A New Winnah

Knitter?
Annoyed by the GF posts?
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Working off of last week’s recap of my fave GF recipes…
Once again, I found myself going to a Friday dinner where my son and I wouldn’t be able to eat the challah.
Once again, I went to the Interwebs. I love the growth of this blob monster, I really do. Two years ago I found a challah recipe or two: results=eh. A year ago I found more. Results=better.

Yesterday I searched and found a variation on Jules challah recipe (which for some reason hadn’t worked right for me before) at Erica Miss America’s blog (I used dairy and guestimated/halved the recipe). As you may have noted from the previous post, anything using Jules’ GF flour (NAYY) is good by me so when I found this recipe, I was thrilled.

Especially because it took about an hour to make.

The result?

AWESOME—all the celiacs at the dinner found me and had some bread and tears came to their eyes, “Oh! I haven’t had challah in so long…”
Made me happy.

Almost as happy as snacking on the remnants as I write this.

Other GF successes:
STUNNING success of the King Arthur Flour GF Angel-food cake recipe (using Jules again).

However, this cake left me with ELEVEN egg yolks. Quick Googleness and I found a recipe for Avgolemono soup (naturally GF) which was also stunning (no picture b/c it just looks like really thick chicken broth.

A nice, perky, lemony soup for dreary days. Makes me think of Amalfi in January ’93 where they grow lemons bigger than your head…
seriously.

***
Knitting.
I’m working on the second, third, and fourth What Would Madame Defarge Knit? books which means full-time designing and editing/writing (along with CraftLit duties), but I will have some free patterns for y’all next week. I also have a few things I’ve been knitting on of which I’ll be posting pics very shortly.

If, however, you’re a knitter with a friend who can’t eat gluten, do them a favor once in awhile—bring some GF cookies to an SnB (in a separate ziplok). Make them a loaf of GF bread when you have a party or some GF biscuits (check first to see if they have to avoid dairy too—those issues sometimes go hand-in-hand). You have no idea what it means to someone to find that you took the time to cook for them when they are “the other” and generally have to just gaze in wonder and sadness as the rest of the world enjoys ‘normal’ food.
“How,” I hear you cry’ “HOW can I cook GF when there are so many things you need to know to do it?”
Ah.
You’re thinking of a few years ago.
Here’s everything you need to be nice to those among us who are less gastrically-gifted:
1) Make sure everything you cook with is clean (no stray flour bits anywhere
2) have Jules ship you a bag of cookie mix (EASY) or her flour—she puts the extra weirdness (xanthan gum used to replicate the protein structure of gluten) in the flour and mixes so all the tricky GF-ness is done. Just store the extra in your freezer and use it later.
3) continue to make sure you don’t accidentally add anything with gluten to the mix (and by this I mean keep the regular all-purpose flour far, far away. A grain of flour can make a celiac sick).
4) That’s it. Jules’ recipes often uses vanilla yogurt in her recipes as GF cooking requires more moisture (rice flour sucks up liquid like regular rice does) so don’t be surprised by a wetter texture and always check the recipe before you head to the store. Otherwise the yogurt might take you by surprise.