Me & My Cookie Scoop: Gluten-Free Almond Butter Cookies

I don’t like peanut butter. I’m off gluten. I love cookies.

It’s a hot, Sunday afternoon, and I am lolling around, overheated and sleepy.

What is a girl to do?

Well, one of the best – really the best gluten-free chocolate chip cookies can be found at My Gluten Free Kitchen – peanut butter cookies at My Gluten Free Kitchen so I went there in search of some kind of nut butter cookies, but finding only peanut butter, used the recipe as a basis for my own. The major differences are different gluten-free flour and use of almond butter and slivered almonds instead of peanut butter and peanut butter baking chips. (Ugh! You just don’t know how much I dislike peanut butter!!) But, these are pretty good, if I do not-so-modestly say so myself.

Gluten-Free Almond Butter Cookies

1.5 c. Bob’s Red Mill 1-for-1 Gluten-Free Flour
1/2 t. baking powder
3/4 t. baking soda
1/4 t. salt
1/2 c. softened, unsalted butter
1 c. almond butter (unsalted from Trader Joe’s)
3/4 c. white sugar
1/2 c. dark brown sugar
1 egg
1 T. cream / half-and-half
1 t. vanilla extract
1 c. slivered almonds

Preheat oven to 350F. Beat together butter, almond butter, and sugars till creamy. Beat in egg and vanilla until fluffy. Add the flour, soda, salt, powder, and beat until well blended. Stir in slivered almonds

Refrigerate dough for at least 30 minutes. Gluten-free baking – at least cookies – seem to do better with chilled dough. Use a cookie scoop or a couple of teaspoons to make your cookies.

If you like, roll your cookies in granulated sugar before baking.

Bake for 8-10 minutes. Be sure to make test cookies! Let cool a few minutes on cookie sheet, then remove to wire rack to cool.

When done – devour!!

Honey Bourbon Peach BBQ Sauce

Monday is the beer brewer’s birthday, so we are doing a small gathering of the clan for a barbecue. With any BBQ, you need a smoker, BBQ sauce, and pork ribs. (At least we think so!) So, Mr. put together a rub and I am simmering the BBQ sauce as we speak. As with all my recipes, this is a bit of this and that, and while I sort of followed a recipe, I sort of did my own thing. I like my sauce sweet and sour and hot all at once, and lately I have been in a real mood for peaches and bourbon for a sauce, so here is my attempt!

Honey Bourbon Peach BBQ Sauce

2 sweet onions, finely chopped
4-6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
8 peaches, peeled, pitted, chopped
2 c. tomato sauce
3/4 c. honey
1/2 c. apple cider vinegar
1/4 – 1/2 c. bourbon
1/4 c. Worcestershire sauce
2 small hot chili peppers, seeded and chopped (I used Black Cobra)
1-2 T. hot chili flakes
2 T. chipotle chili powder or a few chipotles from a can
1 t. pepper
1-2 T. ground ginger
1/2 t. salt

Method

Saute together onions, garlic and chopped tomatoes (if used) until soft and translucent. Place chopped peaches and onion-garlic-tomato mixture in with peaches. Blend until smooth and creamy. You may need to blend in small batches; as each batch is done, put into large pan. Once all the blending is done, leave about 1/4 of the blender filled and add remainder of ingredients. Blend until smooth. Pour into pan with rest of sauce. Simmer on stove top for about 30 minutes. Taste it as it begins to cook – you may need to adjust the flavors to your own liking.

Cool.

Yield: about 6 c. (from what I am guestimating)

Me and My Cookie Scoop

I love cookies, but of late, dietary issues have forced me to stop eating certain foods after a lifetime of eating them. Well, that is the way life is. Luckily, there is the internet, there is imagination, and there is my love for cookies. If I were to single out two favorite sweets, cookies and homemade fruit pie are the winners. So, today, I decided I would look for cookies that didn’t use flour or starches, and I came across this recipe for thumbprint cookies by Danielle Walker. They are designed to be paleo or specific carbohydrate diet (SCD). They are a great start, but as I didn’t have coconut flour, I changed them a bit. Here is my take on the recipe.

Thumbprint Cookies

1 egg
6 T. soft butter
1/3 c. honey
1/2 t. vanilla extract
1 egg
2 c. blanched almond flour (mine is from Trader Joe’s)
1/2 c. almond meal
1/2 c. unsweetened flaked coconut
1 tsp. cinnamon
Fruit preserves without sugar (I used some fruit spread sweetened with grape juice and natural pectin from Trader Joe’s)

Preheat oven to 350F. Beat together butter, honey, and egg, for about a minute at medium speed. Beat in at low speed the remaining ingredients until the mix together well.

I suggest you make one test cookie! This will help you adjust time and add ingredients if you need to.

Using a 2 T. cookie scoop, make balls, and place on parchment covered cookie sheet. Press your finger into the cookie to make a deep well. Fill well with just enough fruit spread to fill the indentation – don’t let it run over the sides or overfill. Bake for 15 minutes until lightly brown. Let cool completely on wire rack to allow the fruit spread to cool to a non-liquid state. Yield: 17 – 18 cookies (I ate some of the dough!).

I think next time around I will add a bit of salt . . . I seldom cook with salt, but these cookies need just a tad.

Damned good cookies if you ask me!

Cranberries & Yogurt

This is, admittedly, a rather odd title for a post, but in few minutes, you’ll see why.

Sugar is in everything, and so I decided I would try to make some cranberry sauce that has a good flavor, but is not filled with a cup of granulated white sugar. I came across a number of recipes. Some used stevia, the flavor of which I don’t like. Others recommend aspartame or other synthetic sweeteners – all of these are horrid. Sucralose is also suggested. The fact is, I really don’t like the flavors of artificial or substitute sweeteners. So, what is left? A bit of research found some recipes using sweet cherries and cranberries, or adding apple sauce. Orange flavoring via orange juice and zest. Pineapple juice. And honey, which is an easily digestible sweetener, and if not too strong, is okay with me!

So . . . I made up my own recipe for non-sugared cranberry sauce!

Cranberry Sauce Without Granulated Sugar

12 oz. cranberries
1 bosc pair, peeled and chopped
1/2 c. water
1/2 c. unsweetened apple sauce
zest and juice of 1 orange (I used a large navel orange)
2-4 T. honey

Simmer all the above together, and after cranberries have slowed their popping, pour in the juice of one orange, and its zest. Cook another 10 minutes on a low temperature. Sauce will be tart with a strong orange flavor. You may want to use less zest, or none, and just the juice. This is not a very cranberry sauce, but you do not want a sauce so sour your lips pucker! Add some honey if you want (I added about 3 T – still tart, but not puckery – and I do like sour!).

Okay, now the yogurt part. Years ago I used to make my own yogurt. What? Yes, you can, and you can make it without an expensive yogurt maker. If you have a gas oven with a pilot light, there you go – home for your yogurt until done. My current stove is gas on top, electric inside, so I use an ice chest filled with a few bottles of boiling water to keep the yogurt warm, and I check on it periodically to make sure it is still warm. I let my yogurt set for 24 hours. Once done, you do need to cool it down so it won’t continue to ferment – too much is not a good thing.

There are two types of cultures for yogurt. Some are thermophilic, needing heat, and others are mesophilic, meaning room temperature is the best environment. I like Bulgarian yogurt, made with lactobacillus bulgaricus, and lactobacillus acidophilus. These days, with the increased knowledge about probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, it turns out that the acidophilus bifidus is not considered to be a “good” one for adults. Apparently breast fed babies gut flora is primarily acidophilus bifidus, but if it continues to flourish in the gut biome past weaning, it could set the individual up for digestive issues, such as celiac and other similar diseases. Here is a link to some interesting information about acidophilus bifidus.

So, I have some yogurt in my fridge. It has bifidus in it. A search for bifidus-free yogurt in the store to use as a starter yielded only one yogurt that does not have bifidus in it! It is Siggi’s Sheep Yogurt, expensive, but bifidus free. I bought some to use as a starter (it also tastes good!). I also purchased a starter from Amazon for $8.00 which states it “contains live active bacteria like ”Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. Bulgaricus” and ”Streptococcus thermophilus” – there ya go!

My Yogurt Recipe

1 qt. whole milk
1/4 c. Siggi’s

Bring milk to simmer – hot to the touch. Watch on stove to be sure it does not burn, so stir it! Reduce to about 75 F. Take 1/2 c. cooled milk and whisk into the starter. Pour into 1 qt. container (or smaller containers, such as 2 pint jars, etc.). Place in ice chest filled with a few bottles of boiling water. Set aside to ferment for 24 hours.

Now you understand “Cranberries & Yogurt”!

Cool Stuff on Hot Days: Gelato

If there is something dear to the heart of most of us, it is ice cream, or some form of ice cream, especially on a hot summer’s day. Making ice cream from scratch is a bit intense at times – like when the hand-crank freezer leaks salt into the batch you have been waiting for. Another disappointment is when it gets chunks of ice when you freeze it in the freezer without having churned it because you don’t have a churn. You can also put a bowl in a bucket of ice and chill the mixture by hand, stirring, stirring, stirring, but that is a bit primitive.

Enter the electrified, freeze-the-bowl-overnight variety of churn. We got one for our wedding over 20 years ago, and we still use it. It looks something like this one, except we have to make the ice cream! And it works wonderfully well for gelato.

I’ve outgrown my taste for heavy, thick ice cream. Frozen yogurt is okay, but never a favorite. Sorbet is better than ice cream or frozen yogurt, but not quite what hits home. The other night, we went out shopping and ended up buying gelatos just because. And then the thought hit: why not make it at home? We just love gelato!

Research began, and at first I was sure I was not finding anything that was gelato as it sounded way too much like ice cream. The difference, it seems, is that gelato is not all cream, but a bit of cream or half-and-half combined with milk. Some gelato recipes have egg yolks, and others do not. Those egg yolks are necessary to absorb water and prevent those nasty chunks of ice from forming, so some recipes that are eggless use a starch of some sort to absorb the water molecules. Interesting, eh? You can use cornstarch or potato starch or arrowroot. Not liking that idea, I used egg yolks in mine, but it is good information to have on hand. Ya gotta love the internet!

Basic Gelato Recipe
3 c. whole milk / half-and-half / cream combination (largest portion should be milk)
3/4 – 1 c. sugar
4 egg yolks

Heat milk combination over low heat with half the sugar, stirring to dissolve sugar. Watch the heat does not get too high. Beat egg yolks with remaining sugar until thick, heavy, and filled with air. Add a bit of vanilla if you want. Once the milk is warmish, and the yolks are beaten and thick, take about a cup of warm (not scalding hot) milk and beat it into the yolks. This is to equalize the temperatures of both mixtures. If the milk is too hot, you will cook the yolks, which is not what you want to do. Then, beat in the rest of the milk. Once this is done, take a fine strainer or sieve and pour the mixture through it to remove any chunks of cooked egg or whatever. Store in the fridge until cold. Then freeze, using whatever ice cream maker you have on hand, being sure to read the directions!!!

Customizing your gelato is easy. Some hints I read about making good gelato, one with a deep rich flavor, is to use over-ripe (but not spoiled) fruits, freeze it until custardy in texture, not hard, and so on. Too little flavor is not good! I read about the following types of gelatos:

mascarpone lemon gelato
chocolate-cardamom-stewed fig gelato
toasted coconut gelato
raspberry gelato
blueberry lemon gelato

You get the idea – you can do anything you want! What did I choose?

Mint & Chocolate Chunk Gelato
2 c. whole milk
1 c. combination of cream & half-and-half
1 c. sugar
4 egg yolks
fresh mint leaves
vanilla extract
chopped Valhrona 70% or more dark chocolate (1 bar)

Follow the directions above. In the milk mixture, add the mint leaves and leave to soak a bit. Beat the egg yolks and vanilla. When ready to combine the two, I strained out the mint leaves and set them aside. Once the yolks and milk were combined, I took the mint leaves, now soft from being in the warm milk, and chopped them up as fine as I could. Then I put them into the yolk-milk mixture, and put the whole mess in the fridge to cool. Once ready to churn, I set up the ice cream maker and churned – about 20-25 minutes by my watch – and then, before removing the gelato from the churn, added the chopped chocolate.

Freeze, eat, devour.

Altogether, I was very happy with the recipe. I think the chocolate could also be melted and then slowly poured into the gelato as the ice cream machine runs. That could be pretty darn delicious. I know we will be revisiting gelato a lotto this summer.