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Mimi’s Cafe Gluten-Free Menu

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff 5 Comments

Wondering if Mimi’s Cafe offers a gluten-free menu? We recently got a new Mimi’s Cafe in my area and being that they are a national chain, I decided to look into the possibility of gluten-free offerings.

Official Website Menu Information: Mimi’s Cafe Gluten-Free Menu
Location Finder: Find a Mimi’s Cafe Location Near You

As of the date of this post, it doesn’t appear that Mimi’s Cafe has released an official gluten-free menu on their website, however after contacting the company I was directed to the following gluten-free menu information which should be good at any Mimi’s Cafe location. Of course, once this information is available on their official website I will update this post!

Mimis Café Gluten-Free Menu Offerings

Breakfast Safe Gluten-Free Offerings:

  • Low Fat Fitness Omelette: Egg Whites, Mushrooms, Steamed Broccoli, and Tomatoes Served With Tomato Slices
  • Ham, Cheddar, And Broccoli Omelet: Eggs, Diced Ham, Steamed Broccoli, and Cheddar Cheese Served With Seasoned Breakfast Potatoes
  • Monterey Omelette: Eggs, Jack Cheese, Smoked Bacon Strips, And Avocado Served With Seasoned Breakfast Potatoes
  • Smoked Bacon, Link Sausage, Or Ham And Eggs: Eggs Cooked Any Style With a Choice Of Bacon, Sausage, Or Ham Served With Seasoned Breakfast Potatoes

Lunch And Dinner Safe Gluten-Free Offerings:

  • Dinner Salad: Baby Greens, Carrots, Tomato, and Cucumbers Served With No Croutons, And a Choice Of Olive Oil, Lemon, Or Balsamic Vinegar
  • Mimis Chopped Cobb: Iceberg Lettuce, Diced Turkey, Tomatoes, Bleu Cheese ( Safe), Bacon Bits, Green Onions, Hard Boiled Eggs, and Avocado Served With a Choice Of Olive Oil, Lemon, Or Balsamic Vinegar
  • Bleu Cheese & Walnut Salad: Baby Greens, Walnuts, Bleu Cheese, Tomatoes, Bacon Bits, Dried Cranberries, and Strawberries With a Choice Of Olive Oil, Lemon, Or Balsamic Vinegar
  • Chicken, Fruit, And Baby Greens: Broiled Non-Marinated Chicken Breast, Baby Greens, Seasonal Fruit, Dried Cranberries, and Diced Tomatoes With a Choice Of Olive Oil, Lemon, Or Balsamic Vinegar
  • Petite Citrus Salmon: Broiled Non-Marinated Salmon With Baby Greens, Orange, Lemon, And Lime Wedges, and Strawberries With a Choice Of Olive Oil, Lemon, Or Balsamic Vinegar
  • Chicken, Fruit, And Baby Greens: Broiled Non-Marinated Chicken Breast, Baby Greens, Seasonal Fruit, Carrots, and Diced Tomatoes With a Choice Of Olive Oil, Lemon, Or Balsamic Vinegar
  • Salmon Hollandaise: Broiled Non-Marinated Salmon With Broiled Asparagus, Lemon Hollandaise Mashed Potatoes, Jasmine Rice, Or Baby Bakers
  • Broiled Mahi Mahi Dinner: Broiled Non-Marinated Mahi Mahi With Seasonal Vegetables And Mashed Potatoes, Jasmine Rice, Or Baby Bakers
  • Slow Roasted Turkey Breast: Roasted Turkey Hand Sliced, Seasonal Dinner Vegetables, Cranberry Orange Relish And Mashed Potatoes, Jasmine Rice, Or Baby Bakers
  • Cp (Children’s)Slow Roasted Turkey Breast: Roasted Turkey Hand Sliced, Seasonal Dinner Vegetables, Cranberry Orange Relish And Mashed Potatoes, Jasmine Rice, Or Baby Bakers
  • (Cp) Or Adult Naked Turkey Or Beef Chuck Burger: A Turkey Or Chuck Beef Patty Cooked To Order, Wrapped In Lettuce, Tomato, And Red Onion Served With Seasonal Fruit.
    11_2009
  • (Cp) Children’s Corn Quesadilla: Corn Tortillas Cooked In A Sauté Pan With Cheddar Cheese And Fruit.
  • Broiled Chicken Dinner: Broiled Non-Marinated Chicken Breast, With Seasonal Vegetables And Mashed Potatoes, Jasmine Rice, Or Baby Bakers
  • Broiled Spiced Flat Iron Steak: Broiled Choice Flat Iron Lightly Seasoned With Cajun Spice, Topped With Garlic Mushrooms And Red Onions ( Cooked In Separate Pan), With A Drizzle Of Au Jus ( gluten-free), With Seasonal Vegetables And Mashed Potatoes, Jasmine Rice, Or Baby Bakers
    Desserts:
  • Mimis Mousse Ensemble Or Individual Petite Treats: Lemon W Marinated Blueberries, Chocolate W/ Strawberries, And Raspberry With Whipped Cream
  • Ice Cream And Fresh Strawberries are Available If Ice Cream Is Ok. Also, We Can Hand Cut A Fruit Salad For You Consisting Of, Melon, Watermelon, Orange, Berries, And More.

To read more about this restaurant, check out our recent review of Mimi’s Cafe’s gluten-free options.

As always, when dining out gluten-free, do your due diligence and make sure the staff understands your needs. There are very few restaurants that are 100% gluten-free, so cross-contamination is always a risk. If you don’t feel comfortable with what you are hearing from the staff, perhaps it is best to dine elsewhere.

For information about other gluten-free restaurants menus, check out our gluten-free restaurants page.

Recipe: Chicken & Black Bean Soup Casserole

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff 1 Comment

Gluten-Free Café introduced several soups many months ago, including their version of Chicken Noodle. If you missed Kim’s review of it, you can read it here. I wasn’t overly impressed with that gluten-free Café soup, but I decided to try the Black Bean soup from the line anyway.

The soup sat in the pantry for a while because I didn’t want to use it as soup. I wanted to use it to make a casserole of some kind. Finally, last week, I thought of something to make with the Black Bean soup. Even though I made this dish on a weekend evening, I was in a rush to get dinner together. The result was a surprisingly tasty casserole and it can be modified easily to suit one’s personal preferences.

Ingredients:

  • 3 C. cooked chicken pieces (I used left over rotisserie chicken)
  • 1 can black bean soup
  • ¾ C. shredded cheddar cheese
  • Fritos corn chips (optional)

Instructions:

  1. Mix chicken, soup and cheese together and put into a greased baking dish.
  2. Top mixture with corn chips (regular size or crushed Scoops chips)
  3. Bake in 350 degree oven for 30 minutes.
  4. Serve over fresh green salad or rice.
  5. Top with sour cream if desired.

There are several things you can do to jazz up this basic casserole. The soup is very good, but not very spicy so I might add minced jalapenos or green chilies the next time I make the casserole. You could use Mexican cheese instead of plain cheddar and you could add corn or other veggies to it as well.

Even though not much thought went into making this last minute dish, my husband liked it so much that he had three servings, finishing off the entire thing. It really was very good and with a little tweaking, it could be outstanding. That is my kind of recipe – simple to make using only a few ingredients.

Sometimes people get stuck in a rut when they are on a restricted diet for whatever reason. It can be easier to just rotate several tried and true dishes again and again, instead of making something new. It took me quite a while to trust myself to start throwing things together without following a recipe.

As much fun as it is to follow a great recipe and end up with wonderful results, it’s even more rewarding when you open up the pantry and fridge and figure out how to use what you find to create something new. It doesn’t have to be complicated or a masterpiece. Have fun with your gluten-free creations – you never know what you might come up with next!

Recipe: Gluten-Free Cornbread

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff 5 Comments

Do you like cornbread? I love cornbread! As I began to write this post, I googled to see if cornbread was 1 or 2 words. I found a lot of different answers, though I think I like this one the best. It seems that it can be spelled cornbread or cornbread. So, there you have it. If anyone knows any different, please let me know!

Cornbread goes with so many meals – chili or other Mexican dishes, a southern-style breakfast, BBQ ribs, hot soups, and more. I have even experimented with several different variations, including pumpkin cornbread! When I first went gluten-free, I was using Gluten-Free Pantry’s Yankee Cornbread mix. It is simple to prepare and easy to find in stores. The end result tastes great, too! There are other mixes on the market that are equally as good – Pamela’s Cornbread mix and Bob’s Red Mill Cornbread mix just to name a couple.

Another option is to make your own cornbread from scratch using cornmeal and any recipe that you may have used previously or that you can find. I have used the one on the side of the Quaker cornmeal box numerous times with good results. I typically use any gluten-free flour mix that I have on hand for the flour. If using the Quaker cornmeal makes you nervous, there are companies that make gluten-free cornmeal, such as Bob’s Red Mill.

I often make cornbread into muffins so that I can easily freeze them & then grab them when I need to without defrosting the whole batch. Sometimes the kids will eat them for breakfast with a little butter & jelly. Another idea is to use cornbread crumbs for breading chicken or a casserole topping. I always make cornbread stuffing (or dressing if you are from the south) for the holidays.

Here is a simple recipe to make cornbread from scratch:

Cornbread

**From the back of the Quaker Yellow Corn Meal Box

***Double this for the stuffing

  • 1 ¼ cups Pamela’s Baking Mix
  • ¾ cup cornmeal (Used Bob’s Red Mill Stone Ground Cornmeal)
  • ¼ cup sugar (1/8 cup for stuffing cornbread)
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • ½ tsp salt (I omitted this b/c there is salt in Pamela’s baking mix)
  • 1 cup buttermilk (the box says to use skim, I like buttermilk in my cornbread)
  • ¼ cup vegetable oil (I use canola)
  • 2 egg whites or 1 egg beaten (I used the beaten egg)

Heat oven to 400. Pam 8 or 9-inch baking pan. Combine dry ingredients. Stir in milk, oil, and egg, mixing just until dry ingredients are moistened. Pour into pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown and the toothpick comes out clean.

Review: Uncle Maddio’s Gluten-Free Pizza

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff Leave a Comment

Many months ago, a restaurant in the Toco Hills shopping center in Atlanta, Uncle Maddio’s Pizza, began offering gluten-free pizza. There seemed to be a bit of confusion on the part of the restaurant in the beginning about what safe gluten-free service involved. At least that is what several gluten-free customers there reported was happening. With the help of those patrons, the restaurant tweaked a few things about how they prepared the gluten-free pizzas and their gluten-free customer base grew.

The Toco Hills shopping center is a landmark in Atlanta. Thinking about it brings back memories of visiting my Grandmother up here when I was a teenager. She lived near there and one time, my cousin and I got to see a movie (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees) at the shopping center by ourselves. What a big deal that was for two thirteen-year-olds! The theatre has long since closed and the shopping center has gone through many transformations since then. Currently, it’s being renovated yet again.

We found ourselves needing to have lunch in the Brookhaven area on a Sunday and our first choice for lunch was closed.  We decided to trek over to Uncle Maddios to check out their gluten-free pizza for ourselves. We were the first customers of the day and I had called earlier in the week to find out about sauces, dressings, and so forth. We needed to know what we could order when we arrived because like a lot of places in our area, your order upon entering the restaurant.

The team at Uncle Maddio’s Pizza makes fresh sauces and dressings daily. They use good quality ingredients and offer good value for regular and gluten-free pizzas and salads. We decided to order one pizza and one salad and split them between us. We chose a gluten-free pizza with black olives, mushrooms, pepperoni, and a Greek salad. The build-your-own-pizzas comes with three toppings which is not the case with any other pizza joint here that offers gluten-free pizza (that I’m aware of).

After we ordered, we noticed that the cook got out a gluten-free crust and put the sauce on it with a ladle. The ladle touched the crust and then the ladle went into the sauce container. See the problem? It wasn’t an issue for us because our pizza was the first (of any kind) being made the day.  However, it might prove a problem for other gluten-free patrons. This is exactly what so many people had reported was happening months ago, but eventually many also reported that the place seemed to get the hang of safe preparation for gluten-free crusts.

Maybe the guy making our pizza knew that since our pizza was the first made that day, it didn’t matter if the ladle touched the crust since it had not touched a gluten crust. Maybe there are two containers for each sauce – one for gluten pizzas and one for gluten-free. I’m not really sure what their procedure is and I was taking the day off from being the gluten-free police. I’d go back to Uncle Maddio’s again, but would ask for a new container of sauce and a fresh ladle to be used, unless I was the first customer of the day.

In the end, our pizza was very good and truly gluten-free. It was the smallest-sized gluten-free pizza I’ve been served here, but for the cost, it’s still a great value. It’s a thin crispy crust and it didn’t have an odd taste, texture, or aftertaste to it. Hopefully, the staff will review and improve their gluten-free pizza building technique, because if they prepare the gluten-free pizzas the way mine was prepared (after making gluten pizzas), it is likely that some people would have problems with the finished product.

Review: Gluten-Free Bisquick

Last Updated on by the Celiac-Disease.com Staff 50 Comments

Some of our readers might have been excited by the news in this post about the introduction of gluten-free Bisquick. I know I was as excited as anyone and I never even used regular Bisquick when I ate gluten. Finally, the new Betty Crocker mix arrived in my area. When I read the ingredients on the box of the much anticipated gluten-free Bisquick, I was somewhat disappointed. The first ingredient is rice flour and the second one is sugar. Generally speaking, something with a lot of rice flour doesn’t appeal that much to me. At least, it doesn’t when it comes to baking mixes. I decided that I’d just make biscuits with the new Bisquick because I could not imagine that pancakes made with it could compete with my three favorite pancake mixes.

The pancake mixes from Gluten-Free Naturals, Pamela’s Products and King Arthur Flour all make excellent pancakes. Even though all of those mixes contain rice flour, there are enough of other types of flours to counteract the negatives of rice flour. There is nothing wrong with rice flour, of course. I just personally tend to like things that are lighter on it than other flours. The Gluten-free Naturals mix contains soy flour which I think mimics gluten flour very well. Pamela’s mixes are heavy on almond flour. The King Arthur mix must contain enough tapioca starch and potato starch to keep the pancakes from tasting grainy or bland.

Even though I’d originally planned to wait and make biscuits with the new Bisquick, I decided that making pancakes with it was the most important test I could do with the new mix. The 16 oz. box sells for $4.19 at Publix in the Atlanta area. There are only about 2 ¾ cups of flour in the small pouch inside the box so it’s a fairly pricey mix. With two strikes against it (ingredients and price) I tried to be hopeful about how pancakes made with the gluten-free Bisquick would taste.

I mixed up the batter very quickly. You add an egg, some milk and some canola (or vegetable) oil to the flour and that’s it. The batter seemed thin but I wanted to follow the instructions to a ‘t’ so I did. The amount of batter the recipe on the box yields is supposed to make 10 pancakes. Apparently, I poured too much batter out for mine (it called for ¼ cup each), since I only got 7 pancakes out of it. As they cooked, bubbles formed just like with other pancakes. The pancakes turned golden brown and were easy to flip. They seemed a bit heavy on the spatula as I moved the cooked pancakes to our plates. I hoped I was imagining that part of the experiment.

Unfortunately, the pancakes were very heavy in terms of texture – unlike all the gluten-free pancakes we make with the brands noted above. They had a bit of a grainy taste as well. However, the worst part was the fact that they had a “skin “on them. My husband actually came up with that term. He said “I don’t remember the pancakes we usually eat having a thick skin like these do”. No, he wouldn’t because none of them have any type of  “skin”. I might be able to overlook that weird aspect of the pancakes if they tasted good. They were much too dense for pancakes and tasted rather bland. I was so disappointed in the taste and texture of the pancakes that I didn’t finish eating mine.

With any new product, there are usually some pros and cons. I listed what I thought those were regarding pancakes made with the long awaited gluten-free Bisquick from Betty Crocker (a General Mills company).

Bisquick Gluten-Free – the good and the bad (my personal opinion).

  • Pros: sold in mainstream grocery stores; easy to mix; manufactured in gluten-free facility; made by a respected mainstream (Big 5) food company.
  • Cons: grainy texture; thick “skin”; too heavy; not enough pancakes per batch of batter (only makes 10 if pancakes are quite small).

Ever since General Mills jumped on the gluten-free gravy train, I’ve tried to support their efforts in any way I could. I would like to do the same with this new mix. Even though I personally won’t be making pancakes with the gluten-free Bisquick again, I think everyone should absolutely buy the mix and decide for themselves if it’s for them or not. What one person likes has nothing to do with what others might like. It would be best for everyone to make their own mind up about this new mix. General Mills definitely deserves that much from our community.