[Slide, Goo Goo Dolls]

On with tasty gluten free recipes!

#2 Homemade Vodka Sauce with Grilled Chicken over Pasta

This sauce was INCREDIBLE.  I based it off of this find online; I actually followed the recipe on this one, though I'll adjust it to be healthier in the future.  I won't go through the steps of how I made the sauce, since I followed the recipe online.  That said, here's a pic of the ingredients I used:



The only thing not pictured (I think, since it was over a week ago) was the butter because it was melting on the stove when I took this pic.  Oh, and the chicken.  It was just two regular boneless, skinless chicken breasts from a bag you can get in the freezer at Costco :)  I just put on a little freshly ground salt and pepper, scored the chicken to help it cook evenly (that just means I cut slits into the chicken about a 1/4 of an inch thick), and then grilled 'em on our grill pan .

Once the (not so good in texture... overly mushy though I cooked them for the appropriate amount of time!) noodles were done I put the sauce over the top, added the sliced up chicken breast, and sprinkled on some tasty parm.  Yummy!

Two things:  we only used 1/2 the sauce, so the next night I grilled up a little shrimp, added in the leftover sauce, and then put that over some rice. We realized that we love rice, it's super cheap to buy a huge bag from Costco, and we're just going to start replacing noodles with rice.  The noodles just sort of ruined the first dish... I mean, the sauce was amazing, but the noodles not so much.

That said, it's so pretty!  Here's an alternate view:



Secondly, next time I'm going to try using olive oil instead of butter and 1/2 and 1/2 instead of heavy cream.  But if it doesn't thicken up right then I'll just suck it up and eat in moderation, because if making a recipe healthy makes it gross then what's the point in eating that?  Dumb.

All right- onto the last one!

#3 BBQ Chicken w/ Homemade BBQ Sauce over Rice



The biggest bummer, honestly, has been that we discovered this amazingly tasty BBQ sauce at Costco called Sweet Baby Ray's.  It has a chance of cross-contamination, which means it doesn't specifically have gluten but the plant where it's made does and could cause traces of gluten to get into the sauce, so... no Sweet Baby Ray's for us :(

That said, don't feel sorry for us because I made my own BBQ sauce and it was amazing!  I'm going to use measurements below, but those are estimates... I like to cook ninja style and make things up on my own!

First, I melted 2 TB of butter over medium heat.  Then I added about a cup of ketchup, a squirt of lime juice, 3/4 cup of water, 1 TB yellow mustard, 1 ts worcestershire sauce, 2 ts liquid smoke, 3 TB brown sugar, salt, pepper, a dash of paprika, cumin, and chipotle powers and... actually, I think that was it!

I stirred constantly until it started bubbling, and then I reduced the heat to low and stirred occasionally for about 10-15 minutes.  Once the oven preheated to 375 I put in the chicken, poured over the sauce, covered it with aluminum foil, and baked it for 30 minutes with the skin side of the chicken up.  Then I removed the foil, sprinkled on a little brown sugar (to create a wee bit o' crispyness!  Mmmmm!), and baked it with the foil off at 400 for 20 more minutes.  We have a meat thermometer and the internal meat temp was 170 F- perfect!

I put it over rice and it was delicious!  I'll admit, though, that after I took this pic I poured over some of the extra sauce in the pan... it's just not as pretty :)  Tasty, though.

And, with that, the great "I'm not really here but I'm posting more than I ever do when I am here!" fest of 2008 is over.  May the next post be me actually home, not a scheduled post ;)