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Where to Shop for Inexpensive Gluten-Free Ingredients

Posted in Rice, Thai, tagged inexpensive gluten-free on December 28, 2013| Leave a Comment »

There is a short answer, and a long answer to the question, “Where do I Get Inexpensive Gluten-Free Ingredients?”

I’ll give you the short answer first–because if you like Asian and Mexican food, you may have already figured this out:

1.) Regular grocery stores with a large selection

2.) Asian food stores

The longer answer, and what this blog is intended to do, is demonstrate that if you cook in regional cuisines that don’t use wheat–specifically Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Ecuadorian, and old Irish and Scots recipes–you don’t need all the fillers and workarounds to make good food. The three big things that are added are potatoes, masa, and rice flour.

If you’re buying rice flour it should be from Thailand. It’s too hot to grow wheat in Thailand, so if it’s milled in Thailand, it’s rice. It’s also less than $2.00 a pound U.S.

If you’re buying corn, most of the corn flour sold is not gluten-free. However, Maseca masa is gluten-free. (more…)

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Southern Fried Thai

Posted in Bacon, Rice, Thai on February 19, 2011| Leave a Comment »

O.k., well, it’s not entirely Thai: that is sort of the point–you should be able to substitute ingredients to use what you have on hand. In this case, that means I substituted swiss chard where you could also use broccoli rabe, chinese cabbage, or collard greens. The recipe starts where a lot of my favorite recipes start, with organic, no preservative bacon for breakfast. Leave the bacon grease to cool in the pan in which you cooked it.

Ingredients:

at least 1/4 cup bacon grease

block of firm tofu

1 1/2 cups of some kind of green leafy vegetable other than lettuce (more…)

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Tilapia Pad Thai

Posted in Fish, Thai, tagged gluten-free, rice noodles, tilapia on February 1, 2011| 3 Comments »

I’ve had this voice in the back of my head saying, “If you lived in Thailand, you wouldn’t notice that you’re gluten-free.” Apparently, that’s true: unlike a lot of Pan-Asian food, Thai food uses rice almost exclusively.

Thing is, I have no idea how to cook Thai food, and a lot of the spices involved are expensive, hard to find, and I’m not sure I can spell them. This is where pre-made sauces come in: where you are cooking outside your usual spice library and you don’t have a lot of time, a cooking sauce that includes everything is a lot less expensive. (This particular sauce had coconut milk, pineapple juice and galangal, which is a Southeast Asian ginger. Without the pre-made part, this dish would have a cost that is stratospheric.)