Day 11 - Sweet Potato Black Bean Chili

Pinterest Day 11

The Pinterest recipe I looked at today was Sweet Potato Black Bean Chili at Alida's Kitchen. 

Taco Soup

Before all my food issues popped up, there was a soup that I used to make that everybody in the family loved: Taco Soup. I got the recipe from a friend, although I'm not sure where she got it from, and it was so, so easy, and so tasty, that I loved this thing to bits and pieces.

Actually, I'll put the original recipes AND the altered recipe here, for anyone who can use it...although this is the original recipe + any alterations my memory has made over the course of time, but it's close.

Socca - A French Flatbread

Socca is a completely grain free flatbread that comes from France. It's even a traditional grain-free flatbread, so no weird substitutions to alter the taste, woo hoo!

This stuff is SO easy to make, it's awesome. And it tastes good, too. My kids tell me it reminds them of the batter around a corn dog; I assume that's a positive review, heh.

How to make your own chickpea flour

This is really easy. It takes a bit, but it's really easy. I don't have a grain grinder or nut grinder, so I have to use my blender. I'm sure it's even easier with a grinder!

Making Chickpea (garbanzo bean) flour:

Stuffed Bell Pepper

This comes from yet another failed recipe, LOL.

So far, soaked, raw beans that I freeze and thaw later do not do well in my falafel recipes. I wasn't certain this was the case, but the last disaster has left little doubt in my mind. But unfortunately, that left me with nothing to do with my just-now-made bean and cucumber falafel dough (Don't judge. I was out of veggies to use!).

I baked it in a loaf pan, instead but it was...not good. Tasted like dry crumbs, although the fact that it did taste like crumbs has given me possibilities for its use in other things.

So today, I'm using my crumbs.

Best meal EVER

I've been in such a rut, it's not even funny. I got hit with sulfites in that little injection and it knocked me down for a couple weeks. But we're all home today so I was motivated to try and make the meal a little special.

SO happy with it!

My meal today:
Falafel - the kind I normally make, with chickpeas, yellow squash, salt, and parsley

Roasted green chile hummus - the kind I normally make, with chickpeas, salt, and olive oil, and then with 2 roasted green chiles, skinned and seeded, added in with it. I added a little extra oil and made a smooth, very spicy, slightly green hued hummus. It was awesome!

Dairy free tzatziki - 2 small orange/yellow vine ripened tomatoes, 2 small persian cucumbers, both chopped. Then I added a teeny bit of fresh chopped dill, and about four times as much chopped cilantro. Then maybe 1-2 tsp fresh lemon juice

I got out these large, dark lettuce leaves, broke the falafel into pieces and put in first the falafel, then the hummus, then the tsatziki, then held the lettuce like a hot dog bun and ate it that way. It was AWESOME!

The hummus was spicy, the falafel were really sweet this time, and the sour and crunchiness of the tzatziki was great.

It's using foods I already had, but still, I'm so excited about it anyway because it's just new enough that I noticed, and I needed a good taste. My past few experiments have been utter failures. So nice when something works!

I'd have amazing pictures, but I was so hungry, I ate it all. When I went back for seconds (and food for pictures) it was all gone! :-D I just have these two little photos of the left over hummus and tzatziki, and that's it.

Sour and crunchy, just like I wanted

Socca - Grain Free chickpea-based flatbread

A really simple grain-free flatbread. I didn't even know these existed!

Salt, olive oil, chickpea flour, and water (and cumin, if you can have it). That's it for ingredients. I bet if you used another type of fat, that would work well too. I wonder if lard would be too much?  Hmmm.

If you can have chickpeas, I'm sure you could pretty easily make your own chickpea flour, too. This gentleman mentions that the chickpea flours used for this are rather coarse.

The recipe has a lot of pictures and technique to get this to work well. :-)
http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/06/socca-enfin/


EDIT: 3/7/13
I forgot all about this for months and then recently rediscovered it. My fiddlings with recipes are now on the recipe page. :-)

Roasted Chickpeas - Gluten free

Another recipes from my buffalo blog.

Great on-the-go snack

After realizing that there was such a thing as roasted chickpeas, I had to hunt down how people made this. The result is this recipe. I messed around with different techniques based on a few different recipes and found what worked for me (thanks go to choosingvoluntarysimplicity.com for the idea of cooking them before roasting). I also pared the ingredients down to the bone until they matched what we could eat.

Plantains with black beans

These were great, and turned out so wonderfully I hope we can have them again. They'd work great as snacks or as an appetizer. They have a kind of Cuban feel to them, so they'd probably go well with Mojitos, if you can drink those.

Plantains, guacamole, refried beans, and roasted bell peppers

Falafel

I love falafel. It's a Middle Eastern, chickpea(garbanzo bean)-based, fried, crispy little pseudo-hush-puppy. These are awesome. I even managed non-onion versions, for those who can't tolerate high-sulfur foods.

If you can tolerate beans, though, these should be fine for you, I believe. But if beans are an issue, or only to be eaten when you have a low sulfite load for the day, this should be eaten with caution. Falafel is typically eaten with more Greek or Mediterranean sides, like hummus, but I've varied the herbs on numerous combinations to go with a variety of different cuisines - or in other words, I was desperate and bored and fiddled until I found something that worked.

A Mexican version of my falafel, with tomato and green chile

Easy Refried Beans

If you've never made refried beans before, no worries. They are so easy, you'll wonder why you never made them before.

Faux Mexican Baked Beans

Time: 1-2 hours (plus overnight soaking time)
(5 min prep/1-2 hours hands-free cooking) (Add 8 hours for soaking, if needed)

Ingredients
1/2-1 pound dried beans - I tried Sangre de Toro beans (yeah, woo hoo, pretentious me), but black beans, kidney beans, or pinto beans would probably do great, too.
1-3 sweet potato
a fat of some kind - lard, oil, whatever you got. Optional, if you really can't have any.
sea salt to taste
seasonings to taste (I used crushed chile peppers, just a bit)