Viviana Gluten Free Pasta Recipe

Viviana Gluten Free Pasta Recipe: We always love it when our friends share a recipe with us using our gluten free pasta.  The Viviana gluten free pasta used in this recipe was our gluten free sweet potato orzo.  The recipe comes from Chef Oonagh, a friend we met at the Gluten and Allergen Free Expo in Dallas this past year.  She is a wonderful chef, and very knowledgeable in gluten free cooking and gluten free eating topics.  Visit her face book page for more recipes@Gluten-Free-Cooking-With-Oonagh

 

Braised Pork with Hard Apple Cider

Here's the photo of my pork in hard apple cider with a tower of your sweet potato orzo, plus recipe.  I included the pork recipe with the photo.

With all the rushing around before Christmas and all the fudge, toffee, fruit cake, cheesecake and other goodies I was making, I adapted one of my old recipes by throwing it in the slow cooker and leaving it alone. My original recipe pan fried skinless, boneless chicken breast with apple slices, onion and hard apple cider, and then pureed the cooked liquid, added cream and thickened. Lovely, but I didn't have the time. So I almost literally threw cubes of boneless pork spare ribs in the slow cooker with apple, onion, cider, left it to cook, added some grain Dijon mustard, thickened it and served it with Viviana gluten free sweet potato orzo.

Note: We used to be told that hard apple cider was gluten free. Now unfortunately, and for no reason I can understand, too many hard apple ciders are being fermented with barley and therefore no longer gluten free. So check the label to be sure it is clearly labeled gluten free.

I grew up on what we just call ‘cider’ in England, including ‘scrumpy’ straight from the farm and probably of a higher alcoholic content than factory produced cider. You can also make this with regular apple cider.

2 tablespoons (30ml) olive oil

2 tablespoons (30ml) butter

2 Granny Smith or Gala, Fuji, Braeburn apples, peeled, cored and roughly chopped,

1 onion, peeled and roughly chopped

1-2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely crushed

1+1/2 lb boneless pork spare ribs, cut into 2 inch chunks

1 x 12 oz (355ml) bottle of hard cider or apple juice

½ cup (120 ml) gf chicken stock

salt and pepper

1/2 tablespoon dried sage.

1 tbsp (15ml) gf cornstarch (cornflour in UK) blended with water (optional)

1/2 c (120ml) whipping/heavy cream – optional

1-2 tsp grain Dijon mustard

1. Add olive oil and butter to skillet, add pork, apple and onion to pan, and brown over medium heat. If you have a slow cooker than can be used on a stove top, brown pork etc in slow cooker. If not, brown in skillet and then transfer pork etc to slow cooker.

2. Add cider, chicken stock, sage, salt and pepper and leave to cook. Timings do depend on your slow cooker. Stove top, the pork was tender in less than an hour. Thicken with cornstarch if necessary, add cream if wanted and cook together for a further 3 minutes over gentle heat. Taste and adjust seasoning.

3. I served this with Viviana Foods gluten free sweet potato orzo, mixed with some butter and chopped fresh parsley.

You can read Chef Oonagh's gluten free blog at www.royaltemptations.com/blog , get her cookbook, Delicious Gluten Free Cooking and like her on Facebook at Gluten Free Cooking with Oonagh. Listen to her radio segment 'Not your Whaskwawy Whabbit Food' on her blog as well as watch her regular appearances on NH's ABC Cooks Corner.