Kitchen Chaos

Sometimes you start thinking about a food you enjoyed as a child and want to recreate that. Even a quick version of it, just something to give you a taste of the childhood comfort food. The other day I was in Sams and saw a 4 pack of canned salmon which led me to thinking about the salmon croquettes we ate when I was a child. I loved them, it was one of my favorite meals – not that I was a picky eater, I liked most anything my mom cooked. It wasn’t one of my dads favorites, I am not sure why. Maybe it wasn’t something he grew up eating. I am not sure why I have such a vivid memory of this,  it is strange the stuff you remember from childhood. Anyway, most of the recipes I have seen call for crackers or bread crumbs crumbled up with the canned salmon and maybe some egg as a binder. Crackers aren’t gluten free but corn chips are. Those little crumbs at the bottom of the bag (that are too small to dip in the guacamole) are perfect. Because I didn’t know how it would turn out...

After all that whining about having to make pizza because I promised but didn't feel like it - I didn't make it that night. We had gotten some bad news about my Dad's health and I was crying to hard to focus on making pizza. So tonight I made pizza. Actually I made three. I wanted to compare two Bette Hagman recipes to see which one we like better. And it seemed to be a better taste test to have them side by side. Get it? The third? The third . . . well . . . its like this, cooking pizza on aluminum foil is just so much quicker cleanup-wise. And for one of the pizzas it worked great. Absolutely perfectly. The other pizza not so much. It might as well have been super-glued to the foil. I could not get them separated. So I quickly threw together the third where I used a wheat flour recipe and just substituted sorghum flour (instead of the wheat) and added an egg to help bind it. Honestly it was my favorite (although it does need a bit of tweaking - maybe ...

Last night we tried out the gluten-free offerings at Olive Garden and enjoyed it. Well, mostly. My six year old always gets cheese pizza because he loves cheese pizza. He also loves ravioli. And gnocchi. And garlic bread. But none of that is gluten-free at Olive Garden. Now he did clean his plate without any coercion on our part but that may have been because I promised, promised we would make pizza today. Ahem. I thought about it, decided that there was nothing big going on today, we could do it. Then he said "and ravioli too?" and I said we would try but I was only going to promise pizza. Then after we got home, the cold I have been fighting off won. By the time I went to bed, I couldn't breath through my nose and my chest hurt. I then apparently slept wrong because my left arm aches all the way from shoulder to fingers, my joints ache and I am running a fever. And I have to make pizza. But first I have to find a recipe. I could try to back out of ...