Gluten Free Oaty Breakfast Smoothie

In an effort to be more healthy (and to use up some fruit before it expired!), I decided to try my hand at making a smoothie. I've owned a blender for years but have never used it to make a smoothie--it usually gets pulled from the cupboard when the daiquiri or margarita urge hits or for smoothing out soups!

While I'd never made one, I've always been an avid smoothie drinker, taking the approach that the professional baristas at smoothie bars could whip up a tasty, healthy treat much better than I could, what with their energy shots and immune boosters. I'll happily report that that's not the case! Even still bleary-eyed at 10 to 7 this morning, I managed this tasty drink. And scored some photos too!

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Ingredients:
For the smoothie
1/3 of a cucumber, seeds removed
1/2 cup semi-skimmed milk
1 banana
3 good-sized strawberries
3 tbsp gluten free rolled oats
4 tbsp fat free Greek yogurt
4 tbsp honey
4 ice cubes

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All right, let's blend:
Blitz the oats in a blender until well ground, without making them powdery. Next, tumble in the rest of the ingredients in any order that strikes your fancy. Blitz, give it a taste and adjust any ingredients as necessary. Blitz again until smooth & enjoy!

A few notes:

• This isn't a Slimming World recipe, but it is Slimming World friendly. In fact, I think you'd struggle to find a diet that didn't consider this a good option for breakfast as it's packed full of fruit and veg. 

• This quick recipe was a big hit with my whole family-even my toddler loved it & I ended up making his porridge with it for his breakfast. It doesn't get any better than that, does it?

Gluten Free Skinny Slow Cooker Turkey Burgers with Carrot & Leek Slaw

How to provide healthy meals for your planning while still having time to spend with them is the age-old mommy conundrum, isn't it? In an effort to curtail this and satisfy my Type A personality by doing both (shock! horror!), I've decided to rekindle my love affair with my slow cooker.

Before I had kids, I was one of those carefree cooks, whipping together adventurous plates of food after work, letting the dishes pile in the sink, knowing I'd have hours to spare to tidy them. Before, my slow cooker was one of those seasonal items, that I'd pull from the cupboard around the same time I rescued my scarves and winter coat. Now? Pfft. I would love to have an hour to spare to do anything! And my slow cooker has a permanent home on my counter top.

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Ingredients:
For the burgers
1 pack turkey mince
2 frozen garlic cubes (or cloves)
Cooking spray
1 cup shredded low-fat cheese
3 tbsp semi-skimmed milk
1 bell pepper, diced
1 onion, diced
salt and pepper
For the slaw
2 medium-sized carrots, peeled
1 leek, white & light green part
3 tbsp lemon mayonnaise
2 tsp mustard powder
salt and pepper
a couple pinches of caster sugar

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All right, let's cook!
For the burgers, brown the mince along with some seasonings and the garlic. I added in about a teaspoon or so of garlic granules as well as the frozen garlic cubes. Spray the crock pot with the cooking spray and add the mince to the pot.
Cover the mince with half of the shredded cheese. Tumble in the peppers and onions and milk. Cook on low for six hours. Halfway through cooking, add in more cheese and a knob of butter (optional). If you allow it to cook without stirring, you'll start to get a lovely crunchy crust around the edges.

For the slaw, slice your carrots and leek into thin batons. Cover the leek batons with cold water and allow them to soak for about 10 minutes to help them firm up. Combine the carrots, drained and dried leeks with the mayonnaise, mustard powder, sugar and seasonings. Continue tasting and adjusting the amounts of mayonnaise, mustard, sugar and seasoning until it tastes how you want it to. Cover in cling film and let rest in a fridge for at least an hour. I made mine halfway through the burgers cooking and it was lovely and marinated by dinnertime.

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Serve on your favorite burger bun (floured wholemeal burger buns used in photo). Spoon the mince on the bottom bun and top with slaw. Served with rosemary oven wedges in photos. 

Gluten Free Creamy Chive and Basil Pesto with Linguine

Pasta with a fresh pesto sauce is a dinner that's hard to beat in my house. We're pasta mad here--from fusili to lumache, ravioli to linguine, we love it.

And I'm always looking for new ways to liven it up, because spaghetti bolognese just gets so boring! This dish is simple: big bowl of linguine with trimmed green beans tossed in and saturated with a moreish creamy pesto.

But not just any pesto, this pesto has a kick of garlic chives and lemon pepper. And to really make it sing? A hearty combo of grated and soft cheese.

I was impressed with how quick it was to whip up. It was my first homemade pesto attempt and it came together easily. In fact, this whole meal from pantry to table takes about 10 minutes. Fifteen if you have to keep running into the living room to disentangle a mischievous toddler!

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You'll Need:
Gluten Free Linguine
Garlic Chives
Fresh Basil
Parmesan cheese, grated
Fresh green beans
Cream cheese
Chicken stock
Salt and Pepper

Alright, let's cook:
Cook the pasta until desired doneness, tossing in the green beans for the remaining 3 minutes if you like them a bit more al dente or 6 if you prefer a mushier bean.

While that's bubbling away, get on with your pesto by placing the basil and garlic chives in a food processor. Go ahead and add in the parmesan, garlic granules, salt and lemon pepper. Blitz this until it is a fine crumb. Add the soft cheese and stock and continue to blitz until creamy. Taste season, repeat the blitzing if any big lumps occur.

By now, your pasta should be ready to drain. Do that. Stir in the pesto and toss it to give it a good mix. I'd suggest serving it with a good garlic bread. And if you're not keen on just veggies, tossing a few handfuls of shredded chicken would go really well!

10 Uses for: Lemon Curd

Lemon curd--a tangy kitchen staple. Sunshine in a jar on bleak wintry days. It's such a cinch to whip up and it has dozens of uses. Since I make so many macarons, I'm always looking for new ways to use up egg yolks (that don't involve baking gallons of ice cream!). Lemon curd is perfect for this!

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So lemon curd is great on its own, but it's even better these 10 ways:
1. Sandwiched as a filling for lemon macarons
2. Baked into a moist poundcake
3. Frozen as a base for lemon sorbet
4. Spread on warm scones, (American) biscuits or toast
5. Mixed into tangy lemon curd cookies a la Nigella Lawson (How to be a Domestic Goddess)
6. Piped into homemade sugar donuts in place of jam
7.  Dolloped into the center of lemon poppy seed muffins
8. Combine with tarragon and warm up to use a sauce for fish
9.  Layered in between pieces of sponge cake
10. Thinned with a little bit of vodka, warmed and drizzled over a vanilla ice cream sundae, topped with whipped cream

How do you use lemon curd?

Gluten Free Sticky Slow Cooker Chicken Teriyaki

With literally hundreds of pins on Pinterest, this is sticky chicken teriyaki cooked in the slow cooker is the only teriyaki recipe you'll ever need! As one pinner said, "It's easy and full of flavor!"

Feeds 2 adults with leftovers

I've seen loads of slow cooker chicken teriyaki recipes on Pinterest, but after clicking the pin and delving into the recipe, I've found a lot of dissatisfied pinners. So, in love with the idea of making teriyaki over the course of a day instead of in one quick fry up, I decided to devise my own. The best thing about this dish is how tender and tasty the chicken is. The chicken is just shut up! good. The al dente veggies fit perfectly and the sticky rice? You'll be in heaven.

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photo ||

Ingredients:

For the
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup gluten free soy sauce
1/2 tsp ground ginger
scant 1/2 cup chicken stock
1 pack (400g) chicken thigh fillets
2 tbsp cornflour/cornstarch
2 garlic cloves
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp gluten free teriyaki sauce

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Instructions:

Sticky Slow Cooker Chicken Teriyaki

1. Simply put all of the ingredients except for the teriyaki sauce in the slow cooker and cook on low for 4 to 6 hours. Half an hour before you're ready to stop cooking, add the teriyaki sauce and increase the setting to high.
2. Prepare your side items. I made sticky rice and pan-fried broccoli with spring onions/scallions to go with the dish and they were delicious!
3. Troubleshooting: if your sauce hasn't reduced fully by the time you're ready to add the teriyaki sauce, simply pour the food from the slow cooker into a saucepan on the stove, add the teriyaki and reduce until desired stickiness. It should take anywhere from 10 t 20 minutes to be fully reduced.
4. Want to use different greens? Consider cucumber sliced into thin ribbons with a vegetable peeler or a chiffonade of thickly-textured savoy cabbage. You could even throw in some carrot matchsticks and radishes.

Gluten Free Orange & Parsley Whole Roast Chicken

Whenever I go back home to North Carolina or speak to any of my friends from the States, someone always asks me about the food in the UK. Of course, straight away, everyone thinks of fish and chips, bangers and mash, mushy peas and trifles. And while I do love all those (except mushy peas!), they're not really one of the things that stands out to me about British cuisine.

For me, there's nothing better than a proper Sunday roast dinner. It's a concept that doesn't really exist in America, while in the south we do have our usual big Sunday dinners and roast tends to refer to pot roast, not an oven cooked roast bird.

In fact, I don't think I ever had roast chicken until I came to England. Sure, I'd had rotisserie chicken and it's kind of the same, but I'd never had chicken like this. Since my first experience with a proper Sunday roast, I've been trying dozens of different recipes, recreating this classic dish. The latest effort is a juicy, fragrant chicken filled with fresh orange, garlic and parsley.

Groceries
1 whole chicken, large enough to feed your family
1 navel orange, halved
1 tbsp parsley
1 bulb of garlic, stalk copped off to expose the cloves
salt and pepper
butter or margarine

Alright, let's cook!
To prepare your chicken, go ahead and remove the twine trussing it together, so you can really get at the bird. If you want to retruss it (you don't have to), save it. If not, chuck it in the bin.

Squeeze one half of the orange onto the skin of the chicken, rubbing the orange against the chicken, too. Once done, place this half, the garlic, parsley and seasoning into the cavity of the chicken. Next, slather the bird in butter. I mean really coat it. Get your elbows out and really work it in. Take the remaining orange half and squeeze it over the butter and place this in the cavity as well.

Cook the chicken according to the packet instructions, but a medium sized chicken should take about an hour on a preheated oven set to 200c/400f. Once the juices run clear will pierced with a skewer, you'll know it's cooked. Remove from the roasting pan and leave on a cutting board to roast.

Pour the juices from the pan into a saucepan and simmer until reduced by about 2/3s. Add a splash or two of pulp-free orange juice and adjust the seasoning if necessary. Serve with your favorite vegetables and Yorkshire puddings or crescent rolls.

Gluten Free La Quiche Lorraine

Quiche, for me, is one of those nostalgic foods. There are various events in my life that I remember by thinking about the quiche I ate during them and thinking about the event itself after. My fondest memory of quiche has to be from 2008 when, living in Manchester for the first time as a study abroad student, I huddled around the small island in my communal kitchen with a few other Americans and some Aussie friends and learned how to make a quiche lorraine from scratch from a French girl living with us.  I wish I could say that the recipe I'm going to share with you is the recipe she taught us that day nearly five years ago, alas, it is not. But it's a close second.
This post has been included in the #eggmainsinminutes linky on Brit Mums. You can find more information about Main Meals in minutes here.

Groceries
3 large free range eggs
1 1/4 cup double (heavy) cream
1 cup milk
salt & pepper
1 1/2 tsp  nutmeg
1 tsp tarragon
2 cups nutty cheese + more for sprinkling (Swiss, Emmental or Edam all work well)
2 cups chopped bacon or leftover ham
gluten free shortcrust pastry

All right, let's cook!
On days when I'm stressed and need some time in the kitchen to bake, I'd make my own shortcrust pastry. But, when I made this this weekend, I was pressed for time, so I have no qualms about admitting that this recipe features shop-bought shortcrust. To that end, you should begin by letting your pastry come to room temperature while you preheat the oven. You want it fairly low heat--150C or 200F.

Next, it's just a matter of putting in, whipping up and pouring out: eggs in, beat. Add cream and milk, season; ad nutmeg and tarragon and mix well before adding bacon or ham and cheese.

Line a pie pan or baking dish with the pastry. Prick pastry with a fork before sprinkling some cheese onto base before pouring contents into dish. Pop into oven and cook. It should only take about 20 to 30 minutes before it is set and ready to serve. I served it up with a fresh green salad.

Gluten Free Lavender & Almond Shortbread

Everyone has their perfect idea of a good shortbread and coming across a good recipe for one is hard to find. Too crumbly and to crunchy can be off putting, while others prefer the crunch and crumb of a messy shortbread. Me? I prefer a shortbread with a slight crunch on the outside, almost like a crust, if you will and a sumptuous, buttery inside that continues straight the way through until the end.

The thing I love about this recipe is you can whip up these lovely little British treats in less than hour with store cupboard staples. They're perfect if you've got someone popping round short notice or if you just want a quick bake to help unwind after a tough day. In terms of flavor, the almond meal adds a lovely nutty taste and the lavender, which is more like a fragrance, kind of wafts over the shortbread in a really appealing way.

Groceries:
175g Stork or unsalted butter
75g caster sugar
200g gluten free plain flour
40g almond flour
1/2tsp dried culinary lavender
vanilla sugar for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 160 C.

All right, let's bake!
For the shortbread, place the plain flour, almond flour and sugar into a bowl and rub in the butter thoroughly with your fingertips. Of course, you can use a mixer, but there's something relaxing about doing it by hand.

Next, add the lavender and mix evenly throughout the mixture. Press the mixture into a greased tin, prick with a fork and bake for about 30 to 35 minutes. Cut into fingers while still hot and sprinkle with vanilla sugar. Allow to cool before removing from tin.

Gluten Free Stovetop Barbecue Pork with Jack Daniel's Glaze

As a southern gal, the word barbecue brings to mind two different types of food--soft and sumptuous vinegar-based slow cooked pulled pork and burgers, ribs and steaks slapped on a barbecue grill on a balmy summer evening.

Oddly, I was in the mood for both types of barbecue when I came up with this recipe. I think it unites the best of both worlds, because the pork steaks are marinated and cooked gently (after being seared) they remain tender and the flavor you get from the Jack Daniel's glaze and the sauteed onions and bell pepper reminds me of a good piece of meat grilled over coals.

I have to admit, this meal is super quick to make--less than 30 minutes and that's down to the Jack Daniel's glaze. While you can make your own (and I do have a recipe for it that I'll share at some point), I happily unscrewed the lid on a bottle of Jack Daniel's barbecue sauce we received for Christmas from my mother-in-law. I've gotta be honest, at the end of a long weekend, the last thing I wanted to do was spend hours in the kitchen making dinner. This is the type of dish that tastes like you slaved over it for half a day. I won't tell if you don't tell.

Groceries:
Pork steak fillet (as many as your family will eat)
1 green bell pepper, sliced
1 white onion, sliced
Sunflower oil
Jack Daniel's Barbecue Sauce jar
Rice or Mash
Vegetables

All right, let's cook!
For the pork, simply sear the pork about 2 to 3 minutes on each side until caramelized. Reduce the heat and stack steaks to one side of pan while sauteeing peppers and onions. When the peppers and onions are beginning to caramelize, spread them about the bottom of the pan and place the steaks back on top. Cover and let simmer away for about 5 minutes before topping the pan up with some of the Jack Daniel's sauce. Cover again, reduce heat further and get on with your sides.

That's it! It's so simple and so tasty--you can do this with chicken or shrimp and it'd taste just as good.

Gluten Free Choux à la Crème (Profiteroles)

Choux à la Crème, or cream puffs, as we colloquially call them in the States was one of those treats I'd heard umpteen times on movies and on television but had never tried.

As a child, it seemed that cream puffs (along with other delicacies) were reserved for "foodies" and gourmands. It wasn't until I moved to Manchester that I began to see towering centerpieces of profiteroles, stuck together with melted chocolate and wrapped in gauzy gold strands of spun sugar that I became comfortable with them.

Like many French desserts, profiteroles are mistakenly labeled as being ultimately difficult to make, but these were no trouble at all. Breaking with tradition, I 86ed the idea of piping custard into each bun and opted for the uber American delicacy of Cool Whip. Still taking a shortcut (but one that I think works), I chose not to temper any chocolate (hard to do with a toddler running around the kitchen!) and gave each robust 'role a creamy, chocolate buttercream hat.

groceries...

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For the profiteroles:
1 cup gluten free all-purpose/plain flour
1 cup water
1 tsp sugar
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
1/2 scant tsp salt
4 eggs

For the filling:
1 small container Cool Whip

For the topping:
Chocolate buttercream, homemade or store bought, your preference

alright, let's cook:

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For the profiteroles,  preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line baking trays with parchment/wax/greaseproof paper. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, bring water, butter and salt to a boil over high heat.

Immediately remove from the stove and, with a wooden spoon, stir in flour. Continue to stir until mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan. This should take about two minutes.

Allow to cool for two minutes.

Add the first egg along with the sugar and mix with a wooden spoon. Mix until the batter comes back together and pulls away from the sides of the pan.

Continue to add the remaining eggs, one at a time, incorporating the mix completely before adding the next egg. (Take it easy, this bit kills your arm!)

Once ready, transfer the mix to a piping bag and pipe filled circles. Wet a finger, and smooth down any pointy tops.

Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 350 and bake until the puffs are golden brown and feel light and hollow. Should take anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes. Allow to cool before filling with cream and topping with chocolate.


For the filling, pipe in some Cool Whip.

For the topping, using a palette knife, frost each profiterole with chocolate buttercream.