Stir-Fry Thai Rice Noodles with Chicken Sausage & Vegetables in a Cilantro Chili Sauce

This is way easier than it sounds, I swear it!  Get out your wok, and get ready!
Let me just say, amidst insane amounts of allergic response to Ragweed this time of year, I am all about cooking ANYTHING that contains particularly fresh Thai Basil (AKA 'Holy Basil') which is well-known for its intrinsic anti-histimine properties!

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch of green onions, chopped- reserve some fresh green onions for garnish
• Chicken Sausage, chopped into semi-ovals- go for already-cooked sausage to make this even faster to make (personal favorite for this recipe is a spicy cilantro lime chicken sausage; any spicy variety will work as well)
• 1 package Rice Noodles (I use brown rice noodles in this recipe for the nutrition benefits)
• Dried red pepper flakes (to taste)
• A tiny splash of high quality fish sauce (Do not run away and be frightened.  This is your flavorful salt, people! Use this IN PLACE of salt! Use sparingly- a little goes a freakin' long way, and it adds an amazing amount of authentic character to this dish!)
• A tiny splash of gluten-free (wheat-free) Soy sauce/Tamari (ALSO IN PLACE OF SALT, please don't die, use sparingly!)
• A swirl of Toasted Sesame oil
• assorted hot peppers from the garden, chopped,  if you got 'em (not necessary to make this, however, totally optional)
• Canola oil (for the wok)
• Either Fresh OR Dried Thai Basil (AKA 'Holy Basil')- either will work fine.
• 1 medium Napa cabbage, chopped
• mint-cilantro or cilantro-chili sauce (to taste, Bandar makes a good one)
• 2-3 fresh garlic cloves, chopped
• 1 large egg
• lime juice- optional

Instructions:

Soak the rice noodles for 7-8 mins in hot water in a bowl or pot, while preparing the wok- pour some canola oil in the bottom, and turn the stove on medium heat.

Add green onion, garlic, peppers if you have them, and chopped napa cabbage to the wok- cook it until it appears tender.  Throw in the already-fully cooked chopped up chicken sausage, heat it up in the wok.  Crack open an egg, and add to the wok mix- scramble it into the stir fry.  Quickly drain the water from the almost-cooked rice noodles in the bowl or pot, and add the rice noodles to the wok for their final stage of cooking.  Add that *tiny splash* of fish sauce, and that *tiny splash* of gluten-free soy sauce/tamari.  Stir/fold in.  Add a bunch of chopped or dried flakes of Thai Basil, fold it in.  Add as much crushed red pepper flakes as you want.  Add that swirl of toasted sesame oil- mix it all in well.  Add in cilantro-chili or chili sauce, and make sure the wok-mix is consistent.   

Hope you enjoy! Let me know if you made any awesome substitutions, and how it turned out!  Stir fry dishes are super-flexible and fantastic for using fresh vegetables that you really do not know what else to do with! 

Gluten-Free & Dairy-Free Raspberry-Ginger Muffins!

Hello again! Sorry it has been a hot minute since I've posted some recipes.  I would like to give a shout-out to Relay Foods for providing me with a much better method of shopping for local/organic/special-diet groceries (by making my shopping list online ahead of time) and then picking it up weekly from one of their many grocery-pick-up locations!  For this recipe, I used fresh raspberries from a local farm (obtained through their website), which I am really excited about!

Ingredients:

• 1 and 1/2 cups of gluten-free flour (gluten-free flour composed of primarily chickpea flour will likely hold its form better and be closer to the consistency of 'regular muffins', though I used a uber-generic 'gluten-free flour' (composed of several non-wheat elements: potato/tapioca/rice etc) and it worked out FINE.  Do what is easy!
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 egg (or if you cannot do eggs, use 'the equivalent of 1 egg' substance here instead)
• 1/2 cup non-dairy milk (my personal favorite for this is Vanilla Almond Milk)
• 1 cup of either packed light brown sugar or regular 'ol white sugar (either will work)
• a pinch of Kosher salt
• 1 to 1 and 1/2 cups of fresh raspberries (frozen also work, but fresh is the best)
• 1/2 to 1 tsp finely grated fresh ginger
• Non-stick Baking spray for the pan.

Preparation:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Spray a 12-muffin baking tin with the non-stick baking spray.  If you forgot where you left the muffin wrappers, it'll work out without them (this just happened to me).  Don't let this stop you!

Now, in a medium mixing bowl, combine the gluten-free flour, baking powder, egg (or replacement), non-dairy milk, sugar, salt, raspberries, and ginger, mix together until the consistency makes sense and is fairly uniform.

Pour the mix into the muffin baking tin one at a time: for more compact muffins that won't raise tops out of control, just make sure the mix in each muffin-cast fills it at least half-way to three-quarters of the way for good measure...

Once the oven has sufficiently pre-heated to 350 degrees, Bake the muffins at 350 degrees for approximately 23-24 minutes.  Once done baking, take out, insert a baking test stick into each once to assure they are actually done, and let them cool for at least 5 minutes before attempting transfer.

*I garnished the muffins with some raw turbinado sugar (once they were done baking) for fun.  You can seriously garnish with anything you would like- candied ginger, fresh berries, etc.*

Hope you Enjoy! :D

Dashi!

Still having little to no time to actually get fancy with my cooking skills, I am posting this SUPER-EASY soup broth recipe!  Dashi is Japanese sea stock, a common base for miso and other soups, and is both delicious and healthy.  Do not be scared to use kombu or bonito flakes- I promise it will all turn out fine!

Ingredients:

• 5 cups water
• Kombu (edible seaweed vegetable); approx an 1"x8" long "stick" of kombu, or the rough equivalent of this amount
• 1/2 cup dried bonito flakes
• green onion (as little or as much as you desire)
• shittake mushrooms (optional)

First, soak the kombu in your 5 cups of water for approx 10-15 mins.  I threw a shiitake cap and a few green onions in there as well for good measure.

After the kombu has it's soak, turn on the stove, heat the water n' kombu combo until just-about boiling; you should see bubbles forming on the sides of the pot, and right before it actually boils.......

....Turn off the stove, let it simmer on its own, just sitting there.  This is ridiculously easy.

Add the 1/2 cup of dried bonito flakes over the surface, and let the bonito flakes hang out here for another 5-7 minutes.

Once that time has passed, take the pot of broth and pour into a strainer lined either with cheesecloth (or a large coffee filter) with a container underneath to catch the Dashi!

(In the pic below I added extra green onions and shiitake mushrooms to the broth as soon as it was strained and ready)

You did it! Congratulations!  Eat it now, or put it in the fridge- where it will keep for 1 week, or in the freezer, where it will last a lot longer.

Feel free to: add this as the base to any and every soup, add a dash of tamari or sesame oil, add seaweed/sesame seeds, add brown rice crackers, throw it on top of noodles or rice...you get the idea.  Do your thing.  Make it yours!

The Leftovers Soup

I'll start by saying that this is less of an exact recipe, and more of an overall concept for those of us with 10 minutes to prepare dinner sometimes with limited options and some scattered leftovers from earlier in the week- 'The Leftovers Soup'.  This week quickly got ahead of me and totally insane, between working full time as a nurse practitioner, co-composing an original rock opera, and being on-call in the evening after work!
Just when I thought I was out of cooking ideas/out of food completely and getting a little desperate, I came up with an idea:

To take everything I have made this week and combine it into a SOUP.
This may be why soups are so flexible.  They are one of the few things you can almost always use leftovers for, whether it be for the main component/broth of the soup, or for mere flavoring.

What I made this week:
*Dashi: Traditional Japanese Sea Broth (takes like 15-20 mins to make, not to shabby)
*Saffron brown basmati rice (the rice cooker cooked it for me, any rice will work here)
*Hard-boiled eggs (I make a dozen of hard-boiled eggs before the start of every week on Sundays)

Basic idea here: Take whatever awesome homemade broth you hopefully have.  Pour into bowl with the rice you already have made, cut up a hardboiled egg, layer on top, season as you desire, heat it up however you like (in a big pot, or if you have 2-3 minutes before on-call starts, microwave it).

Extras: Bacon.  I cooked 2 strips of bacon super-quick, chopped them up, added to the soup.

This is quick and easy (if you keep up with the broth, rice-makin and having hardboiled eggs around!)
and is gluten-free, dairy-free & low in acidity!  :D

Oshinko!

Hello All! This is my very first cooking blog post about creative cooking/food preparation, specializing on unique meals for challenging dietary needs/chronic health conditions.  While I myself am cursed with interstitial cystitis (a disease I would not wish on my worst nemesis), chronic allergies, and IBS, it has been a blessing in terms of leveling up my cooking skills dramatically (as the list of what I could tolerate eating was getting seemingly smaller and smaller!).  At current, I am gluten-free, low-acidity, and now dairy-free.  Too many hyphens, if you ask me, and a challenge in terms of a. What to eat? b. How can I make the limited foods I can eat NOT suck?

The other day, I was craving something acidic.  We all crave things we cannot have.  It wasn't worth getting an ulcer to fulfill this craving, so I did some research to find a less-acidic, milder-yet-still-awesome form of pickling.

Oshinko= authentic Japanese pressed pickles.  There are a wide variety of recipes, some more difficult to make successfully than others.  I will give you guys the easy version for starters.  The first pic is the set-up for the 2-3 day period it takes to pickle the vegetables:

Ingredients & Preparation: 

• 1 c radishes (just the radishes themselves, no stem/leaves/stuff)
• 1 c English cucumber or mini cucumbers work as well
• 4 TBP good-quality salt (non-iodized!)
• 2-3 TBP rice wine vinegar (realize that you can make them milder/stronger...)
• optional 1-2 TBP of vermouth/very dry white wine/or keep it real with some sake
• sesame seeds (to garnish with)

• Cut thin slices of the washed radishes and cucumbers, put them in a wide circular glass bowl
• Add the salt, rice wine vinegar, and optional vermouth/dry white wine/and/or sake
• Mix it together well to make sure the vegetables are all covered in the simple brine
• Cover the mix itself with plastic wrap
• Place a plate that fits just inside the glass bowl on top of the plastic-covered mix (it serves to press the mix down within the open glass bowl)
• Place something heavy on top of the plate/or lid (you can use a water-filled ziplock bag, a heavy bottle of water, a heavy can of beans, whatever will do the job) to start the pickling process.
• Every once in a while (that's vague, I did this 1-2 times a day) empty the fluid that accumulates from the glass bowl, once that is done, replace the lid/plate and heavy thing on top.
• In 2-3 days this Oshinko is ready to eat!! (you can eat it sooner, totally up to you); you can transfer to a glass jar/storage container, and add sesame seeds to the mix for garnish.
• If room temperature where you are is 80 degrees or over, you'll need to find a cooler place to pickle this stuff so it will not spoil! Once the 2-3 day period is up, and the Oshinko is ready, store in the fridge, and eat within 7-10 days.