I’ve Moved!

I’ve moved all the AFFFG content over to http://afoodiesfallfromgrace.wordpress.com. Please point your browsers over there from now on because I won’t be updating this site anymore. If you are a subscriber, my apologies, but you’ll need to resubscribe from the new address. Thanks, y’all!

Gluten-free Hanukkah

I’m sitting here completely stuffed with, drum roll please…DOUGHNUTS! The first doughnuts I’ve had in, let me see now…at least five years.

I got on this gluten-free Hanukkah kick because I learned that Hanukkah is a celebration of fried foods! WHY did I not know this sooner?! So The Man and I made gluten-free latkes four days in a row and now the doughnuts. Actually, we attempted to make the doughnuts on Saturday night with some pals, but we had a little miscommunication (couldn’t have been from the hazelnut rum, no) that led to the baking soda, baking powder, and xanthan gum not being added to the dough. So let’s just say they didn’t turn out that well.

But tonight we prevailed. We had latkes again for dinner, followed by the doughnuts. Our place smells like a deep fryer. I think I am going to have to make these recipes every year, healthy arteries be damned.

Thanks so much to Gluten-Free Bay for such awesome recipes!

Fry, little doughnuts, fry!!!

Cranberry Sauce

Here is the recipe I’m using for this year’s cranberry sauce, courtesy of People’s co-op:

Cranberry Sauce

2 c. fresh, local cranberries
6 tbsp. raisins
6 oz. frozen apple juice, undiluted
1/2 tsp. grated orange rind
1 tsp fresh, grated ginger

Also, I totally forgot to include stuffing on my last post, the Thanksgiving menu. Of course there will be stuffing for Thanksgiving! In fact, this year I’m doing a crazy Hawaiian-style stuffing for our pal RCMB. I’ll try to create an actual recipe for that and post it here. I’m totally winging it, but it will likely include some version of my low-carb biscuit recipe with the addition of some cornmeal, macadamia nuts, cranberries, pineapple, mirepoix, and veg stock.

Seriously, I’m hungry already. I can hardly wait for Thursday!

Vegan Thanksgiving Menu

At long last, we have the menu planned. I have to qualify this and say that I’m trying to practice flexibility and not get all Martha about it. That makes me crazy and then I don’t enjoy myself. So, with that said, let’s call this the preliminary menu, subject to change without notice.

As I said in a previous post, this Thanksgiving will be attended by:

• A diabetic vegan
• A celiac
• Another person with food issues, and
• The Man, who hates mushrooms.

Fortunately, I still have a sense of humor and I love to cook, so for me, it’s fun. It also makes for the setup to a great joke: A diabetic vegan, a celiac, and a mushroom-hater walk into a bar… Get some quince liqueur into me and I’ll be the life of the party.

Appetizers

• Flax-sunflower-sesame crackers (these are drying in my new oven right this second–I’m using the Drying feature for the first time, very exciting!)
• Olives (canned black from Lindsay, CA, a family tradition)
• Marinated store-bought vegetables of some kind (Martha is contained)

Main Courses

• Some kind of green salad, maybe this one
• Green beans with pepitas (I loved that Bon Appetit piece about Mexican Hanukkah)
• Mashed butternut squash
• Cashew gravy
• Cranberry sauce
• Falafels with tahini-yogurt sauce
• Turkey done my favorite way (turkey, as you might have guessed, is not vegan, hence, the falafels)

Dessert

• Pumpkin ice cream with quince syrup (recipe to follow)
• Juniper granita (from the Travel Oregon cookbook)

All of this will be accompanied with French reds and quince and apricot liqueur cocktails. Dinner will be followed by a long nap.

Juniper Granita

Travel Oregon put together a really awesome Oregon-themed cookbook that highlights autumn ingredients. The recipes are gathered from restaurants around Oregon. What a great idea. Methinks I’ll be printing this out and trying a bunch of stuff, including the crazy-but-very-right-sounding Juniper Granita. Between this cookbook and the Bon Appetit Thanksgiving planner, I think I’ll be set for My Big Fat Turkey Thursday (mostly vegan).

Eeek! A Spider!

"Happy Halloween!" --Pickle

More dog torture:

Please...help me.

And for those of you looking for a last-minute Halloween  treat, this pumpkin fudge is quite easy and surprisingly tasty. Here it is in the pan on its way to work with me:

Mmmm, pumpkiny!

Happy Halloween to all!

Thanksgiving Menu Planner

We will be hosting our vegan pal RCMB again for Thanksgiving this year, as well as another friend who has some food restrictions. Between the three of us, it should be quite a challenge. But, I’m up for it!

I was looking at last year’s menu and recalling what I liked and what I didn’t. Those cocktails sure were good, so I made up another batch of quince liqueur yesterday so that it will be ready for My Big Fat Turkey Thursday. I really appeciate Bon Appetit’s automated Thanksgiving menu planner thingy. Check it out.

I also got Barbara Ghazarian’s fantastic new quince cookbook and have spent many a recent evening studying it. I bought twelve pounds of quinces this year and plan to use every last ounce of them. I have to say it’s exciting to know another person out there shares my weird quince obsession.

I have no pictures this week. I realize that photographs keep me from posting more because my laptop is barely hanging on at this point and dealing with photos is just too time-consuming and insanity-producing. So until I get a new one (which should be next month), I’m just going to have to post without pics. Hope you can deal with that.

Cocktail Blast from the Past

The wonders of the Internet…you know, when people from your deep, dark past contact you out of the blue and shock you so hard you lose your breath? Yep, I just had one of those moments.

But it’s a HAPPY moment! (thank goodness…hoooooo, have I heard some sto-ries!) This person, we’ll call him George, completely blew my mind and actually sent along a fantastically fun photo to jog my memory (this was over twenty years ago, people!) I had a great laugh (with him, not at him). He really made me reminisce in the best possible way. I was so glad to hear about some very old pals and to know that they are alive and well in the world. Sigh…

Stargaze Greyhound, FMT Style

2 parts Absolut vodka

4-5 parts grapefruit juice

ice

1. Pour ingredients into a fabulous glass mug from the 1970s, the kind your mom still has at the back of her cupboard somewhere…or is maybe even still using actually.
2. Crank up the Bronski Beat soundtrack and rock out a little bit whilst kicking back several of these. It’s Saturday night, baby!
3. Lose track of time and space.
4. Drink so many that you have to walk around your suburban neighborhood with your pals to keep the spins away, and maybe run through the park sprinklers and play a little game involving a certain pegasus/water fountain statue and a huge bottle of industrial strength dishwashing liquid.
5. Maybe fall asleep at some point. Or not.
6. Tiptoe over the sleeping body of your best friend and stagger downstairs at 6 a.m. to watch Charles Kurault’s Sunday Morning with your mom, who drinks coffee, watches TV, and does the crossword while humming a Willie Nelson tune. Feel that homey feeling.
7. Eat several packages of Saltine crackers and later that day hang out at Lake Elizabeth with your pals, feeding the ducks.
8. Come home and overhear your older sister CJ telling your mom about enormous clouds of bubbles floating across a certain main street.
9. Twenty years later, remember all of this very fondly.

Thanks for the memories, George!

A very famous statue in my hometown featuring a pegasus being pelted by streams of water

Note from SE on the back of the above photo regarding a late-night prank on the poor pegasus (after too many greyhounds)

Strawberry Ice Cream

Did I wake up this morning and it’s already September 1st? How is that possible? And yet, already I feel those strange cool breezes and notice the sun acting funny, setting a lot earlier than it should. Alas, I have a mere twenty-one days of summer left to enjoy.

Thankfully, the weather actually seems to be cooperating here for once. We’ve had some beautiful days of eighty-degree weather. I’m hoping it holds so that my newly planted collards, kales, and greens get a decent start before The Rain begins. Also, it’s nice to use my stovetop again finally. I’m making a soup right now from my old Fields of Greens cookbook. Mmmm!

If I must bid summer adieu, what better way to do it than to post my strawberry ice cream recipe? This is the recipe we served at El Puerco this year, so for those of you in attendance, you’ll (hopefully) remember it fondly. Somehow, sadly, I forgot to take a picture of it, so I have included a photo of the menu instead.

Strawberry Ice Cream

1 can coconut milk
2 c chopped strawberries
1/3 c sugar
1/3 c agave syrup

Macerate the strawberries in the sugar for 30-60 mins. Put the coconut milk, agave syrup, and macerated strawberries into a blender and blend. Pour this mix into your ice cream maker and proceed according to mfr’s instructions. I think it’s especially good to top the finished product with more macerated strawberries, as we did at El Puerco.

Every time I post one of these coconut milk ice cream recipes I feel obligated to say my disclaimer, which is: forget about dairy-based homemade ice creams. Using coconut milk is the BEST. You don’t have to make it up ahead of time and it freezes way better than homemade dairy ice cream. Take a leap of faith for me on this, and let me know how it turns out if you try it.

El Puerco Menu next to the Declaration of Independence

Oh yeah, and I also updated my Flickr feed. One day on my way to volunteering at the Travel Portland Visitor Information Center, I took some photos along the way, mostly to entice my friends and family to visit me. You should be able to click on that in the right sidebar. Enjoy!

Oh yeah yeah, I also finally created http://afoodiesfallfromgrace.wordpress.com. Everything should be working fine, but pardon some of the inevitable glitches while I figure things out.

The Gluten-free Backlash

Just when you thought it was safe to eat outside your own kitchen, here comes the gluten-free backlash. Did you catch the article on Slate suggesting that the gluten-free diet is a…fad? I’m sooooo glad Celiac.com decided to post Dr. Hoggan’s very fine correction to the Slate article. It’s too bad most Slate readers likely won’t know about it.

Urgh! As if it’s not painful enough to go through life with a crazy food allergy that prevents one from eating an entire category of food, now we have to deal with people just thinking we’re trying to be trendy? Not to mention how long it took some of us to get a diagnosis. Really, it’s outrageous.

It seems like the writer is trying to distinguish between diagnosed celiacs and people who feel better when they don’t eat gluten. That distinction is lost on me. Do I now need to show the test results confirming I have celiac disease for people to take me seriously? Should people who feel better when they don’t eat gluten, but are not technically celiacs, be judged as diet faddists? Methinks not.

Oh well. Now back to my kitchen.