One teensy mistake...

At our last trip to Costco, I picked up a six pack of ripe bell peppers and 5 lbs of pork tenderloin.  I had some vague intention of making a dish to be served over a creamy polenta, but when I googled for recipe inspiration, I found this.


I had everything I needed for a double batch.  But I varied from the recipe in a few critical ways.  I rubbed my pork tenderloins with a mixture of Penzey's Tuscan Sunset, kosher salt, and red pepper flakes before browning them in my Dutch oven.    I wanted a fairly deep pan since I was doubling the sauce recipe, but I browned the tenderloins 1 at a time so they didn't start to steam.

The pork went into a ceramic lasagna pan drizzled with olive oil, and then into the oven.  I would definitely recommend chopping all the peppers (or at least 2/3 of them) before you start cooking if you try to make a double batch.  Browning 4 large pork tenderloins took less time than chopping 6 peppers.

I tossed the peppers into the pan as I chopped, and gave them the occasional stir.  The peppers were tender, and picking up brown patches by the time I was done chopping the onions, so I turned them out into a bowl while I browned the onions.  Then I stirred in the garlic, added the peppers, and deglazed the pans with 2 cups of cheap Pinot Noir.  That wasn't quite enough liquid to use an immersion blender, so I added the tomatoes, whizzed it into a sauce about the texture of crushed tomatoes, and tossed in the bay leaves.

The sauce was wonderful -- red pepper sweet with just a little acid from the wine and tomatoes.  I added some salt and black pepper, and served it over the pork.  After dinner, I realized that there was supposed to be a lot of smoked paprika in there.  I'm sure that would be lovely.  I may even add some smoked paprika to the leftover sauce when I pull it out of the freezer.  But just peppers, onion, garlic, wine, and tomatoes was a nice change from the marinara rut.

Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies, a recipe in progress

My chocolate chip cookies have always spread a little more than I would like, and when I started baking gluten-free, the "cookie brittle" incidents grew worse.  I've read up a little about the science of baking and recipe conversion and figured out some of the places where I've gone wrong, but I still haven't quite found a standby chocolate chip cookie recipe.  Possibly because I keep losing the little slips of paper where I write down what I did last time.

So I decided to start blogging the iterations.

I like whole grains, and I like fiber in my baked goods, so this recipe has a good bit of whole grain flour.  The stevia is more an attempt to correct texture than to reduce the sugar content.  My GF cookies tend to spread out into sheets of cookie brittle, even when the dough has been refrigerated overnight.  Adding more flour didn't seem to help, so I decided to try replacing some of the sugar, since artifical sweeteners tend to lead to drier baked goods.  (I've seen recipe conversion advice that recommends that you think of sugar as part of the liquid in your recipes.)

3 7/8 oz. expeller pressed coconut oil
4 oz. salted butter
3/4 c. light brown sugar
stevia sweetener equivalent to 3/4 c. sugar (the volume will vary by brand)
2 eggs
1 1/2 tsp double strength vanilla

1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
25 grams golden flax meal
50 grams sorghum flour
75 grams teff flour
150 grams 40/60 All Purpose Blend

12 oz. chocolate chips
1 c. walnut pieces, toasted (optional)

If you're using nuts, take the time to toast them in a toaster oven or a dry pan -- it greatly improves the flavor.  I store my raw nuts in the freezer, and find that the "medium" toasting cycle in my toaster oven gets them perfectly warm and brown if I spread them on a foil covered pan and pop them in to the cold oven.

I also weigh out the flour and measure the soda and salt on top before I start mixing.

Let the butter and coconut oil come to room temperature, and cream them together with the sugar and stevia using an electric mixer.  Start on the lowest speed so you don't spray light, fluffy stevia powder all over the kitchen.  Scrape down the bowl, and beat on medium until light and fluffy, and everything is a uniform color.  (No white blobs of cold coconut oil.)

Add the eggs and vanilla, and beat until well combined.  Scrape down the bowl, and then add the flax meal, flours, baking soda and salt.  Scrape down the bowl once or twice and mix until well combined.  Then mix in the chocolate chips and toasted nuts (if using).

Scrape the batter into a smaller bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 8-12 hours.  (I occasionally mix up cookie dough before breakfast so it will be ready to bake at dinner time.)

Scoop onto a parchment lined baking sheet, and bake 11 minutes at 350F.

40/60 All Purpose and 70/30 Whole Grain blends

I first got the idea of making my own gluten free flour blends from Shauna and Danny Ahern's recipes on Gluten Free Girl & The Chef.

They recommend a 40% whole grain / 60 % starch blend by weight as an all-purpose flour, and a 70% whole grain version for times when you want more whole grain taste/nutrition.  I had big containers of both mixed up when I realized that if I mix a 40/60 blend with equal parts of whole grain, I get a 70/30 blend.

I've been making up my all-purpose blend 5 lbs (80 oz) at a time, so my recipe for it is in oz.

12 oz. sorghum flour*
12 oz. millet flour*
8 oz. teff flour*
12 oz. potato starch (not the same as "potato flour")
16 oz. sweet rice flour
20 oz. tapioca starch

* These are whole grain flours.  If you can't find / don't like the taste of one of these flours, you could use more of any other whole grain, legume flour, or nut flour, as long as you keep the total weight of nut/legume/whole grain to 32 oz. in the batch.   I usually avoid brown rice flour because I think even the superfine stuff gives a gritty texture to the finished baked goods.  The remaining 48 oz. have to be the light, fluffy pure white starches : potato starch, arrowroot, tapioca, sweet rice flour, or white rice flour.