The Gluten-free Chicano's No-Asco Meals

Variations on A Theme: Gluten-free Platos Principales

Michael Sedano, el Gluten-free Chicano

People who avoid gluten in their food avoid obvious dangers like bread and pasta, and hidden gluten like soy sauce, malt, french fries cooked in the same vat as breaded foods, and any number of unsuspected foods, like canned soup or restaurant sauces like red enchiladas and chile colorado. There's a lot of delicious restaurant cuisine a Celiac will not dare eat. 

Gente with celiac disease--The Gluten-free Chicano is one of them--religiously conform to a gluten-free diet, standing in grocery aisles reading every label, quizzing restaurant staff, eating in the same restaurants ordering the same food repeatedly because it's known or proven, this time, safe. 

Dining at home remains the gluten-free person's safest way to ensure a happy digestive system with the added benefit of home cooking's epicurean pleasures. Today, La Bloga-Tuesday shares meal ideas for gluten-free Chicano food dining, and one Honorary Chicano Food dish. These are company food, and generally easy and fast from knife to table.

There's one catch when dining with wheat-eaters, the asco factor. Offer some diners a "gluten-free" dish and their noses wrinkle and faces speak volumes about distasteful experiences in the past with gluten-free analogs of real food. 

All the meals presented here should be gluten free but check your own ingredients before getting out in that kitchen and rattling those pots and pans.

Note, también, diabetics like el Gluten-free Chicas Patas count carbs and eat smaller portions. Soups and the platos presented here, come with low carb counts.Not only are these meals gluten-free, here is low-carb food diabetics will totally scarf down and ask please may I have some more? Do people still say "scarf down"?

Walk a lot. Eat lots of soup. Stay away from wondrous foods like pizza, spaghetti, flour tortillas, warm bread smeared with before an unquestioned dinner of chile colorady, and you might lose weight and exert control over your body mass. Eat right. Eat delicious gluten-free food y vamos a ver.

Breakfast: Two Variations on Weenies con Blanquillos

"Weenies con huevos" has that alliterative ring. When little Gluten-free Chicanito was under his grandmother's care, she explained the natural world as it existed in her backyard. She kept chickens and I would collect the eggs which, the first time I referred to them as "huevos" I got gently corrected. Huevos are what a boy or man has between the legs. The gallinas give us blanquillos, that's what we eat.

My gramma grew up in Michoacan on the shores of a lake where the boats caught fish with butterfly nets. I never learned the name of her rancho or pueblo or what her Purépecha homeland was like. I have only that dim recollection of her story in one of the two languages I was growing up into. I order "blanquillos" in local eateries and get blank stares, an occasional smile of recognition.

This dish is a classic for most raza kitchens, something a child gets in their earliest solid food regimen. For real tasty sausage and gluten freeness, The Gluten-free Chicano uses halal or kosher product, like Hebrew National all-beef weiners.

The Gluten-free Chicano's standard egg and weenies breakfast includes a starch--either papas or frijoles, fresh tomato, aguacate and fresh fruit, and fruit or vegetable juice, as available.

Elegant Lunch or Light Dinner: Balsamic Reduction, Burrata Cheese, Tomato Salad

Balsamic Vinegar Honey Reduction originates far from Aztlán, in Italy, where the Latinos originate. And, you'll find balsamic reduction on fancy restaurant menus, at a premium price. When you taste that twenty-dollar salad, you'll marvel at the exquisite flavor of tomato and balsamic reduction.

You can duplicate that restaurant experience casí a few dollars, and for twenty, you can feed--impress them--two or more happy diners. Sin propina.

Balsamic Reduction: Easy to Make, Eyeball the Measures

Heat a shallow pan over a low flame.

Pour in a quarter cup of good commercial Balsamic vinegar.

Squeeze in an eighth cup of honey.

Splash in some Tapatío or other hot chile sauce.

Add a tiny pinch of salt.

Stir constantly. Bring to a boil for five to ten minutes, or until the volume of black liquid is halved.

Let cool.

*Note: Ensure the balsamic vinegar does not contain barley-derived caramel color.

**NoteNote: Honey make a faster thick sauce. It's not necessary and you can reduce balsamic with no added ingredients.

Drizzle balsamic reduction onto the bowl or plate. Center a ball of burrata cheese in the dish. Lay sliced fresh, or lightly roasted, tomatoes around the cheese. You can use fresh mozzarella slices, too. Garnish with fresh basil leaves, optionally, thinly sliced fresh garlic. Drizzle the whole presentation with reduction.

Ground Beef: Two Variations On Albondigas

The Gluten-free Chicano prefers soup to any other food, at any meal or snack. Albondigas soup is a fast and easy standard in el Gluten-free Chicas Patas' kitchen. The Gluten-free Chicano developed a fierce antojo recently, out of the blue thinking about the porcupine meatballs that were a favorite in his twenty-five cent elementary school cafeteria lunches. 

Restaurant ground beef dishes often include flour or bread to thicken the mix and put them off-limits to gluten-free gente. But albondigas, meatballs, need not contain gluten ingredients. Nor are they fast food. 

Cooks who use food processors or blenders can make meatballs in a whiz. Hand-made albondigas take time but add satisfaction to the cook's day.

The secret to a good meatball is finely minced vegetables. The porcupine meatballs have a lot of bell pepper in them, and more rice than soup meatballs, and don't have the yerba buena that makes albondigas such delicious eating. Otherwise, a meatball is a meatball: good ground meat, rice, onion, garlic, (bell pepper) egg, salt, black pepper, chile powder.

Twenty minutes cooking time, but the longer the better with these two meatball dishes. Flavors build and meld when spices and carne rest after being mixed and formed. Then, once cooked, those flavors continue to blossom until reheated and served at breakfast or lunch, or tomorrow's dinner.

Look for detail recipes for gluten-free Porcupine Meatballs and gluten-free Caldo de Albondigas in upcoming La Bloga-Tuesday columns. Here is a link to a La Bloga-Tuesday column featuring Mexican Chicano Fish Soup, Caldo de Pescado.

Soup: Caldo de Pescado

https://labloga.blogspot.com/2025/02/review-regalos-gluten-free-caldo-de.html

Ingredients with carb counts FYI

Everything- <100 grams carbs or 25 g per bowl

6 oz fillet Cod 0 gm
Black peppercorns (ground is just fine) - 1g per tsp
Carrots - 8g per cup, boiled
Celery - 4g per cup raw
Cilantro - .7 per sprig
Garlic - 1g per clove
Elote - 17.12g
Onion - 10g large bulb
Rice - 45g cup cooked 
Salt - 0g
Tomato - 4g each
Bay leaf-.45g
Jalapeño chile-.83g
Serrano chile-.41g
Water to make 4 bowls
Butter-.01g

This is an incredibly useful carbohydrate counter: (link):https://www.carbohydrate-counter.org/advsearch.php