Gluten Free Baking Mix or It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Vegan

Elise,

Alison was visiting and I had just read about C4C (the Gluten Free baking mix from Thomas Keller’s kitchen that is rocking the GF world), and I’ve been eyeing the King Arthur Flour Gluten Free Baking Mix for a while.

It was all coming together. 

I made chocolate chip cookies.

I used the David Lebovitz Salted Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe.  I tripled the recipe (it makes a very small batch). 

I had to distinguish the three different types.  In case I got confused, I didn’t want to mistakenly feed a flour cookie to Alison. So the C4C got chocolate chunks with walnuts, the KAF got chocolate chips with walnuts and the flour got coconut. 

I didn’t want to have to mix up three separate batches, so I made one big batch up through the vanilla. I then measured this and divided it in 3 parts with my truly awesome combination measuring cup scale. 

The dough was better from the C4C and the flour. (Can we just stipulate that the flour was good?) 

The KAF mix was gritty in dough form. Here is a point to ponder—the DL recipe wants you to let the dough rest in the refrigerator for 24 hours. I didn’t bother with this step. The grittiness in many gluten free mixes comes from the rice flour. Now I wonder if a 24 hour rest would help that, since the rice flour would have an opportunity to absorb some liquid and soften?

The results were mixed. Alison liked the KAF. Jamie liked the C4C. The boys just wanted more than one. I thought that when baked up, the three were pretty indistinguishable. 

I’ll stick with flour, but it is reassuring to know that my gluten free friends and family can have something other than those peanut butter cookies.

MORE

Elise,

Ab’s yoga teacher likes to say, “More isn’t necessarily better, it’s just more.” This is true if you are talking about the angle of your downward dog. If you are talking about whipped cream, it makes no sense at all.

Occasionally, I send someone a recipe that I have made and loved. I send it with stars and exclamation points scribbled in the margins. And occasionally, I hear back that it was bland, uninteresting, am I sure I sent the right recipe? I think this happened when I sent you the recipe for winter vegetable cobbler.

As I pondered this, bewildered by the failure, and questioning my taste, I realized that I don’t follow recipes. And I stray from the ingredient list, measurements, proportions, final instructions, so unconsciously that it doesn’t occur to me to add those addendums to the recipe before I mail it off. I assume everyone adds extra raisins and substitutes black olives for green. Who likes green olives?!

(I’m not as bad as the reviewer on Epicurious who, in writing about Turkey Apricot Meat Loaf with a Tamari Glaze, said, “Wonderful, I substituted lamb for the turkey and left out the apricots. Also didn’t bother with the glaze. A real keeper!” )

 Here’s what I did to that recipe. I used more turkey and more onions than called for. I added mushrooms and chopped kale because they are super immunity foods. And I doubled the glaze. But I didn’t review it. (I called this Super Immunity Loaf and while it wasn’t great, for as healthy as it was, it was NOT bad.)

There is a trend to my recipe alterations and it can be summed up as MORE. A teaspoon of cinnamon becomes a heaping teaspoon; a teaspoon of vanilla is a healthy splash. A cup and a half of chocolate chips? Use the whole bag! I am somewhat circumspect with baking. I leave the important ingredients (flour, baking soda) alone. But I never make a spice cake without at least doubling the spices. As written, can anyone even detect the cloves?? More lemon zest, more dried cherries, more pie filling. And always always always, more frosting!!

For savory dishes, MORE can be an attempt to make the dish healthier (Super Immunity Loaf) or more to my liking, sweet potatoes and raisins are a welcome addition to just about any soup or stew. Or it can be an effort to clean out the refrigerator. Two tablespoons of mashed potatoes and the left over Brussels sprouts will go great in the wilted spinach salad! That braised cabbage isn’t going to last another day, so toss it in with the scrambled eggs. (This may be what evolves from cooking-for-one.)

Frequently but with less dramatic results, recipe alterations involve a subtraction, again this is nearly unconscious. I don’t even see Parsley on an ingredient list. I haven’t added parsley to anything but dog food for as long as I can remember. Celery is slowly joining parsley and garlic isn’t far behind. Parsley, celery and garlic are commonly called for and rarely missed. If you are making garlic bread, OK, add the garlic, but two cloves in a Bolognese sauce are immaterial.

As for that whipped cream—it improves just about anything. If it is called for, add more. If it isn’t called for, serve it on the side. Sweetened, it enhances any dessert, hides flaws (cake too dry, pie too bland), helps healthy foods to pass as dessert (plain berries, poached fruit, jello made from juice), and the leftovers are agreeable in coffee the next morning. Savory whipped cream can take a tomato soup from just OK, to ethereal. Flavored with basil, it is a startling and delightful addition to corn and crab aspic.

I guess the take-away is, add more of what’s called for, except for the waste-of-time-three; more of what you want, super immunity foods; and more of what you like, whipped cream.

The Markets of Majorca

Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...

The front of the olive stand - fresh, local, sustainable, in pottery crocks...

The back of the olive stand, and the empty cans...

This man was making donuts. I like the expression on the boy's face.

Snails were big in Inca, a town in the middle of the island.

The requisites fruits and vegetables

 Majorcan sponges, who knew?

Lemon Mousse

Dear Margaret,

I've been meaning to give you the details on the lemon mousse for so long now that I'm afraid I may have forgotten some of them. But I'll give it a whirl.

Rebecca brought Meyer lemons from her parent's tree when she came to visit and I wanted to make something special with them to showcase the delicate flavor. I did a roast chicken with slices of lemon on it that was delicious, but I wanted to make a desert with the remaining ones. You know, something special. Like desert.

Lemon mousse seemed like the perfect vehicle for the juicy goodness of these golden globes. I thought about using Belle's recipe for Lemon Souffle, which is really a mousse, but it has raw egg whites and that seemed unnecessarily risky. I will happily risk my health for cookie dough, but not for a lemon mousse that I could make just as well without the risk of a hospital stay.

I found a few lemon curd recipes on line and in books and set to work.

3 large eggs
3 large eggs yolks
1/2 cup sugar
zest of 2 Meyer lemons
1/2 cup Meyer  lemon juice
pinch of salt
2 sticks unsalted butter, cut up into pieces about a tablespoon size

Put the eggs, yolks, sugar, zest, juice salt all into the top part of a double boiler set over medium heat. Whisk like crazy to keep it from scrambling. Scrambled eggs with sugar and lemon juice in them are icky. Trust me.

Whisk, whisk, whisk until it starts to get frothy and bubbly. Keep whisking. It will start to thicken and turn into a lemon cream. Keep whisking. This took me about 10 minutes or so, in Idaho so at 5,500'. Might be different in Seattle or Virginia.

Once it's reached the desired consistency, take it off the heat and add the butter a few pieces at the time, continuing to whisk until the butter is melted and fully incorporated. Then add a few more pieces, until you've used up all the butter.

Now strain it through a fine mesh strainer to remove any stray strands of lemon flavored scrambled eggs. Place plastic wrap on top of the curd, actually touching it, to prevent a skin from forming, and chill for several  hours.

After licking the bowl and the whisk, and the fine mesh strainer I hoped that the plastic wrap would provide a deterrent to eating the rest of it with a tablespoon. It helped a little.

When you are ready to serve the mousse, whip 2 cups of cream to soft peaks, and gently fold in the lemon curd.

My, oh my. Oh my.

Rememberance of Things Past or Grits Souffle

A few weeks ago Alison sent around a picture of Jamie and Sam taking a lovely golden orb out of the oven - Belle's grits souffle, an old childhood favorite of hers. I remember Belle so well. She was a marvel. Everything she made was full of butter and sugar and tasted amazing. When I was a vegetarian I'd ask her, Belle, how do you feel? And she'd tip her head back, making her appear even shorter than her already not so big self, and roar out, I falafel! and bust up laughing. Her white stockings made a rustling sound as she sped around the kitchen, making cinnamon rolls, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, Carmelitas and grits souffle, apparently.

I remember Sue as the originator of the grits souffle recipe, but Mom clarified that it was originally Aunt Mary Harry's recipe and that Sue introduced it to us, since Aunt Mary Harry was on Henry's side of that marrying-cousins family. 

I also remember it as much flatter than the current photo. But I had fond memories of it none-the-less so set to work. Mom and Abby were coming for dinner and Downton Abby so that seemed the perfect opportunity. I planned porkchops with bitter winter greens from Epicurious to balance the richness and Pineapple Upside Downton Cake for desert (that's another story, but it doesn't have a happy ending).

The original recipe calls for heating milk and butter, adding the grits and cooking til thick, then beating for 5 minutes and baking in a souffle dish. Abby and Mom were due at seven and my unfailing belief that I could do just one more thing before getting ready meant I was late and not ready. Consequently, there was a temper tantrum, followed by some bellowed curses when the milk boiled over because I had it on too high because I wanted it to boil faster. Right. in my post-tantrum state of excess adrenalin I forgot the part about cooking the grits and just went right to the 5 minutes of beating.

The result mirrored the geographical deposition that you would see on a canyon wall. The lowest layer, the sedimentary layer, was like dry, tough cornbread; the next layer, the metamorphic layer, was a rich soft  custard of cooked milk; and the top, the igneous layer was a thin brown crust. Not inedible, but not far from it and nothing liking the memories of yore. No photos.

 The next weekend armed with real grits this time, I tried again. I started early, avoided temper tantrums, remembered to cook before beating. Huge success - just like I remembered.
 

Still curious about what Jamie had done, I called him up. He revealed that he had tinkered with the original "a bit", adding eggs (separated and whites whipped to soft peaks, then folded in) and Parmesan cheese. Apparently Alison had remarked, well, it's not what I remember, but it's not bad. I'm sticking with Alison on this one.

Healthy Cookies

Healthy is to Cookie as Decaf is to Coffee, Nonalcoholic is to Beer and Vegan is to Burger. Take the beef out of a burger, and you are left with squirrel food in a cylindrical shape. Take the refined and processed flours and sugars out of a cookie, remove the butter, disallow chocolate and again, you are left with squirrel food but in a slightly smaller cylindrical shape.
That said, I just read (skimmed) Super Immunity by Joel Fuhrman, MD. Joel Fuhrman, MD says that if you are going to eat white flour and white sugar you may as well lie in a bed of asbestos, French-inhaling Unfiltered Camels and sipping Tab. Also, it is January, time of the new leaf, the kale juice cleanse, the intention to stretch at least five times a week, the commitment to always apply moisturizer in short, upward strokes.
I thought I’d give it a whirl. I started with something called Chia Cookies (be still my beating heart) from Joel Fuhrman, MD, himself. Joel Fuhrman, MD wants you to soak some currents in hot water. I used raisins because I didn’t have currents. There may be some prohibition against raisins because they rarely appear in his recipes.*
Then he wants you to whiz up your rolled oats in a food processor. I skipped this step altogether. I whizzed up the raisin and water mixture. I combined the rolled oats, the raisin water mixture, some nuts and chia seeds, some apple sauce, some dried coconut, a little bit of almond butter and a tsp of vanilla. I formed this into cookie like shapes and dehydrated them in a 200 oven for 2 hours.



The result wasn’t totally disgusting. I ate about half of them. They were sweet and crunchy, the texture and consistency of Mrs. Bentley’s oatmeal cookies, if you haven’t had Mrs. Bentley’s oatmeal cookies in a long time and your memory of their specific texture and consistency is vague. And they are healthy, as long as you can be healthy and dramatically dyspeptic at the same time. Bottom line: I wouldn’t eat them if they weren’t healthy and I won’t be making them again.

Next I tried some carrot oatmeal cookies from 101 Cookbooks, my new favorite web site.


These have ww flour, maple syrup and coconut oil, along with carrots, ginger and rolled oats. There is even some baking powder and they are actually baked at 375.



Needless to say, they were better. But of course, less healthy. I’m divining a pattern and I don’t like the looks of it. Bottom line, I’m not sure I’d make them again because they were about as tasty as they were healthy, which is to say not enough of either.

I tried one more, also from 101 Cookbooks. These are called Nikki’s Healthy Cookies. Healthy, right there in the name. How encouraging. And they call for chocolate chips. Downright propitious. This recipe has you mix up some mashed bananas, some coconut oil (oleagine of the Gods apparently) rolled oats, almond meal, cinnamon, salt, vanilla, baking powder and those promising chocolate chips. They are baked. And they are good. And they are pretty healthy. I used dark chocolate. Next time I’ll skip the cookie shape and form them into rectangles, bake them a little longer so they are a crispy and eat them as a bar. They could happily sub in for a Clif bar on a hike or long bike ride.



The healthy cookies are definitely healthier, or at least not as unhealthy. All whole grains, some of that miracle oleagine, some fruit, vegetables, nuts, chia seeds. But since it is January, and the real goal of the new leaf, besides no colds, no flu, no MRSA, is no cellulite. So are these cookies less fattening? Sadly, no. The Nikki’s cookies come in at a little over 100 calories per. A quick search of Tollhouse cookies puts them at 100 calories per. My favorite salted butter chocolate chip cookies probably have twice that, but they are bigger.
The healthy cookies might be less fattening in the long run because I just won’t eat as many. It’s like having a bag of yogurt covered pretzels in the cupboard. They have zero calories because I won’t go near them.

*Joel Fuhrman, MD’s recipes: Black Bean Brownies which contain 2 cups of cooked black beans. Mighty Mushroom Stroganoff with a sauce made from cauliflower, white beans, hemp milk, a salt substitute and some nutritional yeast. The Acorn Squash Supreme calls for acorn squash, apricots, pineapple, raisins and a salt substitute. These are the kind of recipes that make Mollie Katzen want to go out with Ray Kroc for a steak tartare binge.

Red Velvet Cake Reprise

Elise,
Rob's birthday was last week and Annie agreed to let me make the cake. I have been to a shocking number of parties lately where the "cake" was purchased at Costco. This is so very wrong in so many ways. These are parties where the rest of the food is prepared right there in the host and hostess's kitchen.
When did it become acceptable to serve a "purchased" dessert? Other than ice cream, and in the summertime at a casual get together, Popsicles, one should never serve a "purchased" dessert. It is disgusting, unattractive and unhealthy, full of chemicals, trans fats and ingredients processed from other processed ingredients, the final product being to cake as Tropical Fruit Pop Rocks is to a mango. The "cake" has a crumb so uniform it could be used in a science fair project on geometry, the "filling" is usually lemon the color of a fluorescent light bulb and similarly created, or glutinous "fruit" from the flavor palette of Bonnie Belle Lip Smackers or White Owl Blunts and with the mouth feel of river sludge. The "frosting" is made from some low rent Crisco that coats the roof of your mouth with a grease slick impervious to all known detergents, and enough high fructose corn syrup to hurl you into diabetic shock.
I was delighted to be allowed to actually bake a cake for Rob.
I pulled out a number of cook books, read and reread.

I considered a mousse cake, but rejected that idea as mousse can be tricky, the cakes are usually not pretty, and I don't have a 12" springform which I would have needed to make a mousse cake for 20. I considered a chocolate caramel cake and rejected that because Annie doesn't like chocolate and having never made it before, I was scared that the cake would be dry. I thought long and hard about a spice cake and finally accepted that for me, spice cake has been failure followed by disappointment followed by defeat.
Chocolate dump cake? Too dump-ish. Carrot cake? Too healthy. Lemon cake? Too boring. Yellow cake with Chocolate icing? Too boring. Coconut cake? I'm tired of it. I settled on Red Velvet Cake.
Although I have not been enamored of RV cake and I know you think it is gross, I went with it because it is popular, Southern and festive. We live in VA; this was a party; an audience inured to the horrors of Costco cakes wouldn't have any reservations about a cake the color of a Twizzler.
From my previous experiments, I knew that the recipe would have to use oil not butter, and would need red food coloring, never mind my visceral aversion to both the ingredient and the resultant hue. (Talk about viscera!) And I knew that none of the recipes I had previously tried would do.
I found a recipe for Southern Red Velvet Cake on Cookstr. It is from The Neely's. There were 3 comments and all were effusive in their enthusiasm and praise. It contained oil. I went for it. I wanted three 10" layers. I made one and half times the recipe, I doubled the cocoa powder and I added pecans to the frosting.
The cakes baked up with nearly burnt and crusty tops, maybe because I had to bake them longer because the layers were so large, maybe because my ovens are too hot.

I sawed off the top 1/2 inch and still had three very tall layers. The frosting was quite gooey and drippy and the cake began to slide and list as soon as it was frosted. I secured it with four dowels.

It was delicious. Festive, traditional and very popular.

I wish I had brought some home.