We’re halfway through the month, and I’ve kept it gluten-free. Even when eating out, there’s almost always a viable option or two (or more). And since we moved last week, there were a number of eating-out nights.

Logan’s Roadhouse was easy — a nice steak, with grilled veggies and a crouton-free salad. Plus all the free peanuts you can eat.

We discovered a brand-new location of the sandwich chain Jimmy John’s near the new place. I’d heard about them before, but there weren’t any in Washington, and the nearest Florida location was many miles away. We tried their “unwich” (all the sandwich fillings, wrapped in lettuce leaves and then wrapped in paper so you eat it like a burrito). Fantastic! My only problem is that they don’t have pickles as sandwich toppings. They have cucumber slices, which isn’t the same thing at all, and they have a full dill pickle as a side. Next time, I may ask them to slice a pickle and put it on the sandwich. That would be perfect.

We also discovered a salad place, Greens & Grille. It’s a local two-spot chain where they make a salad to your specifications, then throw on some grilled meat. It’s tasty, but it has its problems. Number one is that a salad can run you over ten bucks. Number two is that the place is really cold, with metal chairs. Shiver! Hopefully it’ll be more pleasant in the summertime, but when the outside temperature is mid-40s and the indoor feels maybe ten degrees higher, it’s not a pleasant dining experience.

But my friends, I haven’t been completely low-carb while I’ve been gluten-free. We did Fuddrucker’s one night, and I got my burger without the bun … but with those awesome wedge fries. We also went to Moe’s (one of many burrito places, and the closest thing Florida has to the magnificent Taco Del Mar) and I had a naked burrito bowl — all the fillings, but without the wheat tortilla. That means rice, beans, and even corn chips.

I will admit, I’m burned out on eating out for a little while. It doesn’t help that a couple of days ago, I had some upset stomach issues that I’m pretty sure were food-related. That’s no fun. But our new fridge (and much larger freezer) are now stocked with meats, meats, meats, cheeses, meats, and some fruit and veg.

So healthwise, how is gluten-free January treating me? Just fine! Besides the stomach upset, my energy levels have been normal, and I’ve been relatively free of any bloating or gas (even after eating beans and rice). My weight, which I maintain between 130-133, has been bouncing around from 130.4 to 130.8 the last few days. Even with me eating the occasional potatoes, rice, beans, and corn.

File this one under both gluten-free and low-carb.

I can’t believe I haven’t posted this soup before. You know how there are some recipes you make all the time, and love, and you don’t even have them written down because you know them so well? This is one of those. So I’m going to give approximations on things like spices, since I’m used to just dumping in what looks right.

This soup originated as an actual jambalaya recipe. But when we went low-carb, we couldn’t do the rice part anymore. So I tried it without the rice, and it’s still just as awesome. I’m sure there are some jambalaya-ish things I’m leaving out (chicken, for one, because I’m just not a big fan) but since it started as jambalaya, the name remains for me.

This is the first big thing I’m cooking in my new kitchen. So much room! I got my mise-en-place all ready, then had to take a panorama photo of everything. My shorty soup pot, herbs and spices, some canned goods, and some chopped fresh stuff. Onward!

2 tsp olive oil
1 6-pack beef brats (or the sausage of your choice)
1 medium onion, diced
6 stalks celery, diced
1 Tbsp chopped garlic

2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp basil
1/4 tsp parsley
1/4 tsp garlic powder
2 bay leaves

1 can tomato sauce
2 cans/1 tetra-pak beef broth

15-20 raw shrimp

Heat up the oil on medium, then toss in the brats. I chop the sausage into little half-moons; I think that’s a nice size for a soup spoon. Let the brats render out some of their oil.

Toss in the onion, celery, and garlic. Let it reduce down some. Then throw in all the dry spices. I made educated guesses on the amounts for all of these, except the bay leaves. Those are easy to measure. If you’re nervous, go with half of my stated amounts, then taste and add more. I just eyeball and taste, eyeball and taste. You could also toss in some cayenne pepper, or some smoked paprika, or even some Tabasco for a little extra kick. I like to do a little shake of the garlic Tabasco. Next, add the liquids: two cans of broth, one of tomato sauce.

I used the larger tomato sauce can, which is 15 ounces. You could also do two of those little 8-ounce cans. The cans of beef broth are 14.5 ounces each, or you could do the 32-ounce box. It’s all close enough.

Let it simmer. It could simmer for 10 minutes, or an hour. Up to you.

But whatever you do, make sure the simmering is watched over by a quartet of tiny luchadors.

A couple of minutes before you’re ready to serve, add the shrimp. I get the raw tail-on ones from Coscto, thaw them in running cold water, then chop off the tails and cut the shrimp into 3 or 4 pieces. Again, nicely sized for the soup spoon. They only take three or four minutes to cook in the bubbling broth, then you’re ready to serve.

We do big ol’ mugs for soup. This really hits the spot on a cold day! Depending on bowl/mug size, you can probably get 5-6 servings out of this batch. Which means at least a couple of delicious soupy lunches later in the week.

What a way to start 2011 — moving the house. Or, well, the apartment. At any rate, we moved all of our stuff from one off-white box to another off-white box.

Our reasons for moving were manyfold, but the primary one was the fact that we were paying too much at the old apartment. The market is soft here in Orlando, and everyone everywhere was lowering their prices. Our complex, however, offered to generously keep our too-(damn)high rent the same for another year, so we generously decided to move elsewhere.

Here’s the new living room, pre-move. We hit IKEA first and got a new couch, since our old one was old and hurtin’. Guess that’s what you get for buying a $180 loveseat. Although we loved that loveseat, so we just replaced it with a fresh $180 loveseat. For the record, it’s the Klippan with a discontinued zebra-print cover. I’m glad we bought an extra cover when they were closing them out, because it’s all solids and one weird cross-stitchy pattern right now.

We moved a ton of stuff on Thursday, with help from our fantastic friend John. Between him and Scott, it was like having two powerful gorillas hauling most of our stuff. Of course, I mean “gorilla” in the nicest possible way. We’ve been really gung-ho about throwing out or Goodwill-donating as much as we possibly can, because we’re total packrats who live in a thrift store in a Russian submarine. We left even more stuff at the old place, which will be sorted through during next weekend’s cleaningfest.

The last step was bringing the cats. They mewed pitifully all the way, then found a dark place to hide immediately. I anticipated their yearning for a dark place, so I cracked open the door of the linen closet for them. The first night, they were pretty disruptive, what with the meowing and scratching at boxes and constantly hopping up and down on the bed, but last night they settled in pretty well.

Most of the living room is now set up, as well as our desks. IKEA again, here’s my Expedit desk. I’ll fill the cubbyholes with books and such as we unpack them, but I’m guessing someone will insist that I leave one cubby open for her. And yes, that’s a screenshot of Bioshock as my desktop background. Bloody splicers.

I’m still going strong with gluten free January, and even though we ate out for several meals, there was always a great option. Here’s what I had at the always-tasty Fuddrucker’s. The lettuce is hiding the truly embarassing number of pickles I piled on the plate. They have some really good pickles.

Our moving-mate John introduced us to a new place, Greens & Grille, and I’m seriously sorry that you probably don’t have one in your neighborhood. It’s like a salad place meets a Mongolian grill — you pick what salad veggies you want, from carrots to artichoke hearts and anything in between. Then they toss it, grill up some fresh meat of your choosing, and it’s totes delicious.

We’re headed back to work today, after a 3-day break, so it’ll be interesting figuring out our new routes to and from Disney. Already it looks like I have three exits to choose from when coming home, so there will be some experimenting.

I’m taking part in Gluten-Free January, a little grassroots project that is actually something I’d been thinking about trying to put together myself. I wanted to challenge friends to try just one month gluten-free to see how much better they could feel. This makes it easy, since someone else has already set up the framework.

I eat mostly gluten-free already, because it turns out that gluten can be one of the main triggers for a Crohn’s disease flare. I do occasionally splurge, but when you’re not used to eating the stuff, a splurge tastes good at the eatin’, but doesn’t feel too good during the digestin’. So come tomorrow, I’ll be avoiding the stuff completely for a full month. In fact, I had some breaded chicken strips a couple of days ago, and … blargh.

This also means no beer. Although the Whole Foods has a couple of gluten-free beers, they’re pricey. Maybe I should just make 2011 a beer-free year as well.

Anyhoo, anyone else out there doing GFJ? A couple of my Seattle friends on the Facebook say they’re going to take part. If you’re a low-carber, this does mean that certain convenience items like low-carb tortillas and breads are off limits. But on the plus side, there are a ton of gluten-free products out there, some of which are not bad. And all pre-packaged products have to list wheat as an allergen if it’s included.

I have a number of gluten-free items in my low carb category of posts. And I just got some Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free baking flour; it’s only slightly less carby then regular wheat flour, but I don’t plan on using much at a time. It’s mainly to adjust the texture of stuff made with my old favorite, coconut flour.

First off, a cat update. The swelling around Commie’s eye is steadily worse, and the eye looks more nasty every day. Plus, yesterday he started having more sneezing fits than ever before. Still, we watch and wait and cuddle.

As you can see, his eye is barely visible anymore, and it looks even more like the eye is sealing itself up. Poor kid!

We’re in the middle of packing and sorting right now, because the House of Meyer is moving in January. We came across an old film camera with a roll of film inside. I can’t remember the last time I used the camera, so we took the film out and took it to the Costco. Did you know that they still develop film? Did you also know that the ONLY option is 1-hour processing? I think the last time I got film developed at Costco, it was a 2-day turnaround, and that seemed fast.

There were several pictures of shoes (clearly, one night a lot of the members of Jet City Improv were wearing Chuck Taylors, so we all put our feet together for a snappie) and some of the cats as kittens. From the location in the pictures, it was in our first six months with the cats, and they were both under a year old. Look at their size compared to the remote controls! The pictures are all dark and blurry, but since the film sat in the camera for 12 years, I’m amazed anything came out at all. A little adjustment or two in Photoshop, and this one came out pretty well.

Scott had family in town last week, so we hit the parks. We even went over to Universal, where we watched the sad and limp Macy’s parade. We got to see the bottoms of several underinflated balloons:

Almost all of the balloon-holders looked like they wanted to stab themselves.

Just this evening, we braved the holiday shoppers to get some grocery shopping done at Target. Carts were few and far between, so we ended up with a dud with a shrill squeak. Scott figured out how to stop the squeaking, but he got a few strange looks.

And as a final note, to celebrate the awesome article in the L.A. Times about how it’s carbs that make us fat, not fat, here’s some bacon that looks like a pair of seahorses.

They were delicious little seahorses.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried peanut butter cookies. There was a semi-failure a while back, in which I tried the “amazing” flourless peanut butter cookie recipe that’s all over the internets. Well, they weren’t bad, but they weren’t great either. Not moist, not chewy. More crumbly and powdery than anything.

So when I asked a coworker if he wanted something baked for his birthday, and he asked for peanut butter cookies, I figured it was the perfect time to adjust, experiment, and cobble together something better.

Please note, I didn’t put “low carb” in the title of this recipe. It is a reduced-sugar recipe; however, it has more carbs per serving than my usual experimental baking. If you’re in maintenance, these should be fine, but be warned that there’s actual brown sugar in these.

Ingredients!
8 oz peanut butter
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup Splenda (9 packets) or 1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup coconut flour
2 Tbsp softened butter (1/4 stick)
2 Tbsp whey protein powder (plain vanilla flavor)

Let’s talk about these ingredients. Almost every recipe out there demands a cup of peanut butter. But I find it a challenge to measure peanut butter into a cup, then get it all out. So sticky! Instead, I put my mixing bowl on my food scale, and plopped spoonfuls in until it hit 8 ounces. Much easier. Although my use of “plopped” is probably another example of why Scott says I should never write catalog copy for foods.

I split the sweetener between regular and brown, because brown is supposed to make a softer cookie. Because it has a little moisture (molasses) in it. I used coconut flour to bulk up the batter, and protein powder to … well, add protein. Which is apparently also supposed to help make a moister, softer cookie. This is the job that the protein gluten usually does with wheat flour. If you don’t have whey protein powder, no worries, just add a little more coconut flour. Or you could make up the 2 Tbsp in almond flour. Whatever floats your boat!

After dumping everything in the bowl and using the hand mixer on it, I threw on a pair of gloves (I have a huge box of latex-free rubbery gloves, good for everything from hair coloring to jalapeno chopping) and made balls of dough. I flattened them with my hands, then pressed them to an even height with a fork. Because peanut butter cookies without the fork marks are like Florida without sunshine.

Bake on a silicon sheet or parchment paper at 350° for 10-12 minutes.

On the advice of my lawyer the internets, I also put these on a brown paper bag when I took them off the baking sheet. Supposed to absorb as well as paper towels, but not make the cookies soggy.

But the big questions: how do they taste? And are they moist? Well, they taste GREAT. As for the texture, they’re not the weird, light, powdery consistency of the other ones. These are almost more cake-like. Fluffy and light. Definitely a better cookie than previous attempts.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to make a truly moist and chewy low-carb cookie. So much of the chewiness comes from the wheat flour. But I’ll keep trying. And I’ll definitely eat my fair share of these.

Nutrition stats, per cookie, for a batch of 20 cookies (approx 2″ across):

100 calories
7g fat
5.5g carb
1.5g fiber (for 4g net carbs)
4g protein

When I was growing up, my folks used to make a huge batch of spaghetti sauce every now and again. Seems like we always had some in the freezer, and it was always freakin’ delicious. I learned to make it, and just threw down a batch the other day. It works as spaghetti sauce. It works in a lasagna. And if you chuck a can of beans and some cumin into it, it’s an awesome chili.

I say “easy” in that it is indeed easy, but this is a simmered sauce. It takes time. So this is the perfect project for a weekend day when you’re just kicking around the house.

First, brown two pounds of ground beef. I used 93/7 beef for two reasons: it was on sale, and with that small amount of fat, you don’t have to drain the fat. If you don’t want to. You can still drain the fat if you’re on one of those crazy low-fat fad diets, but you don’t need to.

Look here, I drained the fat so you can see how little there was:

See? Not even half of a small almond can. Which I’d cleaned out first. Because I poured the fat back into the pot. This draining was for demonstration purposes only. I really don’t recommend it. It adds flavor, and all of the healthful benefits of natural animal fat.

Have I made my opinions of meat fat clear? Good. Fat returned to pot, and it’s time for the first wave of additions.

One onion, diced. Eight or so stalks of celery, diced. You could also dice up a couple of bell peppers, if they float your boat. Can’t stand the things myself. Next: a couple of tablespoons of chopped garlic (yes, I used the stuff in the jar). I eyeballed the spices, but it’s approximately 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/2 teaspoon of black pepper, 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder, and a tablespoon or so of chili powder. I likes me the chili powder.

You don’t need to sauté the vegetables; they’re about to spend hours simmering, which will get them plenty soft. See? Easy! Now for the next additions:

1 can of diced tomatoes (I like the “petite diced” for the size. You’re welcome to use bigger chunks if that floats your boat). And here’s where I hope you used a large pot, because this recipe calls for two jugs/cans of tomato juice. My folks used to use the big-ass metal cans of Campbell’s juice; this time around, I got two 46-oz bottles (again, because that’s what was available).

Why juice, and not sauce or puree or paste? There’s just something magcial about how the juice reduces down over a few hours. I guess if you want to be really adventurous, you could substitute one of the cans/jugs of juice with V8. Me, I’m not that ballsy.

Dump in. Mix. Bring it to a simmer, reduce heat to medium-low.

Now put the lid on, half-cocked so steam can escape. And let it simmer gently for … let’s say 6 hours. Because that’s how long I let this particular batch simmer. Stir it every half-hour or so, or whenever you get up to go do something else. Look at how much it’s reduced:

Dark. Rich. Tasty. BUT WAIT! Sure, you could serve it up now, but it’s not as good as it could be at this point. This sauce really requires some time in the freezer. I can’t explain what happens; I don’t have the math for it. But it’s good, good stuff.

Let this cool a bit on the stove. Portion it out to suit your family — for the two of us, I put it in two-cup containers. Back in my youth, the family-of-four servings would be frozen in old Cool-Whip containers. I put them in the fridge first, since our freezer is kind of full, and I didn’t want all that warmth in there. After they cooled down, I stacked them in the freezer.

When you want to eat it, no need to pre-thaw (although you can toss one in the fridge the night before if you want to). What we’d do in days of olde was throw the frozen block of sauce in a saucepan and add in one of those little 8-ounce cans of tomato sauce. Along with a dash of chili powder, garlic powder, and black pepper. Heat until the frozen block is demolished and it’s all bubbly.

Serve it on spaghetti. Or spaghetti squash. Layer it in a lasagna. We’re going to try to make noodles from zucchini, like Alton Brown did on Good Eats recntly. Or you can throw in a can of drained beans and some cumin when it’s thawed, and it becomes chili! Sometimes I’ll put some in a dish, add some frozen meatballs, and take it to work. A quick blast in the microwave, a sprinkling of parmesan, and that’s some damned tasty lunch.

It’s a baking time of year, and I’m not about to let low-carb or gluten-free get in my way. Also, it’s a pumpkin time of year, and Scott loves pumpkin pie. I figured this would be the best of all worlds.

As a note, I don’t think I’ve ever had pumpkin pie before. Sure, my parents made one every Thanksgiving. But I wasn’t all that big on Thanksgiving foods in general — I ate Spaghetti-O’s or macaroni and cheese throughout my childhood, because absolutely nothing on the Thanksgiving table sounded edible at all. So it’s certainly possible that this will be my first taste of a baked good based on pumpkin.

For a base, I looked back to my coconut cheesecakes. I figured I’d still do the cupcake versions, since I don’t have a springform pan. Also, the cupcake-sized cakes make it easier to not take too large a slice. You always know what one serving is.

I researched pumpkin pie spice, and also looked at little jars of it at the grocery store. Since it was made from a blend of spices I have on hand, I decided to throw together my own.

THE CRUST
2 Tbsp melted butter
1/2 cup almond meal
1/4 cup coconut flour
2 Tbsp (3 packets) Splenda (or the sweetener of your choice)
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Smoosh the crust ingredients together (I put on a rubber glove and did it by hand). This was exactly enough crust mix for 12 cupcake cups; the problem was that the recipe I whipped up made way more cheesecake filling. So:

THE REVISED CRUST
3 Tbsp melted butter
2/3 cup almond meal
1/3 cup coconut flour
2 Tbsp (3 packets) Splenda (or blah blah choice)
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Split the mix up among 12 cupcake cups (18, if revised), and press it down into the bottoms of the cups. I then opted to pre-bake the crust for 5 minutes before putting in the filling. I don’t know that it made all that much difference, but it felt fancy.

THE FILLING
2 packages (8-oz. each) full-fat cream cheese
1 can (15-oz) pumpkin (make sure it’s purely pumpkin, not some sort of “pie filling”)
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup Splenda (or … you know)
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt

I wasn’t especially delicate here — I dumped everything into the bowl, then blended it with my hand mixer. All of the spices are ground. I went heavier on the cloves (initially I only wrote down 1/4 tsp) because whenever I open up the little can, I remember how much I absolutely love the smell and taste of ground cloves.

Mix it all up, then pour it into your cupcake cups. This is enough filling for 18 cups. I only made enough crust for 12, plus I only own one 12-cup cupcake pan. So this is what I did with the remaining filling:

Bake them at 350° for 25-35 minutes. I started checking at 20 minutes, set five a couple more times, and took them out at the 30-minute mark. Your oven may vary.

How about the nutrition facts? I ran the numbers with the increased amount of crust, so this is based on a batch of 18 cupcake cheesecakes, all with crust.

PER CUPCAKE CHEESECAKE
160 calories
14g fat
5g carbohydrate
1.5g dietary fiber (for a net carb count of 3.5)
4.5g protein

And! The bulk of the carbs are coming from pumpkin. So hey, vegetables! (Or culinary vegetables that are botanically gourds, or squash, or fruit, depending on how obstinate you want to be.)

As usual, these go in the fridge after they’ve cooled a bit. It helps the butter in the crust hold together better, and gives a nice, dense texture to the filling. I likes my cheesecakes heavy.

The starter was ready, more than doubling in size after a feeding. I had two days off in a row. It was time to bake!

I began by moving the starter into a larger bowl and feeding it with a full cup of flour, as well as about a half-cup of water. The mere act of making a bigger sour sludge changes its name from “starter” to “sponge”.

“Proofing the sponge” is letting your big gooey mess grow to double its size, as you can see here. Then you use some of the sponge for your bread dough, and put the rest back in your jar. Feed it again, and once more it’s just considered “starter”. Weird that it’s name changes like that, but there you go. Bakers are crazy.

Time to make the dough! I used a simple recipe, and mixed it in my big ol’ stand mixer with the bread hook:

2 cups sponge
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 tsp salt
4 tsp sugar
1/2 cup water
2 cups flour

As with pretty much every other recipe on earth, mix the sponge with everything but the flour. Then add the flour slowly, a half-cup at a time or so, mixing every time. You don’t want to dust the house with explosive flour. Depending on your local humdity, altitude, and whatever other mysterous factors affect baking, you may need to add a little more flour or a little more water. Eventually, the dough will become one cohesive ball, not sticking to the sides of the mixer bowl. Let it thump around in there a little while longer, and you won’t have to knead by hand.

Clean out the sponge bowl, add a little olive oil, and toss in your dough orb. Make sure to roll the dough around in the oil, so that it’s all shiny and slick. This will keep the dough from drying out and getting a “skin” on the surface. Cover the bowl with a damp tea towel (again, the dampness helps keep the dough from drying out) and let it grow.

The picture just above is after 6 hours of rising — I mixed the dough at 5pm, and visited it right before heading off to bed at 11pm. I punched the dough back down, re-rolled it in the oil, re-dampened my tea towel, and went to bed.

9 hours later, the dough was ginormous again. I punched it, pulled it out of the bowl, threw some flour on my hands, and kneaded the stuff until it was a small ball again. Then I cut it into sixths, rolled them into balls, and put them on my silicon baking sheet.

I covered them directly with, you guessed it, a damp tea towel. Then we played some video games and went to Costco. Four hours after making the balls, they’d grown considerably again. I took off the towel and let them sit for another hour uncovered. As opposed to previous stints of damp-toweling and oil-slathering, this time I wanted them to grow skins, because that makes the crust even crustier.

So then, at 1pm the second day, I baked. at 350° for 30 minutes. (A full-size loaf would probably take 45 minutes or so.) And the result is some perfectly sour, dense and chewy, crusty-crusted sourdough bread!

So yes, it takes a lot of time. But really, most of that time passes without you having to do anything. I don’t think I put any more actual prep time into this bread than I would into, say, a batch of cookies or brownies. The prep time is just spread out a bit more. And you COULD bake after that first rise, if you felt the urge, although the more time you let this stuff do its thing, the more sour the resulting bread. This was 20 hours from making the dough to baking, and I think the level of sour is just right.

Came home today to find this ginormous mushroom next to the parking lot. Did a double-take, saw the tiny lizard on top of it. He scampered off just as my phone made its picture-clicky sound.

Meanwhile, the sourdough starter from the freezer is ready to use. It grew to more than double its original size (marked with a line) in two hours. Sadly, the pantry stuff isn’t quite there yet. (Although another day or two might get it there.)

I think I’m going to mix a little of the pantry stuff into the freezer batch and go down to just one container. Because the freezer stuff is peppy as heck, but the pantry stuff has more age to it, which means a more sour flavor. Since baking sourdough is an all-day project, I’ll just feed this stuff until Wednesday or Thursday, when I can get back into the swing of things with a practice loaf.