Relearning to bake

Fiona mixes brown rice and potato flours

Moves on to using her hands for better mixing...

And finishes by rubbing it all over her belly! I swear she did not learn this technique from me!

one of the better loaves of gluten free bread

Since figuring out that Fiona is allergic to gluten we've had to rethink everything we eat around here. Gluten is in a lot of weird places. Some things like bread and pasta are obvious. Others not so much. Soy sauce, salad dressing, vitamins, and nutritional yeast are some of the things that we have had to learn to avoid. Beer too, though thankfully we aren't terrible parents who give their kid beer to drink! Also I'm not always prepared with a Fiona friendly alternative. I've brought her own cupcakes to a birthday but never thought I'd need something for library story time. They read the Gingerbread Baby and decorated gingerbread cookies. Although Brian can obviously eat gluten I can't since Fiona is still a little nursling. I'm about 90% gluten free. She does react if I break down and eat a few slices of "real" pizza or something so I try to be really good. Otherwise I feel like a terrible selfish mom.

For the first few months the idea of baking gluten free totally intimidated me. Recipes call for about 5 different kinds of flour. What the heck is sorghum flour and where do I get millet flour on the island? And somebody please tell me about xantham gum and guar gum. I don't even know how to pronounce the last one. Is your head spinning? Mine too. So we relied on store bought things. We bough terrible bread that tasted like sawdust, frozen pizza dough, and rice flour pasta. The good news is that these things exist (even in Kodiak). The bad news is that a lot of it tastes bad or is just super processed junk food. We are not a frozen pizza family! Why did I break down and buy frozen pizza just because it was gluten free. I hated it and didn't feel that great about feeding it to Fiona.

So I'm creeping out into the world of gluten free baking. Armed with a pantry full of 5 different kinds of gluten free flour and xantham gum I've managed to pull a few things off. The priority seemed to be cookies since that was the first thing I mastered! Then brownies. I can honestly say the brownies are so good that I'll make them even if I don't need a gluten free recipe in the future. Pizza dough needs some tweaking but turned out pretty good. Bread is a work in progress. I'm sure if I can get my hands on some millet flour I'll have it down. It feels good to be taking back our kitchen and banishing the boxed junk food once again. What I really need is a good cake recipe. Brian's birthday cupcakes were only so so. It's hard to compare these things to their gluten free counter parts. Especially cake. Seriously, how can anything come close to North Douglas Chocolate Cake? It can't. So I might just leave that one alone.

I'm hoping that Fiona will outgrow this allergy in time. We'll just have to see. For now, we'll keep on experimenting. Fiona makes a great baking partner and doesn't seem to mind the misses! She loves homemade bread with "yellow butter please Mama". Yellow butter (not to confused with peanut butter) really does make some of those funky loaves go down a bit easier. Pass the butter.