| This recipe makes me consider the problem of problem-solving.
I’ve always problem-solved in an unusual way, as best as I can tell; not exactly in an optimal way, but in a highly experimental way. Mind you, they’re rigorous experiments, and for brief or abstract problems most of the experiment takes place in my head. |
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| I promise this’ll be my last post about pasta (at least for a while) — but there’s nothing quite like a good cheesy filling in a creamy sauce, I just had to post about tortellini. It takes me about 40 minutes start to finish to make a meal of these from scratch, but it’s so very worth it that I’ve had them for lunch probably 5 days a week since it first entered my head to try them. It’s a weird world when good pasta is a delicacy instead of a staple — before going gluten-free I positively lived on spaghetti! — but hey, delicacies are worth their while. 🙂 |  |
| Cinnamon rolls. 🙂 Need I say more? I know Jocelyn did a post on a sugar-free version of these, so maybe you could add her alchemy to my own and get something really unusual yet delicious, but neither of us has tried it! Living in two different time zones probably has something to do with it, but, I digress. The real point is that these are so good I can’t keep them around. If there’s a bunch of people around, everybody eats one; if there isn’t, everybody eats several. They’re just plain yummy. |  |
| Ravioli are probably my favorite food in the universe. I’ve mentioned before my ultimate goal of recreating ravioli, but my profound joy in their existence is perhaps best expressed by the 45 minutes or so of spontaneous song I burst into celebrating the victory of their re-creation. My friend Ginny can and will testify that she was impressed by the length, variety, and sheer doo-lally euphoria that poured into this music, despite a few odd tangents into philosophical questions such as whether or not we know what it’s like for a clam to be happy, or even what it’s like to be a clam. |  |
| Pasta is almost certainly my favorite food in the universe. My sister and I would just eat plain spaghetti whenever we wanted a snack, and my mother used to be flabbergasted that as a kid I could get home from school, run through the house, and without going through the kitchen know by the distinctive smell of the brand of pasta she was boiling if it was macaroni for macaroni and cheese or spaghetti or rotini she was boiling in that pot. 🙂 I never liked spaghetti sauce, but who needed it when there was parmesan cheese in the world? It was cheap, it was easy, it was delicious. And then, suddenly, it was gone. |  |
| You can’t really find kolaches in New Mexico, where I grew up, so when I was a child we only had them when we visited my grandparents in Houston during the summer. I’d drag myself out of bed one sleepy morning, early by my standards at least, only to discover Daddy had already ventured out into the wild (sub)urban environment and back, box full of kolaches in hand for everyone to share. Of course, when I was that little I had many, many objections to eating things I wasn’t already completely familiar with, especially things with funny textures, so I usually took a blueberry kolache (the flavor I deemed least dangerous) and ate the tasty sweetbread and topping, carefully picking around the dubious filling in the center. This was of course little me being a paranoid dumbass, as in the process I missed out on the most fantastic part of the kolache. |  |
| Back in the days of yore, before the world of a gluten-free diet, Daddy would often take us to Red Lobster on our birthday. (Yes, “our,” my sister and I are twins!) I always got snow crab legs, and filled up on their fantastic biscuits before filling up yet again on my entree; my sister always got an order of mozzarella sticks for her entree, and filled up on that, and then I would fill up a third time on what she had left over. (Yes, I turned out to be the kind of undiagnosed celiac whose appetite shot through the roof, and she turned out to be the kind whose appetite plummeted through the basement; however did you guess?) 🙂 Daddy would mix things up with a little more variety, but he often got snow crab legs, too. Nowadays, of course, I can get snow crab legs from the store whenever I want, but it isn’t quite the same without those biscuits and mozzarella sticks. So here’s one of the two, at least! |  |
| When we used to order Chinese, everyone had their order: Mom wanted General Tso’s (and usually so did my brother), Dad and I would want chicken and broccoli, my sister and I would want chicken fried rice. But every so often, we threw in an order of sweet and sour chicken, or sweet and sour pork, to mix things up. I always loved sweet and sour sauce, and was gratified to find out it didn’t even need to be modified to be gluten-free; it was just a question of adjusting the ingredients until I had the balance of sweet and sour I liked best. |  |
| This recipe comes to me through Ginny’s mother, who made the gluten version for Ginny’s birthday party last year (before Ginny was diagnosed and went GF herself). My brother and I were both there, but he hadn’t gone on the diet yet, so when everybody gushed about how good the cake was, I asked him — is this worth getting the recipe for and adapting so we can make it? And the answer was an unequivocal yes. |  |
| My dad loves fried chicken. When we were little, he told us fried chicken was the one time we were allowed to “eat like a barbarian” — which, naturally, meant picking up our drumsticks with our bare hands and tucking in. I know it was hard enough to teach us manners without the occasional exception like that; but, on the other hand, it was hard enough to teach us fine motor skills without the occasional exception like that, too, so I suppose the lesson there is just that we were difficult children. 🙂 I hope it’s paying off at least a little, Dad, what with the frying of the chicken now. |  |
