| When I think of these pretzels, I think of my friend Ginny. I don’t think I’ve mentioned her on this blog before, which is a shame, because she’s a great friend with a fascinating story: She’s among the many celiacs who get a false negative on the antibody test, but a positive genetic test. Long story short, when we met her she knew something was wrong with her, but had no idea what–and neither did any of her doctors. (We’ve all been there, haven’t we?) But the better my sister and I got to know Ginny, the more she would mention some of her symptoms, or we would mention some of ours, and we’d all start to get a little wigged out at how much we had in common . . . |  |
| Sometimes, the best desserts are the ones you don’t have to adapt. Of course, I had to adapt this one a little; the recipe I started with many moons ago used flour to make the bottom layer, but that was easily left out.
These bars are the sort of thing that seem like they shouldn’t be delicious, yet they are. If you like coconut, but your sweetie doesn’t, they’re also a great way to get some dessert snackies all to yourself for a few days! 🙂 They don’t take long to put together and bake, but unless you want to be eating goo (hey, sometimes you do) you want to let them cool at least an hour before even attempting the arcane task of dividing such a great mass of deliciousness into something resembling bars . . . |
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| The hilarious thing about all this is that I never much cared for tortillas when I was a kid. (Or dinner rolls, or French bread–okay, I liked that a little–or pizza; the list goes on!) Bread never felt like it was a big part of my culinary world until it was gone. Tortillas in particular were pasty, dense, and gross, and the fact that they were used to wrap up all sorts of squicky food I didn’t like sure didn’t help their case. It would be great to be able to look back on my early life with the foggy glass of the wisdom of years and say I didn’t care much for so many bready foods because deep down, I knew in my heart they were bad for me, nay, toxic to my very flesh! . . . but no. I was just a picky kid. 😀 Can blame at least part of that on sensory processing disorder, an unrelated malady that makes my family tick somewhat funny, but I just plain didn’t like tortillas. Tortillas were gross, and the things that went in tortillas were even grosser . . . |  |
| Merry Christmas, everyone. 🙂 It’s been a busy few weeks for me; I was going to fall back on a post about tortillas, which I have all the pictures for, but I woke up the other day and the first thing I thought was, “Really, Jennifer? Really? You’re going to post about tortillas on Christmas Eve? Forget that. Post about sugar cookies.” I had not ever in my life made sugar cookies from scratch, but this did not stop me! After all, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, right? . . . |  |
| You might literally not believe how well this recipe came out in the end. It’s flaky, it holds together beautifully, it lasts until the last slice of pie (even when that takes a week!).
Pie crust is one of the first things my mother took a serious crack at back in the day, just a few months after my sister and I (and by extension my father) were diagnosed with celiac, since Thanksgiving was coming up soon. She probably ran through every pie crust recipe she could find anywhere on the internet; the results were . . . well, a little hard on the jaw. 🙂 Which isn’t her fault, of course, pie crust is hard to make when youdon’t have to do it gluten-free, let alone when you do! For a solid year, her attempts failed, my attempts failed (though they made nice Frisbees, once you scooped the pie filling back out), and we’d basically written off pie as, well, pie-in-the-sky. . . |
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| This recipe started from one of Jocelyn’s, but it’s been transformed many times since such an auspicious beginning. The procedure for rolling them out is a little unusual, but it works well as long as you’re attentive to detail. From start to finish, it’ll take about 2 1/2 hours to make a whole batch of this dough. I highly recommend making a full batch even if you aren’t planning to eat more than a little of it right away, since you can just parbake the remaining crusts, freeze them, then thaw them out to use later. |  |
| When I made my final test batch of bread sticks, there were plenty of people over at my apartment, including an old friend who’d been out of the country for most of the past few years and so had mostly been out of touch. He was obeying our “no gluten in the apartment” rule, of course, but hadn’t stopped to think through how that meant every bit of food in sight was gluten-free. So when I handed him his share of the freshly buttered breadsticks, then came back five minutes later to ask how they were, he said, “Yeah, they’re good.” I asked him, “So they don’t taste fake? or weird? or anything like that? You wouldn’t think they were gluten-free?” He blinked at me several times, then asked as it sank in, “Wait, these are gluten-free? Really?”
That’s always how I know a recipe is done. 🙂 |
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| I don’t know if there’s really a story behind these muffins in particular; the first muffins I made, I was still in the habit of sticking to the exact amounts of the glutinous recipe I was adapting from, and using truly generous amounts of xanthan gum out of some sort of fear that if I didn’t provide enough superglue, the end result would fall apart in my hands, in keeping with its true nature as a desperately fabricated objection to the laws of physics. I was still making imitations of food, not food itself. But anyway . . . |  |
| Nothing fancy about this bread; it’s not trying to be extra-light, or extra-sweet, or extra-yeasty. It’s just basic and delicious. (It reminds some people of bread-machine bread.) I’ll eat it straight up with a little butter, or (my favorite) in a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich. I don’t cook for a lot of people, so more often than not I go through half a loaf or so in the first couple days, use up a little more by making toast, then turn the rest into bread crumbs and chuck it in the chest freezer. Alternatively, you can get good use out of this bread for nearly a week if you take the time to chuck slices in the broiler and toast them really thoroughly! |  |
