But never fear, the recipe still conforms to its humble origins as a super-fast, super-easy, super-cheap, super-tasty meal! All in all, it’s just a super soup supper.

Forgive me, I have obviously had too many GF cookies this afternoon.

Anyway, here are the ingredients arrayed nicely on my stovetop. That’s Pacific Foods beef broth, a can of cream corn, a can of mixed veggies, Amy’s Fire-Roasted Southwestern Vegetable soup, a small can of Contadina tomato sauce, and a can of plain pinto beans. [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change their formulas without warning. Always check your labels!] For the corn, veggies and beans there are many safe brands–just make sure the ingredient list includes nothing but corn, veggies and beans respectively. Also, make sure you do not use the “Italian Spices” flavor of Contadina tomato sauce, only the unseasoned flavor.

Keep in mind we’re not using the whole box of beef broth–just half of it, or roughly two cups. Pour everything into a large soup pot. Now this is important: don’t drain any of the cans. Just open them and dump them in.

Now add 1/2 teaspoon of salt…

And 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder.

Heat through, stirring occasionally. And that’s it! Instant soup! Well, not instant instant, but you know what I mean. Oh, and you know what?

This soup goes great with cornbread!

Happy Eating!

The GFCF Lady’s Vegetable Soup

2 cups Pacific Foods beef broth
1 can cream corn
1 can mixed vegetables
1 can Amy’s Fire-Roasted Southwestern Vegetable soup
1 can Contadina tomato sauce (NOT “Italian” flavored)
1 can plain pinto beans
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp garlic powder

That there’s a dutch oven with some olive oil in it. You could technically do this in a crock pot, but I just can’t imagine why you would want to. Number one, a dutch oven distributes the heat more evenly than a crock pot, and number two, the heavy lid makes a tight seal and keeps all the moisture inside, while every crock pot I’ve ever seen lets the steam escape, sometimes splattering all over the counter in the process. And that’s just not cool.

Peel and quarter two onions. This is my absolute favorite part of the recipe, by the way. When they come out of the pot, all golden and soft… but wait, that’s not for hours yet, don’t let me get sidetracked.

Now, a lot of pot roast recipes out there will tell you to season the meat with a “ranch dressing packet.” There are lots of descriptive words I could use to tell you what I think about those things, but we’ll keep it family-friendly and go with “not GFCF” for now. Suffice it to say, it’s both cheaper and healthier to use real spices. All you need is one Tablespoon each of celery salt (which is just salt and celery seed mixed together, if you happen to already have the latter in your spice drawer,) parsley, and chives.

Mix the spices on a plate and just lay the roast right on top of them. I usually do about a 2-3 lb. piece of meat, but you could certainly choose a bigger one if you wanted. Rotate it around on all sides, and press the spices in firmly so they stick.

Now, sear each side of the meat on high heat until it’s browned. You may feel kind of silly holding a huge piece of meat up on its end for a minute or two, but it’s important to get the edges too, and try as I might, I’ve never had a roast that would balance on its own.

Then set it aside on a plate, just for a second.

Measure out 2 cups of Pacific Foods organic beef broth, which is gluten-free. (But don’t take my word for it, always double-check your labels.)

See all those brown bits that stuck to the pan when we were searing the meat? We don’t want to waste them because they taste awesome. So pour just a tiny stream of broth into the pot to deglaze it. (It’s always seemed to me that we’re creating a glaze, not de-glazing anything, but those fancy chefs on the TV all tell me I’m wrong.) It’ll boil and spatter for a minute, and then the bottom of the pot will be magically clean.

Then set your meat back in the pot, pour the rest of the broth in, and place your onion quarters in around the sides. Mmm, cooked onions…

Top with carrots, put the lid on, and cook in a 275 degree oven for 3-4 hours. Normally people use baby carrots for this sort of thing, but we just love the matchsticks. Any shape will work, even those cute little flowers they cut them into at fancy restaurants. But don’t expect that kind of artistry out of me.

Just take a look at that deliciousness! Sure, sure, the meat’s good too, but do you see those onions? I could seriously just eat all the onions out of the pot and leave the rest for everyone else. But that would be a bad idea. Still, it’s tempting.

A quick tip: if your meat is tough, that does not mean it’s overcooked–it actually means it hasn’t been cooked long enough. The longer you cook it, the more of that connective tissue will break down, which is precisely why tough cuts of meat like this are always slow-cooked. I lived through many a tough pot roast, cooking them for less and less time, until I finally figured out I was going in the wrong direction.

But the onions were always good!

Happy Eating!

The GFCF Lady’s Pot Roast

2-3 lb. beef roast
1 TBS celery salt
1 TBS parsley
1 TBS chives
2 cups Pacific Foods beef broth
2 onions
1 cup carrots

What was I saying? Oh yes: meat. A basic, well-seasoned piece of meat is such a rarity these days, people will think you’re some sort of brilliant gourmet for serving it, and marvel at your minimalist elegance. This here is about 2 pounds of beef brisket, with a dry rub of spices pressed into it. What spices you ask? Well, it’s brown sugar, paprika, chili powder, salt, and pepper. 2 Tablespoons each. What I like to do is mix all the spices on the surface of a large plate, and then just lay the meat down on the plate on all sides. I really should have gotten a picture of this, I know, but my hands were all covered in meat juice, and then one of the kids needed something, and somehow I got distracted and forgot.

Anyway, if you’ve got the time to let your meat sit with the spice rub for a few hours, great; if not, don’t sweat it. When you’re ready, place the brisket in a dutch oven or crock pot (but really, a dutch oven is better. I won’t quibble about the color, they have red and brown, too, if for some strange reason you don’t agree with me that my blue one is the most beautiful thing ever. The important thing is that enamel surface on the inside.) Make sure you lay the meat fat side up.

Pour in about 1 1/2 cups of Pacific Foods beef broth. [As always, my brands were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change formulas without notice. Always check your labels.] If necessary, add some water to the pot until the liquid is at least an inch deep, and make sure to lift the edges of the meat a bit so it can flow underneath. Then just put the lid on and stick it in a 325 degree oven for 3-4 hours (or set your crock pot to high for that amount of time, if you insist on doing it that way.)

Man, I wish I could tell you how good my house smells right now. When it’s time for dinner, just drench the top of your meat in Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce. There are other GFCF barbecue sauces available too, but as a Texan, I have to tell you: this stuff is the real deal. If it’s available in your area, this is the product you want.

See? That is some fine barbecue brisket right there. Serve this with smashed potato salad, and you’ll have a positively mouth-watering meal that no one will even suspect is GFCF.

Happy Eating!

Brisket

2 TBS brown sugar
2 TBS McCormick’s paprika
2 TBS McCormick’s chili powder
2 TBS salt
2 TBS pepper
1-2 lbs. beef brisket
1 1/2 cups Pacific Foods beef broth
1 cup Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce

Mexican food is one of the safer cuisines to eat on this diet, since so much of it is corn-based. But nonetheless, it turned out that our favorite pre-diet Mexican restaurant not only served tortilla chips made with wheat flour and whey, but even their rice was unsafe. The GFCFBoy absolutely loves to eat refried beans and Mexican rice, so I knew I had to find a workable recipe right away.

First, dice up 1/2 an onion. You can add other veggies if your kids will tolerate them, like some frozen peas or carrot bits. Unfortunately our old restaurant didn’t do that, and my kid has always been fixated on the look of his foods, rather than whether he actually likes the ingredients or not. So I can put carrots and peas in other dishes, no problem–but not his beloved Mexican rice.

Toss the veggies in a pan with some olive oil and 1 clove of minced garlic, and let everything sautee over low heat while you prepare the rice cooker. If you don’t have a rice cooker, you are really missing out, I’m telling you. This thing is the greatest kitchen appliance ever. We used it probably once a week even before we had to rely so much more on rice for our meals. If we had to start selling our personal possessions, this is the very last thing I’d get rid of. I’d be wearing a burlap sack and still happily cooking perfect rice with zero effort.

But if you insist on doing things the old-fashioned way, you can still use this recipe. It just won’t be as cool. Instead of cooking the rice in water, we’re going to boil it in the following concoction: first, 3 cups of Pacific Foods gluten-free beef broth (yes, I know the picture only shows two cups, I don’t have a measuring cup that will hold three cups all at once.)

1 tsp of McCormick chili powder (YES, I know that’s not the right measuring spoon, I use two scoops of the littler one because it fits inside my spice jar. I’m practicing my math skills while keeping my kitchen counters clean at the same time.)

1 1/2 tsp McCormick cumin…

And 6 Tablespoons of Contadina tomato sauce. Please note that the Contadina tomato sauce “with Italian Seasonings” is not gluten-free. But seriously, why would you want to put Italian seasonings in Mexican rice anyway? Ya weirdo. [As always, manufacturers can change formulas without notice. Always check your brands.]

Once all that is mixed up in your rice cooker, and the onions are translucent, add 1 1/2 cups of uncooked rice to the pan.

Sautee the rice lightly, stirring frequently. You probably want to use a larger pan than I did, I always try to get away with the pan that fits better in the dishwasher, and it doesn’t always work out. The point of cooking the rice like this is to sort of seal each grain before you boil it, which will result in that nice non-sticky texture that Mexican rice is famous for.

See how the grains are turning translucent, but there are still some that are mostly white? If all the oil in the pan has been absorbed, you can add another Tablespoon or so. You don’t have to get every grain translucent, but the more the better.

Now scrape the whole pan into the liquid in the rice cooker, and give it all a good stir. If you were doing this without a rice cooker, at this point you’d put it all in whatever pot you were going to use, bring it to a boil, cover with the lid, etc.

But all I have to do is push this button down and walk away. It will pop back up at the precise moment the rice is done, and not a moment sooner or later. No burned rice on the bottom, no accidentally checking your pan too early and letting all the steam out.

Ta daa! Just like at the restaurant. Except gluten-free, cheaper, and available even in the middle of the night if you get some sort of weird craving for it. Which you just might, you never know.

Happy Eating!

Mexican Rice

1 1/2 cups uncooked rice
1/2 chopped onion
1 clove garlic
3 Tbsp oil
3 cups Pacific Foods beef broth
1 tsp McCormick chili powder
1 1/2 tsp McCormick cumin
6 TBS Contadina tomato sauce