Home Made Coffee Liqure

Ok, so there's the official list of what's safe for coeliacs to drink, and then there's all the real life experiences (read the comments below the article) that make that list as clear as mud. That's what's good about the Internet though, because at least you can read the comments and reader feedback and come to your own conclusions. Without that feedback, I'd feel like a (n even more) giant freak.

Speaking for myself, I used to have a big problem with wines, which I originally thought was due to milk protein (to which I'm allergic) being used as a clearing agent, but since buying some certified vegan wines (casien free) wine and still reacting, I guess it can also mean that there may indeed have been gluten used to clear the wine as the dude in the wine store says is often the case. I haven't found any co-op wines with gluten in them, however to get an idea of which wines types or regions might do this.

I also react to caramel colouring (an E number, which has nothing to do with the food, and is often wheat derived in Europe) and have discovered that despite what most barmen have been told, that most dark or amber coloured liqueur is almost certain to have have some of this additive added to the final product to pretty it up for consumers.

Case in point: Jose Cuervo 100% agave Tequila in amber leaves me in an uncomfortable rash for days, while the clear (and cheaper) version of this 100% agave distillation leaves me bouncy with good memories of the night before. Same story with Bacardi white vs gold. Same gluten free alcohol base, different colour, different outcomes.

While I'm happy and relived to have found what works for me, I miss variety, and I really miss after dinner liqueurs.

But guess what? Some liqueurs are super easy to make!

The following recipe required no speciality shopping and comes out tasting exactly like Tia Maria, but I'm hoping (fingers crossed) that it will improve with the recommended 2 weeks of maturing (I don't know how, but I can hope, right?). It has a strong coffee kick, so if I was going to shop for ingredients it might be worth buying decaf, or mixing decaf and regular instant coffee 50%-50%.

I was a little concerned that Bacardi wasn't strong enough as the original recipe called for 100% proof alcohol, so am thinking that if I don't like how the final product is in two weeks I might hunt out this 100% proof white rum or a 100% potato based vodka for future ventures.

Preparation Time:
It takes about 15 minutes on the hob (although I used my thermomix so I wouldn't need to watch it), about 30 minutes to cool (I left the kitchen window open with the jug on the sink) and then pour into suitably large empty bottle. I recommend keeping some used wine bottles around, as the near empty 700ml bottle of Bacardi I had wasn't big enough and I wound up filling up an empty mini ouzo bottle and a jam jar.

Coffee Liqueur

• 300 grams unbleached caster sugar (that's what I had, you can use white regular sugar)
• 100 grams brown sugar. (I want my liqueur dark brown and sticky)
• 475 ml water
• 15 grams instant coffee granules (a little under 100ml in a measuring jug. Consider using decaf!)
• 15 ml vanilla extract (I used Nielsen-Massey Pure Vanilla Extract, but look for one that has no colouring added, and ideally, which lists it's ingredients as "vanilla extract" and "alcohol"). 
• 475 ml white Bacardi. You can use this equivalent of vodka for a taste like Kahula if you prefer. 

Method:

1. Combine sugar and water and slowly bring to boil, stirring well. (Note: in a thermomix this took forever to happen even at 100C. I had to hit 'Varoma' before it finally boiled) 
2. Let it simmer for ten minutes (in the thermomix, I switched it back to 100C which steamed more than simmered, on speed 1) and mix from time to time. Now let cool, which will take a while. 
3. Add the coffee granules and the vanilla extract, then the Bacardi and fill into an empty bottle. I used a measuring jug to pour into an empty 700ml Bacardi bottle, but still needed more room! 
4. Close bottle(s) (and in my case, jam jar) tightly and keep in a cool dark place for 2 weeks. 

Coffee not your thing?
Try your hand at making lemoncello or coconut liqueur just as easily as above (although I will swap Bacardi in place of vodka, and forget the brandy in the coconut liqueur, as I can't find one without the dreaded colourant.)

Mixed Game Cacciatore

Cacciatore is usually made with chicken but since I understand it's name to mean "hunter" I decided mixed game was fine. They were selling 2 packs of mixed game for £6 at Tesco which seemed pretty good value for something that had never seen the inside of a barn, I figured. If using chicken try and get it with skin on as it adds so much flavour.

For a meatless version of this, think of things you'd "gather". I'd use a combination of wild and brown mushrooms, a bell pepper, and my seasonal fave - the chestnut, but go all out in caramelising the onions. It'll take around 30 minutes on medium to low heat but the flavour is so worth it.

I'm using a slow cooker for this since it's the weekend and I have time and don't want to be jumping up to check the dinner, but this can be cooked in a lidded pot in the oven at 200C for 40 minutes.

Ingredients:

• 2 packs of mixed diced game - around 500g (or chicken legs, breast, wings - whatever you have to hand.)
• gluten free flour, for dredging the meat.
• 2 large onions, sliced
• 1 can chopped tomatoes
• 1 bay leaf
• a spring of thyme (I bought a bunch of the fresh stuff last week so it's appearing everywhere, but you can use whatever herbs you prefer, really)
• a sprinkle of oregano
• salt and pepper to season
• 100 ml red wine
• half a chicken stock cube
• a glug of white sherry (I found one that hadn't been cleared using milk at the local Co-op. The Co-op is the only place in the UK that lists all ingredients in their own-brand alcohols.)
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar

First, coat the meat in a little flour and leave to soak up the juices. In a frying pan on medium heat, gently caramelise the onions for 10 minutes. Put the onions aside. In the same pan, brown the meat gently, add seasoning and tip into the slow cooker. Add the tomatoes to the slow cooker. In the frying pan, pour the red wine into the pan and scrap down the pan with a wooden spoon to remove any burnt on bits. Add to slow cooker.  Add the herbs, haled stock cube, sherry and brown sugar, then leave to cook for 2 hours on high or 4 on low.

Serve over, what else? Pasta.

Turkey and Chestnut Meatloaf

The thing about eating seasonally is you actually look forward to the changing seasons for the change of flavours, and in winter, chestnuts are one of the seasonal perks I look forward to.

Preparing Chestnuts: You can buy then fresh or dried. If buying dried, you'll need to soak them for 12 hours to hydrate and then cook for another hour and a half. If buying fresh, slit the chestnuts at the top and boil for 20 minutes. You can also heat fresh chestnuts in the oven for 20 minutes, but they can explode (well, pop) or burn if you're not careful, so for me, boiling is best, and I like to do the boiling in the slow cooker to prevent boiling them dry and/or a super steamy kitchen. In a slowcooker, they take and hour and a half for fresh chestnuts and two hours and a half for dried chestnuts (on high). They'll start to crumble a bit as you peel them, but that works out pretty well for this recipe. Once done boiling rinse under cold water but return to the emptied warm crockpot to keep warm. Chestnuts get more difficult to peel as they cool.

The Ingredients:

• 500g of Turkey mince
• 100g ground chestnuts
• 90g gluten free breadcrumbs (I used Organ, which I found at Uhuru whole foods in Oxford)
• 1 egg
• 1 leek, or onion, chopped.
• a good glug of olive oil
• a few sprigs of thyme
• salt and pepper

Method:

Preheat oven to 200C. Rub a little olive oil into a roasting tin and place in oven so the oil gets hot. 

Fry the leek or onion gently to slightly caramelise. 4-5 minutes. Put Aside. Pulse chestnuts in a food processor to chop, but don't let them get to breadcrumb size. 2-3 pulses should do it. In a bowl, combine breadcrumbs, chestnuts, seasoning, thyme and raw mince and the egg and mix together. Bring the roasting try out from the oven and press the turkey mixture into the roasting tin. You don't want it to be too flat, just compressed so it holds together well. Top off with a little more herbs and put in oven for around 30 minutes. It should be nice and brown on top without looking too dry. 

We served this with some roasted root veggies -beetroot and parsnip- and a side of mashed potato. We had enough for a generous lunch the next day and plus little more for snack.

I Crave Chocolate

My immune system smells allergens like a shark smells blood in water. One of the knock on effects of this is that I can't eat chocolate.

I don't mean my home made hot chocolate or coca infused brownies, cakes or mousses. The crunchy bar stuff. The stuff that's always got soya lecithin included as an ingredient, or "may contain traces of.." the things that put me in so much pain I might as well imagine someone hitting me fully in the face with a frying pan the moment I pick up the bar. Talk about aversion therapy. I was lucky enough to find a brand of dairy free, gluten free chocolate that did not include soya, but which "might include traces of soya". I figured my soya allergy wasn't so pronounced to be affected by such tiny amounts yet so bought it, but by the third day I was reaching for the antihistamines immediately after and was wheezing in an unmistakable true-food allergy fashion.

I gave the rest of the bar to Mr Umami, even though 70% dark cocoa isn't his thing; he's more of a swiss chocolate type. Me, I prefer the "crack" of chocolate, at 70% or 80% - a single square leaves me my nerves tingling and my tongue satisfied, but my preference is probably because this way my chocolate -the mythical bar that's that's allergen free- would last longer than one sitting.

So I was really happy when Quirky Cooking posted up this recipe for "almost raw" chocolate. This is because, like the author (Jo), I also have a thermomix. It's one of the smartest investments I ever made once I had confirmed that food was the source of my health problems. I had also bought chocolate moulds earlier this year but my plans at making chocolate stagnated. Her recipe for the thermomix seemed extremely do-able, no adaptations needed.

I found cocoa nibs at amazon.co.uk along with cocoa butter. JOY! You'll notice amazon also stocks ground cocoa powder by the same company, but one thing I've learned about my storm trooper immune system is that if something isn't milled in a dedicated gluten, dairy and soy free factory, then I'll react. One particle in 500 may be enough to fit the gluten and wheat free criteria by E.U law, but try explaining that to my white blood cells. Really, find a way, and I'll be more than happy to go nuts in the free from section again. That's one of the reasons I shelled out for my Thermomix, and why I prefer to buy things whole and grind them myself if I don't know for certain where they've been milled. I've had to throw out a lot of expensive "naturally gluten free" flours (coconut, chickpea, buckwheat, quinoa, corn) because my skin was able to tell me they weren't gluten free enough. I've since learned to rinse rice and other gluten free grains a few times before using, and to soak dried fruit and nuts to get rid of any "other" particles.

So. Chocolate. 100% home made, no traces of anything.

Bloglovin'

Follow my blog with bloglovin

Next Day Pheasant Pie

Yesterday's Slow Cooked Pheasant recipe yielded massive dinners for Mr Umami and myself and hearty lunches for us both the following day. Making bigger dinners and then taking leftovers to work is my top tip to save hassle in the morning or anxiety over finding anything suitable for an allergy diet in the perimeter of the workplace. I like to pack the leftovers up the night before to give myself one less thing to try and squeeze in the morning. 

Pies are versatile: use whatever leftover meat you have to hand, add some vegetable fillers (carrot, swedes, parsnip, celery, leeks, etc), and some 'meaty' fillers: mushrooms, chestnuts, beans, fried bacon or other bits of leftover meats, or even potato if the cuboard is bare. Optional: an 'accent' such as: prunes, figs, apple, currants, apricot.

Then top with pastry. 

Tips for Working with Gluten Free Pastry

This will need to be chilled for a minimum of thirty minutes. If in doubt, make it a little dryer than you think you'll need and it'll be easier to work with. If your kitchen is on the warm side (like my closet sized one is) consider taking the pastry and a smooth chopping board lined with clingfilm into the living room (or any other cool room) to roll it out. Warm pastry will tear a lot. 

And if it tears, just patch it up! It's home-made, after all.

I don't line my pies with an underlayer of pastry as it seems a lavish use of expensive flour and dairy free butter substitute - and just because I'm gluten free doesn't mean I don't still need to watch my cholesterol - but if you'd like to do so, please double up the amount of pastry dough below.

Gluten Free Pastry:

• 190 g gluten free flour (I use Doves Gluten Free White Bread Flour with Xantham gum already added)
• 90 g dairy free spread (I use Pure Dairy Free Sunflower spread)
• 1 egg, whisked
• 1 tablespoon of water.
• clingfilm

If using a bowl and spoon, chop butter up into cubes, and rub into the dough until it resembles breadcrumbs, then add the whisked egg and mix with a spoon until it just begins to come together. Tip out of the bowl onto a smooth surface and roll into a smooth ball and wrap in clingfilm, then leave in fridge to harden.

If using a food processor: add flour and butter and pulse a few times until the mix achieves that breadcrumb texture. Add the egg and blend for a few seconds. My thermomix found the mixture too hard for the blades to keep whirring after a few secs, and it has a strong motor, so I wouldn't push it on a lesser powered food processor. Just blend for a few seconds and then stop, tip out into a bowl and form into a ball by hand, cover in clingfilm and then leave to harden.

For the Pie filling:

• Leftover pheasant meat, stripped from carcass.
• 1 Large carrot, diced
• 1 Parsnip, diced
• 1 baking apple
• 1 leek
• olive oil
• 100ml of chicken stock
• thyme
• 1 egg (whisked), for brushing on the pastry.

Method:
Fry up the leeks on a gentle heat - the idea is to caramalise them a little rather than kill them- and then add the carrots and parsnips to soften a little. Tip all into the pie dish.

Take the pastry ball out from the fridge. I have a silicone mat that I like to roll out my pastry on as it's non-stick, but you can use a sheet of clingfilm under and over the pastry ball. I find gluten free pastry tears more easily than regular type pastry so once I have it rolled out to the shape I like I pick up my silicone sheet, flip it over onto the pie dish and carefully separate it from the silicone sheet with a dining knife. 

Press the pastry over the sides of the baking dish, then brush with whisked egg and bake in a pre heated oven at 200C for half an hour until the pastry is puffed up and golden.

Slow cooker Pheasant, and Next Day Pheasant Pie

One of the reasons I love game is because its had a chance to live it's wild life just as it was meant to. In my opinion, this trumps any organic, free ranged meat that's been carefully fed a pre-made mix of whatever at scheduled times. The other reason I like game is because we don't cut down forests locally or rainforests abroad in order to feed and keep them. As far as eating meat goes, it's win win (except for the game, that is).

The downside of game, is that because it's not kept in a tiny cage and killed as it approaches puberty, it'll be a bit tougher to cook, but this can be dealt with beautifully in the slow cooker. If you're buying from a market, The Cottage Small holder gives excellent advice on choosing game (and a great recipe for pheasant) but I order mine through Able and Cole when it's in season, so I wasn't the one choosing the bird. 

Tenderising the bird (overnight): 

The way I deal with a larger bird is to marinate it overnight with a mix of cider vinegar, olive oil and salt (plus whatever herbs I'm planning of using) to begin tenderising the meat, then putting it in the slow cooker the next day with a good glug of wine and let the slow cooker get to work. This might seem like a hassle, but the convince of ordering most of the weeks groceries while in my bathrobe in a few minutes on a Saturday morning (the veg box is scheduled weekly, all I do is check the next weeks contents and add a few extras to the box to compliment it -usually some kind of meat and gluten free pasta or some risotto rice) and then having it brought to my doorstep greatly outweighs the time and effort of wandering around a supermarket, so chucking a little tenderiser over the bird the night before is an acceptable trade off for me. 

Substitutions: This recipe uses what we had in our veg box that week. You can substitute cavolo nero with cabbage or kale. If using cabbage, you can add this to the slow cooker an hour before serving to soften it up, if using cavolo nero or kale, add half an hour before serving, or stir fry in a frying pan (1-2 minutes) and add at the last minute. I think cavolo nero and kale are best when not be completely wilted. If you don't have leeks, shallots or onions would be fine.
You can cook this in a conventional oven in a lidded pot for an hour and a half on 140C if three hours is too long.

Ingredients:

• 1 pheasant. If large, marinated overnight as above.
• 2 leeks, chopped
• 1 large carrot, chopped
• 3-4 rashers of bacon, diced. 
• 2 garlic cloves (I love garlic! You can use one if you prefer)
• 3 tomatoes, chopped (these were in our veg box that week, right at the end of tomato season, but you can use half a can of tinned otherwise)
• 1 tablespoon of tomato puree
• a splash of balsamic vinegar
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 glass of red wine 
• 200ml of chicken stock.
• salt and pepper
• Rosemary
• Sage (or hebs of your choice)
• A good handful of cavolo nero. It will shrink to less than half it's volume so don't afraid to use more than you can possible image you'll need. Tear the leaves off from the stalks, discard the stalks, then chop the leaves roughly. 

Method:

1. Fry up the bacon and add to slow cooker
2. Turn the heat up high and add the copped tomatoes and a table spoon of olive oil until tomatoes get soft and and and start to melt. Turn down heat to medium and add a splash of balsamic vinegar and a teaspoon of sugar. Stir a little and turn down heat for a minute of so. Add to slow cooker.
3. add the chopped leeks to the bottom of the slow cooker
4. Rub a little olive oil, salt and herbs on the pheasant and add pheasant to the slow cooker.
5. Add carrots, seasoning, herbs, then the glass of wine, stock and the tablespoon of tomato puree (into the liquid). Don't worry if the liquid doesn't seem to cover the bird (it won't), what we're using here is the heat inside the slow cooker to replicate a pot roast in the oven, but using less energy.
6. set slow cooker to 'high' and leave to cook for three hours
7. Before serving, stir fry the cavolo nero with a little olive oil and add to the pot on serving.

We ate this with mashed potato and it was gorgeous. Even more so as my train had been delayed and I was starving. (thanks once again to Mr Umammi for taking instructions by email and cooking for me!).

Tomorrow, I'll write up how to make the leftover into a pie.