Burger Pizza Bites

Today was a long day with school and doing errands, I wanted something that I could make for the girls that was quick and still left me with time to spend with them. I remembered that I found a recipe for quinoa pizza bites by Morgan Berg, who has a blog of her own. For that recipe visit her site here. I took the recipe and changed it to make it fit to my family. As much as I love quinoa, my girls are not huge fana, I also did not have enough for the recipe. I decided to make TVP pizza bites. For those that don't know what that stands for, its Textured Vegetable Protein. It is used in a lot of vegetarian meat products. I buy it in bulk because it is gluten free and great for putting in chili. I also used onion powder as onion baked does not get completely soft unless I saute it before putting it into a recipe. I guess I could have grated it, maybe I will try that next time. The other option I would have done differently was put the bites in paper cupcake liners. This would prevent me from having to wash the cupcake pan and prevent it from possibly sticking. Well, I hope you all enjoy this recipe. The girls ate all of the bites. A true winner in my opinion. 

Kid approved!

Burger Pizza Bites

Ingredients: 

1 c. hydrated TVP 

2 large egg

1/2 t. onion powder

1 c. Veggie Mexican Blend Vegan Cheese

1 t. minced garlic

1 T. dried basil

1 t. dried oregano

1/2 t. salt

Method: 

1. Hydrate TVP (7/8 cups of boiling water to 1 cup dehydrated TVP). Let sit 5 minutes.

2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine all of your ingredients in a mixing bowl until it is well mixed.

3. Lightly spray the bottom of a mini-muffin tin with olive oil spray or place paper liners in muffin tin. Using a Tablespoon scoop into each muffin tin. I did heaping tablespoon in each one.

4. Bake them for 20 minutes and let cool.

Whole Grain Gluten Free Bread

I would say that gluten free cooking is a whole new world for me. I recently started cooking and baking GF for my daughter, who is 3. She was expreiencing some GI problems and we decieded to take her off of gluten to see if this was the problem. Since then she quit complaining that her tummy hurt and eats all her food at each meal (which she wouldn't finish before.) It's great that she is feeling better, but this way of living is tough for a Mama who has cooked gluten/wheat for everything. I was even told that wheat was so good for you that everything should be 100% stone ground wheat. So as you can imagine, I baked and cooked that way for a very long time and have become frustrated at starting something basically from scratch. 

So, my current mission was to find a bread that wasn't hard around the edges (Udi's) and tasted similar to gluten bread with the same kind of texture. I didn't think it was possible. I started researching the internet and after a few days I found a recipe that I wanted to try. It came from gfrealfood.com. The author of this recipe (Kim) has made this bread amazing. I made it for the first time by her instructions exactly and the bread came out perfectly. It tastes great, texture is unbelievable, its bigger than the store bought brands and its whole grain. My husband who is a very particular about texture said it was pretty close to gluten bread. He didn't want to compare taste as there are different breads out there. His response was, "it tasted like bread." Great! Now its time to share it with you. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. 

Whole Grain Gluten Free Bread

Ingredients:

3 large eggs lightly beaten
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup oil of choice (canola, olive, corn, coconut, grapeseed etc)
1 1/3 cup milk of choice – unsweetened (rice, hemp, almond, cows) warmed to about body temperature
1T +1 t honey
3 T brown sugar
1/2 cup millet,sorghum, quinoa, amaranth or buckwheat flour  (choose one)
1/2 cup second choice of flour – millet, sorghum, quinoa, amaranth or buckwheat flour (choose one)
1 cup multi grain rice flour, brown rice flour or my favorite teff flour
1/2 cup tapioca flour
1/2 cup corn starch (potato starch works too)
3 t xanthan gum
1 1/2 t salt
2 1/4 t dry active yeast
optional add ins:
flax seeds
sesame seeds
sunflower seeds
add in a total of about a 1/4 cup

Method:

1) Put the first 6 ingredients in a kitchen aid mixer. Mix on low speed for a few seconds just until it was all mixed. 

All the dry ingredients combined and then added to the mixer.

2) Add everything else with the exception of the flax seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds and yeast. 

3) Mix for 2 minutes on medium speed.

4) Add the remaining ingredients and mixed for another 2 minutes while occasionally scraped down the sides. 

5) Spray a glass bread pan and let it rise in the oven with the oven off but the oven light on. 

6) Let it rise for 40 minutes.

7) Take it out of the oven and preheat the oven while it continued to rise.

8) Bake it for 35 minutes at 350 degrees. 

I chose to leave the seeds out this time to make sure my kids liked the taste first. LOL

Super Yummy.