GF Fruit Cobbler

Well, it's really Wednesday, so this probably shouldn't be tagged "If it's Tuesday, it must be gluten-free!" I'm a day behind myself this week. We're passing a cold around, and this morning I woke up to discover I'm it.

Something comforting is in order, I think.

The basic idea for this cobbler comes from More-with-Less by Doris Janzen Longacre. I'm on my second copy, and it's getting pretty tattered, so I handle it gingerly. It's not a gluten-free cookbook, but I've been able to adapt some of the recipes so far. The recipes are pretty simple and basic, and this is the cookbook (along with Laurel's Kitchen, during a mostly vegetarian phase) that taught me most of what I know about cooking from scratch. This is the cookbook that taught me to make chocolate pudding without the pudding package from the store. This is also the cookbook that fueled our love affair with cobbler -- especially made with fresh-picked wild blackberries, but also great with blueberries or peaches or any combination of berries and peaches.

My quick-and-sloppy GF flour mix works well in this recipe. (See below.)

Fresh, canned or frozen fruit, it doesn't matter. This cobbler always comes out right. You make the batter first and pour it into the baking dish, sprinkle fruit over the top, and bake. The fruit sinks to the bottom, the batter rises to the top, light and fluffy, and bakes to a lovely golden brown while filling the house with an enticing fragrance. I doubled the recipe to serve the five of us (people around here are greedy when it comes to cobbler), and it disappears quickly. I cut it up into six portions and put one away for Dad's lunchbox.

Easy GF Fruit Cobbler
based on Quick Fruit Cobbler from More-with-Less

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 10" x 13" baking pan. Mix the following ingredients, beat until smooth, and pour into pan, spreading to the edges. It'll make a thin layer.

1 cup sugar (I can cut this by almost half and still get a fairly decent result)
1 cup GF flour mix
1 cup milk (I've tried regular milk, raw milk, coconut milk, almond milk, and rice milk by turns. They all work.)
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 to 1/2 tsp. salt

Now it's time for the fruit! You can make an all-one-kind cobbler (we often do, especially when we've just come back from berry-picking), or you can mix different fruits. This recipe is very forgiving -- it takes fresh, canned, or frozen fruit. I'd drain canned fruit first, if I were you. If you use frozen fruit, your baking time is going to be somewhat longer. How long? I can't tell you. We pretty much tell when it's done by peeking in the oven when we can't stand the wonderful smell any longer. When it's golden-brown-and-delicious (is that Rachel Ray?), it's ready to eat.

We haven't tried this with apples, yet, as we usually make Apple Crisp or baked apples or apple pie with those.

You want your fruit in somewhat even pieces, although I've been known to slice peaches (or use canned sliced peaches) and lay them in a pretty pattern, before sprinkling with blueberries or blackberries.

Scatter about 4 cups of fruit across the surface of the cobbler. Bake about 40 minutes. It's really good served warm with cream, whipped cream, or ice cream. In the unlikely event you have any left over, it makes a great breakfast, cold.

Quick GF Flour Mix

My quickly cobbled-together flour mix, that works well for simple scratch recipes, contains approximately:

1/2 cup rice flour (white or brown seem to work about the same)
1/4 cup tapioca or corn starch
1/4 cup sorghum flour or millet flour

Mix these together before you add them to the rest of the ingredients.

What's quick about it is that it seems to work well even if I don't measure carefully. GF flours can be unforgiving. You don't want to pack them down in the measuring cup. You don't usually want to scoop them from the flour container with a measuring cup; you want to scoop them gently into the cup and level off, not pack down. However, with this mix I just stick the 1/2 or 1/4 cup measure into the flour/starch I'm grabbing and lightly scoop it up, scrape the excess off the top of the cup with the blade of a knife, and dump it into the mix.

I linked up this post to the Domestic Arts Link Up 1st Edition. Check it out here! Lots of good information.