Why am I here? Well, I got diagnosed with celiac disease in July, 2009. It required I remove all gluten (wheat, oats, rye, barley) from my diet forever. I found myself, at 42, having to re-learn how to cook. It's been a challenge, primarily because the American diet is FULL OF WHEAT. It's everywhere, even in things that you wouldn't expect to find wheat in...like canned chicken broth. And I'm a southern girl, so not being able to cook up biscuits, gravy and fried chicken, well, that's just wrong.
Anyway, this blog came about because Mike over at Taro and Ti recommended I blog about my cooking experiments. We co-own a yahoo group together and I've posted several times about some of the things I've tried since the diagnosis, like gluten free cornbread dressing (good), and zucchini bread (BAD). The biggest challenge is cooking things that are gluten free for me, but taste good for the three guys who live in my house. The kids aren't so picky, but the husband, well, let's just say that he has some sort of weird gluten free radar that tells him something is gluten free before I do.
So, with encouragement from Lotznausten and inspiration from the Gluten Free Girl, I present Cooking Dangerously - my experiments in gluten free cooking.
My first post is my experiment in making gluten free eggrolls. I had a recipe in my inbox from the Gluten Free Club, which is basically a mailing list where you mostly get recipes, but also ads to try and get you to join the club. The recipe is as follows:
Ingredients:
1 or 2 tablespoons coconut oil or other cooking oil
1 pound ground pork
½ pound peeled shrimp, chopped
½ chopped onion
4 to 6 cloves garlic, minced
2 to 3 carrots, shredded or chopped
½ head cabbage chopped
2 tsp sesame oil
2 Tbsp soy sauce (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
½ cup scrambled eggs
Spring Roll Wraps (24)Directions:
Lightly brown pork with onions, garlic and shrimp and cook a minute or two more in hot oil. Stir in carrots and stir fry a minute more. Add in cabbage and stir fry until cabbage is wilted and soft. Season with sesame oil, soy sauce, salt and pepper to taste. Spread on large open pan or tray to cool before putting in wrappers (if you want egg rolls with eggs, stir in some scrambled eggs in the last minutes of cooking).
Soak spring roll wraps (tapioca starch wraps available in Asian section of most grocery stores) in water until soft and pliable, about 30 to 60 seconds. Put softened wrapper on flat surface. Add one heaping tablespoon filling on wrapper close to you. Roll up one turn rolling away from you, turn lateral ends inwards and finish rolling. Let rolls rest 20 minutes before frying, which is about as long as it takes to roll all this filling if you have help. The point is, they fry up better if they have "rested" for a while.
So, I followed the directions, all the way through, including the part about deep frying the rolls in an inch of oil. In the process I learned several things NOT to do, including not to deep fry them. The first time I tried frying them, the oil wasn't hot enough. The wrappers got soggy and fell apart. Second time around, the husband suggested double-wrapping them AND making sure the oil was actually hot enough to fry in. (350) This worked to a certain extent...but the double wrap apparently soaked up way too much oil. They were good, but greasy. I made mental notes of how to do this differently "next time", and decided "next time" would be tonight, when I repeated the filling recipe as a stir fry to use up the shrimp from last night. I decided to pan fry instead of deep fry and ditch the double-wrapping. Miracle of miracles, it worked!
So, here's my list of Dos and Don'ts for making gluten free eggrolls.
DON'T overfill the wrapper. That heaping tablespoon is about perfect.
DO wrap the wrapper tightly. Smaller and tighter is better.
DON'T deep fry. Pan fry with just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan.
DON'T let the eggrolls touch in the pan AT ALL. They will stick. They will stick like glue.
DON'T try to turn the eggroll until the side that's in the oil is crispy. It will stick like glue.
DO wrap the wrapper tightly. Smaller and tighter is better.
DON'T deep fry. Pan fry with just enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan.
DON'T let the eggrolls touch in the pan AT ALL. They will stick. They will stick like glue.
DON'T try to turn the eggroll until the side that's in the oil is crispy. It will stick like glue.
Oh, and here's a picture of the finished product. There was one out of the four, on the right hand side of the plate, that was near perfect.
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