It Must Be Karma

We have been planning to go to Alabama to a National Forest Service campground to work as volunteers for some time now. We have had this planned for months, and even confirmed with them last week. The only thing is, we got an email from the volunteer coordinator at Payne Lake telling us that we would either have a site with water and electricity but no sewer, OR a site with sewer and electricity but no water. We have been trying to decide for a couple of weeks which would be easiest to handle.

In the meantime, Jim's Mom called and asked us to come up to Unicoi State Park for a little while to be close to them. Unicoi is the park where we have volunteered for the last two winters, in north Georgia, in the mountains. Since we have been there before, we know what the volunteer responsibilites are so it wouldn't be hard for us to do it again. But, the day that Jim's Mom called, I hung up from talking to her and called the volunteer resource contact at Unicoi and reached her voice mail. Since we had not heard back from them we just assumed they didn't have a need or a space for us there. We were both wanting to go to Alabama, but also wanting to go to Unicoi because that would be the right thing for us to do.

Today, we got a call from Unicoi saying that they do have a volunteer space for us. And Ellen, the resource person, said that even though she has had other people call wanting to volunteer, we were her first choice, since we had been there before. So, tomorrow we will be going back up to Unicoi until the end of March.

Now, the karma part. We have been applying for jobs out west since before Thanksgiving, and had not heard back from anyone. Not ONE. Until about 10 minutes after we agreed to go to Unicoi. Then, the phone rang and it was a park near Bryce Canyon in Utah. As soon as the man started telling me they were "very interested in hiring us" I told him that we had had a change in our plans since I sent the application last week. We would not be able to come the first week of March because we had just committed to someone until the end of March. And he said, "That is even better for us, because we don't need you until the first week of April" Is that Karma or what?? We don't have a confirmed job yet, but we are closer than we were before that phone call. As soon as we get a firm offer, I will post a link to the place. It is gorgeous!

Dang!

Sigh....Make that a BIG SIGH....I just realized that we ate the last of our yummy Utz White Corn Tortilla Chips. They are the best corn chips ever, but, alas, they are only available in Pennsylvania. They taste delish and are gluten free for a gluten free FabGrandma.

If there is anyone out there reading this, who is in Pennsylvania, who would like to make me very happy, you can do so by sending me some more of these loverly chips. I know, I am just too easy to please.

Hammy Ham Ham

When I was growing up, we always had ham on Christmas Day. My mother cooked it on Christmas Eve, and it made the house smell wonderful. We always got to have ham sandwiches on pumpernickle bread for dinner on Christmas Eve. When I was a kid, I used to think it was a such a special treat—the very best bread in the world, with a good smear of mustard, and that sweet juicy delicious ham fresh from the oven! I can still feel the mustard smeared on my cheek after the first bite. But when I got older, I finally figured out that we had those sandwiches because Mama did not have time to make anything else. That did not make the memory any less sweet, though, and I still yearn for a ham on pumpernickel whenever I smell ham baking in the oven.

When my own three children were young, and I was the one in a frenzy on the night before Christmas, I started a new tradition. Instead of spending all my time in the kitchen away from my three very special guests, I made a cocktail party for them with all the grownup hors dourves---sausage balls, raw veggies and dip, a cheese and cold cut platter, olives, pigs in blankets. And I got out my real crystal wineglasses and served up punch or koolaid. We all got dressed up in our best clothes, put on music and danced, even when the oldest of them was only five years old. The first year that my son was in the Air Force was the first time I didn’t make the traditional party for them. After Christmas, my son, who was home on leave, said, “It just didn’t feel like Christmas without our party.” I truly didn’t know it meant so much to him. I am wondering if he is doing this for his own children now.

The reason I am having these rememberies is because I bought a ham this week. I cooked it yesterday, but not before I made a loaf of gluten free pumpernickel bread. Well, not REALLY pumpernickel. I used Bob’s Red Mill Hearty Whole Grain Gluten Free Bread Mix. I add four tablespoons of brown sugar to the mix because I don’t like the taste of it if I don’t. It turns out a very dark, spicy, nutty bread much that tastes a lot like pumpernickel. And unlike the last time I made it, I actually used two 8” X 4.5” loaf pans. The result was two beautiful, if small, loaves of bread.

So, what is a two person household going to do with a nine pound ham? Well, the first night we had baked ham, collard greens and bread. The menu for the coming week looks like this:

Ham and Potato Casserole
Leftover Collards
Bread

Bean Soup
Ham Sandwiches

Ham Salad with Rice and Peas

Macaroni and Cheese with Ham
Pear Salad

Homemade Vegetable Soup
Cornbread

Ham Omelettes
Stir Fried Squash and Peppers

There are also four ziplock bags of ham scraps and fat trimmings to be used to season soups and other dishes later on. I would say that this $9.00 ham purchase was a real bargain!

Here is the recipe for my Ham and Potato Casserole

4 or 5 medium red potatoes, peeled and sliced
2 cups cubed cooked ham
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon thyme
1 small can evaporated milk
enough water to make 2 cups when added to milk
¼ cup sour cream
¼ cup tapioca flour
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 8 oz container of fresh mozzarella cheese
1 cup shredded Italian blend cheese

Spray a casserole dish with olive oil. In a large bowl, mix together the potatoes, ham, salt and pepper, thyme. Cut up the mozzarella cheese into small pieces, and add to the potato mixture. Mix well, pour into the casserole dish.

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Add the olive oil. Add the onions and cook until they are transparent. Add the tapioca flour and stir well. Add the sour cream to the evaporated milk and water, stirring to combine. Pour into the saucepan with the onion mixture. Cook, stirring constantly, until thickened. Pour over the potato mixture in the casserole dish. Sprinkle the shredded cheese on top. Bake in a 400 degree oven for 1 hour. Take out of the oven and let rest for 15 minutes before serving.

Note: The sauce will not look like a white sauce made with wheat flour—it will be less thick and clearer. But it will taste very good.

Chicken With Salsa and Rice

This dinner is so quick, easy, inexpensive and good--all the best reasons in the world to try it. I'm telling ya, it does not get any better than this.

Chicken with Salsa and Rice:

6 pieces of chicken, skin removed
3 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper
1 jar of your favorite salsa
1 jar of water
1 cup of uncooked rice

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Salt and pepper the chicken pieces and brown them in the olive oil. Pour in the jar of salsa, the water, and the rice. Stir to distribute the rice in the pan. Cover and simmer until the rice is done, about 22 minutes.

I made this tonight with an Apple Salsa from a farm market in Pennsylvania. Side dishes were black beans and pear salad. How simple is that?

Chicken Corn Chowder

I found a really good deal on chicken the other day—only 89 cents a pound for leg and thigh quarters. The only catch was that you had to buy 10 pounds of it to get that price. Those of you who know me know that I live in a tiny little travel trailer and have a tiny little freezer. That 10 pounds of chicken just about filled up the freezer. So I have been cooking chicken just about every day for the last week. In order to not have the same old thing day in and day out, I have been trying new things. The chicken of the day for today may be the most yummy thing made with chicken, EVER! If you have a gluten freedie that you feed, or even if you don’t this should be on your menu soon. It tastes like love in a bowl.

Chicken and Corn Chowder

2 cups cooked chicken, diced
6 cups chicken broth
2 tablespoons butter
1 onion, diced
1 celery rib, diced
3 shallots, diced
salt and pepper to taste
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
1 ½ cups frozen creamed corn or 3 ears fresh, scraped off the cob
2 oz evaporated milk
¼ cup sour cream
1-3 tablespoons potato flour (or regular wheat flour if you are not gluten free)

Put the chicken, broth, corn and potatoes in a dutch oven and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for 30 minutes or until the potatoes are soft. In the meantime, melt the butter in a skillet. Add the onion, celery, and shallots and saute until the onions are translucent. Add the onion mixture to the dutch oven. When potatoes are done, add the evaporated milk and sour cream. Add flour and stir until desired thickness is achieved.

This is very good served with buttered gluten free bread or cheese toast.

For an interesting variation, add a couple of roasted, diced poblano peppers with the onions. Yuummmm!

Mom's Gluten Free Meatloaf

Ok, all you GF’ers, here is THE BEST MEATLOAF EVER! Just make sure all of the ingredients you use are gluten free. Those good steel cut oats make this a yum.

Meatloaf

1 ½ lbs ground meat (I use equal parts gr beef, gr pork, and gr turkey, but you can use 100% ground beef if you want)
¾ cup oatmeal
1 cup milk (cow, goat , soy, rice or any other milk is fine)
1 egg ( can be omitted if you do not eat eggs)
1 onion, chopped
1 tablespoon worchestershire sauce (GV brand from Wal-Mart is gluten free)
1 ½ teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon dry mustard
¼ teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon sage

Mix all ingredients well, shape into a loaf and put in ungreased pan.

Top with:

½ cup catsup
2 tablespoons mustard
2 tablespoons brown sugar

Mix all together and spread on top of meatloaf.

Bale at 350 degrees for 90 minutes.

My mom got this recipe from QVC, the shopping channel on TV. It is the best meatloaf I have ever eaten. I actually won 2^nd place in a meatloaf cookoff with this, and I would have won 1^st place but my husband was one of the judges and could not vote for my entry! It turns out just right every time. Hope you enjoy it.Here I am with my second place ribbon at the cookoff.

Problem Solved

One of my favorite hobbies is collecting recipes and cookbooks. For most of my life, I have done this, and collected book after book. However, when Jim and I sold our house and all our stuff and moved into the travel trailer, the weight of books turned them into a heavy luxury I could no longer afford. With a GVWR of just 9,500 pounds, it became more important to have things like underwear, pots and pans, and a laptop than a couple of boxes of books. So, I picked out about 6 books with which I could not part, and sold the rest. My very most favorite cookbooks are:

A Taste Of Georgia

Eat Smart For A Healthy Heart

The FrugaI Gourmet

I started checking cookbooks out of the libraries in the towns we visited, and making copies of recipes I liked and thought I might someday try. But, then, I started accumulating this gigantic pile of paper. What to do?

I bought a scanner, and started scanning the recipes and saving them on my computer. But, the scanner only made a picture of the page. In other words, if I wanted to change the recipe in any way, I could of course print it out, write notes on it, and scan it in again. What a pain. And a jpeg file is huge—it takes up a lot of room on a hard drive. I had to have a better way. Especially now that I am eating a gluten free diet, I like to take the recipes I find, and use them as a starting point to change them around to make them gluten free.

The other day I was sitting there thinking about this problem and came up with a solution for it. I searched the internet for a freeware OCR program, and found one called TopOCR. I downloaded it, and installed it on my laptop. It is not that hard to use, and does exactly what I wanted it to do. It did take a little patience to figure out because the help files are not that informative, but it only took me about 30 minutes to get it installed and working.

I scanned my first OCR pages from a cookbook today and saved them in text format. Now, when I want to change them in any way, all I have to do is type the changes in the document. I wonder why I didn’t think of this a couple of years ago?

I am going to be experimenting with making gravy, using tapioca flour to begin with. I am really missing gravy now that it is cold outside. I hope to be able to post some gravy recipes soon. If anybody out there who is eating gluten free has any ideas about making gravy, I sure would like to hear about them.

So Much News!

Where to start? First of all, thank you so much to all my friends, relatives, co-forum members, and readers who headed over to 7 Babes A Blogging last week and voted for me. I am officially the 7^th Babe for the month of December. While there is no monetary reward, the personal satisfaction of knowing I AM A BABE is priceless!

We celebrated my mother’s 80^th birthday on Saturday. You can read my tribute to her over at 7 Babes. It was a lot of fun to see her reaction to her surprise party, and all the other surprises that came along with it. My surprise though, was that I got to see a lot of people I haven’t seen in years. Friends of our family, young and old, (HA! Most of them ARE old now, just like me!) came out, and I spent my day not quite getting to finish a conversation with someone before someone else came up and hugged me, and it started all over again. I cannot remember another day when I felt so loved.

I saw my cousin Steve, and my cousin Joe, who I found out was a fulltime RV’er too, having lived and traveled with his wife in a fifth wheel for 12 years before coming home to Georgia a couple years ago. (This is Joe on the left, and my older brother, Hank, who is workamping in Florida this winter. He and his wife came up for the weekend so they could be at the party.)

And Steve, one of my favorite people in the whole world, was one of the very first people to visit me when I moved into my first travel trailer 7 years ago. At that time, he was very excited for me, and kept telling me how he wanted to get one of “those driving things.” He is now the proud owner of his own motor home. I got an email from Joe this morning saying he and his wife are loading up their fifth wheel and coming over to the campground where Jim and I are to visit for a couple of days this week. I can hardly wait!

A lot of the younger generation were there, too. Only one of my own children, Emily, was there, and she looked so beautiful! Here she is (on the left) with cousin Jason, his wife Sandy, and cousin Alisa. My other two could not make in down from Maryland and Virginia.

My sister had hired a photographer to come and take family portraits. Jim and I had our first ever in fifteen years portrait done, and I can’t wait to see the proofs. The only thing, though, is that the guy was taking the pictures outside, and both of our eyeglasses have those lenses that turn dark when you go out into the sunshine. He suggested taking them off, but hey, I have worn glasses for most of my life and I don’t look like ME if I am not wearing them. We were in the shade, so maybe they will be okay. At any rate, as soon as I get my pictures, I will pop one up here to share.

Also, at the party, my sister, Linda, gave me a huge bag of gluten free items. She had tried the gluten free diet but decided it was not for her, so she gave me all the things she had bought. Among them was a Bob’s Red Mill Whole Grain Bread Mix. I decided to make that bread yesterday, and let me tell ya, it was delish! However, I must tell you all that when I read the ingredients list and saw that it had bean flour in it, I decided to add some brown sugar to it. The last time I tried a bean flour recipe, I decided that bean flour would never grace my kitchen again. But, because this was free, I did give it a chance, and I may well be buying it in the future. Hot out of the oven, with some butter, and I was in gluten free heaven!!! The mix made two large loaves. I put one in a ziplock bag and put it in the freezer, and kept the other one out on the counter. I’ll let you know how the frozen one holds up to the pressure.

And while I was at it, the baking I mean, I decided to make some cookies as I had been such a good little gluten free granny at the party and did not eat the cake or cookies there. I found a recipe for Oatmeal cookies somewhere on the internet. Since I did not have all the ingredients that were called for, I changed it around to fit what I did have, just using that recipe as a guideline. The results were mahvelous, Dahling! Oh, just be sure you use a certified gluten free oatmeal in this recipe. I know there are two schools of thought on whether or not oatmeal is gluten free, but I have not personally had any problems with eating my oats.

The pictures here don’t show you how moist and chewy the cookies were, even the next day, which all of us gluten free types know is practically unheard of in gluten free baking. Or how yummy scrummy they tasted. They were so good that my non-gluten free FabGrandpa Jim ate more than half of the first batch. He is eagerly awaiting the second batch. These cookies are not sugar free, but they are corn free if you use molasses instead of the Karo syrup, egg free, and casein free. Just be sure you use certified gluten free oatmeal in your recipe.

Gluten Free Oatmeal Craisin Cookies

1 ¼ cups oatmeal
1 cup white rice flour
½ cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon tapioca flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup canola oil
2 tablespoons applesauce
2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon Karo syrup or molasses
½ tsp vanilla
½ cup raisins or craisins

Mix all dry ingredients including fruit in a large bowl. Mix all wet ingredients in another bowl, then stir into the dry ingredients. Form into balls about one and half inches in diameter, then flatten out and place on a greased cookie sheet. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 14 minutes. Let cool before removing from pan.

This cookie dough keeps well in the fridge, so you can make up a double batch and just bake as many as you need for fresh yummy cookies on demand. They do wonders for a cup of fresh brewed coffee.