French food focus-About living and cooking in rural France,recipes,lifestyle,comments

FRENCH FOOD FOCUS Latest Post Other Posts Recent Older Truffles Cassoulet Index of Recipes L inks House Sitters FiFi About me About 'My' France Comments to: yankinparisot@gmail.com Archives		Life in rural France - Food - Friends - Wine - Cheese - Comments Welcome to French Food Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food and because I live in rural France the stress will be upon French food. There are numerous posts concerning life in France and, certainly, opinions about anything that strikes my fancy. If you have some good recipes or if you want to rave about any great French restaurants this is the place to do it. I hope you enjoy my ramblings about rural France! Click Here to send me a comment
		This is our village. Our house is the white one at the top right.
	Gluten Free This seems to be the latest mantra. All of a sudden people we know are becoming gluten intolerant. Why I don't know, perhaps its to do with age or gender. Both of the sufferers we know are female and over 60. I'm not implying that there's anything psychosomatic about this because they truly do suffer effects if they eat anything with gluten in it. All of this, you guessed it, leading up to a tale and a recipe. We had 10 for dinner last night two of whom are gluten intolerant. Our starter was oven roasted tomatoes with garlic, basil and balsamic vinegar. Now, you have to have bread with this dish; not to would be criminal. Difficult, but my clever wife had found gluten free bread at the supermarket. I can't say that it looked much, but both guests said it tasted fine. The rest of us had to suffer 'tintin' with our tomatoes. Its just about my favorite bread. We were Ok for our main course as it was cold roast pork loin with a mustard & sage sauce accompanied by Caponata and green beans. Cheese followed, but they still had the gluten free bread to put their St Felician on. Dessert. Here's where the real tale starts. Several months ago we were invited to tea at some new friend's house. They're still renovating, but you can see that its going to be a great place. Anyway they served an orange cake with the tea. It was absolutely delicious, fabulous in fact. It turned out that it was John, a recently retires solicitor, who had made the cake. We were lucky enough to have it a second time at the Shakespeare picnic (see a few blogs back). Knowing John better by then we asked for the recipe which he gladly supplied. Now, we hadn't realized that the orange cake was gluten free until we actually read the recipe. So I made it myself for the first time last night. And I must say that it was wonderful, again. I loved it and so did our guests both those gluten intolerant and the rest of us. Thanks to John here's the recipe: Orange & Almond Cake Ingredients: (These ingredients are right for an 8" diameter spring form cake tin. Or, as I did, you can use a 10" angel food cake tin. (the type with a hole in the middle)) 2 large oranges 6 eggs 8 oz (250g) ground almonds 8 oz (250g) light brown sugar (golden caster sugar if you're English) 1 teaspoon Baking powder Method: Boil/simmer the whole oranges for about 2 hours until soft. Allow to cool, cut up into chunks and remove any seeds. Puree the oranges, skins & all in a blender or food processor. Pre- heat the oven to 190 degrees C (375 F.) Beat the eggs until they are smooth and pale. Mix in the almonds, sugar and baking powder and blend well. Add the pureed orange to the egg mixture. Pour the cake batter into the buttered cake tin. Place in the pre-heated oven and bake for about 1 hour or until a skewer comes out clean. Serve with crème fraiche, whipped cream or ice cream. I made a little orange sauce using the zest (boil for 5 minutes to soften) and juice from another orange plus sugar. Simply put the zest, juice and sugar into a pan & boil until the mixture thickens. To serve place a spoon full of the sauce on a plate and put the cake slice on top of it. My thanks to John. This is a terrific recipe AND its gluten free. Try it you'll love it!