Thursday, December 9, 2010

Recipe Box: Everything Soup (gluten free)

This is an idea I've used before, but I give full inspiration credit to
http://glutenfreeeasily.com/everything-soup-and-cornbread/ in this case.

Between cleaning out the cupboards of everything with gluten and getting my paycheck a.k.a. grocery money today, there was a bit of a gap where the kitchen was bare indeed.  It wasn't completely bare though, and after reading through a bunch of recipes on the site above, I was inspired by the "everything soup" idea.  It's essentially a gumbo; you toss whatever bits of leftovers you have into a freezer bag, then toss it in to make soup.  The appeal is that you have a different flavor every single time. 

So I looked around the remains of our pantry and fridge and put the following in a crock pot to make enough gluten-free soup to last a good solid week!

4 frozen chicken breasts

1 small bottle of white wine (a Riesling, about 2 cups; I buy these specifically for cooking wine, as I only have to open a small bottle at a time instead of wasting a full 750ml when I'm the only one who drinks it)

The remains of a slightly shriveled ginger root (about 2 tablespoons minced)

A large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1" cubes (leftover from Thanksgiving, about 2-3 cups cubed)

half an onion, chopped

four slightly shriveled and half-frozen carrots from the back of the fridge (no longer edible raw) chopped

half a red-pepper, diced

about a cup of green onions (about to go bad but not quite slimy yet) chopped

about a cup of dried pinto beans from the back of the cupboard.

2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp cardamon
1/4 cup butter, sliced
4 cups of water

Everything went into the crock pot about 9:00am, and by 5:00 we had a large amount of golden, delicious, slightly sweet and fruity soup.  I added another 2 tablespoons of lemon juice to the finished soup at the end to give it a nice fresh flavor and bring out the other flavors by raising the acidity (vinegar works well for this too!).

This is a great way to use up leftovers, especially if you have one of those "too little for another meal but too much to throw away" situations.  Stuff it into a dedicated ziplock bag in the freezer.  I'm planning to do a soup every grocery day (about two weeks) to use up leftover fresh produce before we re-stock the fridge.  The best part is that because every batch is different, there's enough variety to satisfy anyone!

3 comments:

Meowser said...

Oh wow. I just went GFCF recently (that's casein free too, in addition to gluten free), plus I've been exploring things like salicylate sensitivity and fructose malabsorption, all in the service of getting my stomach to calm down already. I will probably do a post about it, if I can avoid making it 10,000 words long.

Yep to everything you said, it's a real eye-opener. Soy sauce was the big thing for me; I practically swam in the stuff! (And it's in oyster sauce and hoisin sauce, too, unless it specifically says it's GF.) I wound up ordering mini-packets of tamari to take with me when I go have sushi.

The GF cooking blogs are awesome, though. They have workarounds for everything, it's amazing. I made a GFCF version of the red velvet cupcakes I make every holiday season, and Chris actually liked them better than the ones I used to make with wheat and butter!

Meowser said...

Hmm, I don't know what happened there. This was supposed to be a comment on your original GF post.

Audrey said...

If you like your crockpot may I suggest A Year of SlowCooking http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/

She has tons and tons of easy AND interesting AND gluten-free recipe for the crockpot.

And I find her really funny.