Tag: Recipe

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Birthday in Quarantine and a Chocolate Cake Recipe

Today’s post is short and sweet because I’m celebrating my 40th birthday at home with my family. Birthday’s mean cake, so here is my favorite chocolate cake recipe to make from scratch. It’s dairy-free, egg-free and easy to make gluten-free as well. Enjoy!

Chocolate Cake
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Chocolate Cake

This is a simple chocolate cake recipe that is super easy. It is dairy-free, egg-free, and if you swap the wheat flour for a gluten-free flour blend, it's gluten-free, too! To make it gluten free, I like Bob's Red Mill 1 to 1 gluten free blend because it already contains xanthan gum. If you use a different gluten-free flour without xanthan gum, I would add about 1-1.5 teaspoons of xanthan gum.
To top, make a simple buttercream (with shortening and non-dairy milk to keep it non-dairy) or use your favorite store bought frosting. You could also sprinkle the warm cake with dairy-free chocolate chips, let them melt a little, then spread across the top for a rich, chocolaty treat.
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time35 minutes
Course: Dessert
Keyword: 9 x 13, cake, chocolate, dairy free, easy, egg free, gluten free, one bowl, simple
Servings: 29 2×2 inch servings

Equipment

  • 9 x 13 rectangle pan

Ingredients

  • 3 Cups Flour see recipe summary for gluten-free adjustment
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons baking soda
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 6 tablespoons cocoa powder
  • 2 tablespoons vinegar white or apple cider vinegar
  • 1 cup vegetable oil any light flavored liquid vegetable oil is fine
  • 2 cups cold water
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit
  • Grease the 9 x 13 inch pan, either with shortening, butter, or cooking spray
  • Combine the first five (dry) ingredients in a large mixing bowl and mix until evenly blended. Alternatively, sift them together into the bowl.
  • Add the remaining (wet) ingredients and mix until thoroughly blended. You can use a spoon or an electric mixer.
  • Pour the batter into the greased 9 x 13 inch pan.
  • Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the middle comes out clean.

Notes

I frosted this cake with buttercream tinted blue, then used gel food coloring to paint the faces. I then piped buttercream for the eyes, facial features, outlines, writing and trim. I clearly am not a trained cake decorator, so I can’t really say which tips I used or any other details.

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Mushroom Brown Rice for Instant Pots

Mushrooms are one of those foods that you either love or hate. I love them and try to incorporate them into once in awhile in hopes of swaying my kids to the “love” side. Finn is already there and Thadd is interested but skeptical that something with that texture can be delicious. I’m not giving up on Beckett, but I think he may have inherited his dad’s and grandma’s mushroom dislike. 

This mushroom brown rice dish is rich but mild, with the brown rice adding a little nutty flavor. Because the mushrooms are sliced and not chopped, they are large enough for little mushroom skeptics to remove them and eat the rice.

Not a fan of brown rice?

The brown rice adds to the flavor, but takes a lot longer to cook than white rice. With an electric pressure cooker, it’s only about 15 minutes of active prep time. After that, the pressure cooker does all the work. If you’re in a hurry to eat, though, swap it out in favor of a long grain white rice. I like basmati and jasmine rice the best for white rice. 

Dietary Restrictions?

As written, this recipe is plant-based, gluten free and dairy free. If you choose to use broth instead of water, that could change depending on the type of broth you use.

One thing I like to keep on hand is a broth base called “Better than Bouillon“.  It’s a paste that comes in a small jar. You mix a bit of the paste into water to make broth like you would with bouillon. To me, it really does have a better flavor, and a little goes a long way. I usually have the vegetable version on hand and would have added a bit to this recipe, but I used my last bit up yesterday. They also have a mushroom version that would compliment this recipe as well. Between the onion, garlic, mushrooms and brown rice, though, it’s really not necessary. 

All electric pressure cookers welcome.

I’ve titled this post “Mushroom Brown Rice for Instant Pots” because Instant Pot has become the most popular brand and is now synonymous with electric pressure cooker. The recipe should work in any similar electric pressure cooker. Personally, I use a GoWise brand 8 quart electric pressure cooker.

Mushroom Brown Rice
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Mushroom Brown Rice for Instant Pots or other Electric Pressure Cookers

Rich, earthy mushrooms in nutty brown rice make this work as a side dish or, serve with a salad to make it a meatless main course. Makes 6-8 servings.
Prep Time15 minutes
Cook Time22 minutes
Course: Main Course, Side Dish
Keyword: gluten free, mushroom, rice, vegan
Servings: 8 people

Equipment

  • Electric pressure cooker, such as an Instant Pot

Ingredients

  • 1 T coconut or other oil
  • 1 small onion, diced
  • 3 cloves garlic, minced
  • 3 cups mushrooms, sliced White, bella or similar.
  • 1.5 tsp salt Can use less if preferred.
  • 3 cups water or broth
  • 2 cups long grain brown rice
  • 1 squeeze lemon juice optional
  • 1 dash black pepper Adjust to taste.

Instructions

  • Select "Saute" on the pressure cooker and add the coconut oil.
  • Add the diced onion and saute until translucent.
  • Add the minced garlic and saute for about a minute more.
  • Add the mushrooms, salt and pepper. Continue to saute until onions are lightly browned and mushrooms begin to get some color.
  • Add about 1/2 cup of water or preferred broth and stir up any browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Let simmer for 1-2 minutes.
  • Add the rice, remaining 2 1/2 cups of water, lemon juice and pepper.
  • Turn off the "Saute" function and set the pressure cooker manually to 22 minutes or follow your pressure cooker's instructions for brown rice. Most require longer than the "Rice" setting allows.
  • Allow the pressure to release naturally for at least 10 minutes before doing a quick release. I think it's best to let it naturally release completely if you have the time.
  • Fluff rice and serve.

Notes

This recipe has tons of flavor with just water, but you can use broth (vegetable broth to keep it vegan) if you prefer. Unless the broth is low sodium, you probably want to reduce the amount of salt.
I like coconut oil, but feel free to use olive or your preferred cooking oil.
Brown rice adds an earthy, nutty flavor, but it takes a long time to cook compared to white rice. If you’re in a hurry, substitute a long grain white rice and reduce the cooking time to 8 minutes or use the “Rice” setting. Basmati is my favorite long grain white rice.

While I try to write recipes as clearly as possible, it’s easy to miss a step or make assumptions. If anything is confusing, please don’t hesitate to comment with your questions. If you make this recipe, please let me know what you think.

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Mushroom brown rice
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Easy Homemade Chicken Broth in an Electric Pressure Cooker

If you have an Instant Pot or other electric pressure cooker, delicious homemade chicken broth takes just a few minutes of prep. This technique can easily be applied to other types of broth as well.

The ingredients

When I make chicken broth, I prefer to use bones from a cooked chicken. It’s easy to cook a whole chicken in an electric pressure cooker, or use an oven-roasted or rotisserie chicken. Save the bones for broth to make a chicken stretch farther meal-wise. You can make the broth immediately after de-boning a cooked chicken. If you’re short on time, store the bones in the freezer until you’re ready.

To flavor the broth, I like to add some combination of carrots, celery, onion, garlic, salt and pepper. I usually use:

  • one onion peeled and cut into chunks
  • one or two carrots
  • two to three celery stalks broken into two or three pieces each
  • two to three cloves of peeled garlic
  • a few peppercorns
  • about 2 teaspoons of salt.

It’s easy to add salt and pepper to taste to the finished broth, so I lean toward adding less at the beginning.

Herbs like sage, bay leaf, parsley, basil and oregano are great additions, too. You could also add jalapeno to give it some spice.

Making the Chicken Broth

To make the chicken broth, put the bones, chosen vegetables and seasonings into the pot of your electric pressure cooker. Add enough water to cover the ingredients by 1-2 inches. Lock the lid and manually set the pressure cooker to cook on high pressure for 2 hours. When it’s done, depressurize naturally.

Once it’s cool enough to handle, I like to pour it through a mesh strainer to get all the small bones and vegetable remnants out. If not using the broth within a few days, it’s best to store it in the freezer.

That’s it. With a just few minutes of prep to assemble the ingredients, an electric pressure cooker makes flavorful chicken broth that tastes like it was simmered on the stove all day long. Unlike on the stovetop, though, there’s no worry about it boiling over, and the time is dramatically reduced.

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Easy Three Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies

Easy 3-ingredient Peanut Butter cookies

Sometimes you need cookies. Or maybe that’s just me. Chocolate chip cookies are my favorite, but sometimes those aren’t fast enough, or somebody has eaten all of the chocolate chips. You know who you are. Peanut butter cookies are a close second, and this three ingredient recipe is dangerously fast and easy.

Because it is a flourless recipe, it is perfect for people following a gluten-free diet.

I’ve only made this recipe with peanut butter, but it should work with other nut butters or nut butter substitutes. Typing that, I got the strong urge to try it with Nutella. Maybe some other time.

Three ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe

Easy 3-ingredient Peanut Butter cookies
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3 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies

Fast, easy peanut butter cookies. Great for anytime you need a little something sweet. The recipe calls for three basic ingredients. Because it doesn't call for flour, this is a great gluten free recipe. I usually add a bit of salt and vanilla just because, but they are totally optional.
Prep Time10 minutes
Cook Time6 minutes
Total Time16 minutes
Course: Dessert
Keyword: dairy free, easy, gluten free, one bowl, simple
Servings: 25 cookies

Equipment

  • Baking sheets either lined with parchment or silpat mats or greased.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 cup peanut butter I usually use smooth because that's what I have on hand. Crunchy would work, too.
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract Totally optional
  • 1 dash salt Totally optional

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
  • Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl and mix until smooth.
  • Drop by spoonfuls on the prepared baking sheet.
  • Bake for 6-8 minutes. You want them to just start turning golden at the edges.
  • Let cool to fully set before eating.

I don’t have a photo of the finished cookies because we tend to devour them. I just drop by spoonfuls on the prepared baking sheets, but you can do the crisscross pressing with a fork for a traditional peanut butter cookie look.

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Easy 3-ingredient Peanut Butter cookies

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Easy All in One Electric Pressure Cooker Meal

For busy weeknights, there’s nothing better than an all in one meal that practically cooks itself. Prepare everything the night before and keep it in the refrigerator until it’s time to cook for even more time in the evening. You could even prep the vegetables and meat and store in the freezer for last minute meals.

The basics

This is more of a how-to than a recipe. You can really use however much of the ingredients based on how much food you need and your pressure cooker’s size. For my family of five with two little appetites, I used about four chicken breasts, three cups of rice and water, one jar of sauce and all the broccoli I could squeeze in and around everything.

You can easily swap out the protein for whatever you prefer. Ideally, it should be cut into small, bite sized pieces prior to cooking. With the chicken breasts, I’ve been able to cook them from frozen first and cut them later, but it’s not ideal.

This time, I used broccoli, but it was a little overdone for my liking. Root vegetables cut into bite sized pieces or frozen peas or green beans are probably better for all in one meals like this.

The sauce

To make it super easy, I started with a jar of Korma simmer sauce from Aldi. You could easily substitute any store bought or homemade sauce. Canned soup, salsa, tomato sauce or even just broth are all options. Tailor it to your family’s tastes.

Assemble the ingredients

I used an old rice cooker pot for the rice. Any heatproof container that is big enough to hold the rice and cooking liquid but small enough to fit in your pressure cooker’s cooking pot would work.

I put the chicken and broccoli under and around the rice pot. Then I filled the rice pot with appropriate amounts of rice, water and salt.

The Korma went on top of the broccoli and chicken, and I added about half a cup of water just to make sure there was plenty of liquid. If you use broth or a thinner, liquid sauce, the water isn’t necessary.

Cooking

Finally, I set the whole thing in my pressure cooker and cooked it with the “Rice” setting. My electric pressure cooker is a GoWISE USA brand. Recipes for the Instant Pot brand usually work as written for mine, so I assume that setting would work for the Instant Pot and other similar pressure cookers.

Here is a terrible picture of the end result. I promise it tasted better than it looks. A homemade sauce would have been healthier, I’m sure. When you are strapped for time or having to make do without a fully functioning kitchen, though, it’s lots better than having to rely on fast food.

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All in one Electric Pressure Cooker Meal
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Ridiculously Easy Gluten Free Tortillas

I have never been a huge fan of corn tortillas. They’re good for some things, like street tacos, but overall I love the soft, slightly chewy texture of flour tortillas. While there are flour gluten free tortillas on the market, they are pricey and hard to find. Which means that since eliminating gluten from our diets, I’ve had to stick to corn. Which is fine, because it’s better than no more tacos, but , I still miss flour.

After much searching, I finally found a recipe that mimics the soft, chewy texture of flour tortillas. They require no real prep work, so it’s easy to make them last minute, if needed. Basically, if you can make a pancake, you can make these gluten free tortillas.

You can also adjust the thickness to be more like a flatbread. I can see pairing them with curries or stews, or cut into chips , toast and serve with hummus.

Gluten Free Flour Tortillas
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Ridiculously Easy Gluten Free Flour Tortillas

Soft, chewy gluten free flour tortillas so easy you can make them last minute.
Prep Time5 minutes
Cook Time1 minute
Course: Side Dish

Ingredients

  • 1 Cup Chickpea based gluten free flour Can be straight chickpea flour, or a blend with a high amount of chickpea flour, such as Bob's Red Mill GF flour. (NOT the 1 to 1 flour)
  • 0.5 cup Tapioca flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 tsp coconut or other oil If you use a non-stick skillet or griddle you may not need the oil.

Instructions

  • Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl.
  • Add the water and stir until blended.
  • Oil a skillet or griddle as needed and heat to medium high.
  • Pour about 1/4 cup of the batter onto your prepared skillet or griddle.
  • Cook for 1-2 minutes over medium high heat.
  • Flip like a pancake and cook for another 1-2 minutes.
  • Repeat the cooking and flipping for the rest of the batter.

Notes

This recipe is very versatile. For thinner tortillas, add a little more water. For more of a flatbread, reduce the water to about 3/4 of a cup. 
Gluten Free tortillas
 

Find more of my gluten-free recipes here: https://subearthancottage.com/?s=gluten+free

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Fruit and Nuts

We have eleven pecan trees, so along with the leaves, pecans cover our yard this time of year. We already had about ten pounds collected just from our front yard, so this weekend we took them to the farmer’s market to have them cracked. Even though we still have to separate the shell from the meat, it’s so much faster than doing it all by hand that it is totally worth it.

Cracked pecans

While we were there, Thadd discovered a big box full of bruised apples for five dollars, so I bought those, too. Thanks to my apple peeler-slicer-corer contraption, I was able to quickly get them ready to freeze for later. Here’s a similar apple peeler to the one I use:

Johnny Apple Peeler by VICTORIO VKP1010, Cast Iron, Suction Base

Some of the apples went straight to the stove with cinnamon and sugar to have as a sweet side and baked oatmeal topping.

Apples!

I’m looking for more recipes to use the apples and pecans that aren’t overly sugary. So far, I’ve found a recipe for apple cider vinegar that makes use of the saved peels.

In the meantime, I made my favorite pecan dessert that is the opposite of not sugary: pecan pralines. (That’s puh-cahn prah-leans, y’all.) They are dangerously easy, especially when you have a ton of pecans on hand and the rest of the ingredients are kitchen staples.

Pecan Pralines
Still too hot…

Here’s the recipe I use:

Pecan Pralines

3/4 cup each of brown sugar and granulated sugar

1/2 cup of milk

1 cup of pecans

1 tablespoon of butter

1/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Combine the sugars and milk in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and cook until it reaches the soft ball stage. (That’s when you can put a drop in cold water and it holds together in a ball shape but flattens on your finger when you take it out of the water.) I stir it pretty constantly and check it when it starts to look a little thicker.

Once it is at the soft ball stage, remove it from the heat and stir in the butter, vanilla and pecans until it’s well mixed. Drop the mixture by the spoonful onto waxed paper. If it gets too hard to spoon out, warm it back up for a bit on the stove. It’s best to have the waxed paper ready and work quickly, though. That way you don’t risk burning it and the resulting sadness.

Resist the temptation to try the yumminess immediately and let it cool. Seriously, let it cool. Hot melty sugar burns! The pralines will be more frosty opaque than glossy and easy to peel off the waxed paper when they are ready.

I usually get about sixteen pralines from one batch, but it will vary depending on how big you make them.

Enjoy!