Ever wondered how your favorite recipes can be just as delicious, even without gluten? In today's episode about gluten-free cooking I'll share some of my tips and tricks to adapt your regular recipes into gluten-free wonders. Get ready to adopt the art of substituting common ingredients with gluten-free alternatives, and even learn how to cook a hearty gluten-free pasta sauce from scratch. You’ll also hear me chat about baking being a bit of a science- so when it comes to your gluten-free cookies or cakes, best to stick with tried and tested gluten-free recipes!
Today, I’ll also tackle the topic of how to make cooking a fun and efficient exercise. I'll be sharing insights into how to divide tasks in the kitchen, creating a family focused atmosphere where everyone has a role to play. I'll also discuss how to transform mealtimes from just another chore to a treasured ritual that everyone in the household looks forward to.
Learn more about Ultimate Celiac System here
www.belindawhelan.com/ultimateceliacsystem
Join my free community and grab your copy of 11 Mistakes People Make Living Gluten Free here www.belindawhelan.myflodesk.com/11mistakes
Check out my Daily Health Tracker here
HEALTH TRACKER | The Healthy Celiac (belindawhelan.com)
And I would love to connect with you on Instagram thehealthyceliac
If you have a spare moment, please pop over to Apple Podcasts and leave me a review. Thank you!
Music Credit bensound.com
Ever wondered how your favorite recipes can be just as delicious, even without gluten? In today's episode about gluten-free cooking I'll share some of my tips and tricks to adapt your regular recipes into gluten-free wonders. Get ready to adopt the art of substituting common ingredients with gluten-free alternatives, and even learn how to cook a hearty gluten-free pasta sauce from scratch. You’ll also hear me chat about baking being a bit of a science- so when it comes to your gluten-free cookies or cakes, best to stick with tried and tested gluten-free recipes!
Today, I’ll also tackle the topic of how to make cooking a fun and efficient exercise. I'll be sharing insights into how to divide tasks in the kitchen, creating a family focused atmosphere where everyone has a role to play. I'll also discuss how to transform mealtimes from just another chore to a treasured ritual that everyone in the household looks forward to.
Learn more about Ultimate Celiac System here
www.belindawhelan.com/ultimateceliacsystem
Join my free community and grab your copy of 11 Mistakes People Make Living Gluten Free here www.belindawhelan.myflodesk.com/11mistakes
Check out my Daily Health Tracker here
HEALTH TRACKER | The Healthy Celiac (belindawhelan.com)
And I would love to connect with you on Instagram thehealthyceliac
If you have a spare moment, please pop over to Apple Podcasts and leave me a review. Thank you!
Music Credit bensound.com
Hello. Welcome. Welcome back to the show. Now, on today's episode, I want to talk with you about something that I personally have found to be super simple, but it's not something that everyone is doing. So this is, this is something I thought that I needed to share. And it's basically about cooking food from recipes or changing recipes that aren't necessarily gluten free. Now I have seen people throw out all of their cookbooks and go out and purchase gluten free cookbooks because they thought they couldn't use their old cookbooks anymore. When this is not true, we just need to learn how to adapt those recipes and change them to become gluten free. Now, when we cook, it's, it's as simple as sometimes just swapping out a few ingredients or just finding a gluten free version of that ingredient. You know, it doesn't, it doesn't always have to be a specific gluten free recipe. The only exception to this I would say would be when it comes to baking, I think baking is a science. And when it comes to baking, we do need to use the recipes that are gluten free. I don't mess around with those recipes as much because I find that, like I said, it is a science and when you get those quantities messed up, it can be a little bit trickier. So when it comes to baking, yes, gluten-free recipes are incredible. And I, yeah, I prefer to use the gluten-free recipes, but when we are talking about cooking, cooking is a whole nother ball game. Cooking is something that we get to play around with. We can use our uniqueness, we can change flavors up. We can add different things into other people's recipes to make them our own, whether we want something spicy or milder or you know, more vegetables in it, we can completely change those types of recipes, whereas baking things like, you know, cupcakes and cakes and cookies and things like that. They're a little bit trickier to play around with when it comes to different flowers and ingredients. So let's talk today about cooking. All right. So my main example that I wanted to give you was with my pastor source because I shared this on Instagram recently and had quite a few people ask for my recipe. And it's funny because I don't really think of my past sauce as a recipe. It's just something that I've always made. And even before I got diagnosed with celiac disease, it's the same recipe. It's just tweaked a little bit. So when I make my pasta sauce, I make it from scratch. I've never been one to buy a jar past a source because I believe you can make it from scratch and have so much more flavor in it. And, and basically it's, like I said, it's just changing a few things out in that recipe. So what we do is we use mint meat for our, our pasta sauce. So let's just say you were making up a big batcher pasta sauce. You would cook up some crush garlic. So we use fresh garlic. We crush up the garlic, pop it in the pan with some olive oil, chop up an onion. So dice that up, pop that in there, cook it up and also some bacon. So we throw in a few rashes of DED up the bacon, throw that in, in cook it all through, gives it lots of flavor. We used to put carrot in. My son is very funny. He does not like cooked carrot. He only likes raw carrots. So we no longer bother doing that. He eats so much fruit and vegetables that we don't really care that we've admitted that from our recipe, but you can at this stage as well, ice up some Cara and throw in there and cook up with your bacon onion in garlic. And that gives your pasta sauce a really great base, a really delicious flavor. So once that's all softened and cooked and really delicious, then you wanna add your mints meat and you cook that up. So you cook that until it's brown. And once that's cooked, what we do is we add a jar of Piata. So Piata sauce is basically just tomatoes. We sometimes use tin tomatoes. So you can do that either, either again, another fussy child in my family, my eldest, she doesn't like tomatoes, but she loves anything. That's tomato sauce, tomato soup, things like that. We find that when we use tin tomatoes, it's too chunky for her and she picks it out. Sounds like we have fussy children, but we really don't. They're actually really good. This is just one thing that we found. So in this instance, we prefer to use the passata. So we pour that in and then we add some other things to it. Sometimes we add red wine. Sometimes we don't, it depends. If we've got a bottle open, we don't really always do it, but you can add red wine for a different flavor and give it a bit more depth. And then we add some beef stock to it. So beef stock is my husband's secret ingredient for years. He and I would take it in turns making our pasta sauce. And he he's always tasted just that bit better than mine. And I could never put my finger on it. And one day I saw him cooking the pasta sauce, and I saw him put beef stock in there. And I was like, what is this? What is this secret you've been holding onto for all these years? And it was kind of a little bit evil that he hadn't told me he was doing that. So yeah, beef is a great ingredient to add into your past source. Now, when it comes to beef stock, very simple, we just need to swap out our regular beef stock for a gluten free version. So always make sure you are using a gluten free stock. We use a stock powder. I don't believe in using liquids. They're so easy. Make from powder that you know, is such a waste on the environment to buy the liquid bottles. I don't think that we really need to worry with that. They're no better than using a powdered form or a cube. So if you can find yourself some safe gluten-free stock, we look for gluten-free and dairy-free one. And we use that. So we just put a little bit of that in there to give it the flavor. And then we put in some, um, dried mixed herbs, again, just make sure that you're reading labels. So everything that you're putting in there, you're still reading labels and you're making sure that those ingredients are safe and gluten free. So once we've put the, um, mixed herbs and the beef stock in there, we just let it simmer and we let it cook away. Let the flavors go through it. Sometimes you need to add a little bit more water. You just kind of check out the consistency. It will completely de depend on your mints meat. I know some of you call it ground beef. So if that makes more sense for you ground beef or mince meat, it depends on your meat. It depends how much water is in it. Sometimes it's quite watery. So you may or may not need to add water to your, to your, um, your pop. So yeah, so let it cook for a while. You'll need to stir it every now and again. And you will find that you have such a flavorsome, pasta, salt us. Now, none of that matters whether you've used it in the past, like I said, we used to make this and it was never gluten free. It always had stock in it that had gluten in it. And we used to cook it with pasta. That was gluten. Whereas now obviously we use gluten free pasta and we use our gluten free stock and we make sure everything else is safe as well. Or I forgot a key ingredient. And then you also need to put in some tomato paste, I have found that some tomato paste do contain gluten and others. Don't so that's another thing you do need to make sure that you're not putting any unsafe, um, tomato paste, but the tomato paste gives it a really great flavor as well. So a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste to pop in there. Now, once you've cooked up your pasta sauce and you've cooked your pasta and you serve your meal and you've had, you know, whether you've had spaghetti bona, or you have it with some Penn, it doesn't really matter which past you have it with. You've got yourself one meal. But what I like to do is I like to cook up a massive batch of this pasta sauce. So I generally will do it with a two kilo amount of meat. And then I freeze it in containers and I've got multiple meals because I absolutely love the whole concept of cook once and eat twice or more. And I learned this when I studied nutrition, when I became health coach. And it was a big thing that they taught was to, to make it really easy on your clients and cook once to eat more than once. So whether that be twice or more, like I said, it saves you time and it saves you energy. And when we cook a meal like this, it doesn't always have to be pasta. Okay. You don't have to use that pasta source for pasta. So now you've created a really great base for something else. Okay. So you might have that in the freezer for a week. And then a week later you might decide that you want to have something like baked potatoes and you use that same delicious pasta sauce on baked potatoes. And you have some cheese. If you, if you're able to eat cheese, you can milk some cheese on there, some sour cream, maybe some chopped up be root. That might sound weird to you, but that's totally something that I do. Some corn, things like that. And you've got another completely different meal to what you had originally with the pasta, but you're using the same base, right? So you're not only saving yourself time, but you've, you've now just got two meals out of that one original meal. Let's go another step further. You could also use that on nachos. So nachos again, you've got another different meal, similar to the baked potato, but a different meal again. Okay. So you could do that a week lay and you've had it in the freezer easy. So these are great to have in a pinch when you are busy or you can't be bothered cooking, or you're not well, things like that. It's good to have these types of meals in the freezer as a backup plan. Now, another thing you could do is you could use that pasta source for, um, making lasagna, okay. It's another pasta dish, but it's different again. So yeah, it's just, it's just one of those things that you, you get creative and you stretch out your meals to make different things. So I hope that helps you see that it's not, it's not always hard to eat gluten free. Sometimes I think we're getting this mentality. That wo is me. It's hard. I don't wanna do this. I can't cook enough meals and you need some, you know, some strategies in place to make it easier on yourself. So you might be very new to eating gluten free. And I hope this is helping you see that it's not just, you've gotta cook every single day and come up with different meals every day. I hope this is helping you see that we've just gotta get creative or maybe you've lived with celiac disease for quite some time now. And you're a bit overcooking. You're a bit sick of using the same meals over and over again. And it gets a little bit repetitive, get creative, get in the kitchen and, you know, get on Google and find different recipes. Doesn't always have to be gluten free, pull all out your recipe books, see what you can adapt. You know, we've got, um, recipe books from when my husband and I first met. We've been together over 17 years now. And when we first met, we loved cooking together. We absolutely, that was a thing that we loved to do was to cook and come up with beautiful meals. Our, our cooking has changed a lot since we've had kids. We don't have as much spicy food or as many unique foods, I guess, but, but that's the beauty of having children, is it, we, we change. We adapt. We do things differently when we have kids. But as I was saying, when we first started dating, we cooked together a lot and we used certain cookbooks and we had our favorites and there were certain meal. So we absolutely loved to cook. And when I found out that I did have celiac disease, we still cooked many of those meals. We still had many of those favorites, but they weren't in gluten free cookbooks. They weren't gluten free if we followed that recipe, but we adapted them and we made sure that they were gluten free. And when I was first diagnosed with celiac disease, we got rid of all the sources that had gluten in them. We got rid of all the ingredients that had gluten in them that we would use for cooking and baking and things like that because we didn't want the, to run the risk of if my husband was cooking or even myself, that we would accidentally grab the wrong source or grab the wrong paste or grab the wrong ingredient and put into the meal that we were cooking. So that's one thing that we made sure that even though we were cooking a meal that was, you know, in a recipe book that wasn't gluten and free. There wasn't that risk of, oh, whoops. I accidentally put the wrong source in there, anything like that. So you can make it easier on yourself by doing these types of things. So I hope that inspires you to expand the way that you are eating and expand the way that you are cooking, because it, it doesn't have to be hard. We don't need to make hard on ourselves. We can, we can be gentle on ourselves and we can make it easier. So like I said, cook cook once, eat twice or more and save yourself time in the kitchen and, and find your favorites. Find the things that you enjoy cooking. And if you have someone else in your life that can, can cook for you as well, you split it up, teach each other how to cook different meals, teach each other what, you know, what you value, what you enjoy eating. And it makes it so much more enjoyable because this is a journey. We're all learning. We're all in this together. And, and food is such a wonderful part of life. I truly believe that that eating is such a wonderful experience when we can share it with others. And even in our home with, with our own family, it's such a wonderful experience to sit down each day and eat, eat with our families and enjoy that time. So we want, we want it to be enjoyable. Don't we, we don't want it to be stressful and we don't want it to be hard. So if you can use any of these tip just to move forward and enjoy mealtime, then that's wonderful. I'm so happy to hear that. And yeah, I'll leave that with you. And like I said, I hope that's helped and I will talk with you again next week. You have a wonderful week and I will talk with you, then take care. Bye.