by Laura K. Curtis | Mar 16, 2015 | Books, Recipes |
If you follow me on social media at all, you probably know two things: first, that I love cheese in all its many forms and second, that my new book, Echoes, comes out tomorrow.
You may think these two things have nothing in common. However, Echoes is set partially on the island of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten, which is half French and half Dutch. And the French and the Dutch do have one thing in common…they make very good cheese. So to celebrate this release I’ve decided to do something I doubt any other author has done: I am giving away a couple of pounds of cheese from my favorite cheese shop, Murray’s.
What, you can’t have cow cheese? No problem. If you win, I’ll send goat cheese and sheep cheese! Can’t have dairy at all? I’ll send you a package of non-dairy cheese from fakemeats.com. So enter for your chance to win. And if you want to see what Echoes is all about, you can find an excerpt on my website.
Also, if you like winning things, and especially books, don’t forget to stop by the multi-author Facebook party tomorrow. Between 2pm and 10pm Eastern we are giving away a book every single hour from several different authors!
Good luck!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
by Laura K. Curtis | Jun 20, 2014 | Recipes |
I originally published this recipe in 2012 on my now-defunct TorchSongs GlassWorks blog.
As anyone who knows me knows, I make cookies all the time for the guys at the the local firehouse. These seem to be the favorites. Because one of the guys (hi, Matt!) asked for the recipe, this one has copious notes on it.
- 2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda*
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 cup salted butter (put this into mixer bowl and let sit until softened)
- ¾ cup granulated sugar
- ¾ cup dark brown sugar
- 1 teaspoon water
- 1.5 teaspoons vanilla
- 2 large eggs
- 1.5 cups bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate chips**
- 1/2 bag Heath Bar bits
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Either grease two cookie sheets, or use Silpat mats on them. (I am a huge fan of the Silpat mat/sheet, so if you’re a big baker, I highly, highly recommend them. Don’t bother with cheaper versions – they don’t hold up.)
In medium-sized mixing bowl, stir together flour, baking soda, and salt.
In bowl of electric mixer (or in a large mixing bowl), cream together butter and sugars. Add the water and vanilla and mix until just combined. Add eggs and mix lightly. Stir in flour mixture. Fold in chocolate chips and Heath Bar bits. Do not over mix dough,
Drop cookies by heaping teaspoon 2 inches apart using 2 tablespoons or an ice cream scoop/melon baller (like this one: cookie scoop). THESE COOKIES SPREAD! You will want to go with two cookies per row, five rows per sheet, offset. No more than ten cookies will fit on a cookie sheet.
Bake for 12 minutes or until edges and centers are brown. Cool on sheet itself for at least 5 minutes before moving to rack to cool completely.
Yield: ~4 dozen
* Cooking may be an art, but baking is a science. Be sure your baking soda doesn’t get old or damp. If you keep one in the fridge open to soak up odors the way many people do, don’t use it for baking.
** Quality is key, here. Never, ever use Tollhouse chips. I have a big bin of chocolate chips/chunks/drops so what ends up in my cookies is usually a mix of bittersweet and semi-sweet, along with chunks… Semi-sweet is sweeter, but I prefer bittersweet which is richer and deeper.
- If you’re at the supermarket, go with Ghirardelli chips. Again, I like the bittersweet (brown package).
- If you ever get to Trader Joe’s, their brand of chips are excellent, too. I have a strong suspicion that they are just Ghirardelli packaged with TJ’s brand name.
- I order from King Arthur Flour with alarming regularity, and pretty much all their chips, chunks, etc, are worth tasting.
by Laura K. Curtis | Feb 16, 2014 | Books, Recipes |
As many people know, a while back I developed an allergy to gluten. At first, it was ghastly. But time passed and I have found substitutes for almost everything. The two things I haven’t been really happy with are pizza dough and real bread. Sandwich bread is easy enough, and we’ve found that Jules GF pizza dough is delicious, but it takes a long time to make. (If you’re curious, I am working on a Pinterest board of GF pantry staples, things I’ve taste-tested and approved. If you have things I should add, I’d love to hear about that them!)
But real bread, despite all the things I tried, defeated me. Sure, I could get a pretty good one with eggs and milk and all kinds of things that, IMHO, don’t belong in bread. I could spend weeks or months (I kid you not, depending on what you see online) developing a starter from a minimum of five different types of flour. I love bread, but that wasn’t going to happen.
Then I bought Gluten-Free on a Shoestring Bakes Bread: (Biscuits, Bagels, Buns, and More)
. Now, I haven’t made anything from it yet–I’ll let you know how that goes as I try it. It all looks DELICIOUS. But the recipes call for an ingredient I’ve read about before but never been able to find: Expandex Modified Tapioca Starch. I’ve skipped plenty of recipes in my search for gluten free food because I couldn’t find Expandex. The places that had it online wanted WAY too much in shipping and no one had it locally.
However, in the resource section to the book and on her blog, Nicole recommends Montana’s Gifts of Nature. Their website is fairly tragic, to be brutally honest, and to contact them you have to call them. It was about 5:15 on Sunday night my time when I got to the resource section of the book, but Nicole said that one could call and leave a message and they’d call you back. So I called. And Larry answered.
And let me tell you something…that was a super conversation. It wasn’t anything particular that I can put my finger on. But he discussed everything with me from shelf life to shipping costs so I could make the best decision about how much I wanted. When I hung up, despite having had to call, I was really happy with the decision to choose them rather than one of the other two places I saw online that had the product in stock.
It occurs to me that there are very few companies I can say that about. If I had the time, I’d build them a proper website so their products could get the attention they deserve. For now, I’ll just say that if you’re looking for Expandex, it’s definitely worth making the call. And if you’re selling something, take a lesson from Larry and be as friendly as can be!
by Laura K. Curtis | Oct 21, 2013 | Recipes |
You can, of course, do the same thing with meat if you like, but there are a thousand recipes for beef stews out there. You can also use seitan as a beef substitute if you don’t have a problem with gluten.
You will need a large slow cooker or a pot you can put on very low simmer and a large saute pan.
INGREDIENTS:
1.5 cups chopped celery
1.5 cups chopped onion
1.5 cups chopped carrots.5 lb French beans (or regular string beans), ends trimmed and beans cut in half horizontally
2 baking potatoes, scrubbed & cut into 1-inch cubes or slightly smaller
2 Tbs oil*
Garlic to taste*
1 12-oz container of Pacific Naturals Organic Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup
1.25 cups vegetable broth (I like Better Than Bouillon, but it contains soy sauce so it may not be for you if you’re very gluten-sensitive)
1 can diced tomatoes
1 cup of red wine (currently, my favorite for this recipe is Cantina Zaccagnini Montepulciano, which we refer to as “wine on a stick”)
1 dry cup of Beef (Not!) strips (do not reconstitute before cooking)
Salt, pepper, herbs and spices to taste
*I don’t mess around with oil and garlic. I begin virtually every recipe with these two ingredients (unless the first two are butter and sugar), so we keep large containers of Rick Bayless’s garlic mojo in the fridge at all times. So when I saute this particular mirepoix, I use a tablespoon of mojo and a tablespoon of canola oil.
DIRECTIONS:
Saute celery, onion, and carrots until onions clear but have not yet begun to brown. Add beans. Saute until onions brown. Scoop out (leaving as much oil as possible in pan) and put into slow cooker. Saute potatoes in leftover oil (add more if necessary) until brown but not cooked. Put into the slow cooker.
Add cream of mushroom soup, diced tomatoes, and wine to slow cooker.** Pour some vegetable broth into still-hot saute pan and use to deglaze. Then pour all stock into slow cooker. Add salt, pepper, and herbs. (I use grey sea salt because it’s strong so you don’t need much, and blended Italian herbs because they’re easy.)
Cook on high for two hours or until the potatoes are cooked through.
Enjoy! As with most soups and stews, this tastes even better the next day.
**I don’t like a particularly thick base, but if you do, you can start this with a roux using gluten-free flour or you can thicken with cornstarch.
by Laura K. Curtis | Sep 11, 2013 | Recipes, Stuff! |
Tonight our town, like so many towns across NY state and the nation, held its 9/11 ceremony. Our town hosts several surrounding towns, and our fire department puts on a shindig for all their brothers and sisters in uniform from the area. The Women’s Auxiliary (don’t laugh) always bakes for these occasions, and you can find my recipe for the Gluten-Free Dutch Cocoa Cookies that I made for this year’s event at Janet Rudolph’s Dying for Chocolate blog. Here are a few pictures of this year’s ceremony.
by Laura K. Curtis | Jun 5, 2013 | Recipes |
If you’ve checked out my recipes you may have noticed that they’re gluten free. Several months ago, I discovered that if I didn’t eat gluten, I didn’t get hives or the little blisters/ulcers I used to get in my mouth all the time.
At first it was hard. I mean, you’re talking to a girl who pretty much never had a meal that didn’t include either bread or pasta. But as time has progressed, it’s gotten easier for me to avoid gluten–I’ve given up most bread, and gluten-free pasta is common enough that not only can I get it at home, it’s even available in many restaurants. (Though now that softshell crab season is here, it’s hard for me not to go out and eat them–everyone wants to dredge them in flour or breadcrumbs or both before sautéing, and my husband doesn’t like them so it’s hard for me to make them at home.)
Needless to say, home cooking is much easier than eating out.
But here’s a problem I’ve run into a few times in restaurants. I say, “I’m allergic to gluten.” They say, “No problem. <Whatever> doesn’t have gluten in it.” And yet, once I’ve eaten, I feel the blisters inside my mouth showing up and pretty soon I break out in hives. Now, neither of those is a deadly reaction. Some people have it much worse than I do. But it’s still darn annoying.
I don’t believe waitstaff is inconsiderate or malicious. I believe there are two problems
1) They don’t really understand what I mean
2) Communication fails between waiters and the kitchen
So I’ve made up some business cards. They tell people the problem in the most common languages in my area–English, Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese. This makes things a bit easier as I can hand it to a waiter if I have any doubts whatsoever and he can turn it right over to the kitchen, which solves the problem of French waiter, Portuguese chef, etc. I’ve attached the document here in case anyone else wants it. Gluten Allergy cards. This one is in Word 2011, but it’s easy enough to make your own in whatever word processing program you use.
Enjoy and be safe.
