Bird and Little Bird

Rhythm of the Home for Autumn (and Allergy-Free Caramel Sauce for You).

It is a rainy, rainy day here in Vermont, so it does seem appropriate to announce that the Autumn Edition of the Rhythm of the Home magazine is here!  I have a recipe for an allergen-free caramel sauce in the new edition, which you can find here.  Also, those of you have visited Rhythm of the Home in the past will notice that the magazine has a brand new (and oh-so-beautiful) design.  You cannot imagine the amount of behind-the-scenes love and effort that went into the new site, so when you have a moment, please hop on over and take an appreciative look!

Eighteen Pounds and Counting.

Some of you may remember my high, high hopes for the tomatillo plants of gardens past.  Indeed, I have planted at least one tomatillo each of the summers that we have lived in Vermont, only to be disappointed when the husks formed on the plant in early summer and then failed to grow any larger than an average sized pea.  So, it was much to my surprise when the volunteer tomatillo plants in our community garden plot began to prouduce actual, real, fat green tomatillos. In abundance.  Apparently, tomatillos need to be planted in pairs to produce, which is exactly what we accidentally did when moving the volunteer plants from one side of the garden to the other earlier in the season.  We gathered eighteen pounds of tomatillos from just a few plants this past weekend and honestly, I don't think that we got even half of what the total harvest is likely to be.

 

So what exactly is to be done with eighteen pounds of tomatillos?  Salsa verde, of course.  Annie 2.0 happened to talk to our community garden neighbor the morning of the tomatillo haul, and he mentioned that he would be going out of town for the better part of a week.  He invited us to pick all of the peppers and cilantro that we wanted.  Annie gathered up a few pounds of poblano chiles and super spicy tiny little red peppers of some kind (a Thai chile variety, I think).  And we got to work.

 

Most of our canning jars from previous years have been gradually absorbed into our drinking glass collection; we tend to break stuff and I don't even bother buying actual drinking glasses anymore.  Even if that wasn't the case, we probably still would have needed new jars because as it turns out, eighteen pounds of tomatillos makes a lot of salsa.

 

As in, nineteen pints and two half-pints of salsa.  I suspect that it will last us a little while.  Although considering how good it is, perhaps not. 

I'm actually typing this with my left hand while eating chips and salsa with my right.

Adirondack Blue.

 

We harvested the first of our potatoes from the community garden plot this past weekend.  A big, heavy, delightful bucket full.  Mostly, they are a variety called Adirondack Blue, a medium sized potato with a thin skin and very, very purple flesh.  Also, they are ridiculously tasty and an official source of happiness in the world.

I was not quite as helpful as I might have been during the actual (semi-laborious) process of digging up potatoes.  It seems that the small guy has decided that it is really best for everyone if I am never more than an arm's length away from his actual person. Which makes things like potato digging tricky.  As well as cooking, showering, going to get the mail... You get the idea.

Anyway, he's super cute, so I'm trying not to worry about it all that much.  Someday he will be six feet tall (or maybe even the 6' 5" our pediatrician predicts) and I will be considerably less interesting to him and I will probably be nostalgic for all of this togetherness.

Back to the potatoes.  I'm thinking more and more these days that the simplest of preparations are really the way to go with such good ingredients.  On at least a handful of occasions since bringing home the potato haul, I've cut them up into smallish strips or chunks, tossed them with olive oil and sea salt and then roasted them at 400 until they were just a little crunchy around the edges. Really good all by themselves, even better mixed with some cut up avocado and piled on top of a nice salad. 

Even with all of the potato roasting that's been going on, we've got a lot of potatoes left on the shelf.  Mariam noticed this as well and inquired about exactly how many potatoes a person could realistically eat. 

Well, we are about to find out.

 

The Way Things Work (Part Two): A Whole Foods Kitchen.

I originally intended for this follow-up post to the babywearing post to come a little sooner, but food photography and rainy days don't really go well together, so we are going to just appreciate this picture of my slow cooker and get on with it already.  Yes?  So here we go: post no. 2 in the series about how we manage around these parts.  For the inspiration behind these posts, please take a quick peek at the original from a couple of weeks ago.

As many of you may remember, we have been presented with various dietary hurdles to jump in the last year.  In late November, my daughter was diagnosed with celiac disease.  Then, around March or so, the baby was found to be allergic to eggs and dairy.  However, I find that in order to control his eczema, I also need to eliminate corn and legumes from my diet.  Dan has a severe tree nut allergy, so those are out as well.  In other words, the cooking and eating of meals has the potential to be a very complicated business for our family, if we let it.  But we really can't.  It just isn't an option when five to eight p.m. is by far already the most challenging part of the day around here.

The natural answer has been to move in the direction of a diet that incorporates simplicity to a higher degree and that is primarily whole foods based.  As much as I actually do enjoy putting together a four layer lasagna with homemade sauce and fresh ricotta, it just isn't going to be happening here in the forseeable future.  And even if we could eat that, the baby would never allow me the time to make it.  Thus, my newfound affection for the slow cooker. 

The way things work? Really, it goes like this:

- Breakfasts tend to be fairly simple.  Zak often eats some fruit or an avocado.  Mariam often eats an avocado sliced on gluten-free bread and then toasted with some cheese.  Since we eat more individually at this meal, the dairy eating folks can get their cheese in here.

- Lunches are usually leftovers from the previous evening's dinner, or some days, a quick sautee of olive oil and whatever produce we've picked at the garden that morning.

- Dinner. This is the big one.  Unless Dan is on call at the hospital, we pretty much eat    at home, as a family, every night.  And everyone eats the same thing. Also, if I don't plan ahead, our entire evening turns to the chaos of doom at five o'clock on the dot. So, many days I make dinner in the slow cooker at around 1 p.m. When I say many days, I actually mean almost every day. And it has saved us from various crippling forms of insanity.

What goes in the crockpot? Well, despite my being a reluctant meat eater, there isn't really any way for me to avoid it right now when so many grains and legumes are eliminated for us and dairy, egg and nut proteins are not options for whole family meals. So, we eat a lot of things like Thai-style chicken curry, we do taco night with slow cooked meat simmered in salsa and in the winter, we will likely do a number of soups and stews.  Maybe by then we'll be able to venture into legume territory with less trepadation. 

There are a few resources that have been particularly helpful in getting into a habit of crockpot cooking, and here is a little list:

- A Year of Slow Cooking

- This e-cookbook

- This blog

I find it works especially well to plan for a week or two of slow cooker meals from these resources at once, and then I can minimize trips to the grocery store during the week.  If I plan well, I can sometimes get away with only going once, which is nice.

So, that's the gist of it. An evolving system, but one that is definitely a step in the right direction for us.

How does it work at your house? If you have tips for getting dinner on the table with minimal late day fuss from tired family members, I'm sure that everyone would love to hear about it!

Here and There.

By which I mean here.  At home.  It has been raining like crazy for the last two and a half days, and considering the baby's lack of enthusiasm for tromping around in the out of doors in a storm, plans like sailing paper boats down at the lake have had to be put on hold.  Which is fine, I suppose.  It's four o'clock on a Wednesday and I'm in my pajamas, and if I were younger or cooler (or both) I might try to pretend that this doesn't constitute my idea of awesome.  But I think we all know better. 

I needed to re-up on my various gluten-free flour blends, so a few minutes was dedicated to that cause this afternoon.  I'm pretty much exclusively baking out of the magical book at this point, so I use the flour blends from there.  I have strong and deep feelings about the importance of having the kitchen situation run as smoothly as possible these days, hence the need to mix up larger batches of flour ahead of time so that I can just bake when the whim strikes (instead of doing lots of measuring and mixing when I would just like to eat a cupcake already). 

In other news: 

- Imagination Soup has a nice little post about Alphabet Glue up, and you can find both a free project download and a discount code by hopping on over to check it out.

- For Read Aloud Book Along families, the first surprise activity has been posted to the site, and you can find it on the picture book page.  The chapter book activity should be up in a day or two.  I've chosen the books for the July round of the Book Along and will be sending out an email with the selections by the end of the week.  They are uniformly awesome reads, and the chapter book is so incredibly good that I cannot wait to read it along with you.  If you'd like to join us for July, email me at [email protected] and I will get you set up. 

- It is more than possible that I have been secretly working away on a very fun project that I will be sharing with you all shortly.  Hopefully by Monday, if not sooner. You'll totally know it when you see it.

None.

It makes absolutely no sense how good these cupcakes are.  Especially considering that when I think about the recipe, it seems as though there isn't really anything in them.  So I don't understand how they could be so uniformly awe inspiring.  But they are.  They are gluten-free and vegan and are also soy and nut free. And, they are amazing.  Easily comparable to the best of conventional cupcakes and probably better than many of them.  They are the kind of baked good that challenges my conception of adulthood.  There is this circular argument going in my brain about how I could totally eat all of them because I am the grown-up here and I can do that if I want to.  But, I then reason, I absolutely should not eat all of them because I am the grown-up here and I should know better.  Sigh.  The recipe, like everything that I bake these days, is from here.

Oh! And speaking of food allergies, it looks like I owe a few of you guessing types a copy of Alphabet Glue, Volume Seven.  Indeed, baby Z. is currently allergic to both dairy and eggs.  The mystery allergen is still outstanding, but I'm not suprised that it wasn't guessed.  It's a weird one: black beans.  Anyhow, I will take another peek at who guessed what and get folks their Glue. 

If you'd like to read a funny little interview with yours truly, head on over to K.C.'s blog.  You can learn all sorts of new things, such as how frequent trips to the principal's office as a child resulted in my encyclopedic knowledge of Nancy Drew.  

And lastly for this particular Thursday, for those of you participating in the Read Aloud Book Along, I did pop in over there a day or two ago and post a little update as far as where we are at with our reading.  Feel free to do the same- you know where to find us! 

 

Strange (But Also True).

I'm happy to report, however cautiously, that I believe we may be making progress on the gluten-free bread project.  This comes as some relief, I must say, because I was starting to feel pretty discouraged about the situation.  I think that the fundamental issue has something to do with the fact that so many gluten-free bread recipes are attempting to replicate white sandwich bread.  We never ate white bread when we could have gluten in the house, and I'm pretty sure that we don't want to do it now. We are whole grain people, really.  So spending countless hours trying out complex recipes to replicate a food none of us ever liked in the first place seems a little crazy.   

Anyhow, until this week I had been thinking that I would just give up on the idea of baking bread at home altogether.  I came across a really decent gluten-free bread at Costco (of all places!) and since Mariam liked it, I thought we'd just start buying that.  But, it has sunflower seeds in it, which Dan is allergic to (his nut allergy extends to some seeds as well) and it also has eggs.  Yes, eggs are now a problem.  Because as it turns out, my longstanding (and long ignored) minor allergy to eggs is no longer so minor.  At least not to the little guy.  Despite the fact that I can eat eggs with only minor symptoms as a result (generally eczema) the baby's reaction to my eating anything containing eggs is a little more um, dramatic.  Apparently I'm not allowed to use the word "projectile" to describe the situation because after spending a month on the internal medicine service at the hospital, Dan claims to be deeply and painfully aware of what that word really can mean, and he says that it does not apply to the way that our baby spits up.  But, the spit-up scene post-egg consumption is still untenable.  Not to mention the nasty rash that comes along with it.  So, back to the bread baking I go.

This is where we get to the reason for the title of this post.  In looking at recipes and ways to get around the problem of gluten-free baking being very egg dependent, I happened upon various sources who claimed that you could use a mixture of ground flax seed and water as a replacement for eggs in gluten-free baking.  No one seems to know why this works, but the reviews are in, and it does indeed seem to do just that.  I made the Gluten-free Crusty Boule from Artisan Bread in Five using flax seed instead of eggs and not only did the bread still come out, it was probably my best attempt to date.  I was low on brown rice flour, so I also substituted a bit of teff flour for the rest of the brown rice.  I measured each of the flours by weight this time, rather than by volume, and I think that this made a tremendous difference as well.  I'm starting to suspect that measuring by weight could be the secret to gluten-free baking success, and it was almost certainly the reason that I was able to substitute the teff in without ruining the recipe.

So, this one is a keeper.  Which is good news, indeed.  It does not, however, solve the problem of feeling like our family should be starring in a sketch comedy/parody about people who can only eat cardboard because they are allergic to everything else. 

Thursday Afternoon in February.

Purple potatoes with roasted quinoa, garlic and cranberry bean gratin. In the oven as I type. 

 

Baby toes in baby socks.  With fuzzy pants.  Sigh.

 

 

We stayed after school for a few minutes to help collect and empty sap buckets at the sugar house.  At home, there was homework.  And, the Ostheimer/Playmobil mashup is still in full effect on the living room floor. 

 

 

A soft and furry companion, sitting in the late afternoon sunshine.

 

 

Bare branches and visiting chickadees near the bird feeder out back.  We are expecting our first real and proper snow in a very long time tonight into tomorrow.  I'm trying not to get too excited, but Mariam and I are both very hopeful just the same. 

 

The Corn Tortilla Project.

As we have ventured farther down the road of gluten-free living, various little challenges have arisen.  No surprise there, I suppose.  However, it was a little unexpected when corn tortillas, generally a big time staple at our house, temporarily became a no-go.  Corn, being corn, is naturally gluten-free.  But, after being advised by various gastreonterologists about the importance of maintaining a strictly gluten-free environment for Mariam, we found ourselves needing to read labels on everything, even products that were seemingly safe.  And it turns out that a corn tortilla that is both semi-decent and guaranteed to be free from any and all traces of gluten is not to be found in the greater Burlington area.  Thus the humble brilliance of the tortilla press arrived at our house.

 

Making corn tortillas turns out to be surprisingly simple, which is a good thing, since we have been eating them like it is our job.  The biggest challenge in the whole operation was probably just assembling what we needed.  We couldn't get guaranteed gluten-free masa locally, so we had to order it online.  And the press came from Amazon as well, since none of our local kitchen shops had them in stock when we were looking.  We'd love to find a cast iron one, but apparently they are few and far between and so far, we haven't had much luck.

 

We've been using a combination of 2 cups masa, 1 1/2 cups of hot water and a teaspoon of salt for each batch of tortillas.  This seems to yield a dough that is stiff but still workable and that forms and presses well.  Letting it sit for an hour or more after mixing up the batter is important to getting good results, so I would definitely recommend doing that. 

 

The basic process goes something like this: mix up the dough in the proportions mentioned above.  Let it sit for an hour at room temperature. Then, make a golf ball sized ball of dough and place it between two sheets of wax paper in the center of the press.  Close the press and press down hard enough on the handle to really flatten out the dough.  Open it back up, peel off the top sheet of wax paper and then gently peel the tortilla off of the bottom sheet.  Toss the tortilla into a dry skillet and cook it over medium-low heat, turning once about half way through and taking it off when it begins to brown just slightly.  You can reuse the same wax paper to make the rest of the tortillas from your batch of dough.

 

And as always, easy and good continue to be a stellar combination.

Procrastination Baking.

 

 

 

There isn't anything quite like having lots and lots of things that you absolutely must get done very soon to make a person decide to bake doughnuts instead.

Just saying.