Halloween Hangover

It’s November first and the world is choked. Mother Nature is throwing fits worthy of a screaming toddler: heavy wind, pounding surf, sporadic bouts of pouring rain—and then a rainbow appears as if to apologize for the tantrum.

Ter comes home from the grocery store. “Boy, is everyone out there cra-bee!” She’s been a little grouchy herself, on the heels of bolting a Bucky’s “Frappula” yesterday. It tastes like a Viva Puff mallow cookie and drops you like a drained corpse when the sugar high wears off. I suspect that a few folks have indulged in the seasonal specialty this weekend, and if they haven’t, the honking horns and crashing carts at the store today must be the result of those “one for you, two for me” trips to the candy bowl last night.

Then there’s the time change. Spring forward, fall back. I got the saying right, this time, but it hasn’t stopped me from feeling disoriented and easily annoyed … though the latter may be attributed to the bowl of caramel/cheese popcorn I devoured with my chocolate tea yesterday afternoon.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Because it’s fun, silly.

Last week, the office held a cake walk that turned into a charity bake sale when no one else in the building turned up to play. I looked at a table piled high with cake, cookies, muffins and more, and was truly grateful that the only gluten-free item was the pineapple upside down cake I’d contributed and had no desire to reclaim. Oops, but there were the mountainous meringues donated by someone who had promised to bake but ran out of time—I’m not a huge meringue fan, but these babies came with blueberry whipped cream and one of my evil office fairies coerced me into splitting one with her (for a good cause), hence the buzz in my ears that began last Thursday.

As Nic would say, Blerg.

Tomorrow, everyone at work will be sick of candy and bakery treats. This will not stop me from refilling the Vader bucket with the last of the Rockets, treacle kisses, lollipops, jelly beans, tiny Mars and Snickers bars that I bought to get us into the Halloween spirit. Neither will it stop me from indulging if I get too stressed—it is the workplace, after all.

I am advised that the Red Cups are back at Starbucks, launched at opening time this morning to get us all into the holiday spirit and onto insulin drips after New Year.

Buckle up, folks. ’Tis the season!

Fried Egg Friday

My all-time favourite sandwich has to be fried egg. From the time I was a kid, I’ve loved them: semi-runny yolks, whites crispy-fried in bacon fat, and thick mayo on good white bread. Bond Bond’s bakery here in Victoria makes the perfect white bread, the best I ever tasted, which elevated the relatively simple fried egg sangie to something celestial. In my glutenous glory days, my bi-weekly Friday off regularly featured a killer fried egg sandwich, sometimes with potato chips to poke in the yolk. Culinary heaven.

Alas, those days are gone. I tried it with GF bread and promptly abandoned the notion of creating a reasonable facsimile. Honestly, there are times when substitutes are just not acceptable. Gluten free bread is smaller, far more dense, a lot more fragile, and quite frankly not that great unless it’s toasted first. Toasted, it assumes a similarly crispy-crusty texture and stability that emulates “real” toast well enough to make it an occasional treat. What I can’t figure out, however, is why peanut butter just sits on the surface like a sticky puddle of goo rather than sinking into what tiny pores exist. If my complexion was as smooth as a slice of GF toast, I wouldn’t need makeup.

It took me more than a year to find a solution to the fried egg dilemma, a solution that existed long before I went gluten free though I didn’t see it at the time:

The next best thing to the perfect fried egg sandwich is a tiger’s eye – white bread with a hole cut in the center, fried in bacon fat with an egg cracked into the middle. Since GF bread toasts up so well, logic suggests that it will fry up equally so, yes?

Yes! Eureka, it’s not the monarch of all sandwiches, but it’ll do.

Today is my last day of solo vacation. I have a week remaining, but Ter is also on vacation starting tomorrow, and while we won’t be living in each other’s pockets the whole time, my run of the house will require, well, clothing. I got the first scene of the new story done yesterday, plan to write more today, plus catch two more episodes of Orphan Black … which may or may not have inspired the theme for said new story. It’s not about clones, but there is a theory out there that everyone has a double. If that’s so, says I, why not more than one, and do they all exist in this dimension?

Enquiring minds want to know … but can certainly wait until after lunch.

Food Porn VI

“Oh, Muffin!”

Wow. That was close. If not for my lovely assistant, these applesauce-spice muffins would have been a complete disaster.

For the latest in my GF treat basket, I decided to make this easy-peasy recipe and, as usual, prepped the ingredients before I started mixing. The cup measure won’t fit in the flour jar, so I did the math and determined that 10 x .25 scoops would give me the requisite 2.5 cups, but, boy, did that look like a lot of flour. In fact, I ran out of the GF mix and had to top up with plain brown rice. Must have been an optical illusion, i.e., if I’d used a bigger bowl, it would have looked right. So, in went the baking powder, soda, salt and spices.

On to the wet ingredients.

Butter and sugar beaten to “light and fluffy”, it was time to add the eggs. However, as the stand mixer in our kitchen is me standing with the hand mixer, I called on Ter for help. She knows the drill; she’s done this often enough: Eggs first, one at a time, then dry/milk/dry/milk/dry.

“Boy,” she said once the eggs were in, “that’s a lot of flour.”

“One cup at a time,” I suggested, dismissing her observation as I had dismissed my own.

She dispensed the first cup in three increments (the better to incorporate flour into batter without dusting up the kitchen), then poured in half the almond milk. The second cup of flour went in, also in three increments.

“Wait a sec,” I said. “Are you using the third cup measure?”

She checked. “Yup.”

We both eyed the remaining flour.

“That’s way more than half a cup,” she said.

I was doing rapid calc in my head and suddenly realized, “Crap! I measured out the flour in half cups, not quarters!”

Ter blanched. “What?”

I gave her the half-cup measure. “One of these and we’re done. I wondered why it looked like too much flour!”

“Well, yeah,” Ter agreed, all but rolling her eyes, “because it is!”

I wore that one, emerging from near-catastrophe with gratitude for my trusty kitchen elf attachment. She helped with the cleanup, too, but ahead of putting the flour back in the jar, she glanced a little nervously at me and asked, “Did you put cinnamon in the flour?”

Oh, $***. So the muffins are only half-spiced and our flour supply has cinnamon, salt and baking powder already added. No breaded chicken until further notice.

I’m renaming this recipe “Right Brain Muffins” because that’s obviously where I was when I baked ’em.

Food Porn V

“PB Cookies”

caution - attack bear on duty!

Another GF experiment that worked pretty well if you like crispy cookies—which I do. I split the batter to include chocolate chips in half of the batch, because I really like crispy cookies with chocolate. The only mistake I made here was to let the tiny panda pose for the picture with them.

Now he thinks they’re his.

Contrary to our policy of No More Bears, this little guy snuck under the wire because he’s so little that I doubted he could possibly create any more havoc than the rest of the gang causes on a daily basis. He’s a Telus panda—the holiday promo the company used to encourage contributions to the World Wildlife Fund last Christmas. Ter is a panda nut, the cause was a good one, and I needed a final stuffer for her sock. So I went to the Telus shop on a lunch break, waited in line while everyone in front of me finished buying the latest communications technology, got to the counter, looked the service rep in the eye and said, “I’ve come for a panda.”

“You’re in luck,” he said. “There’s one left.”

“Sold,” I said.

No need for a bag. This little guy cuddled in the crook of my arm along the street, across the intersection, through the courtyard, past the security desk (where he was offered a chocolate by one of the commissionaires) and up the elevator to my office. He spent the next three days there, playing with my office critters and charming the heck out of everyone who came to visit, and on Christmas morning, he and Ter bonded immediately.

He has since resided in the kitchen, where he makes a point of claiming everything we set on the table as his own. Well, almost everything. Being a vegetarian, he turns his nose up at meat. He likes to play with veggies (especially green veggies), plastic clamshells full of berries, butter tarts or salsa … and plates of fresh-baked cookies. I know, I know. He’s so little that surely I could overpower him with my size, but anyone who’s been attacked by a purse dog knows that ankle biters are the fiercest of tiny creatures, so it’s easier to let him think he’s won until he falls asleep. Ter puts him to bed, I bag up the cookies, and in the morning he’s forgotten all about them.

Still, in honour of our miniscule despot, the PB in the title stands not for “Peanut Butter” but for “Panda Bear” Cookies.

Food Porn 4 - Drop Cookies

anyone for white chocolate/cranberry?

We had white chocolate left over from Christmas and I needed new tea treats, so Ter suggested substituting gluten-free flour for AP in our favourite cookie recipe. Recalling lessons from our first GF attempt, we mixed up the batter, dropped it by tiny teaspoons eight to a sheet pan, baked them for 12 minutes exactly and OMG did they turn out well!!!

Thin, crispy, buttery, sweet—YUM! I like crispy cookies and these guys donʼt flag for a second. They freeze well, dunk well, heck, they act just like regular cookies unless you like them chewy … but we put enough white chocolate in ours that when it melted it got kind of chewy, so win-win!

I fear in the long run this diet will prove that you can be gluten-free and still put on weight.

Food Porn 3 – Caramel Apple Upside Down Cake

Experimental GF baking continues. The chocolate chip cookies baked into a single 9 by 13 cookie that had to be carved into squares for eating; they were crisp and delicious, however, so I will try them again, with adjustments to try and keep them from glomming onto each other in the oven. They tasted good frozen as well, because sometimes I just won’t wait.

I’ve always been averse to pastry—too fussy, too finicky, blah blah blah, though my wee sister can’t see my problem with it. Easy for her to say. She’s a master, as she proved with my Christmas mincemeat dilemma last year. Whining aside, I’ve discovered a local source for GF baking, so butter tarts are back on the menu. So is pizza, thanks to thin and crispy crusts being available at the grocery store. Ter and I load ’em up with toppings and pig out on Friday nights.

A work buddy who is also gluten-free (most of the time) uses regular recipes and simply substitutes GF flour for all purpose. She also defies the experts by matching amounts one for one, rather than reducing the flour by one eighth. I was originally scandalized by such wanton disregard, since surely the amounts are doctored for a reason, but she merely shrugged and said, hey, it works. Not with muffins, though; she still can’t figure out why they turned out like hockey pucks, to which I reply, don’t they always?

Last week, cake became an issue. Bored with tarts and cookies, I pored over my special needs baking book in search of a simple recipe and didn’t find what I wanted. Then I remembered the upside-down cake recipe I snipped from a supermarket flyer a couple of years ago. It calls for rhubarb, but I’ve also made it with peaches or pineapple, and it’s fabulous. I’d been eyeballing a couple of apples that were approaching their best before date, and thought they’d make a dandy bottom—or top, as the cake may be.

Bracing myself for the baking gods’ wrath, I took my reckless friend’s advice and substituted measure for measure GF flour for AP. With my able kitchen elf’s assistance, I made the caramel apple upside down cake pictured above and it turned out great! Light and tender with good crumb texture and those sweet, sticky apples on top … yum!

There is a downside to it, though. The first bite is generally the best of any food item. Not so with gluten-free. Lovely as my cake turned out, the first bite was purely weird. Rice flour has a distinctive flavour and if you’re not expecting it, the surprise is not a pleasant one. So persevere and go for the second bite. I promise you, it gets better. I ate two pieces before my sugar tolerance shut me down, else I’d have porked the whole thing in one sitting.

Fortunately, it also freezes well.

Food Porn 2 - Pasta Borgia

Flour

Butter

Milk

Hot mustard

Aged white cheddar

Bacon

Green onion

Salt/pepper

Pasta of choice 

Fry up the bacon and crumble into bits. Set aside (and no snacking!)

In a small saucepan over medium heat, make a roux with the flour/butter; add milk and stir until thick. Add salt and pepper, mustard, cheddar, green onion and whatever bacon bits are left from illegal snacking.

Cook pasta as per directions on package.

Pour sauce over cooked pasta and toss to coat.

Serve with baby tomatoes, more bacon bits and more green onion as garnish. 

* * * 

While this is in no way an original recipe—a zillion variations are doubtless unique to a zillion home cooks—Ter and I christened it “Pasta Borgia” because it’s killer yummy.

The greatest challenge of going gluten free has been what to do about pasta. We ate a lot of it in our day—pasta with red sauce; pasta with cheese sauce; pasta with pesto cream sauce; pasta with sausage, peppers and mushrooms; pasta al forno (dubbed “al porno” because, well, nothing in our house is ever called by its proper name) … the list seemed endless when we realized just how many of our favourite dishes contained noodles in one form or another. Linguine was a staple, as were penne and fusilli. Ter made a veggie lasagne that was so good I never missed the meat. Spaghetti, rotini, farfalle, fettucine, vermicelli, you name it, we had it in our pantry.

I know, I know. There are sundry forms of gluten-free noodles. We tried a few. Yuk, blech and erg. Noodle consumption for the better part of the past year has been at Asian restaurants because the best pasta requires durum semolina. Yet Ter’s passion for pasta has dwindled not one whit, so she’s persevered in the search for a GF brand that will at least try to fool us in ways the competition has not.

She found one at our local healthy food store. It’s not cheap, but it’s edible. And it comes in baby shell form! That was our favourite shape for Pasta Borgia – and now that we’re able to eat it again, we’re likely to take on a similar shape ourselves.

Oh, who cares? Mangia!

Live From the Ocean Room ...

… it’s Friday morning! And a gorgeous one it is, too, given that I spent most of Wednesday night and yesterday laid flat with the worst migraine I’ve endured since May the 8^th. There is nothing like 24 hours of pounding, nauseous darkness to make you grateful for a new day. Ironically, the headache struck just as “Glutenous Maximus” went up and the day after I’d been happily telling the gang at work how they’ve pretty well ceased since I went gluten-free. Less is truly more, however; rare as they’ve become, the severity has been shocking in its intensity. Ter had to type my email to the office yesterday because I couldn’t even sit up without wanting to barf – I lay curled on the sofa with my eyes closed while she wrote on my behalf. She’s the best friend in the world.

But enough of that. The headache is pretty much gone, I’m on a legitimate day off and I have plans to write. I intended to tackle the angels once more because I’ve been struggling with them; the story is coming so slowly that I have fallen into the trap of second-guessing every scene and have therefore rewritten the most recent one at least three times. I don’t know what the problem is. Could be that it’s a new world and I have no idea what I’m doing with it, but I suspect it’s more (or less) than that. I’ve simply been unable to immerse myself in the story. Starting something new takes real commitment and I’ve just not been there. I watched a cool documentary about Agatha Christie a few weeks back. She`s a great source for writerly quotes and this one stayed with me:

“All a writer needs is chair, a table, a typewriter and some peace.”

Without complaining, the peace part is missing. I live in a world full of distractions that prove particularly tempting when I’m embarking on a brand new project. So, when contemplating what I would attack today, Ter suggested that I let go of the struggle and write whatever the heck I want. I thought I wanted to write the angels, but what I really want is a cup of Persian apple tea and that was my first hint. The hopeless knot in the novel has managed to unravel itself and the story has regained traction, so back to Castasia go I. And today I’m happy to be there.

And here.

Glutinous Maximus

Phase Two of my gluten-free existence began this week, with the freezer purge I was emotionally unprepared to do six months ago. It’s one thing to decide not to bring naughty nummies into the house. It’s quite another to discard one’s existing supply.

Phase One began last Easter. I had been chronically suffering from a growing list of minor maladies that included joint aches, mood swings, a sluggish thought process, lethargy, and headaches. The headaches were the worst. I blamed them on chocolate and hormones, but when the bi-weekly migraines became a series of week-long events, Ter took action. She was led to a magazine article about wheat allergies and when she checked the symptoms against mine, she ticked every darned box. By then I was so miserable that I’d try anything. I’d already given up chocolate (to no real avail); no sacrifice could surpass that one on the martyrdom scale. I stopped knowingly consuming anything containing wheat, barley, or rye, and almost immediately began to feel better.

My headaches ceased. My ears unplugged. My thought processor quit grinding and began to operate smoothly. I (mostly) quit dozing at my desk. My joint aches virtually disappeared. So did my second spare tire! Yikes, who knew that giving up sticky buns would be so beneficial?

Not buying new sticky buns was no problem. Tossing the buns in my stash was going to be more difficult. I looked at the collection of full freezer bags and wanted to cry. Taking pity on me, Ter suggested we do it another day.

That day did not happen until this past weekend, but I must have been ready for it. Ter handed me each bag, I checked the contents, closed my eyes, ground my teeth, and discarded. Then I hauled the whole weighty sack down to the garbage and nearly threw my back out getting it into the dumpster. The freezer now has an echo – and more room for ice cream!

Plus, I’m eating chocolate again J

Phase Three is looming and while I have no idea how I’ll get through the fall and winter holidays, I will get through them because I must get through them if I want to maintain the status quo. The greatest loss will be my wee sister’s killer mincemeat tarts. She bakes them for me every Christmas and this year … augh, I’ll whine about that when the time comes.