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A lot of GFCF families also have to avoid soy, and this Coconut Aminos is a fantastic substitute to use if that applies to you. It tastes just like soy sauce, and nothing like coconut. It’s a magical little nut, I’m telling you. Of course if you do use real soy sauce, you’ll still need to choose carefully — La Choy is one gluten-free option. [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change formulas without warning. Always check your labels!]

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So put 1/4 cup of either soy or not-soy sauce in your bowl, then add 3 Tablespoons of dry cooking sherry. It should be 100% wine, and contain no malt or grain alcohol.

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Add 3 Tablespoons of brown sugar…

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and 1 Tablespoon of honey. Because two kinds of sweetness are better than one!

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Now add 1 Tablespoon of minced ginger, 2 cloves of minced garlic, and 1/2 teaspoon of Five Spice seasoning. Like any spice blend, you’ll want to double-check that your brand is not mixed with flour to prevent caking.

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Next, chop up two green onions. A pair of kitchen shears will take care of that even faster than a knife.

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Now throw the whole sauce plus the green onions into a ziplock bag with your two pork tenderloins, and let it marinate overnight in the fridge. If it only gets a few hours that’s not the end of the world either.

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When you’re ready to cook, line a pan with foil and place your tenderloins on a raised rack. But don’t throw out that little bag of marinade! First, scoop out one Tablespoon of the marinade, and set the rest aside for a second.

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Add 3 Tablespoons of honey, and brush the mixture over the tops of your tenderloins. This will lead to a fantastic carmelized glaze on the surface of the meat that will have you falling out of your seat in flavor ecstasy.

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Stick a fork into the marinade bag and scoop out the ginger, garlic, and green onion solids, spreading them evenly over the meat. You couldn’t do this a second ago because then your honey brush would have just wiped them all off again, you see?

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Pour enough water in the bottom of the pan so that it’s just beginning to creep up the sides, but not so much that it’s touching the bottoms of the tenderloins. Then carefully place the pan in a 450 degree oven, and cook for 30 minutes.

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Meanwhile, pour the remaining marinade into a bowl, and mix in another 1/3 cup of honey. This ratio of honey-to-marinade is much lower than that first little bit of glaze we made, so the final sauce will have a lot more of those wonderful savory flavors.

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Now this step is important: you must sterilize your sauce, since it just spent a very long time hanging out with raw meat. You can either bring it to a boil in a small pot on the stove, or microwave it for a couple minutes, either way. I know which way leaves me with fewer dishes to wash.

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Drizzle across your cooked tenderloin slices, and clear the area of any loose toys or furniture. You wouldn’t want to injure something when you fall out of your chair like I promised.

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Happy Eating!

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Chinese Barbecue (Char Siu)

2 lbs pork tenderloins
1/4 cup Coconut Aminos (or La Choy soy sauce)
3 Tbs sherry
3 Tbs brown sugar
1 Tbs + 3 Tbs + 1/3 cup honey
1 Tbs minced ginger
2 cloves minced garlic
1/2 tsp Chinese Five Spice
2 green onions

 The stir-fry is one of the most potent tools in your GFCF arsenal. Meat, veggies, rice–all you have to do is verify the sauce, and you’re good to go. You can switch up the base ingredients for an infinite number of possibilities. Plus, a stir-fry cooks up extremely fast, so they’re ideal for those nights when you’ve got no time and only a random assortment of foods to choose from. You know, the nights when any normal family would just hop on over to a restaurant and not think twice about it.

If you want to know the truth, my kids don’t really eat the bell peppers in this, though we usually insist on a bite or two. But I’ve told myself that by cooking it all together, some of the vegetably-goodness sort of seeps into the rest of the ingredients. I’m sure there’s no scientific basis for that, but I’m going to keep living my delusions, thank you. At any rate, they chow down on the pineapple, so at least they’re getting a good serving of fruit.

Now is when my son’s nutritionist would cheerfully remind me that a bell pepper is technically a fruit anyway. But I just can’t hear her over the lovely sizzle of these vegetables.

Once you’ve cut the bell pepper into your preferred size and shape, sautee them for several minutes in olive oil. Some vegetables are better only lightly sauteed, what the cookbooks refer to as “tender-crisp,” but I really prefer my bell peppers nice and done. I think they taste kind of bitter otherwise.

Meanwhile, start your rice. What, you don’t have a rice cooker yet? I don’t know why not. This is 1 1/2 cups of rice here, but I could make up to 6 cups of rice at once, if I had a Little League team to feed.

Cut up 1-2 chicken breasts, again depending on how many people you’re feeding. Make sure you buy the good meat that’s not “injected” with broth, because that broth can often contain gluten. It may say something like “1-2% retained water,” which is okay, or “up to 10% solution,” which is not. Toss them in with the bell peppers and stir frequently. Feel free to add a little more olive oil if necessary to keep the chicken from sticking.

Once the chicken pieces are opaque on all sides (but not necessarily cooked all the way through,) dump in one can of drained pineapple chunks. This is another one of those foods where there’s just no need for extra stuff in the can, whether or not it ultimately has gluten in it. Go for the kind packed in 100% juice, not some chemical “syrup” concoction, and you won’t have to worry about it.

Also add one clove of minced garlic, and give everything a good stir. I can never seem to get my pineapple really drained, so it always takes a minute to boil off the extra juice that sneaks in.

While everything continues to sautee, prepare your sauce. Start with 1/4 cup Kraft Catalina dressing (light or regular version, it doesn’t matter.) [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change formulas at any time without warning. Always check your labels.]

Add to that 1/2 Tablespoon of La Choy soy sauce, and mix well.

When the pineapple is getting soft and the chicken is completely cooked through, pour in your sauce and stir for just another minute or two to get everything nice and coated.

Right about this time, your rice should be ready to serve. See how incredibly fast and easy that was? I especially love this meal because I love cooked pineapple. I wish I could put it in every single meal, but my family would eventually start to complain.

Happy Eating!

Catalina Chicken

1-2 chicken breasts, cut up
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 can pineapple chunks in juice, drained
1 clove minced garlic
1/4 cup Kraft Catalina dressing
1/2 TBS La Choy soy sauce

This is definitely a kid-friendly meal, but only if you don’t let them watch you make it. It looks all fancy and gourmet, and some of the ingredients have a mental gag-factor all their own, but trust me, the final product is to die for.

The basic premise of this recipe is you steam some fish filets, and then you turn the liquid from the pan into a sauce for the fish. As you can guess, we will be steaming them with something a little tastier than water. Here’s what we start with: sugar, white cooking wine, minced ginger, minced garlic, and… clam juice. Seriously, don’t panic. It’s just like fish stock, but it tastes better. They carry it in most grocery stores, over with the canned tuna. You can use plain ol’ fish stock if you really can’t handle the concept of cooking with clam juice, but then you’ll never know what a truly great meal you could have had. Come on, live a little.

Start by putting 3/4 cup of the wine and 3/4 cup of the clam juice in the bottom of a steamer pan. Then add in 1 Tablespoon of sugar.

Mix well so the sugar dissolves, then add 1 Tablespoon of minced ginger, and 1 clove of minced garlic. As you can see, my ginger is just like my garlic: pre-minced and in a jar. I already spend enough time prepping and cooking with ingredients from scratch, so I’ll take my shortcuts where I can get them. Plus, I always manage to grate my fingertips along with the ginger when I try to grate it myself, and while my blood is 100% gluten-free at this point, it’s just not that appetizing.

Get a good boil going, and let it simmer for ten minutes.

Meanwhile, chop up one green onion. (Do you still count it as one if the bulb has two stalks on it? I always do, but that may also be because I like green onions a lot.)

When your sauce has simmered for ten minutes, place the top rack in the steamer pan, and spritz it lightly with canola oil.

Lay in your fish filets, and drizzle them with 1 teaspoon of sesame oil. Just let the extra oil drip down into the pan, it’s cool.

And do the same thing with 2 teaspoons of La Choy soy sauce. [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change their formulas without notice. Always check your ingredient lists!]

Then sprinkle on your green onions, cover it with the lid, and steam until the fish is done (when it flakes apart easily with a fork.) I’m using pretty small Tilapia filets, so it only takes about 5 minutes. Now, the one major drawback of this recipe is you can only do two fish filets at once unless you have an unusually large steamer. This was a late night for us, so the kids had already eaten. But if you’re cooking for more than two, you can do everything the same except drizzle half of the sesame oil and soy sauce onto the first pair, and save half for the second round of filets. Most of it ends up in the bottom anyway, which is where we want it for the sauce.

Now, while the fish is steaming, prepare a cornstarch mixture. Check your brands, most but not all of them are gluten-free. Start with 2 teaspoons of cornstarch in the tiniest little container you can find.

Add just enough water to dissolve all the cornstarch into a slurry. We’re talking bare minimum here, a tiny drizzle. (Man, how many times can I use the word “drizzle” in one post?)

Move the fish out onto plates, and toss the steamer tray in the sink.

You’ll see the sauce underneath has changed greatly since we last saw it. Please forgive the abundance of steam in this shot. I was, ah, going for extra realism? Anyway, here comes the part that makes this meal kid-friendly: add 4 Tablespoons of brown sugar to the simmering sauce. I did tell you this recipe was called Sweet Wine Fish, didn’t I?

Pour in your cornstarch mixture, and mix well.

Continue to simmer the sauce for several minutes until it has thickened to your liking. TheGFCFMan likes a pretty thick sauce, but I’m usually starving by this time and very impatient to eat, so we meet somewhere in the middle.

Then all you have to do is… wait for it… drizzle the sauce onto your filets and enjoy. You will probably end up with extra sauce unless you choose to go beyond drizzling into soaking your fish, and I like to save that in a small tupperware for leftovers. It makes a great salad dressing, or a dipping sauce for chicken nuggets, or any number of things.

Happy Eating!

Sweet Wine Fish

3/4 cup white cooking wine
3/4 cup clam juice
1 Tbs. sugar
1 Tbs. minced ginger
1 clove minced garlic
2-4 Tilapia filets
1 green onion
1 tsp. sesame oil
2 tsp. La Choy soy sauce
4 Tbs. brown sugar
2 tsp. Clabber Girl cornstarch in water

Just looking at this picture makes me want to eat these again, even though I just had them yesterday. This here is our family’s solution to the tragic loss of fried chicken. Yes, you could bread them in the same mixture as my fabulous chicken nugget recipe, but frying full chicken legs requires deeper oil, and takes longer to fry, and, well… the truth is I already make the nuggets on a regular basis, and I’m just not into doing lots of work, you know? But these chicken legs, they couldn’t be easier. And the delectable red honey sauce is kid-friendly, but sophisticated enough for adults.

Here are the ingredients. Simple, right? Note the brands–Heinz ketchup and LaChoy soy sauce are both gluten-free, unlike many of their counterparts. [As always, manufacturers can change their formulas without notice. Be sure to double-check your ingredient lists.]

That’s 1/4 cup ketchup, 1/2 TBS soy sauce…

1 clove of minced garlic (or 1/2 tsp of the jarred kind)…

And three tablespoons of honey. I just love honey; I even use it in my tea instead of sugar. I may or may not have licked this measuring spoon after I was done with it. I’ll never tell.

Bag o’ drumsticks.

Bag o’ drumsticks plus sauce. Seal it up, mix everything around so it’s all nice and coated, then let it marinate in the fridge for an hour (or however long it is until dinner, the chicken won’t care.)

Arrange them in a greased baking dish, and pour the rest of the sauce on top. Bake in a 375-degree oven for 45-55 minutes. You’ll know they’re done when you stab the fattest one with a fork and only clear juice comes out.

Super easy, right? Take a good look now, because these beauties won’t be on the plate for long. Until I make some more, that is.

Happy Eating!

Red Honey Chicken

6 chicken drumsticks
1/4 cup Heinz ketchup
1/2 TBS LaChoy soy sauce
1 clove minced garlic
3 TBS honey