Christirei's Profile

creme brulee!! definitely, you can make them ahead and scorch them just before you are ready to serve

I am currently in love with Melissa Clark's cookbook In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite and she has two cakes that sound perfect for something like this. She has a dark chocolate bundt cake that is soaked in rye, it is definitely not sweet but very very special!! I made it for my brother in law's birthday, he also isn't a fan of sweets but it hit the spot! She also has a blood orange cake that is served with a blood orange compote on the side and it is delicious, simple, and you can adjust how much honey you put in the compote to make it less sweet if you like

Okay, from reading the links that Faith posted and everyone's comments...I am definitely guilty of over-stirring!! The recipe says to stir every ten minutes, and since I have never made granola before this, I just didn't know. I have very limited granola experience :) My family didn't even really eat granola before I started making it! So, I typically bake it at 300 degrees, is that a low enough temp to just let it bake without stirring?? I love the recipe and don't want to change it to much, but the sweeteners she calls for are brown sugar and maple syrup. They are not the super sticky ones that people have mentioned as helping to create clumps, but I do love the overall flavor of the granola.

MOMOF8's mix sounds great! I bake gluten free pancakes and frequently use buckwheat flour. I wonder if you could sub in a cup or two of the white flour in the above recipe to up the protein/fiber content without changing the taste to much. Almond or hazelnut flour is also a yummy sub and would taste great. Another whole grain that isn't as common is teff flour, but it probably isn't as easy to sub out as buckwheat would be.

There is a blog I think called Elana's Pantry that this website has quoted from before, I think they posted her Strawberry Muffin/Cupcake recipe. Anyway, she uses coconut flour and agave nectar in all of her recipes. Her cupcakes are moist and delicious and super easy to make, especially if you have never baked gluten free before. I don't know if your friend will eat agave nectar or not...but it's a nice option, and a lot of the cupcakes don't need an icing option.

so any advice when you are the gluten free traveler (our whole family of five is in fact!) and rather than working with me to come up with dishes everyone could enjoy, the family just acts bothered and annoyed that we can't cheat this "one time" - celiacs don't really have a choice though! I think that I will need to bring basically our whole T-day dinner in a cooler and reheat when we arrive!!

I am coming into the digital age slowly kicking and screaming :) I still print out recipes that I find on the web, or even... GASP! write them out by hand! I have a folder in my kitchen to keep recipes I want to try, and binder for the recipes I have tried and love. Recipes I have tried and don't love, just get tossed! I also have an entired cabinet full of actual cookbooks, what can I say...I love holding a book and flipping through the pages! I don't have a smart phone, and my computer is in the basement, so keeping recipes in my email is just not practical for me.

This type of thing sounds good on paper, but is so dangerous. Start with taxing soda, sure...but where does it stop? Who decides what is good food vs bad food? If we opened a forum up on this website about good/bad food there would be so many opinions it would be impossible to narrow it down to a list of choices that should be taxed. And once you start something like that, how do you stop it? My family never used to eat potato chips, they were greasy and I thought "bad for us" but then my youngest daughter got diagnosed with a gluten intolerance and quickly was followed by dairy, corn, oat, nut, and egg allergies. Toddlers love crunchy snacks and while her diet is mostly fruit and veggies, we buy natural potato chips now because for her, they are safe. Should I be taxed extra for that? Our food bills are pretty outrageous already, and we eat about as healthy as any one in this nation can eat.

how about some new ingredients with your chicken? like chipotle chiles in adobo sauce?? Nigella Lawson has an awesome and quick chicken teriyaki recipe that you can find online, it uses the thighs and comes together very quickly with only a few ingredients. I'm getting a little ethnic here, but what about a chicken curry or even some grilled greek chicken to change up the flavor profile a bit??

my birthday is on Christmas, so my mom would go to great lengths to make my birthday cake special, in high school she started letting me thumb through Southern Living magazines and picking cakes out of them! One year I chose a cake that took four of my family members to bake! it involved shortbread angels, a white truffle filling, and three layers of cake! yummmmm!