good recipe and set of ingredients, but it's not going to be the same.

The upside, however, once you reset your expectations for the final product, is that there is no gluten to worry about.  No need for extensive kneading or long double and triple rises to develop gluten in a bread, and no worries about overmixing causing too much gluten development (and therefore toughness) in quick breads and cakes.  No pull-back when you shape dough.  No need to let a pizza crust rest before rolling it out.  It's really quite brilliant.

One of the "downsides" to GF bread--namely how quickly it dries out and gets stale at room temperature--is ideal for my purposes.  The solution is to bake bread ahead and freeze it (although so far, the bread I've made is eaten up by my family of 5 so fast, it hasn't needed to last more than 24 hours fresh anyway).

As far as shopping for this goes, you do need some "unusual" flours and ingredients.  Fortunately, it's not hard to find them.  All the major grocery store chains near me carry these items.  Bob's Red Mill is the brand that's most prevalent.  Some stores carry them on the regular baking aisle and dairy case; some have them in a "specialty diet", "organic/natural foods" or "gluten free foods" area.  If you don't see what you need, ASK.  I bet they have it somewhere.

One last thought...the first rule of GF baking is You Don't Talk About... No, that's not it, just kidding.

The first rule of GF baking is Don't Change the Recipe.  You can't just take a gluten-based recipe, sub in some GF flours and have it work.  You need thickeners, binding agents, extra leaveners and a lot of trial-and-error to start generating a workable GF recipe out of thin air.  You also need to be mindful about whether you inadvertently add gluten to a recipe by switching ingredients (there's a lot of hidden gluten in the world).

So I'm not changing anything about the GF baking recipes I try.  I'm going to link to the original recipe found wherever it originally lives on the interwebs, and post my notes about how it worked for me.  With pictures of course.

So off we go.  Please join us :)  And please point out my mistakes...I'm not new to allergen-sensitive cooking, but I am new to this particular (and rawther tricky) branch of food sensitivity.  So I'll try not to screw up, but if I do...holler!

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Cheeseless Pizza

It sounds like pure heresy, no?

Unfortunately, my little girl is dairy-intolerant.  She's also a little iffy with soy foods and I'm not a fan of pretend foods, so a store-bought cheese substitute (which is usually soy-based) is out.  And that soy cheeze stuff doesn't melt well anyway.

So I went looking for *something* that would give that rich, mouth-round texture and flavor to a cheese-less pizza and found this sauce here.  I have made this sauce a couple of different ways now, and I have to say, each way was worked wonderfully.

You really do not miss the cheese.  I mean, I am highly motivated to find alternatives to my favorite cheesy foods because of my daughter, but my other two kids will spit out anything they don't find up to snuff, and this pizza sauce passed muster with them.

Even though we don't need to be tomato-free at our house, I did not use any tomato sauce with this pizza.  The garlic sauce is, well, a sauce after all, not a firm cheese-like product and two sauces just seemed too much.  You could absolutely use some sliced tomatoes as a topping though.

Extra bonus, as a way to enjoy a cheese-loaded favorite without the cheese (and also can be tomato-free), it's a boon for the dialysis diet.  Feeding two birds with one stone, if you will ;)

As far as the garlic goes, I like this sauce both with roasted garlic and sauteed garlic.  The flavors *are* different, so I'd say use whichever you prefer.  To roast a head of garlic, slice the top third or so off the whole head, drizzle with a bit of olive oil, wrap in foil and bake an hour or more at 350F.  Or if you're grilling, put the foil-wrapped garlic on the top rack in your grill and leave it there while the grill cools.

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Dairy-free mac and cheese, Take 1

This cheese-free mixture combines with almond milk to make
the mac-sans-cheese sauce

My darling nearly 1-year-old daughter (Miss H) has an apparent dairy protein sensitivity.  It's not a true allergy, thankfully.  She can eat small amounts of "hidden" dairy products (like the amount of milk in a single pancake is OK), but yogurt, cheese, a cup of milk and we are in Digestive Distress Central.  Unfortunately that means that dishes are that are basic food groups at my house are off limits for her :(  Like mac and cheese.

So I am exploring the world of cheese-free mac and cheese.  As best I can tell, dairy-free mac and cheese recipes fall into 4 main categories...those that use processed faux cheese and plant-based milk for the sauce, those that use miso paste and plant-based milk, those that use some kind of nut puree and plant-based milk and those that use a product called nutritional yeast and plant-based milk.

I'm starting with the last one.

You might remember that I said I wasn't going to make a special trip to get nutritional yeast to make this recipe awhile back...I apparently shoulda gone ahead and done it.  So off to my local natural foods store I went.  $4.50 for half a pound and it looks like it might last forever.

I've also had to try plant-based milks...we've settled on almond milk mostly because she doesn't barf it back up and that's good enough for us.  I was surprised to see that most plant milks have added sweetener.  When I compared the nutritional information on these milks with cow's milk though, I realized that without the additional sugar, most of these milks (the ones made from protein sources like nuts anyway) are far lower in calories and natural sugar than cow's milk.  Great for adults who want to cut calories, not so great for growing babies.  There are flavored versions of most non-dairy milks, and those have LOTS more added sugar which we *will* be avoiding.  Just a tidbit for you.  Back to the recipe.

I tried this recipe from the Bad Mama Genny blog.  I liked that it was easy, fast and could sit on the shelf like the boxes of mac and cheese do.  Nice and easy for me or my Dear Husband to throw together for a quick kid-friendly meal.  And it absolutely was.  And Miss H LOVED her cheese-free mac.

Full disclosure...the boys did not like this.  They were 100% rock-solid prepared for Kraft and were disappointed.  I thought it needed a little acidity from, say, some white wine vinegar or tomato paste, but otherwise I'd absolutely eat it again.

Full disclosure...I'll probably make up a few small jars of this mix (as recommended here, though I prefer the sauce-to-pasta proportions of the above-linked version) and make it just for Miss H while continuing to keep the boxed stuff, the "real" stuff for the boys.  And I'll keep trying other recipes too.

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