Another No-Grainer: Funky Flax Microwave Sandwich Buns

 Funky Flax Microwave Sandwich Buns
Delicious, no grain, no sugar, and speedy!

Probably the thing I miss the most are burger buns and sandwiches. And it's not that I never eat wheat or grains, (like I can really ever turn down a great piece of cake...) it's just that I generally try to limit my intake to keep my symptoms at bay. Even gluten free items usually have rice in them, and some of the other store-bought alternatives taste awful. Shockingly bad. When I do choose to eat grain, or a wheat product, it has to be worth it; consequently, many of my lunches and dinners are breadless.  Even when on busy days, a sandwich would be the most convenient thing to take to work to eat on the go, I end up going without, and tuna salad wrapped in a lettuce leaf gets old fast.

If I'm going to indulge in grain, it's going to be a piece of really good, fresh artisan bread or a roll, a great cookie or cake, or a homemade biscuit. Not that grain-free highly processed yuk from the supermarket. In the meantime, I've been fooling around with a recipe my friend Betty sent me that her husband calls "Funky Flax Muffins". These are fast, easy and you can literally make them while you are packing lunches or chatting on the phone. Bonus: they're damn tasty.

These really are very good -- kind of nutty tasting, and hold up to a good juicy burger, or a mayo based salad. Good buttered and toasted, too. There are quite a few kinds of microwave  flax-based breads floating around the web, but this one uses ingredients you can actually find easily in any supermarket. Nothing odd or spendy. Betty's version makes one big muffin, but its over 200 calories, and nearly a meal and a half if you are watching calories, especially if you add a sandwich filling or butter. My recipe makes two, at just over 100 calories each. ( Ran the recipe through Livestrong; your calculation may differ). I like them split and toasted, but, if toasting isn't an option, make them early in the day, or the night before, split each in half and leave it out for a while to dry out a bit.

Slice carefully when completely cool.

Funky Flax Microwave Sandwich Buns

Makes 2

Note: you'll need a couple of burger-bun sized ramekins or one of those Nordicware Eggs n Muffin Microwave breakfast sandwich makers to actually get these to the right size. Alternatively, just place 2 equal sized mounds on a piece of parchment paper and spread them out to bun size. If you are strict with a Primal / Paleo eating, plan, you may want to omit the cheese and add a seasoning salt, if you are not eating dairy products.

1/4 cup flax meal
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
2-3 grinds of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of sea salt
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
1 large egg
1 tablespoon water

1. Mix the flax meal, the garlic powder, the pepper, the baking powder, the  cheese if using, and the salt in a small bowl with a fork. Beat in the egg and the water. Let the mixture stand for 3-4 minutes until it thickens.

2. Place even portions in each of two microwave safe ramekins, or a microwave-sandwich maker, opened up, or, just make two round blobs, slightly smaller than the diameter of a burger on a piece of parchment paper. Microwave on high for about 60 to 90 seconds until the rolls are dry and puffed.

I knew I could find more than one use for my microwave egg pan!
Especially since I don't really like microwaved eggs...

3. Let cool for a couple of minutes, and then remove from the pans or paper. Slice each one in half after it has completely cooled. Toasting lightly before serving is recommended.

Blog Ideas Just Drop From the Sky, Right? #150+.

Any time someone finds out that I write a food blog, they invariably ask how I come up with topics and recipes, week in, week out. It came up today. Caroline, a young woman I work with asked just that this afternoon. I told her ideas just drop from the sky. She laughed; but I was only half joking. I have no trouble coming up with things to write about, but I do have a problem coming up with enough time to cook and write. I was thinking about it while driving home from work and realized that in the past 10 months or so I've written more than 150 food-related short essays. Posted them here. Sheesh.

Should be in every good cook's kitchen, and on
every recipe developers bookshelf.

Ideas come from everywhere. A trip to a market and a pile of gorgeous red peppers in late Summer can start the ball rolling. A book, like Page & Dornenberg's "The Flavor Bible" can get me off on a cooking tangent. It's something I really like because it isn't a book of recipes, its full of ideas about what foods go together, a great jumping off spot. I highly recommend taking a look at it. A conversation with another cook about a family favorite will get something germinating, too.

Sometimes it's interesting to analyze something we take for granted, like good knives, or the herbs in our gardens that come back each year like chives or thyme. Other times I'm focused on what the garden is producing, like too many hot peppers, or an upcoming holiday feast.

It sure helps that I work in a kitchenware store, surrounded with coworkers and customers who are all about food. It also helps to have hundreds of cookbooks, collected over 40 years. Often, all I have to do is look at the cover and that reminds me of a recipe in that book that I made over, and over, for several years and then totally forgot about.

This post came from my commute home, sitting in traffic, and thinking how many times over and over I do certain things and I never get bored with them.  Like this. That's when I realized that I've written more than 150 blog posts this year and I feel like I've just exposed the tip of the iceberg. Inspiration really does just drop from the sky, doesn't it? Now if I could just give up sleeping, or make my day 28 hours long, I might have enough time in this lifetime to tell you about it all.

Fee, Fie, Foe Friday: Wonder Why That Recipe Didn't Turn Out?

It's not just using the wrong ingredients that can make a dish o very wrong...

Okay. Yes, there are a few faulty recipes on the internet. I've found some that, even with my 30 years of cooking and teaching, make me say, " WTH?" Those we can't do much about.

But if you read the comments sections of food blogs, as I do, you'll find that either literacy on the part of the reader/cook is a bigger problem than we know, or that people just will-nilly substitute ingredients left and right and then have the nerve to complain to the food blogger that the recipe doesn't work or is awful. At least half of the commenters have made mistakes in execution or have made off-the-wall substitutions and are unwilling to take the blame for their own stupidity mistakes. If you substitute applesauce for butter and carob chips for chocolate in one of MY recipes, don't come whining back and tell me the cookies were dreadful. No sympathy from me, since you've just made YOUR OWN bad recipe, not mine. I admire the tactfulness and kindness of so many of the blogger I read; someday I will learn to be that nice. Probably not very soon, even though I have yet to run out of patience with any of my in-the-flesh students.

There is a lot of both chemistry and physics in food prep and cooking. Most of us slept through so many science courses in school that we've forgotten about things like how metals conduct heat and what happens with sodium and cell walls...Cooking and baking are  the everyday practical application of those classes that seemed useless at the time.

My mother always claimed that if you could read, you could cook; maybe not well, but passably. I think people can read, but their comprehension is low. Not understanding the instructions and not using the correct ingredients are pretty much guaranteed to spoil the best of recipes, especially if the cook is inexperienced.

The bright side here is that by making cooking mistakes is how you get cooking experience. Some things you'll likely learn the hard way: that baking soda and baking powder are NOT interchangeable, that a wet cloth transmits heat way faster than a dry one, and that butter cookies don't taste good when you use a trans fat free, earth friendly, vegetarian, factory spread instead of Mother Nature's good butter. Or that a cup of ketchup is a lousy substitute for sauce on a homemade pizza. This list goes on and on, and each of us has our very own list of things we'll never try again.

The point of this Fee, Fie, Foe rant is basically to read the recipe, and then read it again to be sure you understand what to do in each step and then make sure to use the food the recipe specifies. If you don't have something a dish asks for on hand, and you aren't sure if what you've got in the pantry will work, don't do it. Make another recipe. Google a recipe for what you do have. And if it's one of my recipes, I don't want to hear about it unless you think its a funny story and you take the blame.