An easy dinner *updated*

One of my favorite go-to dinners for those crazy days spent running kids around, is spaghetti with garlic bread.  I get two pots of water boiling, and start making the garlic bread.  Our favorite garlic bread is sour dough with a spread of butter, sprinkled with sea salt and garlic powder.  Sometimes I get fancy and add some Parmesan  cheese.  Then I just stick it under the broiler until it's golden brown.  Mmmm....it's so good! It's also easy to make gf and dairy free.  Gluten free bread doesn't keep very long, so I usually make it, slice it, and freeze it the same day.  For garlic bread I take a few pieces out of the freezer, spread on some dairy free "butter", and then sprinkle the salt and garlic powder.
The best tasting gluten free pasta we have found is corn pasta.  It cooks well, and is easily stored and warmed the next day if there are leftovers.  Many other pastas either over cook easily and are nasty or they are nasty rewarmed.  Then I just heat up our favorite sauce, Francesca Rinaldi Sweet and Tasty Tomato, and we have dinner on the table in under 30 minutes.  Perfect for those crazy soccer days.

*I just discovered a way to make it easier!  I bought a round loaf that was unsliced originally, but walking down the bread aisle the other day I discovered presliced oval loafs.  Duh!*

Sometimes I forget that not everyone knows how to safely cook gluten free.  So here's some tips for cooking pasta.  The most important thing to remember is that you want to avoid cross contamination with food containing gluten.  So with pasta, you have to use a separate pot, and spoon, and when I drain it, I drain the gf pasta first, and then the regular.  Always make sure everything is clean, and that you don't accidentally use something for your gf food that you've used with your gluten food.

Chicken strips

For my first official post, I decided to share one of Josh's favorite things; he calls them chicken bites, but basically they're chicken nuggets, or chicken fingers.  He is constantly asking me to make these.  A little background on Josh first, and to make a VERY long story short, I'll just say that at a year we had him tested for food allergies, and he is allergic to wheat, milk, and peanuts.  He can't eat wheat at all (he breaks out in hives) so we won't even ever know for sure that he has celiac, but we've been told to just treat him like he does.  So he's been eating gluten free his whole life.  I'm getting much better at cooking gf foods for him now, and it helps that there is just so many  more options now than there was even 6 years ago when we started this journey.  It used to be a lot trickier because we had to cook gf, milk free, AND egg free, but thankfully he outgrew the egg allergy.

So here is Josh's favorite meal:

I found these bread crumbs at our local Grocery Outlet for a SUPER good deal (I'm now kicking myself for only buying one bag).  I basically follow the instructions on the side of the bag, but cut it in half.  I whisk an egg, dip in strips of chicken breast, then dip it in the bread crumbs.  To season the bread crumbs I sprinkled in some sea salt, ground some pepper into it, and then mixed in some oregano.  Once the chicken is nicely coated with the bread, I put it into an 8x8 pan coated with olive oil.  Stick it in the oven and when it's cooked for about ten minutes, I turn them over and let them finish cooking.  This makes sure that both sides are nice and crispy.

Here's the bag of gf bread crumbs.

We got some yummy corn from a farm down the road, so I cooked that up, and he was a happy, happy boy.  If I had REALLY been on top of it, I would have added a nice salad with romaine and baby spinach, BUUUT I wasn't.  At this point, with soccer games and practices and dance class, we're lucky to get dinner on the table by 7 pm.

I made us some yummy chicken too.  Here's the link to the recipe I used.  

Oh, and don't you like our fancy china?  ;)

Up and Running

I'm starting this blog to record all of the crafting, cooking, and attempts at being organized with my crew of five.  We have one child with multiple allergies, and a baby with some food sensitivities, one being nuts, so there will be lots of gluten/dairy/nut free recipes, along with some allergen full recipes.  I'm so excited to have a place to record this area of our lives, and I hope you enjoy it too!