Beef Stroganoff Can Be Gluten and Dairy Free and Still Taste Good

Cooking is not difficult. Everyone has taste, even if they don't realize it. Even if you're not a great chef, there's nothing to stop you understanding the difference between what tastes good and what doesn't. –Gérard Depardieu

I fought it for a really long time. I did not want to give up gluten — in essence, my daily bread. I was tested for Celiac and it came back negative. I gave up dairy almost a year-and-a-half ago, which was really, really hard. It was hard enough eating diary free without adding gluten to the mix so I stubbornly stuck to my gluten-laden diet because I don't have Celiac disease. I was convinced that it wouldn't help. I couldn't have been more wrong. I was eating myself sick. Within 3 days of giving up gluten, I felt better than I had in months. It's been a little over two months now and I feel like a normal person again. I can't believe what a huge difference it has made.

Coming up with menus that aren't monotonous is difficult. And living dairy and gluten free limits what you can make but necessitates cooking almost every day. Very few restaurants cater to special diets. You can only eat so many salads with vinaigrette dressing without getting bored. And there are cross-contamination issues, as well, when eating out. This week, I felt like I was out of ideas, so I rummaged around on Pinterest and found a few things I'd pinned a while ago and decided to give them a try. First up, was the most amazing Black-Eyed Pea Curry from Mel over at Mel's Kitchen Cafe. Her recipes use mostly fresh ingredients, so it is easy to substitute if necessary. This curry called for half-and-half, but I used canned coconut milk instead, added cauliflower as suggested in her notes but not included in the recipe and omitted the cilantro because I'm not a big fan. After tasting it, I could see how the cilantro would have complimented the flavors, so if you like it, I'd say go for it. As it was, I thought it was heaven on a plate. We will definitely be having more curry around here in the future.

Mel also has this casserole {she calls it a hot dish} that I've been romancing for the past year or so. It is an upscale version of one of my favorite casseroles. Mine uses cream of mushroom and cream of chicken soups and plain white rice, with a splash of soy sauce, some hamburger, onions and garlic and chow mein noodles on top. Hers uses butter, flour, milk and spices to flavor wild rice. The first time I made it, I used a wild rice blend, butter substitute and almond milk and halved the recipe but otherwise followed it exactly. The rice came out crunchy and under done, and it was all burned to the bottom of the pan. The second time I tried it, I made the same changes as before but I tried cooked the rice half-way by using only half the water and half the time, hoping that the time in the oven as part of the casserole would finish cooking it all the way. It was an epic fail. For some reason, it was too salty. Way too salty {operator error, I'm guessing} and the rice still wasn't done.

Several months ago, I gave it one more try. I still used half the amount of rice and still did a wild rice blend, but I cooked it all the way before putting it into the casserole. I also used the full amount for the sauce ingredients {subbing in dairy-free only; I was still in denial about being gluten intolerant} and added in a tablespoon of soy sauce. It was spot on. I was going to make this recipe last week, but I was still recovering from surgery, so it got bumped to this week's menu. As chance would have it, we had a leftover steak that Mr. Bug had grilled up for us on Friday night, so I decided to use it to make beef stroganoff night before last or as close to it as you can get without using dairy or gluten. I used the sauce recipe from Mel's casserole, modified slightly, and I thought it was pretty tasty. Without dairy, it isn't exact, but it is pretty darn close so I thought I'd share.

Beef Stroganoff

½ to 1 lb. beef (leftover roast beef, stew meat, steak – raw or left over), cut to bite size pieces
2 tablespoons butter substitute or olive oil
1 small onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
8 oz. mushrooms, diced
¼ cup corn starch
1½ cups beef broth
¾ cup rice milk (or 1 cup almond milk)
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon celery salt
¼ teaspoon onion salt
¼ teaspoon garlic salt
¼ teaspoon pepper

8 oz. gluten-free pasta

• Cook pasta according to package directions. Do not drain until ready to serve.
• In a 10” skillet, brown the beef on medium high heat until juices caramelize on the bottom of the pan {works with both leftover and raw meat}. If your pan is non-stick, you don't need to add any oil, but if it is a regular pan, add a little olive oil to keep the meat from sticking. Transfer the meat to a plate and cover with foil.
• Return the skillet to the stove and add butter substitute or olive oil and melt over medium heat. Add onions, garlic and mushrooms to the skillet and cook, stirring occasionally, 5 to 7 minutes until the onions are translucent and most of the liquid has evaporated from the mushrooms. Sprinkle the corn starch over the vegetables and stir to combine. Continue stirring and cook the mixture for about 1 minute.
• Slowly whisk the broth and milk into the skillet. Add the salt, celery salt, onion salt, garlic salt and pepper and stir to combine.
• Return the meat, with any juices that might have accumulated, back to the skillet and bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring frequently. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens, about 4 to 5 minutes.
• Serve over hot pasta.
Serves 4

Notes:
• I used Heartland Fusilli pasta. It was excellent. You can find it on the regular pasta aisle at Wal-Mart.
• Rice milk doesn’t thicken as much as almond milk, but I’m sensitive to almonds, so I use rice milk. Also, for some reason, sauces and gravies made with corn starch lose their “thickness” when you refrigerate them, so leftovers will have runny sauce, but it still tastes good.
• My favorite butter substitute is Earth Balance. They have the original in Wal-Mart, but I go to a health food store to find the kind made with olive oil because I like it better.
• The amount of meat doesn’t have to be exact. This is a great recipe to use up leftover roast or steak, but you can buy a steak or stew meat if you don’t have leftovers. Stew meat tends to be a little bit tougher, though.

Giveaway: Amelie Purse Pattern from Geta's Quilting Studio

In giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude. –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A couple of weeks ago, I put my name in on Giveaway Day at Geta's Quilting Studio and I was delighted to be one of the winners! Geta has so many beautiful designs. I bought her Flower Ball and Flower Power quilt patterns a while ago {which I will eventually get to} and recently, I made some bags from her Amelie pattern.

While I was perusing her fantastic patterns trying to decide which ones to choose, an idea began to hatch. What if I were to use part of my giveaway winnings as a giveaway of my own? The Amelie purse was so fun to make and everyone who has seen it loves it. I've received lots of compliments on it. The mother of one of the girls I made one for loved it so much that she even ordered the pattern!

It has tons of pockets and would look fabulous in an infinite number of fabrics and colors.

So, I asked Geta if I could use one of the patterns I won from her as a giveaway on my blog and she kindly consented. I'm so excited to share an Amelie Purse Pattern in PDF downloadable format with one of you! I would like to send a huge thank you to Geta for her generous giveaway! And for those of you who can't wait for the giveaway or want to try one of her amazing quilts, her patterns are on sale for $5 each for two days only, through May 28^th!

The Fine Print:
• To enter this giveaway, leave a comment telling me something good that has happened to you this week. Or just leave a comment. Whichever.
• One entry per person, please.
• Non-blogging/non-Google users and international entrants are welcome.
• If you do not have a Google account, use the name/url {url optional} commenting option and make sure you leave your e-mail in your comment in the following format: address (at) domain name (dot) com.
• Comments with no contact information will be deleted.
• Duplicate comments will be deleted.
• Comment moderation is on, so don't panic when your comment doesn't show up. I'm notified of new comments and will approve them periodically each day, after which they'll show up on the post.
• The giveaway will close at 10:00 pm MST on Friday, May 30^th. The winner will be chosen by random drawing and notified by e-mail and announced here by 8:00 pm on May 31^st.

Good luck!

Same Familiar Packaging with New and Improved Functionality

"This is the cabin for Hypnos, the god of sleep," Annabeth said.

. . . Soft violin music played from somewhere. The air smelled like fresh laundry. The cabin was so cozy and peaceful that Jason's eyelids started to feel heavy. A nap sounded like a great idea. He was exhausted. There were plenty of empty beds, all with feather pillows and fresh sheets and fluffy quilts and—Annabeth nudged him. "Snap out of it."

Jason blinked. He realized his knees had been starting to buckle.

"Cabin Fifteen does that to everyone," Annabeth warned. If you ask me, this place is even more dangerous than the Ares cabin. At least with Ares, you can learn where the land mines are." –Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero

I am beginning to wonder if I am a child of Hypnos because a nap always sounds good to me. But since that is probably not the case, I had a septoplasty {warning: link contains gross photos} with turbinate reduction, which probably isn't the most logical choice of treatment but let me explain. For as long as I can remember I haven't been able to breathe well through my nose. I couldn't breathe out of my right nostril at all. And I clench my jaw while I sleep, so I wondered if I might not be getting enough air at night, which was causing or at least contributing to poor sleep quality. I never wake feeling rested and refreshed. As a matter of fact, it is very difficult to wake up. Most mornings, I push the snooze button a few times and then turn the alarm completely off and go back to sleep. And no matter how many times I tell myself that I will get up when the alarm goes off, my mornings pretty much always go like that. Obviously, I don't make good decisions when I'm asleep.

When I finally do wake up, I feel like I have to take several minutes to breathe deeply enough to re-expand my lungs and come to my senses. The coming to my senses parts takes about a half-an-hour, at which point, I start scolding myself for sleeping past the alarm again and promising that tomorrow I will do better.

Whether or not there is any real correlation to my hypothesis, I went ahead and made an appointment with an ENT about a six weeks ago. The PA asked lots of questions and then she donned a forehead light and took a pair of cross-lock tweezers, stuck them up my nose and expanded my nostril so she could have a look in there. She told me that it looked to her like about an 85% blockage and explained that to repair it the surgeon would remove the cartilage from my nose, shave the bones spurs from it, smooth it out, make it nice and straight and put it back in. Easy peasy. She said it was a very non-invasive procedure {which is kind of debatable in my non-educated opinion, because they go right up your nose} and a quick recovery. She made me feel very confident that it was a good option and would be less than a minor interruption to my life. So I signed up.

Cut to Thursday-before-last. Mr. Bug and I had to be at the same-day surgery center at 8:45 am. After we checked in, the nurse led us back to a little room where she gave me a lovely lilac-colored paper gown about the same weight and feel as a reusable grocery sack and a pair of large and unattractive boxer shorts of the same material, for which I was very grateful. I supposed that in the event they needed to open my chest from my collarbone to my navel, they could get those babies off and out of the way in a jiffy and in the meantime, I could keep from hanging the moon on my way to the bathroom. It was a win-win situation.

Then they started explaining the procedure in more detail. That's when I started to worry. The anesthesiologist came in and explained how the anesthetic would work, which didn't worry me {sidebar: my first c-section, which is major surgery, was a semi-emergency but by the time we got to that point I was so tired I didn't even care and just wanted a nap, although they didn't put me under. I breezed right through the second c-section. But when I had a bunion removed a few years after that, the thing that worried me the most was the anesthesia. What if I never woke up? Of course I did, and I was really annoyed that they wanted me to leave the blissful and best sleep I'd ever had so soon after I arrived there. After that, I wasn't worried about it anymore, and kind of looked forward to it when the opportunity arose. Weird, I know. But sleep and I have a long and complicated history.} What did worry me is all that they told me about after-care. Namely, that there would be swelling, bleeding and crusting. And I was not allowed to blow my nose. That was a deal breaker and I was ready to get out of the paper gown and go home. Fortunately for them, they had powerful sleeping agents at their command and before I could make a break for it, I was under.

I have to add that when the surgeon came in to talk to me between the anesthesiologist and the surgery nurse and the guy with the drugs, I was working on one of the embroidery labels for my Patriotic Sampler quilt. I put it on my lap while he went over what he was going to do, but I saw him look at it several times as he was talking to me. As he was turning to go, he hesitated and then asked what I was working on. I showed him and he studied it for a minute and then complimented me on how precise my stitches were and said something like, "you could do surgery."

I don't remember much of the afternoon after my surgery. I think we were supposed to start at 10:00, but they must have been running behind because they didn't wheel me out until 10:45. We made it down the hall and around the corner and I was out. They told me I'd have to move from one bed to another, but I don't know if that even happened. The next thing I remember was trying to wake. My lungs felt heavy and it was difficult to breathe. Then I was in a recovery room and the nurse brought me applesauce, pain meds and soda. Mr. Bug hung out and read and I slept. About 2:45, it seemed like the nurse kind of wanted to shoo me out the door. She brought in a nose sling, which wrapped over my ears and had padding across my cheeks and then a plastic strip under my nose, which you placed a gauze pad on to catch any blood that might be dripping out. Up to that point, my nose seemed pretty clear, but when I stood up, it started to drip. It was uncomfortable, but not unmanageable. And according to the nurse, it wasn't a lot of bleeding. So I got dressed, they trundled me out to the car in a wheelchair and we went home. I slept on the way. When we got home, Br. Bug set me up in a comfy chair {they recommended sitting up, or lying at an incline}, I had a popsicle and watched TV for about 10 minutes. Then I had another nap. One of my kind neighbors brought dinner, after which I'm pretty sure I had another nap. And then Mr. Bug and the kids came in to watch TV with me and I dozed in and out and went to bed before 10:00.

At about 2:00 am, I woke up and wandered into the kitchen to get some more pain meds. I decided that a popsicle would be a good idea, too. It took me about 15 minutes, and the whole time I stared at my sewing table and seriously debated about doing a little something. In the end, I decided it was too much effort and went back to bed. I got up a few times to use the bathroom or get pain meds, but mostly I slept until about 1:00 in the afternoon. I set up camp on the living room couch and trimmed frayed threads off the cut edges of my latest fabric acquisitions fresh from the wash {sidebar: I used to serge the cut edges but quit doing that and instead I wash on the "hand washables" cycle, which is very gentle. I get about a fourth of the amount of frayed threads than with a normal wash and because there are less stray threads, there isn't a tangled up rat's nest that has to be sorted before the fabric goes to the dryer. I figured that the time I spend trimming that off is about the same as the time it takes to serge the edges, but saves on thread and wear-and-tear on my machine.}. The rest of the weekend was spent mostly sleeping interspersed with saline flushes, pain meds and popsicles, alternately. I wasn't in too much pain following the surgery and after the first few days Tylenol and Advil did the trick.

Resting was nice, but also difficult. I have kind of a hard time sitting still {another sign that I may be a demigod and that Hypnos is indeed my father} and am always working on something. I almost never sit and veg in front of the TV, but I did a lot of that because I was so tired. I wanted to sew, but it seemed like too much effort. I had four whole days off and all I managed was one set of four blocks for the signature quilt I'm making.

Four blocks. That is all. Admittedly, I pressed 3 yards of pink Kona and 2½ yards of white Kona between naps. But four - 5" blocks seems like nothing for a four-day weekend. OK. I did get all of my stash fabric washed, folded and put away in rainbow order. Some of it wasn't as recently acquired as I may have previously led you to believe. Some of it has been sitting in my laundry room since last July. So, that is a good thing.

I other happy news, after the first few days of crustiness and several dozen saline flushes, my nose functionality has improved. And so has my sleep. This was recorded by my sleep app {Sleep Cycle for iPhones and Sleep as Android for Android} just a few days after the surgery. That has been my best day so far, but I've moved from the mid 70's on average into the low 80's on most nights, which is a step up from a C to a B- and I'm encouraged by that.

I'd planned to go back to work last Monday, but by the time I got up and dressed, I needed a nap so I worked from home. Tuesday was much the same, except I had a popsicle for courage {don't ask me why, because I don't really know} and actually went to work instead of working from home. Wednesday morning I had a follow up with the PA, who again donned the light headband and armed with the cross-lock tweezers and a suction tool, went up my nose and cleaned it out. At one point, she got a pair of tweezers and pulled something out—I didn't look—and went back to suctioning. I wonder if she goes home at night and says to herself, "best job ever!"? She told me that the doctor had used the word "severe" in his notes in reference to the deviation of my septum. Part of the reason I put off going for so long {I've been thinking about it for a couple of years now} was because I was afraid I would get there and they would say, "nothing is wrong, you big whiner, so quit whining." It was a relief to know that there really was something wrong and that it has been corrected.

The PA noted that there was still quite a bit of swelling in my previously good nostril {the left one, in case you were wondering} because that was the side that the surgeon went in on. She told me that the swelling would go down, and after about four weeks I would be better than ever and I would wonder why I had put it off so long. That put me at ease, because on my way in I was wondering if the large chunk of change that was our portion after insurance had been worth it. I felt even better on my way out because I noticed a huge improvement from the little vacuuming job she did. Also, I was cleared to blow my nose. In the past week, there have been several times that I have noticed that breathing is a lot easier for me. I even woke up one night and realized that both my nostrils were open and that I had a nice flow of oxygen going there. I settled back to sleep with a smile on my face.

I constantly marvel at the amazing-ness of the world we live in. Sometimes, when I'm cooking up something yummy in the kitchen, I wonder if they had simple, ordinary, commonplace ingredients as readily available a century ago as we do now? Could Laura Ingalls stop at Olsen's Mercantile on her way home from school and pick up some chocolate chips? Or did their Coconut Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookies just have oatmeal in them and she didn't even know to imagine chocolate chips and coconut? What if they wanted to have a curry? Did Nels stock Garam Masala {sidebar: I made the MOST FABULOUS Black-Eyed Pea Curry last night. You seriously have to give it a try, and make sure to add some cauliflower to it.}? What if the reason Nellie was so cranky is that she was lactose and gluten intolerant? Diagnosing that would have been next to impossible and changing her diet would have been entirely impossible. What if Ma had trouble delivering Carrie? Doc Baker couldn't give a her an epidural, let alone begin to imagine performing a c-section. There wasn't an outpatient treatment center for when Albert was hooked on morphine. He had to go cold turkey. And even the fancy doctors in Mancato couldn't have done my septoplasty.

We live in an age of abundance and modern convenience. This fairly non-invasive surgery {which will not result in my nose caving in. I asked.} has the potential to improve my quality of life on a very fundamental level. Or at least I am hopeful of that. I'm already feeling better. If my sleep doesn't improve to at least a B+ average, I'll pursue other diagnoses and treatments, which will involve gadgets and gizmos and tests the likes of which Doc Baker couldn't begin to fathom, even in his wildest dreams. In the meantime, I will continue to marvel at the technology that made my little modern miracle possible.

Mormon Messages: The Other Prodigal Son

Someone or something is forever telling us we need to be more handsome or more wealthy, more applauded or more admired than we see ourselves as being. We are told we haven’t collected enough possessions or gone to enough fun places. We are bombarded with the message that on the world’s scale of things we have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

No one of us is less treasured or cherished of God than another. He loves each of us—insecurities, anxieties, self-image, and all. –Jeffrey R. Holland, The Other Prodigal Son, April 2002

Sabbath Songs: Abide With Me

I need thy presence ev'ry passing hour.
What but thy grace can foil the tempter's pow'r?
Who, like thyself, my gtuide and stay can be?
Thru cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me!

–Abide With Me!

text by Henry F. Lyte, music by William H. Monk