Monday, September 20, 2010

Dancing in the Kitchen with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef

If you have been gluten free for any amount of time and done any searching around the internet you have probably come across Gluten-Free Girl, Shauna Ahern. If you have been checking into her life recently, you'll find her family has grown to include her chef husband Danny and a little girl. About a month ago I got the amazing opportunity to preview 3 brand new recipes from the Ahern's new cookbook called "Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef: A Love Story with 100 Tempting Recipes". You can find this cookbook on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Free-Girl-Shauna-James-Ahern/dp/0470419717

So onto the delicious food. The 3 recipes received were seared shrimp with garlic almond sauce, fresh pasta with anchovies, lemons, and olives and last but not least chocolate peanut butter brownies.

Let's start at the beginning with seared shrimp with garlic almond sauce. I'm not going to lie to you...almonds are not my favorite thing in the world. However, this recipe was amazing. The garlic made the almonds not quite so nutty and I enjoyed it very much.

So onto the fresh pasta with anchovies, lemons and olives. This one went slightly out of out of our comfort zone. We bought a lot of ingredients that we've never purchased before. The fresh pasta was amazingly easy and probably the best gluten free pasta I've ever eaten. I wish I had made more than one batch, so we could have some for later. The "sauce" we had over the fresh pasta consisted of anchovies, lemon, and olives just like the title said. It was really good even if it had ingredients we've never used before. The anchovies melted away and there were no traces of little fishy bits like I thought there would be. Here's a pic to show how it looks finished and how the fresh pasta looks.


Now for the crowning touch...chocolate peanut butter brownies. I made these for game night. 3 of the 8 people there are gluten free. The rest are gluten eaters. Everyone loved them! I forgot to take a picture until after we had devoured them, so you'll have to see them half eaten. The texture was amazing and the brownies were pretty simple to make. The way Shauna sets up her recipes she lays out little steps and they are not intimidating at all even if it looks like there are a lot of steps.
If you look closely you can see the peanut butter swirled in the middle of the brownies.

If you don't already follow Gluten-Free Girl and the chef then you should. She has many great recipes on her blog and links to many other wonderful recipes from her many blogger friends. You can follow her at http://glutenfreegirl.blogspot.com/. Hope you check out her site and her brand new cookbook.

1 comment:

  1. We're thrilled to bits that you loved everything so much. The disappearing brownies picture makes me happy.

    thank you for spreading the word!

    ReplyDelete