Tag Archives: Gluten-free Living magazine

Fun Friday: Cranberry Chocolate Chip Cookies

17 Jan

These cookies were so delicious and contain one of my favorite combinations.

Happy Friday! I love a long weekend because it gives us more time to cook up something extra special, like cookies.

I found this recipe in Gluten-Free Living Magazine back in October and it was actually featured in a holiday cookie recipe spread in the magazine, in anticipation of the upcoming holiday baking season. However, I love the combination of chocolate and cranberries. In fact, it’s January now and I have a pumpkin-cranberry-chocolate-chip bread in the oven as I write.

Being gluten-free, the recipe calls for a one-to-one all-purpose gluten-free flour, (which means you can take a typical recipe and substitute the one-to-one GF flour for the regular all-purpose flour with no other substitutions or extra ingredients needed) and we do use their recommended brand below. However, I believe you could substitute back the other way too, and instead of using the GF one-to-one flour, you should be able to also use regular all-purpose baking flour in this recipe.

I always use a Pampered Chef small scoop to scoop out the batter, so oftentimes my cookies are particularly round if I don’t think to flatten them out a bit after I scoop them onto the tray. That’s why they are seen this way in my photo above.

This was a quick and easy recipe and it would make a great treat with coffee, tea, milk or whatever your favorite beverage. They also made a great school day or after school snack.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups gluten-free all-purpose flour (Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free 1:1 Baking Flour is recommended by Gluten-Free Living Magazine)

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

8 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled slightly (to also make this dairy-free I used Earth Balance baking sticks)

1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 large egg

3/4 cup dark chocolate chips (to make this dairy-free I used Enjoy Life brand allergy-friendly mini semi-sweet chocolate chips)

3/4 cup dried cranberries

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Whisk together the gluten-free flour, baking soda and salt together in a medium bowl.

In a large bowl, [using a mixer], combine the melted butter, dark brown sugar, granulated sugar, and vanilla extract. Mix until smooth.

Add the egg and mix until combined. The mixture should look like thick caramel sauce. Stop the mixer and add the flour mixture. Mix on medium speed until a thick dough forms. Add the chocolate chips and dried cranberries. Stir until incorporated.

Drop dough, about two tablespoons each, onto prepared cookie sheet. Space cookies about two inches apart.

Bake until golden brown, about ten minutes. Rotate the baking sheets halfway through baking.

Allow the cookies to cool for five minutes and then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Meal Inspiration: Where do you find yours?

16 Jan

This salad wasn’t even on our radar until I saw a similar one pictured in a magazine.

Do you ever find you’re stuck in a meal-planning rut? I know that I easily tire of planning “the same old thing” week after week, and we try to mix it up every two-week meal menu. Therefore, I’m always looking for inspiration for our menus. We love cooking, we love eating and we love trying new things all the time.

Recently, I was thumbing through an issue of the Gluten-Free Living Magazine that had come in over the vacation week or sometime in that mad rush of weeks and I came across an advertisement for their newsletter.

It wasn’t the idea of the newsletter that struck me, however, but more so the salad pictured on the page in front of me. We love a good salad at our house and often times we will schedule a grilled chicken Caesar salad or a taco salad as one of our meals. Recently though, we’ve been loving fresh spinach, so when I saw it pictured in the advertisement, I stopped and paid attention.

I quickly ripped this ad out of the magazine and started to plan our next meal.

I am definitely a person who is drawn to food photos and videos, and I get a lot of my inspiration in this way. I took a long look at the salad in the picture, checked out what was in it and then made a note at the top of the page of the ingredients and what else we could add to it to make it even better and more to our family’s liking. When I showed the page to my family four out of five of us thought it looked great, so we planned it for a night the fifth one of us was not going to be home.

The original ingredients were spinach, craisins, pomegranate seeds, crumbled cheese, quinoa, and nuts. To that list, I also added in grilled chicken and crumbled bacon. During our most recent shopping trip we bought it all and on Monday night we laid it all out in a make-your-own salad bar style.

Initially, we forgot to put the quinoa out, but when I pulled out the original magazine photo to compare pictures, I quickly realized it and we added it in after the photos had been taken.

The good thing about this meal besides the flavor and the fact that it’s a healthy choice is that it was fast and had a simple cleanup. The nuts were pre-crumbled, the chicken was Perdue Shortcuts, and the bacon was pre-cooked. Quinoa is easy to cook and I cooked it ahead of time that afternoon so it could chill. The hardest thing was cutting and seeding the pomegranate, and although I know that they come already done for you, the store we were at didn’t have them that way at the time we were there, so we grabbed a whole one and enjoyed figuring that process out. Otherwise, it was quick and easy. There were almost no leftovers and everyone had two bowls. For dressings, we put out a bottle of Panera Fuji Apple that my parents recently introduced us to and which is gluten and dairy free, and a Balsamic Vinaigrette which is also gluten and dairy free. I had the apple, but either would have been good.

This was a completely different salad than what we normally would’ve thought of on our own, and we all raved about it. We’d definitely make it again and it’ll be a staple in our menu cycles going forward. It looked pretty, tasted great and cleaned up well. All in all, a successful meal.

Spinach salad has quickly become a favorite of ours.

 

Tags: , , , , , ,

Fun Friday: One-bowl brownies from Gluten-Free Living

6 Oct

Since finding this recipe at the end of the summer, we have made it at least four or five times.

Recently, I mentioned that when we cleaned out our kitchen to be redone, I had a huge pile of recipes and cookbooks to go through once we were ready to reload. In that pile was also a small pile of Gluten-Free Living magazines that I had put aside as they came in every other month, hoping for a day to go through them with my daughter.

At some point near the middle of August we found a day and we went through and pulled out any recipes we wanted to try, and recycled the rest of the magazines. Today’s recipe is one of the ones we pulled out to try. It’s from the newest issue, the September/October 2017 magazine that had just come in August. It is for a one-bowl recipe for brownies. I love anything that has very little cleanup, so one bowl appeals to me. I also love my new glass mixing bowl that I got in the springtime when my old plastic bowl broke, so I looked forward to the chance to use it as our one bowl.

This recipe was so easy that my daughter, who is 12, could make the whole thing by herself, with very little direction or help from me, other than some clarifying details. Additionally, I always enjoy a good teachable moment in the kitchen, and I loved showing her how the brownie batter doesn’t start out dark, but becomes so when you add in the unsweetened cocoa powder. It’s a simple thing, but when we make them out of a box, they start out chocolatey, so it was unusual for her to see the transition from a plain batter to a chocolate batter.

Like magic, it becomes chocolatey.

 

I’ll never not use parchment paper again.

In the months since we made this recipe for the first time, we have used it at least four or five more times, and we have doubled it depending on how many we were baking for. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s delicious. More importantly, people say that it doesn’t taste gluten-free. The brownies are thick and fudgy, just as brownies should be.

We started a new baking habit with this recipe and actually followed the directions for lining the bowl with parchment paper, which we sprayed with non-stick cooking spray. I always skipped doing this in the past, just spraying my baking dish, but my daughter wanted to use the paper, and we had it, and we’ll never go back to not using it again. The cleanup is super easy and the brownies can be lifted out, cooled and cut right on the paper.

Here is the recipe, I hope you’ll give it a try!

One-Bowl Brownies
from Gluten-Free Living magazine

Makes 12 brownies

Ingredients

non-stick cooking spray

1/2 cup (one stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup gluten-free flour blend (they recommended Bob’s Red Mill 1:1 Baking Flour, which we use as well.)
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp. salt

Directions

Preheat oven to 350F.

Line an 8×8 baking pan with foil or parchment paper, allowing the edges to hang over the side. This makes removal easy. Spray the foil or parchment paper lightly with nonstick cooking spray.

Whisk together butter and granulated sugar until combined. Add the eggs and vanilla extract. Whisk until combined. Add the flour, cocoa powder and salt. Switch to a wooden spoon and stir batter until smooth.

Spread batter evenly into prepared pan. Bake until set, about 20 minutes. A cake tester inserted into the center of the pan should come out with a few damp crumbs clinging to it.

Allow the brownies to cool completely in the pan set on a wire rack, about two hours.

Lift the brownies from the pan using the foil, cut into squares.

Tags: , , ,