Egg-Free, Corn-Free Brownies Recipe

This recipe is another one of those adaptations made for my son, who is allergic to corn and egg. Corn folks, watch your ingredients — Here I use King Arthur flour, pure cane sugar and of course, non-iodized sea salt. Also, the sugar is a homemade vanilla sugar that I keep on hand. I just put a few cups of sugar in a tin with several vanilla pods. Every time I take a cup out, I mix a cup back in, that way I never need to use vanilla with corn distilled alcohol or corn syrup added to it. I also have a jar of potato vodka with a vanilla bean in it, but it’s not quite ready for use yet. It seems to take a while to get going… If you’re only going for corn-free and don’t care if it’s eggless, add in 2 eggs and omit the oil and banana.

• 1/2 cup butter, melted
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 1 cup sugar (or vanilla sugar — just omit the vanilla below)
• 1 Tablespoon oil (like sunflower or canola if you don’t react to that)
• 1 mashed banana (small to medium sized)
• 2 teaspoons vanilla (again, omit if using vanilla sugar)
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 to 1 cup Chocolate chips (Enjoy Life Semi-Sweet and Nestle Toll House Semi-Sweet Morsels are corn-free), walnuts, raisins, or whatever you would like to add in… it’s up to you. I usually add 1/2 cup of chocolate chips because I’m a haus like that.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Butter or oil an 8 x 8 pan.
3. Mix melted butter and cocoa until smooth and cocoa is completely blended in.
4. Add sugar and stir well.
5. Add vanilla, oil and banana and stir well.
6. Add flour, salt and baking soda — stir only until you can’t see the flour any more. In fact, for this whole recipe don’t use a blender or anything. I just use a rubber spatula to stir it all up.
7. Add chocolate chips (or whatever your preferred add-in is) and stir till they are just mixed into the batter.
8. Then spread into the pan and bake for 30 minutes. Don’t cook for much longer than this or they turn out too dry. You can’t do the cake test with these, either. A toothpick or knife will not come out clean, especially if you used chocolate chips.

Smoked Sausage and Cabbage Recipe

This is really comfort food to me. My mom was always making stuff like this when I was a kid but I never knew the recipe. Then my neighbor made something similar and out of the blue brought me over a Tupperware dish full of it. Here’s my version…

• 4 strips of bacon
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 Tablespoons chopped garlic
• Tony Cachere’s Creole seasoning (to taste)
• Pepper (to taste)
• 1 head of cabbage, chopped
• 1 can Ro-Tel tomatoes (whatever variety you like)
• 1/2 can water
• 1 pound smoked sausage (I use Holmes Smokehouse pecan smoked because it’s good and local, but you could use Eckridge or whatever you like)

1. Dice up the bacon (or do like I do and just use some scissors to cut it up) and fry in a large pot (dutch oven sized) until crispy. Set aside on paper towels to drain.
2. Use the bacon grease and the same pan to fry the onions until they are translucent.
3. Add the garlic and fry about a minute more.
4. Add the cabbage, tomatoes and water.
5. Season with Tony’s and pepper. (You can add red pepper flakes, too, if you like it hot)
6. Cover the pot, reduce heat to medium low and let the cabbage steam down until it’s as soft as you’d like.
7. Add bacon and diced up smoked sausage and cook until the sausage is heated through.
8. This is best served with hot rolls and mustard, but my son will eat it rolled up in a warm tortilla. Odd, but he likes it.

Chinese Chicken Noodles Recipe

I love cabbage. But I really dislike cole slaw. And that seems to be the way that most folks get their cabbage around here. In an effort to get more of this good stuff into my diet, I’ve been adding it anywhere noodles would go, since they blend in so well. Here’s just one such recipe.

• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 2 tablespoons sesame oil
• 3 cups thinly sliced cabbage
• 1 cup chopped green onions
• 2 tablespoons minced garlic (less if you prefer, I just looooove garlic)
• 8 ounces spaghettini or angel hair pasta
• 4 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 cups chicken or pork, cooked and diced
• 1 cup bean sprouts (fresh or canned, if canned — drain first)
• sesame seeds

1. Heat oil and sesame oil in a wok or skillet over medium heat.
2. Saute the cabbage and onions for 3-4 minutes or until cabbage is tender.
3. Meanwhile, cook the pasta (angel hair only takes 4 minutes so can cook while the cabbage and onions are cooking) according to the directions on the package.
4. Drain pasta and add to cabbage and onions along with the chicken (or pork), sprouts and garlic.
5. Cook until everything is heated evenly and add soy sauce to taste (about 4 tablespoons, but you might like more or less, let your taste buds be your guide).
6. Serve immediately and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Bread Machine Doughnuts Recipe

My son, who is allergic to corn and egg, loves doughnuts. It’s pretty hard to find a doughnut out in the wild that doesn’t have one or both of those ingredients. I found a recipe recently that called for egg and adapted it a bit. I’ll include the original recipe and my adaptations as well. These turned out great both fried and baked (350 F for about 15 minutes or more). The baked version was more like a really sweet roll and we slathered them with butter and honey and cinnamon sugar. Yum.

• 1 1/4 cup milk
• 1 beaten egg (or 1 tablespoon arrowroot powder to go eggless)
• 1/4 cup shortening (or 1/4 cup butter to go corn free or if you just don’t like the idea of shortening)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 1/2 cups white flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dry yeast (I upped it to 2 teaspoons to make up for the loss of egg, which acts as a bit of a binder and leavening in this recipe, I believe)
• Enough oil for frying

1. Put the ingredients (except oil for frying) into your bread pan in the order recommended by your manufacturer. My order, fyi, is exactly as listed here w/ yeast going on top of the flour).
2. Use the dough setting and start the machine.
3. When the dough is done, roll it out on a floured space till it’s about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick.
4. Cut with a donut cutter or use cups and caps to give the same effect. (I’ve used a wide mason jar and a medicine cup before, no joke!)
5. Let rise about 30 minutes until doubled.
6. Heat oil to 375 F and cook doughnuts, turning once, until both sides are browned evenly and to your liking.
7. Drain on paper towels and top however you’d like.

About Me and Food

Why this?

I really miss cooking "normally" so I'm going to work on this blog and see if it doesn't satisfy that part of me. These days cooking is all done within a rotation for my son's allergies, so I miss mixing up certain foods. My significant other, who hasn't had an allergy a day in his life and has no family history, is a bit bored with the rotation as well. I'm trying to lose weight, though not quite whole-heartedly yet, but I'm trying to get in the habit of "half now, half later" and eating six small meals per day. I've long been suspicious that my metabolism is very slow and that I do bad things to make it angry (like not eating all day and then eating a gigantic dinner) and keep me chunky.

Another problem that the rotation has created is that it used to be that I'd make enough food for my SO to take to work for lunch and then my son would eat lunch at school. Now the leftovers are always for my son who can't eat school food because of his allergies and I never have enough to send with my SO. So he either ends up eating out, which is crap and costs money (and I'm kind of a frugal nut) or he doesn't eat at all and shows up after work like he's dyin' ovah here. I figure this way I can make Jacob's food and have enough for his lunch and enough to freeze into some TV dinners for emergency use and have enough with the "normal" meals for leftovers for SO and for me to spread out into my six itty bitty meals.

I have no idea if that will work, but we shall see. I have this hunch that I'm going to end up doing OAMC (once-a-month cooking) on Jacob's food... it's starting to make sense in my mind since his rotation is the same foods over and over for each day. (For more about the rotation, you can read all the bitching about it on my personal blog or look at the site I created for a library / web class I was taking this summer.)

About Me

I ain't quite right, as my SO would say. I think that means I'm a little bit different or quirky or something. I look around me though and I figure I'm about as normal as anyone else and I struggle with many of the same things. I can get on my high horse once in a while, but I fall off it soon enough and recognize my place in life. I guess it's part of the never-ending growth process we all go through. Or perhaps it's hindsight. Or maybe it's trying to find right and wrong, black and white, in a world that is filled with so many grey areas. Even realizing these things is a conflict for me these days. I'm a Democrat who is really more like a Libertarian. I'm a parenting writer who feels like I'm warping my kid for life, sometimes. I'm a hippie who uses bleach. I'm a frugal domestic goddess who paid $300 for a purse without apology. Madonna. Whore. Complex.

I guess what it all really means is that I'm either a hypocrite or the labels I think society has for me just don't fit all the time. And I think that's probably a lot of what's wrong with the country these days. Everyone wants everything to fit in these neat little categories and boxes and really, it's just not that way. Almost nothing fits, when you get down to what's real. The bridge between theory and practice is a long one.

How does this relate to my cooking, you might be wondering...

Well, just like the Three Faces of Eve that exist in my personal and professional life, I'm a bit of a schizophrenic in my cooking. On one side, I've got the allergy cooking that is corn-free, egg-free, and tightly controlled. On the other side, I've got the haphazard, throw-a-can-of-soup-to-make-gravy way of cooking for my SO. Oh, and on the third side, I'm just so tired from all the irons I've got in the fire so make a damn sandwich and leave me alone.

I think that's not too far off from a lot of moms. So you probably won't see too many recipes that are fancy-schmancy here. Most of the time it will be easy stuff that won't kill you to make and may or may not kill you to eat. Sometimes it might be wholesome, hypoallergenic food that tastes like food probably tasted hundreds of years ago before corn got so big. Other days it might be pre-processed and rearranged corn molecules in the form of a meal.

This is what happens at my house.

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