Further Piecrust Adventures: Cookie edition

It's traditional in my family to make three pumpkin pies, so technically I only need three crusts, but I just double the two-crust recipe and have enough for four. The rest get rolled out into pie-crust-cookies. You roll them out, just like for a pie, then cut them into roughly cookie size pieces, and sprinkle with a mix of cinnamon and sugar before baking. They're quite tasty, and usually I make them at the same time as the pies, but it was late last night so I put the rest of the dough in the fridge to use this morning.

Well, the dough I make handles much better warm, so I was trying to cut the one large ball into several smaller pieces so that they would warm up faster. There was a lot of resistance to the knife, so, to get more leverage, I held the dough in my left hand with the knife in my right and started trying to cut through it. You can probably see where this is going... When the knife was almost halfway through, the whole thing suddenly gave way. The knife whooshed straight through the dough and into the middle finger of my left hand. It dug out a small chunk of flesh, maybe 0.25x0.5 cm at the extremes. Despite this, it didn't hurt much at first. It started to hurt when I started to wash it off. Anyway, it's quite interesting to roll out pie-crust dough while trying to keep pressure on a finger to stop the bleeding. I had to throw out one cookie, as I bled on it. I would have eaten it, but I figured my mom would have a fit about it.

The finger did eventually stop bleeding. It's still a bit sore, unsurprisingly.

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Piecrust Adventures

A few interesting conundrums whilst making the pumpkin pies last night.

(1) I had only one pumpkin from my garden. It was fairly small, and, when I cut into it, I discovered one part of it was rotten. I had my mom get some canned pumpkin as backup. I got 2 cups from the good parts of the real pumpkin, and had to fill in the rest with the canned pumpkin. Annoying, but workable.

(2) I could not find my pie-crust-bag. It was not on the top shelf of the closet where it's supposed to be, nor in any of the other places I thought I might have decided to put it. If it doesn't turn up, I'm going to assume it got thrown away accidentally and order a new one. The problem is that gluten-free crust is extremely delicate. You need the plastic to hold it together long enough to get it into the pan, and even then there are almost always cracks and holes to patch. So I improvised. I had some jumbo-size ziplock bags. I rolled the first crust inside the bag and then cut two of the edges open so I could extract it, then rolled the other crusts with the bag slit open. It worked better than I expected. I think the crust didn't stick to the ziplock as badly as it generally did to the pie-crust bag. However, the pie-crust-bag is reusable many times over, whereas the ziplock would need to be replaced each time, and the jumbo ziplocks are rather pricey.

(3) I ran out of sweet rice flour on the first crust. It's what Bette Hagman recommends be used for sprinkling on the inside of the bag to help keep it from sticking. I sighed, thought a moment, and used corn meal instead. Actually, I think it worked better than the sweet rice flour. I think the idea with sweet rice flour is that it's supposed to stick together better than other GF flours, so it should help the crust stick together. The problem is that rice flour is dry, and so the more of it you use for rolling, the more you need to add more liquid to the dough. The corn meal seemed to be better at keeping the dough from sticking, and it didn't dry out the dough as much. We shall find out today whether it causes any general weirdness in the eating. If not, I may just switch over to cornmeal for piecrust dusting.

And now, I have cornbread, coffeecake, roasted pumpkin seeds, and piecrust cookies to make.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Zucchini Bread

For the first time in a while, I tried making zucchini bread. I'd been having a problem of it not getting done, so I modified the recipe a bit. To convert it to gluten free, I'd been adding an extra egg (adds protein and helps hold it together), but, on the suspicion that there was too much liquid in the mix, I did not do so last night. Instead, I added two teaspoons of dried egg. I also increased the leavening (from 1/4 t baking powder and 1 t soda to 1/2 t baking powder and 2 t soda + 1 t egg replacer) and replaced half the oil with butter. The resulting batter was considerably thicker than the batter I'd gotten in the past, and seemed to bake much better. I was still cautious and only put one inch of batter in the bread pans, but, as it got done with no problems, I think it would be safe to increase that depth next time. Oh, I also increased the baking temperature from 325° F to 375° F. So here's my grandmother's zucchini bread, modified to be gluten free:

Gluten Free Zucchini Bread

3 eggs
1/2 c oil
1/2 c butter (softened)
2 c sugar
2 t vanilla
2 t soda
1/2 t baking powder
1 t egg replacer (or other leavening agent)
1/4 t salt
2 t dried egg whites
2 t xanthan gum
3 c featherlight rice flour mix*
3+ t cinnamon
2 c grated zucchini
1 c chopped pecans or walnuts

Preheat oven to 375° F. Grease pans and dust with rice flour. Put the eggs into a stand mixer and let them beat while you mix soda, baking powder, egg replacer, salt, dried egg whites, xanthan gum and flour together in a separate bowl. Add the oil and butter to the eggs. Add the sugar and vanilla. Slowly add the flour mix to the mixture. Add the cinnamon. Add the zucchini. Add the nuts. Mixture will be very thick. Distribute amongst three 8" by 4" bread pans and bake for 1 hour.

Note: If you make smaller loaves or muffins, you'll need to adjust the cooking time. I only needed 45 minutes last night, since nothing wound up more than an inch deep.

*Featherlight rice flour is one of Bette Hagman's mixtures. I've modified it a bit. Instead of white rice flour, I use brown rice flour. Instead of potato flour, I use rice protein powder. Since a lot of the GF flours are low in protein, I figure adding a bit in, particularly rice protein to a rice mix, is a useful thing to do.

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GF: Another corn bread recipe

This recipe is very similar to the way I modified the box recipe, with the primary difference being that it lists out a specific GF flour mixture. As I was hoping to try it for New Year's, I made a small test batch today, one quarter of the full recipe, or about 4 muffins' worth. Oh, the reason that I went looking for a different recipe is that on Saturday, rice did not agree with me at all. I suspect it's connected to the antibiotic I've been taking, but I wanted to find a recipe that didn't use rice flour. This one gives the option of using rice or sorghum, and I can verify that it works well with sorghum flour. The quartered recipe is below, or go to the link for the full recipe.

One Quarter version of Carol Fenster's Gluten Free Corn Bread

1/4 c + 1 T cornmeal
2 T sorghum flour
1 T potato starch
1 T tapioca flour
1/4 t + 1/8 t xanthan gum
4 t sugar
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 egg*
1/4 c milk
4 t vegetable oil

*I used 1 1/2 t of dried egg white + 1 T water instead of trying to divide up an actual egg.

This is actually ideal for me to just make a batch for myself. I wound up with four corn muffins out of it, ate two for lunch and I have two left over for another meal. For New Year's dinner, though, I'll need to make the full recipe.

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GF Tips: Pumpkin cookies

At Thanksgiving, I had more pumpkin than I needed for the pies, so I froze quite a bit of it. Today, I decided it was time to do something with it and went hunting for cookie recipes. I used to love the pumpkin-chocolate-chip-cookies that they had in the stores, and I've never seen them pre-made and gluten-free. Of the recipes I scanned, I liked this one the best. It has a bit less fat than the others, probably because it adds eggs into the mix.

Mostly I stuck to the recipe, but I did add a quarter teaspoon of xanthan gum, extra vanilla, and varying amounts of the spices. Also, I used twice as much pumpkin as the recipe called for, mainly because that was how much was in the package I thawed out. They turned out quite well, and I'd recommend the recipe. Here's the link again.

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Useful Things

I got two sets of these silicone baking cups last week and tried them out today on the cinnamon pull-aparts. They work surprisingly well. I just lined them up in a cake pan, rubbed butter on them, and filled them. The dough did not stick to them at all, so far as I can tell, and being in the cake pan seems to have kept the rolls from getting overcooked on the outside (in comparison to the batch that was in a standard metal muffin pan). I can't be certain that the difference was due to the cups vs. pan, however, as the cups were on a higher shelf in the oven. Still, if you've been hesitant to try them, after one use I think they work well. It's possible I may revise this after a few more uses. We'll see.

UPDATE: Extra plus - they keep the cinnamon pull-aparts fresher. Slight minus - The sugar, etc., seems to like to stick to them, so that they don't come clean easily.

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Life as a Sitcom, with Zucchini

Well, zucchini's coming ripe again. I've made the zucchini casserole from last year, and decided I much prefer it with mozzarella instead of cheddar. Today I made zucchini muffins. That's when the sitcom started. Let's see, how many things went wrong...

(1) I had already put the eggs in the stand mixer when I realized I had neither walnuts nor pecans, and I much prefer nutty zucchini bread.
(2) After lunch, I had all the ingredients, got the eggs mixing again, and somehow got it into my head that it needed 2 cups of oil instead of 1. Naturally I had them both in before realizing there was a problem. So I had two choices: throw it out and start over, or double everything. Throwing it out seemed like a waste, so I decided to double the recipe.
(3) This was already a large recipe, so I wasn't entirely surprised to find that it was going to overflow the bowl on my stand mixer. Then I had to figure out what to do about it. I dug out my largest mixing bowl, one that's been used exactly once before, and, by a complicated series of exchanges, managed to transfer the batter to that bowl and keep something under the stand-mixer's beaters the whole time. Of course, the new bowl wasn't made for the stand mixer, so I had to keep a close eye on it and rotate it, etc. But it worked.
(4) I knew that the batter would probably overflow my muffin pans (even with an extra one borrowed from my mom), so I put a third of a cup of batter in each one instead of the usual quarter of a cup. This filled the muffins cups to capacity (with the paper liners in them, anyway). Any more, and they would have overflowed.
(5) I got the first batch of 12 muffins in the oven and realized that I had neglected to redouble the cinnamon. "Redouble" because technically I usually use twice as much as the recipe calls for. The first batch taste good, even without the extra cinnamon, but the latter batches taste even better.
(6) The muffins on the bottom rack of the oven wound up burnt on the bottom (likely I should have moved the rack up a notch), while the ones on top weren't quite done. The burnt ones I'm just dealing with. The top ones I just left in the oven for quite a while after I'd turned it off, and they seem to be done now.

Anyway, it's not quite sitcom worthy as is, but it isn't hard to imagine working that into one of those panic-stricken sitcoms. There would need to be a deadline for the zucchini bread, of course. Also, a few more disasters with the potential of destroying the house would be required. For instance, the sparklers my dad found in a shed and gave to me recently would have to have been so close to the stove that they ignited. Of course they would burn the (party|wedding|funeral) dress that I had promised to fix, so that I would have to fix it again and creatively hide the burns... Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

At any rate, the muffins turned out to be edible and tasty, in spite of it all.

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Excursion Prep

I'm planning on going to Craters of the Moon tomorrow, so I baked some bread to take along. Despite a few muck-ups, it turned out wonderfully. It's essentially the same thing I made here, but I used almond meal in place of hazelnut meal, and forgot about adding the milk. Now, if only Montina flour were easier to find. It adds such an awesome flavor to bread. *sighs*

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Gluten Free Tips: Corn Bread

Corn bread is actually fairly easy to convert to gluten free. I generally just use the recipe on the box, but make a few slight modifications. My modifications are in the brown boxes.

1 cup ALBERS Yellow Corn Meal
1 cup all-purpose flour
I use Bette Hagman's Featherlight Rice flour mix*
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 Tbs. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
I cut this to 1/4 t, since I'm not THAT into salt
1 cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 large egg, lightly beaten
I use two eggs; adds protein and helps it stick together
Add 1 t xanthan gum

PREHEAT oven to 400°F. Grease 8-inch-square baking pan.
COMBINE corn meal, flour, sugar, baking powder, xanthan gum and salt in medium bowl. Combine milk, oil and egg in small bowl; mix well. Add milk mixture to flour mixture; stir just until blended. Pour into prepared pan.
BAKE for 20 to 25 minutes or until wooden pick inserted into center comes out clean. Serve warm.
NOTE: Recipe may be doubled. Use greased 13x9-inch baking pan; bake as above.

*Any good GF flour blend should work here. I'd avoid ones with strong flavors, like Bette Hagman's 4-flour bean mix using garfava flour, since they'll overpower the taste of the cornmeal.

GF Tips Index

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Date Pudding

By and large, most things are fairly simple to convert to gluten free. Use a gluten free flour mix, add some xanthan gum, maybe increase the amount of baking soda/powder and add an extra egg, and otherwise keep the recipe the same. The only trick is to find a GF flour mix that has the same consistency as regular flour, and there are lots of those available in cookbooks and on-line. There are a few exceptions to this "simplicity".

(1) Yeast bread: For this, get a GF cookbook and follow the recipe to the letter the first few times (unless the temperature in the recipe conflicts with the temperature on the yeast you're using; temperature is key).

(2) White cake: I still haven't made a decent GF white cake. It's always too thick and dry. The closest is Bette Hagman's Italian Creme cake, but that's not really a white cake. Her supposed "Master White Cake" recipe was, well, er, interesting... It wasn't any better than any others I'd tried...and in some respects worse.

(3) Date Pudding: I've tried several times in the past to make Date Pudding with gluten free flours using my mom's recipe. It's never turned out. Until tonight. I finally found a GF recipe for date pudding that is similar to my mom's. It's in The Gluten Free Gourmet Makes Dessert. The differences were that I needed to decrease the flour, increase the baking powder, and add some eggs (and xanthan gum). That was it, and it turned out beautifully. So we now have a formerly traditional New Year's dish back on the table for tomorrow. ^/^

What else is on the table? Ham, corn bread, stir fried veggies, and...I'm not sure. I wonder if we have potatoes... I'll probably make rice to go with the veggies, so potatoes would be a mite redundant. At any rate, my mom and I are both happy to get to enjoy date pudding again.

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Holiday Happenings

This was actually one of the smoother Christmas mornings that I can remember. As usual, I was responsible for the majority of the meal. It's sort of become a tradition for me to cook Thai food for Christmas. As far as I can remember, this started in a year that Christmas was on a Sunday and my mom was still the organist at her church. This meant that she would not be able to help much with preparation. Also, she was still sick of turkey from Thanksgiving. So I volunteered to try and make some Thai food. Coconut curries are no problem; they're fairly easy to get to taste right. Other main dishes I haven't had so much luck with, so this year I only made the curry and was very careful not to get it too spicy for my mom. She didn't complain about the spiciness, so I must have succeeded. I also stir fried some vegetables on the side.

For the dessert end of things, I made a coffeecake, some coconut custard, and some coconut rice. Mom made some jello-with-fruit-in-it (there's probably a name for this). The only snag was that I'd forgotten to put the sweet rice to soak last night. Recipe directions say to "soak overnight" and steam for 20 minutes. I checked the package, and it said to "soak 1-2 hours" and steam for 40 minutes. So I did it that way. It turned out all right.

The most annoying thing was slicing up the chicken. Mom had moved it from the freezer to the fridge after the midnight service last night, and the chicken was still nearly frozen solid. In an attempt to separate off one of the pieces, I beat at them with a frying pan that Mom was planning to throw out anyway. The frying pan is now impressively bent and warped. I was rather amused; Mom was horrified. Anyway, I gave that up as futile and began sawing away with a steak knife until I got some pieces to separate off. I gave up after four, though the last two were closer to the right solidity for slicing. Ideally, you want them partially frozen. They're too...wiggly when completely thawed, and too solid when completely frozen. There's a sweet spot in between that is perfect, but it's pretty rare to find it exactly.

One other minor snag: when Mom left to go pick Dad up (I was busy cooking, and had a lot more to get done that Mom would have had to guess at had we traded), she got stuck whilst backing out of the driveway. I heard her walking back and forth and peeked out to see what was going on. I couldn't go help right away due to cooking duties, but when I got a break, I ran out and did some digging around the front right tire. There wasn't much snow there; she must have just hit a slick spot at exactly the wrong angle. Between the salt she put down and my digging, we got her moving again.

Both Mom and Dad liked the curry, which made me very happy, as I'd made up most of it this year. Yeah, I had a recipe, but half the stuff is impossible to find (lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, etc.), and the easy way out, using pre-made curry sauce, is fraught with ginger: Galangal, aka Thai ginger, to be exact, and I don't know whether it has the same effect on me as plain ol' ginger. So I improvised, with some chili-garlic sauce, some curry powder, a bit of lemon juice and fish sauce and tomato paste, all boiled in the coconut milk with the chicken.

As for presents, we did that after lunch/dinner/feast-thing. I got Pirates 3, a gold dragon, and money. I could swear that Mom just wants to make sure that she gives me more than Dad does... but since Dad doesn't even pick out anything, and I have a pretty good idea how much that dragon cost, she's already ahead of the game. And she still offers to give me more. Seriously, those two were plenty. Now I have to find things to buy with that money. Gift-type things. Really, the snowfall yesterday was a nice enough Christmas gift. I get why Dad gives money; he can't go pick stuff out himself unless he sanes up enough to go get his eyes fixed. I don't get why Mom does. *sighs*

Oh, speaking of gifts, I got Buster a doggie-cape. He didn't really want me to put it on him, but I did. It took him five minutes to get it back off, and he had the proudest look on his face when he did... We'll see if we can get him used to wearing it, but I won't hold my breath. ^/^

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Gluten Free Tips (1)

Aka, things I wish someone had told me when I first started having to make everything be gluten-free.

The most important factor for getting yeast bread to turn out is the water temperature. Whatever flours you use, however you get it to stick together without gluten, if the water temperature is wrong, the bread will not turn out right. Period. Bette Hagman gets this consistently wrong, though I love her recipe books otherwise. She nearly always says to have the water at 105° Fahrenheit. When I first started out, I believed her and aimed for this temperature. Then one day I read the blurb on the jar of yeast. It said 110-115° Fahrenheit when added in liquid and allowed to froth, and 130° Fahrenheit when added into the dry ingredients. Most of Bette Hagman's recipes say to add the yeast with the dry ingredients. For the type of yeast I use, 105° Fahrenheit is just plain wrong.

There's a further complication, however. With wheat bread, water is generally the only, or at least the dominant, liquid. With GF bread, you're usually adding eggs at the bare minimum, which decreases the amount of water you use. This means that to get the liquid to 130° Fahrenheit, you need the water to be even hotter. I aim for 160° Fahrenheit. After some experimenting one summer, I found that 160° worked well for the type of yeast that I buy. For anyone else, read your own package of yeast and try to get all the liquid to that temperature before you add the dry ingredients. If there's a secret to making good gluten-free bread, this is the most important bit. Then, after you've gotten bread to turn out, you can start working on texture and flavor by experimenting with different flours.

For instance, for our Thanksgiving rolls today, I used Bette Hagman's Featherlight Rice Flour bread recipe, but I replaced a quarter of the flour with hazelnut meal. This gave a much lighter, moister texture, and a richer flavor. I'll find out tomorrow how well the moisture lasts. But still, it's best to start by following the recipe exactly, apart from the erroneous temperature instructions. When you can get it to turn out as a nice, risen bread, then it's time to start experimenting.

Oh, a few other modifications I make to that particular recipe. I use lemon juice instead of vinegar. The purpose is to make the dough more acidic to help the yeast rise, and I prefer to use lemon juice; I often add more than the recipe calls for, too. I also use more honey than the recipe calls for, especially if I'm making cinnamon pull-aparts out of the dough. And I use rice protein powder (1 T for the small loaf, 2 T for the largest recipe) in place of dry milk powder. The purpose is to add protein to a flour mix that lacks it, and rice protein powder works just as well.

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Unusually Easy Pie Crust

I just got back from my mom's house. We were making pumpkin pies for tomorrow. Well, I was making pumpkin pies for tomorrow, but since I made them at Mom's house, her dishwasher can take care of most of the mess. At any rate, this is only the second time since I started making gluten-free crusts that it was easy. Seriously easy. Like, pre-gluten-free easy. By and large, I followed the same recipe as last year, but with a few minor differences. I have no idea which difference made the, er, difference.

(1) I added the full quarter-cup of olive oil before cutting the butter into the flour mixture.
(2) I didn't actually measure the vinegar or water... I put some ice cubes in a cup, dumped some vinegar in, poured some water in, then dropped two eggs in and beat the mixture with a fork. Rather than add the whole thing, I measured out slightly more than 3/4 of a cup of the liquid (occasionally fishing out ice cubes that escaped).
(3) I used a different rolling pin, a very bizarre one made of plastic that you fill with water for weight.

A few tips for anyone working with gluten-free pie crusts, though. It does not hold together nearly as well as wheat-based crust. Gluten comes from the same root as "glue." It's very good at holding things together. We use xanthan gum to approximate that stickiness but it's nowhere near as strong. So we cheat a bit. Recipe books will suggest that you roll the crust between two sheets of saran wrap. This would work well...EXCEPT that I've never been able to find saran wrap that's a foot wide, and trying to combine two pieces so you've got the width you need just doesn't work.

What I've got is a pie crust bag. I can't see why you'd need it for wheat crusts, unless you were just starting out, but it's awfully handy for GF crusts. You do need to dust rice flour all around the insides of it, thickest directly above and below your ball of dough, but then you just zip the bag shut, roll until the dough spreads out enough to fill the inside, unzip, and flip into a pan. The plastic keeps the dough from breaking apart on its way to the pie-pan. It's not fool-proof. In years past, it's cracked while I've been trying to form it to the surface of the pan, but it gives you a better chance at a crust that doesn't need patching.

At any rate, I've actually got enough dough left over to make another crust, and Mom suggested we make a lemon pie tomorrow. I'm not sure why we need one when we've got three pumpkin pies to eat...but I haven't had lemon pie in a while, so I'll go along with it.

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Further Uses for Zucchini

Over at Bob's Red Mill, they have an extensive list of gluten free recipes. Yesterday, I tried making the Chocolate Zucchini Cake. I didn't try it until this morning, as I was trying to follow the recipes instructions about letting it cool. It's quite good, but rather heavy and filling. I followed the recipe almost exactly as written. I upped the vanilla and cinnamon a tiny bit, though, and left out the orange peel, and I used an 8" x 8" cake pan, which was almost too small. The cake rose above the edges enough that I can't use the lid that the pan came with. I also accidentally left out the walnuts. They were sitting out...and somehow never made it into the batter. *shrugs*

One comment about the Zucchini-taco casserole from the last zucchini entry: I've decided that the next time I make it, I'm going to have the corn chips on the side, NOT directly in the casserole. I don't like them there. Serving the chips on the side turns it into something like a taco salad. I've been picking off the remnants of the ones I put in the pan with the casserole.

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Banana Bread

As usual, holiday cooking duties have fallen to me. My mom wanted ham, but I've had ham several times lately, so I convinced her to switch it to pork chops (after assuring her that I would not imbue them with red pepper, my favorite garnish). I'll also cook some rice, corn on the cob, and stir fry some vegetables. For dessert, however, gluten-free banana bread.

I use Bette Hagman's "Best Banana Bread" recipe (The Gluten Free Gourmet), but with some modifications. Her recipe calls for either 1 cup soy flour, 1/2 cup potato starch and 1/4 cup rice flour OR for 1 3/4 cup of her "4-bean flour mix." I really liked the flavor that the soy flour gave the recipe, but soy flour no longer agrees with me, and I can not stand anything made from "garfava" flour (a mixture of fava and garbanzo beans). So I've modified the flour. I used white bean flour in place of the garfava. Essentially, any bean flour will work; it's a matter of finding one whose flavor you like. The best flavor, imo, is from soy flour. *sighs* But white bean flour isn't too bad.

I also up the amount of banana in the bread. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup of mashed banana for one loaf. I would guess that's about one banana. I put in three bananas per loaf. This improves the flavor and texture, but it does cause problems if you actually bake the bread as a loaf. Basically, you wind up with nearly twice as much dough as you can put in a single loaf pan and expect to get the bread done in the middle. So I stopped making loaves of banana bread, and started making banana muffins instead. :^)

Why bean flours, non-celiacs may wonder? Bean flours do two things: they add protein and they add moisture. Most GF flour mixes are rice-based, and rice flour products tend to be very, very dry, and lacking in protein. But bean flours also tend to have strong flavors, and so they're mixed with other, starchier flours, to 'water' down the taste, as it were. Bette Hagman's 4-flour-bean-mix has a texture very similar to wheat flour (from what I can remember). Depending on the bean flour you use, it will have as much or more protein than wheat flour.

Alternately, you can add rice protein to rice flour mixes (which I do), but they still won't be as moist as products made with bean-based flours.

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Morning Off

I wasn't quite feeling up to par today, so I stayed home from taiji. I feel okay right now, but I suspect that it would have been a bad idea for me to drive to IF and back. Since I stayed home, though, I got to play with tear gas, skin-burning chemicals, dead birds, Japanese fungus, dried seeds, roots, and a host of other things. *grins* In other words, I made chicken stew. It still has about an hour to cook. I've never put Shiitake mushrooms in a stew before, but the raw piece I tried had a nice, woody flavor. Slightly strong aftertaste, though. But since I only got four mushrooms (roughly an inch and a half in diameter), I figure that they won't overpower the rest of the stew.

UPDATE: I started feeling much better shortly after eating the bit of shiitake, but I was also eating a fresh-peeled carrot and half a sweet potato. And I feel even better after eating some of my stew. I'm halfway tempted to credit the shiitake, but chicken stew/soup in general is supposed to be good for colds, too. *shrugs* Though I have to laugh at some of the claims made for shiitake. "Strengthens the immune system! Good for treating HIV!" Anyone else see the irony there? Now, when they claim antiviral properties and good for treating HIV, that, at least, is reasonable. I don't know how true it is, though.

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Resolved: steamless morning

Happy New Year's Eve and a Pippin New Year to everyone.

I find the notion of a New Year's Resolution a bit odd. Mainly because people decide on it in advance, and then plan to wait until the new year to do anything about it. In general, this is a recipe for failure. So I made an old-year-resolution a few days after Christmas, and already put it into action. My goal is to practice taiji, yoga, and chanting at least once each day. Even if only for five minutes each. I would like to make it to 108 continuous days. Why 108? Mainly because that's the number of beads on my Tibetan mala. I mean, I could look up mystic significances for it, but the mala is the primary reason. Anyway, I'm up to five days so far. Assuming I get a round of the taiji form in before I head to bed. Oh yes. I made a calendar check-sheet so I could make sure of the counting.

Oh, and just a note. Do NOT try to bake anything "normal" in the same oven with a custard while it's being steamed. My Christmas coffeecake was, well, soup. Cutting it into thin slices and putting it in the toaster oven helps, but it's still rather odd. So this time I baked the custard the night before. Though it's a bit different. For this one, you cook the rice, put it in the pan, then pour the custard batter over it and bake them together. *shrugs* No clue how it will taste. I'll find out tomorrow. And all I have to do tomorrow is make cornbread and Italian Cream Cake (which is an odd name, since there is no cream in it). It's one of the best gluten-free cake recipes I've ever used (from Bette Hagman's book of GF desserts).

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Christmas Cooking

Thai custard, check
Sticky rice, check (will be mixed ALL together just before serving)
Blueberry-Apple coffee-cake, still baking
chocolate chips for fudge, check
random kitchen acoutrements that Mom probably doesn't have, check
presents, check

When I get over to my mom's house, there will be a flurry of chopping and mixing and slicing, followed by a flurry of boiling and stir-frying and simmering. We're making Pad Thai (sometimes spelled Phat Thai) and a Thai curry. At the moment, I'm just waiting on the coffee cake. Anyway, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Pippin Solstice. :^D

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Pie Crust Promises?

Whoa. I have never ever had that little trouble with a gluten free pie crust before. I mean, at least one of them usually breaks badly enough that I have to patch it. There were absobloodylutely no problems this time. I made one or two minor modifications, so for the benefit of any fellow celiacs who wander here, I'll post the original recipe with the modifications.

I use Bette Hagman's Vinegar Pastry from the revised edition of The Gluten-Free Gourmet, but I double the recipe. Original:

2 c white rice flour ~~~~~~~~ 1.5 c tapioca flour ~~~~~ 1.5 c cornstarch
2 rounded t xanthan gum ~~~ 1.5 t salt ~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2 T sugar
1.5 c shortening ~~~~~~~~~~ 2 eggs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2 T vinegar
4-6 T icewater

For the most part I left the dry ingredients alone, but I did use 1 c brown rice flour in place of half of the white rice flour and I decreased the salt slightly. Instead of shortening, I used 1.25 c butter (softened by 30 seconds in the microwave), with 0.25 c olive oil on standby. I didn't use all the olive oil, but I find that adding a bit of oil makes the crust much MUCH easier to handle. I probably used about 1 T of it. I also increased the eggs to 3. One other change: the recipe says to leave the dough in the refrigerator until you're ready to use it. I've always found that it comes out horribly dry, so this time I didn't put it in the fridge at all. No clue which change had the most effect, but I was quite quite pleased. I'm curious to see how the leftover crust handles when I make it into pie crust cookies. :^D

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Okay, who's the wise guy?

Just an FYI for anyone else who makes pumpkin pies from scratch. Avoid the supposed "pie pumpkins." Mom and I found two of them in town, which wouldn't quite have been enough for three pies (they're very small). The larger pumpkin that I got in Twin Falls cooked up cleanly, and after a short time in the blender took on the consistency of apple sauce. The pie pumpkin didn't cook cleanly, was extremely stringy, and was still not entirely smoothed out after half an hour in the blender.

The other pie pumpkin was too green even to cut. I tried. It took me ten minutes to get it cut open so I could see inside. It didn't LOOK green inside, but I figured it probably wouldn't soften up very well in the oven if it was starting out twelve times as hard as the other. After seeing how badly the other one did, I'm just as glad I threw out the green one. At any rate, I've concluded that the label "pie" pumpkin is just intended to annoy and confuse people, and is probably a ploy by the canned pumpkin industry to discourage people from making pies from scratch.

Anyway, I've got dry ingredients all mixed up for both pie crusts and bread. Pies will be made tonight; bread in the morning. Hmmm... I wonder if we're making fudge tomorrow? I suppose I ought to find out. I'm making dinner rolls and cinnamon-pull-apart rolls. It seems like there's usually something else I make...and I have no idea what it might be. I suppose I ought to stop rambling now.

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