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| Fruit Crisp Trial Run |
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Coffee Cake
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| Take and Finish Pizza Cruts |
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| Test Run at home |
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| Chocolate Cupcakes |
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Sandwich Loaf
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| Angel Food Cake - Who knew it could turn out this great!?! |
Gluten. A word that for some people it strikes discord in
them even when they hear just the word (and that discord doesn’t even include
eating it), for others it leaves them scratching their heads and going ‘huh?’.
I could go into the nitty, gritty details of what gluten is and why it has
become such a discord for so many people in recent years as the thoughts on
this are wide and varied – but – I won’t, well at least not here. You can
easily search the internet and find a myriad amount of information to sift
through yourself. This blog is not meant to dig into ALL the many facets of
celiac, gluten sensitive and gluten allergy and honestly as soon as I’d share
something here the information would outdated, updated or refined. For this
blog I will just tip my fingers (and maybe toes) into the pool of sharing about
being gluten free in my life (this doesn’t even begin to cover nut, dairy, egg,
meat, food additive – allergies, reactions, interactions in other people’s lives).
As I shared in an earlier blog I knew during the Fall on 2022 that I just
wasn’t feeling well. Many, many vague and seemingly unrelated symptoms were
occurring for me in my body (I now realize that I probably was experiencing
these for some time prior to the Fall of ’22 but these symptoms came to an ugly
head during that Fall). The yearly physical in February of 2023 found me
looking at the Dr and telling him I was probably going to need a double amount
of his time that day because we had to try to come up with some answers/ideas.
I had some thoughts of my own and his suggestion was to first try avoiding
gluten (yes that was one of my thoughts). So I launched into label reading,
information seeking and learning.
I have several people in my life that need to be or choose
to be gluten free in their lives. For the past few years I’ve been starting
going down the road to learning how to bake and cook gluten free to be able to
share these items with everyone so it wouldn’t matter whether you needed to be
gluten free or not, you could just enjoy the food item and not have to worry
about it. My husband does not need to be gluten free like I need to be. So he
becomes my recipe judge. If he will eat it and tells me that it’s worth making
again, or he goes back for seconds then I know it’s a winner!! So the
experimenting becomes even more directed - make it gluten free and get it to
pass the taste tester’s approval – aka my husband.
The summer of 2022 I participated in a local Open Market
Night as a vendor taking craft and baked items to sell. I dabbled in a few
gluten free items with the regular baked items that did contain gluten. Things
will probably be looking a bit different for me this coming summer with the
vast majority of my baked items being gluten free. There are tips and tricks to
learn and know about how gluten free (GF) flours can be different from other
flours, a bit of chemistry factors in there. I have a friend who has told me
“cooking isn’t crazy difficult but baking…that’s different – baking is a
science experiment, it’s all chemistry.” And there is some real truth in that.
Baking/Making a recipe that’s designed to be gluten free right from the start
is not as tricky as converting a regular recipe to being just as good but made
gluten free (there in lies the experimentation and the taste testing…and
repeating, critiquing and tweeking).
What has been exciting is finding ways to be successful.
What gluten free items might appear at the summer Open Market Nights? Angel Food Cake, Coffee Cake Muffins,
Sandwich Bread, Take and Finish Pizza Crust, Chocolate Cupcakes, Banana Bread,
Pumpkin/Squash Bread, Fruit Crisp and there’s bound to be more options baking…I
mean developing.
Life – Living Inspired: Finding ways to be successful
