Food

Gluten Free Meal-Burger

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The hamburger is an American classic, and properly loaded up it can provide just about all the essential nutrients in a convenient starchy bun. Unless you can’t eat the bread that is.

Of course, everyone loves some fried potatoes with their burger, but I was kind of in a rush the other day and needed to turn a half pound of beef into a whole meal-burger. Luckily, there were plenty of fresh veggies around…

  • 1/2 pound beef
  • 2oz. mozorella cheese
  • 1/6 large onion
  • 2 stalks long green onion
  • 1 slice red pepper
  • About 10 leafs of spinach
  • 1 slice back bacon

Shape the burger into a patty, just be sure not to overhandle it or add salt before it cooks.  Drop the burger and the back bacon into a frying pan at about half heat, flipping the rasher (bacon) quickly and resting it on top of the burger.  (I started off with low-fat beef so I had to make sure to conserve oils)

When the bacon is ready, chop up all the veggies and add them to the frying pan.  Add peppers & onions first, then the spinach & long green onions.

As the veggies start to fry, flip the burger and add the first layer of cheese to the top.  Place the bacon off to the side for a second then start to pile up the hot veggies onto the cheese.  Once the veggies start to melt the cheese pretty well, add another layer of cheese an top of the veggies and drop the bacon on top of that!

Not only does the gluten-free meal-burger fill you up like a complete meal, it tastes pretty great as well!  Since mine was a bit dry, I made up a quick sauce from spicy brown mustard and some regular old fashioned mayo.  If you started with a fattier ground beef, you might not even need that!

Happy holidays and happy eating!

Food

Finally – A good gluten-free pizza in Jacksonville!

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Attention gluten sensitive pizza lovers in Jacksonville: Tommy’s Pizza on Southside is offering a great gluten free pizza

Before last week, it had been about three years since I actually enjoyed a pizza. Sure, I had tried a few of the frozen ones from those trendy places that sells overpriced soy products, but they were just as awful as they were expensive. I even tried to start off with a cheese pizza and add my own ingredients, and while this made the cardboard crusts a little more edible, it ended up becoming a huge project that consumed a whole bunch of money & time, and still wasn’t worth talking about or repeating.

Anyway, so I heard that Tommy’s selling a gluten free pizza so I had to try it out. They were more than happy to load up the pie with the works, so I had all my favorite favorites in one: (a few kinds of) pork, peppers, onions, olives, tomato, and cheese. They informed me that the meatballs that usually come with the Jack Murray Pie did have gluten in them, so I asked them to switch that out for some ham. No problems.

If you’re worried about cross contamination, its understandable. I normally wouldn’t eat at a place where wheat flies around daily, or I would at least ask a hundred questions and go in with some anxiety anyway. But everything I wanted to ask I was able to find out about online, and this gave me a whole lot of confidence that they understood the minutia of trying to stay gluten free. Not only do they prepare the pizzas off to the side with dedicated utensils, they’ve even got a special filter to put the crust on when its in the oven. Now, I can’t say that all those peppers and pork products didn’t give me some heartburn and drowsiness, but I definitely haven’t felt any gluten-related symptoms from two pizzas.

The price is pretty high for a small loaded pizza, but its actually not bad at all when compared to my earlier attempts of building my own pizza loaded with toppings. The price is really only bad when compared to wheat-based pizzas, so I’ve got nothing to complain about except my own picky immune system. The home version and Tommy’s version each ended up costing me about $20, but Tommy’s was delicious and ready in 20 minutes, while mine took at least an hour’s worth of cooking, some shopping time, and didn’t even taste any good. While this new treat will probably set my budget back a good bit each month, I’m finding it hard to say ‘no’ to a great hot pizza that doesn’t make me sick.

Food

Steak and Eggs as Cheap and Easy Breakfast

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There’s nothing quite like a hearty breakfast to start the day off right, and there’s something special about the way steak and eggs wake you up in the morning. Well, steak isn’t particularly cheap, but the eggs are! So between the two, you can enjoy a great meal with plenty of fat and protein for about a buck and fifty cents. That will hardly buy you a cup of coffee at a retail eatery!

Here’s two tricks to making pan-fried steak and eggs into an easy meal:

Butter, butter, butter the pan

Without a bit of real butter on the pan, those eggs get sticky. If they’re even slightly overcooked, cleanup can become a huge pain! So make sure to thoroughly grease the pan with some butter or olive oil before cracking the egg and cooking it up.

Get some thin cut steaks

There’s two advantages to the thin cut steak. First, you have cheaper and smaller portions: you can eat the “whole piece” and still only consume 2 to 3 ounces. With a $4/lb steak, that’s just about $1 worth of meat for a very decent breakfast.

The other distinct advantage of using thin cut steaks when frying steak and eggs is that they cook as quickly as the eggs do. There’s nothing worse than having the perfectly cooked egg and seeing a bloody piece of meat that needs more time or a higher heat!

For the last few weeks, I’ve been enjoying this meal for breakfast almost exclusively. Once in a while I’ve switched in some fried pork and vegetables, but the egg and meat combo is still one of the best ways to start a day!

Food

Eat Well, Eat Cheap

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Here’s an example of what I got on my last trip to the grocery store. Just because you can’t eat gluten and don’t have much money to spend on food doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy healthy and delicious meals:

3/4 lb lean steak – $3.50
1 lb 93/7 ground beef – $3
1 lb asparagus – $2.50
2 lb broccoli – $3.25
2 boxes Chex – $6.30
1.5 lb muscadines – $4
1 gallon milk – $2.50
8 oz mozorella – $2

That’s about $6.50 for meat, $6.50 for green veggies, and $6.50 for grains. Dairy and fruits are about $4 each.

This will last me a week in addition to some things that are left over. Eggs, coffee, sugar, butter, all those basics are pretty cheap and don’t have to be purchased every week.

Just make sure you’re stocked up on pepper, salt, garlic powder, and some basic herbs like oregano, thyme, and rosemary. From there, you can make a lot of delicious meals in no time, for low cost!

Right now, I’m sitting around, waiting for a few of those thin-sliced lean steaks to sear up a little bit. There’s also about a half pound of brocolli steaming next to it. Despite the steak and eggs I had for breakfast, and the multiple bowls of cereal in between, my body is ready for the next round of healthy foods and my energy levels are staying high.

Now, if I could just get a little more disciplined with exercise, I might actually resemble a healthy person! For all the years I ate gluten unknowingly, I never would have dreamed that I could feel this good again. Healthy food and a bit of physical activity just makes it even better.

Food

Muscadines – Yum

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Muscadines are a relative of grapes who happen to enjoy the particularly hot and humid climate of Florida.  With summer winding down, a crop arrived recently at the produce section of the local Walmart.  Since I had just read a Wikipedia article about them while searching for potential crops that could be grown in the yard, I decided to check them out.

muscadine

The look of the thing is very much like a grape, but the similarities mostly end there.  For one thing, the skin is very tough, and needs to be peeled away rather than eaten.  The large seeds also end up being spit out.

The taste and texture of the fruit is quite unique.  Its sweet at the same time its extremely tart.  I can see why that combination makes a popular wine.  The fruit’s pulp is also a little bit slimier than a grape.  Its quite juicy, but the liquid doesn’t readily separate from the fibers.

Since my stomach is pretty sensitive to new things, I was afraid that these fruits would leave me aching.  But its been eight hours since I tried a couple, and I’m just about ready to have a few more.

In fact, I wouldn’t mind having a bush or two of these growing in the backyard at all!