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Gluten-Free Soft Oatmeal Bread

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Recently, I’ve been adding more carbs to my diet, as carbs help me stay warm.  As a result, I’ve been experimenting with baking with grains.  After not being able to eat grains for several years, being able to return to grains has really opened up my options.

I discovered a wonderful gluten-free flour mix called Better Batter.  It is the best textured gluten-free baked goods I’ve ever had!  Breads stay soft and flexible after baking.  No more cardboard!

You’ll see me using Better Batter in more recipes going forward on the blog.  I now order it twenty pounds at a time and it our main flour for baking.

This is a hearty bread, more hearty than my sandwich bread (which I will be posting soon) and it will hold up to heavy toppings while still being sliced rather thin, especially if the bread is two or three days old.

As this bread ages, the texture becomes better. I like to cook it the day before and allow it to sit on the counter, sealed in a plastic bag to have it ready to eat the next day.

The other benefit of this bread is that it doesn’t require a second rise, so you mix, shape, rise and bake.  It only takes about fifteen minutes of hands-on time to get loaves into the oven.

This recipe does require a stand mixer to handle the batter.  And because you beat the batter on high, I recommend you use a 6-quart mixer to avoid batter flying everywhere.

 

Gluten-Free Soft Oatmeal Bread

Supplies:
6-quart or larger stand mixer
2-quart or larger saucepan
Two 8×4 one pound loaf pans- Norpro or USA Pan
rubber spatula
Cooking spray
plastic wrap
sharp knife or lame
Cooling rack
Serrated knife or electric knife
airtight bread container

Ingredients:
2 cups left-over cooked rolled oats or quick oats – use only certified GF oats!!
1/4 cups apple cider vinegar
6 Tbs butter, coconut oil or dairy-free margarine
1 cup water
3/4 cup milk or dairy-free milk alternative (or use more water)
3 Tbs sugar or rapadura
1 Tbs salt
2 packages active dry yeast (or 4 teaspoons bulk yeast)
475g to 570g (5-6 cups) Better Batter Gluten Free Flour (20 ounces, 5 pound or 20 pound sizes available)

 

Grease two 8×4 loaf pans and set aside.

In the bowl of a 6-quart or larger stand mixer, combine the left-over oatmeal and the apple cider vinegar. Set aside.

in a 2-quart or larger saucepan, melt the butter. Add the water, milk, sugar and salt. Place over medium heat and heat until the mixture reaches 110 degrees. Remove from the heat.

Whisk in the yeast. Allow to sit for 5-10 minutes, until the yeast becomes foamy. Pour the milk and yeast mixture into the mixer. Turn the mixer on low and slowly add 475 grams of the Better Batter flour mix. Cover the mixer, turn to high and allow to beat for 4 minutes.

Uncover the mixer and turn it to low. The dough should look like chocolate chip cookie dough minus the chocolate chips. If it does not have that texture, leave the mixer on low and add one tablespoon of the remaining 95 grams of flour mix at a time until it does look like cooking dough. Turn the mixer back on high and run 30 more seconds to ensure all of the flour mixture is incorporated.

Transfer the mixture to your greased loaf pans, using a gram scale to divide it evenly between the two pans.

Push the dough into the corners and flatten the top of the batter. With a thin, oiled spatula or wet fingers, pull the top edges of the batter towards the center of the loaf to form a rounded edge, then smooth the top of the loaf. With a sharp knife, slash the top of the loaf into four diagonal cuts.

Spray a piece of plastic wrap with cooking spray, and place over the two loaf pans. Allow to sit for 30 minutes to one hour, until the top of the bread is even with or slightly higher than the top edge of the loaf pan.

Place into a 375 degree oven and bake for 50-60 minutes, until golden brown.

Remove from oven and allow to sit, undisturbed in the bread pans, for ten minutes. Then turn the loaves out onto a cooling rack and place on their sides until completely cool.

Once completely cool, you can slice the bread. Slice with a serrated knife. An electric knife is perfect for this.

Store in an airtight container or zip top bag. If you wish to freeze this bread, slice it then wrap individual or paired slices in plastic wrap. Freeze in a rigid freezer container for up to one month.

Dairy-Free Copycat Snickers Bars

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Birthdays and holidays are tough for kids with food allergies and intolerances. For my kids, whose birthdays both fall around the holidays, it’s even tougher.

One of my children has no memory of ever having dairy, therefore he has no idea what the majority of the chocolate-containing candy on the market tastes like. He’ll be fourteen right after Thanksgiving, and he complained to me a lot around Halloween that he couldn’t try any of that candy even though he loves chocolate. That, combined with me having already started my holiday baking and treat making, got my wheels turning.

I had planned to make and freeze nougat this past week for Christmas, why couldn’t I just combine it with dairy-free caramel and make a chocolate coating like a Snickers? This would solve two problems. It would allow him to try what he most wanted to try, a Snickers bar, and it would give us some treats to have at his birthday and again at Christmas.

I have previous made caramel and nougat for the blog or the menu mailer, so combining the two wasn’t a problem.  I did a little adjusting and this was the outcome.

He was thrilled with the results!

If you are new to working with sugar, I have done an audio file to do a question and answer session about getting started with sugar work.  These are the most common problems and mistakes and how to avoid them, along with safety precautions in working with sugar to avoid burns.

 

 

 

Dairy-Free Snickers Copycat

Supplies:
Cooking spray
Parchment paper
Candy thermometer
Rubber spatula
Two heavy-bottomed 4-quart saucepans with tight fitting lids
Pastry brush
Double boiler or a large, heavy-duty, heat-resistant glass bowl that fits over a 4-quart saucepan

For the nougat:
2 large egg whites, at room temperature (allergic to eggs? See note)
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup natural peanut butter (no added sugar) (allergic to nuts? See note)
1-1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup light corn syrup or homemade corn syrup replacement
1/2 cup water

For the caramel:
1-1/2 cups roasted salted peanuts (allergic to nuts? See note)
3/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup plus 1 Tbs coconut milk– use the solid portion at the top of a can of coconut milk
3/4 cup light corn syrup or homemade corn syrup replacement
3 Tbs butter or dairy-free butter replacement such as Earth Balance, or coconut oil (coconut oil has less flavor)
Scant 1/4 tsp salt
Scant 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

 

For the chocolate coating:
1 Tbs high-quality palm shortening 
One bag, 10-12 ounces, dairy-free chocolate chips (we prefer these)

 

 

 

Make the corn syrup replacement, if needed:

First, make your corn syrup replacement if you don’t want to purchase commercial corn syrup.  I prefer to avoid it as it gives my family some symptoms.

Make a 6x batch of this recipe to make enough corn syrup replacement for this recipe.

 

To make the nougat:

Prep a 9×13 pan by spraying it liberally with cooking spray and lining it with parchment. Give enough parchment overhang that you can use it as handles to lift the candy out of the pan later.

Place the two eggwhites in the bottom of a stand mixer bowl fitted with a whisk attachment. Place the salt and the peanut butter nearby so they are ready when needed. Spray the rubber spatula liberally with cooking spray and place near the mixer.

Place the sugar, corn syrup replacement and water into a 4-qt or larger, heavy-bottom saucepan. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Place over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Lower the heat to a simmer, then place the lid on the saucepan and cook for 3 minutes. This washes down the sides of the pan to catch any stray sugar crystals, which can destroy the nougat if left unmelted.

Uncover the saucepan and clip a candy thermometer onto the side, making sure that the tip of the thermometer is in the middle of the pan and not touching the bottom. Increase heat to medium and cook until the mixture is at 250 degrees.

Once the sugar mixture has reached 250 degrees, add the salt to the eggwhites and turn on the stand mixer onto high speed and whip the egg whites to stiff peaks while the sugar mixture continues to cook. Turn off once it has reached stiff peaks and wait for the sugar to come to temperature.

Once the sugar mixture reaches 275 degrees, immediately pull it from the heat. Turn the stand mixer back onto high speed and drizzle the mixture, 1 tablespoon at a time, into the mixing bowl, being careful to avoid the whisk, until it is completely blended into the egg whites. Keep adding one tablespoon of the mixture at a time until all has been incorporated into the nougat.

Continue mixing until the nougat pulls away from the side of the bowl, 1-2 minutes.

Turn off the mixer and using the greased spatula, fold in the peanut butter until smooth. Spread into the prepared 9×13 pan using your oiled spatula or greased hands and allow to cool, uncovered, before placing the caramel layer on top.

 

To make the caramel:

Oil a rubber spatula and set it aside.

Pulse the two cups of peanuts in a food processor to break them up into large, even chunks.  Set aside.

In a clean, heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine the white sugar, coconut milk, corn syrup replacement, butter and salt. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Wash down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush to ensure no undissolved crystals of sugar remain.

Bring to a boil, clip your candy thermometer into the center of the pan, not touching the sides or bottom of the pan, reduce the heat and cook at a medium boil until the mixture reaches 245 degrees.

Remove the pan from the heat immediately and stir in the peanuts and vanilla extract. Pour over the nougat mixture and use the oiled spatula to spread it to the edges and get it level.

Cool at room temperature for an hour and a half, then lift the candy from the pan using the parchment as handles and transfer to a baking sheet. Place the baking sheet to the refrigerator to harden the candy.

After about twenty minutes, the candy is hard enough to cut. Flip the candy so that it is caramel-side down onto a cutting board and peel off the parchment paper. Cut the candy in 24 bars.

 

Storage of the candy centers:

Place the bars in a single layer in a rigid container, caramel side down, to freeze.  I do not recommend stacking them in layers, as the nougat will stick to the wax paper, and it will be difficult to separate to dip them. You can see in the pic below that I stacked them and it was difficult to separate them to dip them, as nougat stays soft when frozen and will stick to whatever is touching them.

You can freeze them and dip same day, or you can freeze them for later use.  The candy centers can be made up to two months ahead and frozen.

 

 

Dipping:

If you wish to finish them at this point, you can proceed as long as they are frozen solid.  The bars do need to be frozen before dipping as the nougat can melt if left in the chocolate too long while dipping.

In the top of a double boiler, melt together the shortening and chocolate chips, stirring constantly until smooth. To do this, put an inch of water into your saucepan, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and put the double boiler on top. You don’t want the water in the pan touching the double boiler, as this can cause the chocolate to heat too quickly and burn.  Stir constantly with a rubber spatula, scraping the sides and bottom of the double boiler, to keep the chocolate from burning.  Once the chocolate is completely melted, turn the heat off and begin dipping the chocolate.

Using a dipping tool or two forks crossed to make a ‘V’ pointing away from you, gently but quickly coat each piece of candy in the melted chocolate, drip off excess, clean the bottom.  I prefer to put the candy in the chocolate, caramel side down, coat the caramel and the sides, then flip to coat the nougat, then immediately pull, drip off, use a small, thin spatula to wipe the excess chocolate from the bottom, then place onto the tray to cool. Work quickly because the nougat will melt in the hot chocolate.

Reheat the chocolate as needed to keep it liquid. Place them on a silpat or sheet of parchment and transfer to the refrigerator until firm, about 30 minutes.

 

Storage of the finished bars:

This should keep for two months, frozen in a rigid container, with parchment or wax paper separating the layers.

 

 

NOTE: While I have not tried it, there are many recipes online that replace egg whites with aquafaba (the liquid off of cooked chickpeas) to make an egg-free nougat.  I looked through several vegan Facebook groups and blogs and noticed this version holds up to candy-making.  If you are egg-free, you could try using aquafaba whipped to stiff peaks in place of the egg whites.  If you try this, please leave a comment to let us know how it goes!

To make this nut-free, omit the roasted peanuts and use a seed butter, such as sunflower seed butter, to make these safe for you.

An Update on KerryAnn

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I have barely blogged in several years. At first, I stopped due to burn-out, but then my life took several changes and unexpected turns that ate up either my time or my attention, and I went through periods of extremely low energy due to my health problems.  It’s been difficult to find the time, but mostly the energy and focus, to write.

Life has finally turned into a season where I can be consistent and focused again.  Both of my children are teens who only need small amounts of direction to complete their schooling (yes, mamas, that day really might come in homeschooling!), the school year is in full swing, and I now find myself with time on my hands where I can be focused and productive.

Going forward, this will not be a food focused blog, but a whole-life focused blog.  There is so much more to being healthy and vibrant than just what you eat!  Despite chronic illness, I have decided to do my best to participate in self-care and focused on becoming vibrant and full of life, even if it means accepting some limitations due to my health!

My goal is to no longer return to perfect health.  My goal is to live vibrantly and fully with the time left that God has granted me!

If you’d like to read my daily posts, you can follow me on Facebook or join our Facebook group, Happy Home with One Vibrant Mama.

 

Diet Derby

I have had many changes in my health and in my life in the last several years.  Notably, I came to realize that there is so much more to health than just food.  And there is no one-size-fits-all approach to food or health, or one approach to lifestyle that would fit for everyone.  In the presence of high quality food, you can still be made ill by stress, toxins, toxic people and more.

In the last few years, I have moved between paleo, keto, low-carb, real food Auto-Immune Protocol, a diet free of various allergens, low-oxalate, low-histamine and more.  All of them provided a certain amount of success, and served my needs for a certain amount of time.  However, none of them provided me with a long-term approach and I felt like diet was a never-ending game of diet changes as symptoms ended and began. Plus, my health was being affected by things outside of diet alone.  As soon as I’d get settled and feel like I was on my feet, my diet would change again thanks to new symptoms popping up.

Through the never-ending diet changes, I discovered that part of my issue was that I was not eating enough.  Not enough calories for years had wrecked my metabolism.  I was cold all of the time.  Both increasing my calories and returning to grains and carbs has returned the heat to my body.  I found that when I was low-carb, no matter how many calories I ate, I was still cold.  My body apparently needs grains at this stage in order to have energy and have a normal body temperature.  It was a huge blessing to not spend this past Summer under blankets and in a housecoat.  It’s a huge change for me that is very welcome.

So while grains and carbs, potatoes and more have been anathema at parts of my journey, and I have even blamed them for some of my health issues, right now they are the ticket to my health.  I am warm, I have energy and I am clear-headed and focused.

 

 

Hair Loss

However, in the midst of a better diet and being able to return to consuming all of the foods I once had to avoid outside of gluten (and keeping the histamine levels down), I have had new symptoms arise and some old symptoms remain.  Notably, the old symptom that remains is my hair loss.  It started when I was in my 20s, several years before my celiac crisis in 2006.

My hair loss has been a public journey.  If you follow my personal account on Facebook, you know I’ve chronicled my hair loss journey there, complete with videos and plenty of posts over the years.

This Summer, I decided I was done fighting the hair loss.  My journey of fighting the loss was done, as I had been fighting it almost two decades since the first hints of loss showed up when I was 24.

I shaved my head one day while the family was gone.  I ordered a wig.  Then two wigs.  Then three!  I suddenly discovered how fun it was to actually have hair that you could play with!

I will be sharing about my hair loss journey and the transition to wigs on the blog.  Because I was so public about the process, I’ve since had several friends who were quietly suffering with hair loss start wearing wigs, too.

It has been a long journey to transition from fighting, to mourning the loss, to washing my face and accepting it, to becoming excited about the possibilities this presented for me!

I have also decided to not try to hide the fact I was wearing wigs.  I’ll go from straight one day to curly the next, blonde one day to brunette the next, long to short, and all in between.  It’s fun, and I have decided to treat it like a fashion accessory instead of an embarrassment that should be hidden.

Saying Goodbye

I can not end this post without noting the recent loss of two people who have been important in my own health journey, Yasmina Ykelenstam from Healing Histamine and Teresa Tapp from T-Tapp.  Both of these brave women pioneered work that has lead to the betterment of my health.

I have blogged about T-Tapp before, as the routine was a huge help with me moving from being bed bound to home bound when I originally became ill.

Yasmina’s blog was what pushed me over the edge last Fall into the low-histamine diet, and led to the slow but steady improvement that allowed me to start getting out of the house again this past July.

We all eventually come to our natural end, and these women’s journeys show me that they lived their life vibrantly in the face of health trials.  We often hear people bad-mouth methods or systems after the death of the founder or someone who espoused the beliefs, but what I see here are two women who undoubtedly would not have lived nearly so long and so vibrantly without their methods.

Ultimately, it is not about how long we have here, but what we do with our time and how we help others.

Summer of Subtitles: Boys Over Flowers

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We started our Summer of Subtitles with Boys Over Flowers, a 25-episode Korean drama. South Korea has quite a following of American youth for their music and TV. It’s referred to as K-pop and K-drama by American fans. My daughter has some friends who are into both, so this series was a relatively easy sell, despite getting some eye rolls at the whole idea for the Summer from both of them at the beginning.

I saw glowing reviews of Boys Over Flowers online and in multiple Facebook homeschooling groups when I asked about media resources for Asia. I’ve heard about this series for years but it was never available to stream without purchasing it when I looked.

So knowing about those glowing reviews, I struggled greatly to review this series.  With twenty-five 70-minute episodes, it felt like it took us forever to get through it, and I had several red flags about the content.

About The Series

It’s rated TV-14 in the US accoding to Netflix, TV-15 in Korea according to IMDB. The IMDB parent’s guide contained no information on sex, nudity, violence, profanity, substance use and frightening scenes.

Boys Over Flowers is available for free right now on Netflix. I had some reservations giving the rating and with no info to go on as to content that generated that rating, but the high praises sung about the series by fellow homeschool moms won out so I decided we’d start the series and stop if we ran into problems. And I should have stuck to that decision.  [Read more…] about Summer of Subtitles: Boys Over Flowers

Summer of Subtitles

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I recently stated on my Facebook personal profile that my teens and I would be taking a ‘Summer tour around the world’ with our TV.  So many people asked about what we were watching and what we were doing that I decided to post about it and my review of each resource to help you evaluate if it’s appropriate for your family or not.

We have access to Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime so everything will come from one of those three sources.

Many overseas movies are unrated in the US. So I rely on a few different resources to tell me about the content. [Read more…] about Summer of Subtitles

Three Things To Do When You’re Not Sure You’re Making a Difference

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Have you ever been discouraged because you thought you weren’t making a difference? Here are three self-confidence boosting things to do when you’re working on what the Lord set you to do in your home, your job or your community but you don’t think what you’re doing has any impact.

 

 

Join us to learn three things to do when you’re discouraged because you think you aren’t making a difference, along with help and support to become One Vibrant Mama, too!

Join us for this video-based Bible study to learn more!