Gluten Free Roll Kuchen

My Mennonite roots are coming out here.  Hot summer day + roll kuchen + watermelon = bliss.  Diagnose a few family members with celiac disease and the roll kuchen days were over.  Oh how we mourned that loss.  But for those of you following along, you know that I refuse to be told I can't have something.  If someone else has done it, then I'll find out and try it myself.

The final push to find a recipe (and try it) came when I spent a weekend in Steinbach for a family reunion and (unfortunately) ended up sitting beside the big bowl of roll kuchen (NOT gluten free).  Enough! I said.  I'm having roll kuchen when I get home.

Brazilian Cheese Bread

Josh and his friends ate out at a Brazilian Steak House a while back and he came home raving about these little cheese biscuits they served.  "The waitress said they were made from tapioca starch so they'd be gluten free!"  I love how he's always thinking of me and what I could eat, even when I'm not with him.  Fast forward a few weeks and I stumbled across this recipe in a gluten free exchange group I'm in on Facebook.  Reading through the recipe I realized this is a NATURALLY gluten free recipe.  They haven't switched to tapioca starch to appease the celiacs out there.  While I know I'm capable of making delicious converted GF food, when a recipe is naturally GF I get excited.

Mediterranean Quinoa Salad

Quinoa has risen quickly as a popular new "supergrain" along with the surge of gluten free products.  But I find it is quite bland on its own, so I haven't experimented much with it until now.  Recently I found a wild rice mix at Costco that had quinoa in it and I've started to appreciate the grain more.

Gluten Free Garlic Parmesan Pull Apart Bread

I seem to fallen off of the face of the blogging world.  I apologize!  Life has been... busy.  But I haven't stopped baking!  I still insist that eating gluten free should be equally delicious as otherwise.  And as such, I have a list of recipes that I need to get up here for you.  Be patient with me!  I know some of you have been requesting a few of them, and I promise to get them up sooner rather than later.

Gluten Free Cheese Biscuits

Gluten free dough does not handle the same way as regular dough.  It is a reality of learning to cook gluten free, but it does not mean that taste needs to be compromised.  But it is for this reason that drop biscuits work better than rolled biscuits.  This recipe is my best success thus far with gluten free rolled biscuits.  It comes from the blog of Celiac Teen.  The millet flour seems to be the key here, it behaves so nicely in those recipes that are particularly difficult to convert.

Gluten Free Crepes

Crepes have always been one of my favorite meals/breakfast items/ desserts.  They are so delicious and versatile!  I knew these could be converted to GF since my little brother had done it once before.  Also, The Creperie in Edmonton serves gluten free crepes!  (As a side note, I also have their GF bread recipe... but I haven't attempted it yet!)  I hadn't tried making crepes myself since I was hoping to get a crepe maker for Christmas.  A crepe maker is basically an inverted frying pan that you dip into your batter, creating a paper thin crepe!  I had never tried the frying pan method.  But I am impatient, so I figured I could try at least once to make crepes in the frying pan... and voila!  This recipe comes from Living Without.  Try them sweet or savory, for breakfast or any meal of the day!  The flour blend I chose is a high protein mix, because it lends itself nicely to high elasticity.

Yorkshire Pudding

I have been craving yorkshire pudding for quite some time.  Paired with a good beef roast and mashed potatoes, it adds the perfect vessel for that delicious homemade gravy.  Good home cooking comfort food.  Well my local grocery store had a fabulous deal on oven roast beef cuts (buy one get one free!), and that was enough motivation for me to find the right recipe and try this.

Stumbling block: self rising flour.  Wait... what?  I had never heard of such a thing, let alone GF self rising flour.  Now, you know I have a problem with premixed flours from the store.  I find baking just turns out so much better if you do things from scratch.  Luckily, a little research produced a recipe for the self rising flour.