Gluten-free, paleo-ish, Crouch house deliciousness

Eggs Florentine

A delicious weekend breakfast… lazy Sunday love.

Ingredients

Spinach

  • 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 small onion, finely chopped
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 5 cups (5 ounces) baby spinach
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 2/3 cup crumbled feta or grated Parmesan

Potato Cakes

  • 1 large potato
  • 2 large eggs, lightly beaten
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
  • Vegetable oil, for frying
  • Optional: Emeril wants you to include cooked & crumbled bacon, so do so if you’re feeling frisky (or you want to run to the store for some bacon, which I didn’t)

Sauce

  • 3 egg yolks
  • 3 tbsp olive oil
  • 2 tbsp hot water
  • 1 tbsp lemon juice
  • pinch of sea salt
  • pinch of cayenne pepper

Eggs & Finish

  • 4 large eggs
  • 4 thick slices of tomato or 4 small handfulls of sliced cherry tomatoes (what we had on hand)

Instructions

Spinach

  1. In a medium skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook until soft.
  2. Add the garlic then the spinach and nutmeg and cook until the spinach has wilted.
  3. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cheese. Season with salt and pepper, to taste
  4. Cover pan and set aside or place in a warm oven to keep from getting too cool

Potato cakes

  1. Wash and coarsely grate the potato and place in a bowl with the egg, salt and pepper (and some crumbled bacon if you’re feeling frisky).
  2. Heat a nonstick pan with a small amount of oil.  Working with a quarter of the potato mixture at a time, flatten into cakes and squeeze to remove any excess liquid.
  3. Place the potato mixture in the heated pan and cook until crispy and golden.
  4. Cover pan and set aside or place in a warm oven to keep from getting too cool.

Daze Sauce

  1. In a medium metal mixing bowl, gently whisk the egg yolks.
  2. Continue whisking the yolks while adding the hot water, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and cayenne pepper to the bowl.
  3. Place the bowl over boiling water and whisk constantly until the sauce begins to thicken (about 1 minute). Serve immediately.

Eggs & Finish

  1. Make two to four poached eggs depending on number of people and hunger levels.
  2. Assemble the layers of the Florentine to your liking (we did potato cake, spinach with tomatoes, egg, then sauce)
  3. We also enjoyed some asparagus on the side and, since there were just 2 of us, there was plenty of sauce to smother it all!

 

 

Sloppy Joes

Again in the vein of husband-pleasing (I know, I know), I made some sloppy joes last week at Evan’s request. It’s a great way to make meat last a while (suddenly we’re on a bit of a pre-baby budget) and is a great source of iron whether you use beef (grass fed when you’re at Crouch house), bison, or ground turkey (the midwives say I need more iron). Evan insisted on fluffy, delicious potato bread rolls (mine toasted golden and buttered; his cool, soft and dry) but next round I think we may just eat this on potatoes and save me the gluten intake.

Ingredients

  • 1 or 1 1/4 lbs of beef, bison, or extra-lean turkey
  • 1 tbsp Montreal steak seasoning blend (this gem is from Rachel Ray)
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 1 bell pepper, chopped
  • 2 tbsp brown sugar (heaping if, like me, you’re serving someone with a sweet tooth)
  • 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
  • 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tsp dry mustard
  • red pepper flakes, to taste
  • 1 15-oz can tomato sauce
  • 2 tbsp tomato paste

Instructions

  1. In a large skillet over medium high heat, break up the meat and cook until browned.
  2. Add the garlic, onion and bell peppers to the skillet and reduce heat to medium.
  3. Add brown sugar, red wine vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, dry mustard, and red pepper flakes and cook for for ~5 minutes. 
  4. Add tomato sauce and paste to pan, stir to combine, and simmer ~5 minutes more while you get the plates ready with the toasty buns, cold soft buns, or baked potatoes.

Serves 6-8 or more, depending on the size of your buns/portions.

 

Honey Mustard Chicken Bake

I asked Evan what he wanted for dinner and he said, “honey mustard chicken, mmmm” so I came up with this bake, which includes veggies. Evan gets a sweet dinner he loves and he doesn’t even have to do the dishes because I did them while the food was in the oven. What a wife!

Ingredients

  • 1.5-ish lbs boneless, skinless chicken legs/thighs (or you could use breast tenderloins)
  • Salt and pepper
  • 3 TBSP butter
  • 2 carrots, peeled and sliced on an angle (1/4-in slices)
  • 1 large parsnip, peeled and sliced to same size as carrots
  • 1 shallot, minced (or 1/2 onion)
  • 1 TBSP Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/3 c Dijon mustard
  • 1/3 c honey
  • 1 TBSP dried rosemary

Instructions

  1. Rinse the chicken, cut off any major fat bits, season with salt and pepper, and lay out in a glass baking dish (9×9″ if low side of 1.5 lbs, 9×13 if more)
  2. Place the sliced veggies over the chicken
  3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
  4. In a frying pan on the stove over medium heat, melt the butter
  5. In a small bowl, mix the mustard, honey, and Worcestershire sauce
  6. Saute the shallot/onion in the butter until soft and then mix into honey mustard mixture
  7. Poor sauce over chicken and vegetables and sprinkle with the dried rosemary
  8. Bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes until chicken is cooked through and vegetables have just started to soften (Evan hates mushie carrots)

Delicious served with cornbread muffins.

Fried rice

We made this amazing deliciousness as part of our Valentines dinner, 2013.

Ingredients

  • 6 c. cooked white rice (2 cups uncooked) or, for a paleo version, “riced”/grated cauliflower
  • 1.5 c. of frozen peas and carrots mix, thawed (or 2/3 c. chopped carrots and 2/3 c. peas)
  • 2 tbsp canola oil
  • 3 eggs
  • tamari (or soy sauce if you ain’t a glutard), to taste
  • sesame oil, to taste (this is the secret ingredient! you’ll probably use about a tbsp)

Instructions

  1. Heat a skillet over high heat, poor in oil, stir in peas and carrots
  2. Crack in eggs, stirring quickly to scramble with the veggies
  3. Stir in cooked rice or “rice” and then shake in some soy sauce and sesame oil until taste is right (it’ll be the color you’d expect from your favorite take-out joint)

Serve with General Tso’s or other Chinese favorite! Or mix in some cooked meat and eat alone as a greasy meal :o)

General Valentines Tso

Although cooking for me is usually most fun as a zoned out, meditative, creative solo process, Evan and I decided to cook together for Valentine’s Day this year. It was a good opportunity to bond and communicate and just hang out with some candles and CPR Classical music. Evan picked the menu (general tso’s, fried rice, and chocolate fondue) because he loves Chinese take-out and chocolate. The Chinese food turned out amazing; I am totally impressed with us. Seriously, the meal was at least as delicious as the take-out variety (read here for the secret to the fried rice). The fondue was awesome, too. (And so easy!)

We doubled the general tso’s recipe because (1) well, again with the Evan-enthusiasm, (2) we had a Costco supply of chicken thighs and (3) if you’re gonna bother to get a bunch of oil really hot, you might as well make plenty of leftovers of whatever you’re deep-frying. (We deep fried all of the chicken but then kept half of the chicken and sauce separate and made the second batch a couple nights later once we’d consumed our V-day dinner and the first round of leftovers.)

Ingredients

This recipe took a while to make, so get your cookin’ tunes turned on. Makes 4 servings.

Chicken:

  • 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken thighs
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1 TBSP soy sauce (gluten free tamari)
  • fresh ground pepper, to taste
  • cornstarch

Sweet Sweet Sauce:

  • 3 TBSP soy sauce (gluten free tamari)
  • 1.5 TBSP rice vinegar
  • 3 tsp try sherry
  • 1.5 TBSP white sugar
  • 5 TBSP chicken broth or water
  • 2 TBSP minced, fresh ginger
  • 3 tsp minced garlic
  • 3 tsp cornstarch

Saute:

  • 1 quart of vegetable/canola oil for deep-frying and stir-frying, as needed
  • 10+ small dried chili peppers (Evan counted out 10 Thai chilies, then I dumped in most of the little bag)
  • 4 green onions, 1/2 inch slices

Equipment:

  • fire extinguisher (Seriously, deep frying scares me and water doesn’t put out oil fires.)
  • kitchen shears
  • cutting board
  • large, sharp knife
  • medium mixing bowl
  • small mixing bowl
  • large frying pan (or a wok)
  • tool for removing hot chicken from very hot oil
  • paper-towel lined platter

Preparation

  1. Rinse the chicken and, using the kitchen shears, trim off any large areas of fat
  2. Cut the chicken into approx 1-in cubes/pieces
  3. Mix egg, soy sauce, and pepper in your medium mixing bowl with the chicken and, working with a scant 1/4 c at a time, mix in cornstarch until the chicken is well-coated
  4. Combine the sauce ingredients in your small mixing bowl, stir to start the sugar dissolving.
  5. Poor oil into your pan so that it is at least 1 inch deep and heat over medium-high heat until 350 degrees F. Drop the chicken pieces into the hot oil a few at a time (you don’t want to drop the temp of the oil significantly by overcrowding the chickens) and cook for 4 minutes, until crispy and just golden. Remove the chicken cubes and drain on paper towels (they’ll keep cooking because they’re so hot).
  6. Drain oil into some heat proof vessel to cool before you dispose of it (ideally for use in a bio-diesel engine, haha) and add chilis and the deep-fried chicken cubes to the frying pan, stir-frying a minute or so until hot and a bit more browned.
  7.  Give your sauce another stir to disslove the sugar and suspend the cornstarch, push the chickens to one side of the pan and poor the sauce on the other. Mix to combine and to stir for a couple of minutes to thicken the sauce. Add green onions and stir again. Serve!

 

I rarely follow a recipe to the T, but since we had no idea what we were doing with this, the recipe is taken exactly from Rhonda Parkinson on About.com