Homemade Muffins and a Rice Pasta Dish

Muffins! I made the banana flax muffins from The Allergen-Free Baker’s Handbook by Cybele Pascal and they are so good! I can’t even tell the difference between them and “regular” muffins. I now feel confident that all the recipes in this book will be a success, after going through the slightly tedious requirement of tracking down all the ingredients. But with time these ingredients will seem like familiar friends. My personal favorite is using organic blue agave in place of sugar. It is low on the glycemic index and better for you than chemically created artificial sweeteners. For copyright reasons, I won’t post the recipe, but I will encourage you to check out the book. I have one of these muffins each day for breakfast, so I froze half so they wouldn’t go bad…although it is tempting to eat them all at once.

I subscribed to receive e-mailed recipe ideas from Living Without Magazine. This is where the following recipe was inspired from, but I had to alter it quite a bit.

Rice Noodles with Fresh Tomato, Corn and dairy-free Cheese:

12 oz wide rice noodles ( I used A Taste of Thai)

6 Tbl olive Oil

1 sweet onion

2-3 cloves garlic

Corn kernels from 2 ears of corn

4 Tablespoons red wine vinegar

1/3 cup chopped fresh basil

Sprinkle of chopped fresh oregano to taste

2 garden tomatoes

Handful of daiya cheese

Cubed, cooked chicken

Cook pasta according to package instructions. Mine required them to be soaked in VERY hot water for 25-30 minutes. Drain in a colander.

While pasta is cooking, boil the corn until they turn yellow and there is an aroma of corn. Cool. Cut kernels off corn and set aside.

In a large saucepan, heat 1 Tbs of Olive Oil. Saute the garlic and onion until onion is clear and tender. Add corn, chicken, 4 tablespoons of Olive Oil, vinegar, basil and oregano.

When all ingredients are heated, add the cooked and drained rice pasta to the pan of vegetables. Stir well and add remaining Olive Oil. Sprinkle in cheese. Allow it to melt and serve.

(You can add tomatoes when you add the cheese, but some of my picky eaters don’t like tomatoes so I served them separately).

Matt (my fiancé) didn’t appreciate the corn in this recipe, but then again he doesn’t appreciate any vegetable very much. My father and I liked it thoroughly. The recipe originally claimed to serve 8, which it probably could as a side dish, but between the three of us, we finished it all. In fact, it was gone so fast that I didn’t have time to take a picture.