Bob's Red Mill GF bread mix

I'm due to write a post about beans and I have a great new recipe to share, but that can wait until later in the week.

In an effort to save money, I didn't buy a case of gluten-free bread from the coop this month. I've been trying to bake it instead. Oh, those gluten-free breads are fickle. If you under cook them, even a tiny bit, they sink. And you can't depend on them to turn brown at the right time--some of the gluten free breads never to brown. This week I tried a mix from Bob's Red Mill. It looked promising though the price of the mix is about equal to the price of a loaf so I won't be buying it again. I didn't cook the bread long enough and it sunk. It was delicious warm from the oven with butter and now tastes just ok, a bit rubbery and strange. I bet its the bean flours they used. I just don't like bean flour in my baked goods. The bread did rise like a champ which made me sing for a short time. From all my reading I think if I really want to bake my own gluten free bread, I need a bread machine. But then, in the long run, maybe the case of dependable rice flour bread is as cost effective as I'm gonna get.

After two years of duds

Another food post from my old blog:

It snowed another 3 inches or so last night. Now the wind is whipping around and it is penetrate-the- down- jacket cold. The paper this morning said to expect more of the same for the rest of winter, which officially starts today (it started a month ago in my mind). I would be relaxing with something warm except my girls are out there, liable to be blown away, laughing as they climb up a snow mountain and then slide down. So I write and glance out the window and write some more. It reminds me of Christmas flavors and sights and sounds. Hot chocolate and cookies, blustering snow. Like the movies. My Christmases have rarely been this snowy.

And I write because I just remembered my discovery. I want to share a recipe with my dear friends who have food issues. I've searched and never found a chocolate chip cookie recipe worth my time that was gluten-free. They always taste sandy, and are unpleasantly thin, like a wafer--not at all what I crave when thinking of a cc cookie. Sometimes I haven't even been able to get them off the cookie sheet. But my dear friends I found one. And gluten-eating folks, who don't even know what gluten is, eat these and say, "Yum." It took me a while to make this recipe as I didn't have Teff flour. Never even heard of it. I have sorghum, tapioca, rice, corn, potato, buckwheat, and amaranth flours. But not Teff. Turns out teff is the smallest grain in the world--so small they can't remove the bran and the germ so it's a great source of fiber which can be lacking in those starchy gluten-free flours. Buy some teff friends and try these cookies, they are worth it. Oh and the recipe calls for muscovado sugar, which is an unrefined dark brown sugar that gets its color from the sugarcane rather than from adding molasses to white sugar. But I just used normal brown sugar, it was still delicious. And the recipe? It is at the bottom of this long post on Shauna James's blog. You don't need to read the story behind the recipe, it is long. But Shauna is a a writer that I admire. Her phrasings are beautiful and she inspires me, the reluctant cook, to get in the kitchen. Enjoy.