Gluten free picnic

Tonight we're going to Shakespeare in the Arb. This is a lovely summer tradition here - a performance of a Shakespeare play in the Nichols Arboretum where the Arb itself is the set and one wanders through, following the actors. We've been going for years and always picnic beforehand.

So what's on the menu?

•Tortilla espanola - lovely omelet made with my friend Kim's farm eggs, onions and potatoes. I use Penelope Casas' recipe from The Foods & Wines of Spain, one of my favorite cookbooks.
•Roasted red peppers in olive oil and garlic
•Chevre
•Baguette from Zingerman's for the wheat eaters and Crunchmaster's Multi-seed Crackers for the gluten free
•Caprese on a stick - toothpick size caprese salad found via Use Real Butter
•olives and cornichons
•Good salami
•And Smitten Kitchen's Summer Strawberry cake made gluten free by substituting Better Batter flour for wheat flour. I also used turbinado sugar rather than granulated and strawberries from my friend Cheryl's garden. We had a trial of the cake last night and it was one of the most successful things I've baked gluten free - will definitely make it regularly! We'll top it with whipped cream from a can since we're picnicking - a compromise I'm entirely ok with.

Pictures will have to come later!

Welcome

I've been contemplating starting a food blog for a while. The initial impetus was the ease of sharing recipes - especially with my college aged daughter who lives far away and texts me requests for particular favorite recipes. A year ago my son was diagnosed with celiac disease (which runs in my husband's family). We've been focused on eating healthy, non-meat heavy meals for years but S's diagnosis forced me to change my approach to cooking and to become far more conscious about what we eat and about meal planning. The luxury of running on autopilot was gone although it is getting easier as I get more accustomed to living gluten free.

We have the usually busy lifestyle of many people - I'm a self employed artist who teaches, is involved in starting a new art center and exhibits frequently. My husband works crazy hours and we have two high school aged kids still at home, one away in college. Given our schedule I try to cook ahead and be organized about meal planning. These days we seem to be pretty traditional about my doing most weeknight cooking although my husband is a good cook. My schedule is more flexible and I get home earlier than he does most often so that just seems to be how it works.

So - without further ado - here's last night's dinner, sadly without pictures since I wasn't thinking about a blog at the time. We all got home late, tired and hungry. Dinner was Mexican rice, chorizo and potato tacos and a citrus avocado salsa. The salsa came out of being served a wonderful grapefruit and avocado salad at a friend's house a few week's ago. It was quite simple - I peeled and sliced one pink grapefruit, one navel orange and one tangerine. To the citrus I added 2 diced avocados and about a quarter cup of thinly sliced red onion and the juice of half a lime. It was refreshing and bright and a lovely contrast to the earthy heat of the tacs - which were simply small dice of potatoes fried with half a pound of chorizo from my local butcher. My teens were dubious about the salad but came back for seconds after they tried it. The time to prepare was dictated by the 25 minutes it took for the rice to cook - all else was done in that time. It was a reasonably healthy meal since I drained the chorizo thoroughly and we only had half a pound between four people. Between rice and potatoes even my starving teenaged son was sated and the fruit salsa and heat of the chorizo kept the meal from feeling stodgy.