Blessed by the Potato

So, as I think most everyone knows by now, Wayfare was recently diagnosed with Celiac disease and can’t eat any more foods with gluten… which is a lot. Well, the story’s a bit more complicated than that — first we need to get an appointment with a GI specialist, and a bunch of other steps that I’ll let her talk about. The main thing is that we’re preparing for a gluten-free lifestyle, while at the same time having a gorging good time on all the bread and pizza she can eat as a farewell.

Just to give a bit of background, celiac disease is, from what the internet tells me, an autoimmune attack against the small intestine triggered by gluten proteins found in wheat, rye, and barely. The only treatment is a life-long gluten-free diet (I’m still trying to find out how much, if any, gluten contamination is allowed; I’ve found one source that says less than 200 ppm, which is “separate spoons” low). This is actually kind of difficult, since so many foods have wheat or gluten in them.

Gluten is the protein in flour that gives dough its elasticity or chewiness — it’s also what helps form the structures in dough that hold carbon dioxide released by yeast to give the final product its airy, bubbly texture. Because of this, it’s used pretty widely, both in the form of flour (often added to things where at first thought you might not expect it, such as sauces, dressings, and drink mixes) and as an additive or binder for medications, preservatives, candies, etc.

The ubiquity of wheat flour (and gluten contamination) will of course make eating out hard, but the sheer usefulness of gluten in cooking is also going to be a pain for making homemade alternatives. If you consider flour, there are a number of different types at the grocery store: bread flour, all purpose, and cake flour, just to name the standard “white” flours. The main difference between them is the relative gluten content: breads and pizza dough need a lot of gluten for the elasticity, and thus bread flour has the most gluten. Cakes and pastries often need a flour that has less gluten so that they come out flakier. All purpose is in the middle. Just using the wrong type of wheat flour can often make a loaf of bread or batch of biscuits come out a little off, so trying to do without gluten entirely is pretty challenging, above and beyond the issue of the alternative flours (corn, rice, potato, sorghum, quinoa, etc.) each having different, arguably inferior flavours to wheat.

Right now, I’m trying to create gluten-free alternative recipes for use at home, preferably only using the 3 most commonly available alterative flours (rice, potato, and corn flour). I’m starting with recipes that don’t rely on the glutenous properties of flour, and in fact my thinking is that any recipe that has a caution not to over-mix, or to let the batter rest so as not to activate the gluten, has a good chance of working well. Indeed, I think the things that make “batters” rather than “doughs” will have the best chance of surviving the translation. So far, I’ve managed to make some decent belgian waffles, and will try a batch of biscuits next. I’ll post these to the recipes section as soon as I find a variation that’s edible (though check back, as I may change the recipes as I experiment).

I know that there are a lot of recipes and products available on the market already, but I’m a little leery of them after the first few I saw. Many of the recipes were trying to do too much at once — making something low fat and gluten free (we’ll worry about making things low fat once we can make them gluten free and edible), or invoving combinations of dozens of ingredients (mixtures of a half dozen flours plus additives to replace the flour). We went out to a gluten free bakery in town and the grocery store, and tried some of the products on offer. The bread was, in the words of the proprietor of the gluten free bakery “not bread. It’s toast. You have to toast it to eat it.” She also sells a “surprisingly good” loaf that’s fairly expensive, but it actually wasn’t too bad. (I think it was a little too soft to make a good sandwich, but then the piece I had was freshy microwaved to make it warm & soft). They had some brownies and pretzels that were quite good (and brownies was one of the things I figured would be easy to do). Then we tried some cookies that started off tasting pretty good with a decent texture… and they turned to ash in our mouths. They left behind this nasty, gritty texture and aftertaste that even a whole can of coke couldn’t get rid of. I’m hoping I can do a better approximation of a cookie than that. FYI: Avoid “Enjoy Life” brand health/alt food products.

I got my breadmaker up and running last night. It’s a pretty nifty little device and does a decent job of kneading the dough, which is all I used it for in my first batch. I just made up some basic pizza dough. The dough that came out wasn’t very elastic in the end, so I couldn’t shape it by rolling and stretching like I usually would, but instead had to basically pound it into my pizza pan. However, the final pizza was tasty and had a good texture, so I’ll take it. After that, I decided to make some bread, and started with their “basic white” recipe. I was surprised at how much more had to go into this supposedly basic recipe compared to the pizza dough. When I saw that I didn’t have everything it called for, I started to improvise, first with 25% whole wheat flour, and then throwing in some ground flax too. The bread came out pretty good, though the crust is a fair bit heavier and darker than the “medium” I set it to; I think next time I’ll have to try light. Bread from a breadmaker is very strange because the pan is very tall and not very wide, so it’s almost like the aspect ratio adjustment I’m having to make with my monitor…

When I was talking about my bread at work, I was told that ground flax only lasts for a few weeks in the cupboard and was cautioned to keep it in the fridge. I just googled it, and sure enough it does have a fairly limited shelf life (though the somewhat biased flax council of Canada gives it a few months), and that worries me just a little bit since I have no idea how long ago Wayfare bought the flax. Ah, well, the bread still tastes fine, and now I’m going to set about turning the other half of it into sandwiches (fortunately, I’ve got 3 different bread knifes here to get just the right slices, evenly thick all over).

Growing up, my parents have always have a ton of kitchen gadgets, from cappachino machines to juicers, deep fryers to smokers — even stone-bottomed pizza cookers — and my mom always cautioned my dad never to get a breadmaker, since that would clearly be the last straw. She always considered the breadmaker to be the gadget that people bought because they sounded neat, but never really ended up using. So naturally, sometime after Wayfare bought me this one but before I opened it, I told this story to Wayfare. “This is it,” I said “I can’t think of anything to get my mom. I’m going to have to resort to getting her the last kitchen gadget on earth, the breadmaker.”

As long as my mind is on food I also got the first season of Good Eats with Alton Brown. This is perhaps my favourite cooking show because he takes the time to explain why he does what he does. He actively encourages us to come up with our own recipes, and explains what each ingredient is supposed to do, and how it can be modified or substituted. I find I still get something out of the episodes that aren’t really of interest to me for the food (of which there are a lot; almost every one, since I’m such a picky eater). For example, the one on steaks wasn’t hugely useful to me, since I’m not really one to go to my local butcher and select the cut of meat for me, then pan-fry that (if I make steaks for friends, I’d probably BBQ anyway). But that episode did have some handy information on cast iron skillets. Likewise, I really disagree with his opinion on mashed potatoes in a number of aspects (adding red potatoes to purposefully make them lumpy? And I’ve never understood the appeal of putting garlic in mashed potatoes), but I finally learned why the Yukon Gold potatoes I switched to for a time after moving out on my own (which the grocery store display says should be good for mashing) never worked as well as the plain baking potatoes my mom used (the baking potatoes are starchier and less waxy).

Anyhow, I’m home with a sore neck. I have no idea how I hurt it: my shoulder was sore when I woke up, presumably from sleeping on it funny (or reaching up to the breaker board repeatedly last night; possibly from curling, too) but my neck didn’t hurt at first. Then I had a shower and let the hot water work out my shoulder for a while, and when I went to towel off, I couldn’t move my neck. I walked to work all hunched over, and of course my office mates laughed at me. When I went down to the cafeteria, a small child looked at me like I was the boogieman, so it must have been a funny posture indeed. After not very long at all, I gave up at work and came home where I can sort of plop myself down on the couch and slouch enough that I can still see the screen with my chin on my chest.

For years my parents have raved about “Oliver’s” (Oliver & Bonacini) at Bayview Village [Sheppard & Bayview, North York]; my mom goes there for lunch so often the staff come up to her to say hi when she’s out shopping (or when they’re on their way out if she goes for dinner). Today they dragged me there for a nice family dinner (which the siblings were smart enough to duck out of at the last minute).

I have to say I wasn’t very impressed with the place. Well, the place was actually quite nice: it was quiet, well lit, and had inoffensive decor. The staff was nice and friendly, though we happened to arrive right between the lunch and dinner rush so they were short-handed and didn’t have a clean table ready for us (even though it was only about 10% full). Once seated we had to wait a long while before our waiter came onto his shift, too.

The food all looked excellent, but didn’t seem all that tasty. My dad had the halibut special, and said it was a very good piece of fish that was cooked well, but just didn’t have any outstanding flavour. It was just fish with lemon. I had spring rolls and bruscetta, usually a safe choice for my very limited palette. Both were very oily and relatively tasteless (there weren’t even any onions in the bruscetta!). I was also a little miffed at the pizza: we ordered a “Prosciutto” which has “vine ripened tomatoes, bocconcini & tomato sauce” sounded like a nice, plain pizza for me. It sounded just like the “Margherita” above it, except it also had tomato sauce (and how I hate “gourmet” pizza that just puts globs of cheese down amongst tomatoes and considers it worthy of the name “pizza”). I knew already that bocconcini is a type of soft cheese similiar to that holiest of pizza holies, mozzarella; while I tend to prefer old-fashioned mozzarella, this would probably be a type of pizza I could eat. When it came, it was absolutely smothered in ham: turns out “Prosciutto” is a type of ham. Who knew? It’s something that I’ve found annoying in the pizza world: giving pizzas names on the menu, and then just hoping that you can get the kind you want. Often people will get extra things added or something held off, and in this case what seems like a name (“Margherita”, “Roma”, “Tuscan”, “Sofia”, “Prosciutto”) is actually one of the ingredients, but not included in the list of ingredients below the name. Though I suppose it can help indecisive people put together a set of toppings, and suggest extra toppings for adventurous people to put together (which usually helps the pizza place push more toppings).

Something else that really grated me was the notice on the bottom of the menu that “for the sake of all our customers, we cannot allow substitutions”. It just seems so arrogant to me that the chefs could think that the dish they put together would be absolutely perfect for everyone, and that they aren’t willing to go to the extra work to customize it for each person. It’s like the restaurant is saying that the ego of the chefs is more important than the preference of the customer. And oddly enough, it tends to only be these hoity-toity places that have those sorts of rules. You can almost imagine one of the annoying chefs from the food network (there are lots of good hosts on TV too, don’t get me wrong, but you all know there are a few chefs on that network that just make you cringe and your stomach turn at what they throw together) coming out to lecture you about how the saltiness of the anchovies will play nicely against the bitterness of the balsamic vinegar and refuse to take no for an answer, no matter how much you try to tell them that anchovies and vinegar in pasta is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

While I’m on the subject of poor menu descriptions, I’ll talk about Symposium, a cute little place in London where you eat from these big armchairs. They have fairly good bruscetta (or they did 2 out of 3 times I was there), but you can find it in two different places in the menu. In the appetizers section, it’s billed as tomatoes and goat cheese on bread, which is sort of… ugh. Later on, with their pastas, it’s billed as garlic, tomatoes, and onions lightly covered in mozzarella and parmasean, which sounds much better. I don’t know if they have two different types, or if it’s just a mistake on the menu, or what the story is, but I’m always careful to point to the one in the pasta section, just in case.

Anyhow, to finish off my review of Oliver’s, I’d have to say that if you want to go to a swanky/trendy, downtown restaurant with decent (though not great) food, and show off big bills ($90 for the three of us) without actually having to go downtown, then Oliver’s is the place for you.

So about 2 years ago or so, I bought a case of caffeine-free Coke, though I have no idea why. I drank about half the case, and really noticed the taste difference. The rest ended up under the sink for a very long time. One or two exploded (or so I thought) quite some time ago. I cleaned up the mess, and for reasons that escape me now, put the intact cans back under the sink.

Now that we’re moving, we’re poking around under there again, and two more cans have leaked. The weird thing is, they didn’t explode, and they didn’t have any punctures in them. They just… leaked… a little. The cans were still mostly full, but some sticky, nasty caffeine-free Coke escaped its aluminum prison and made a mess of the cupboards (it dissolved the paint!). It really disturbs me how it was able to apparantly leech through the can over time like that. It’s all the more unsettling that most of the Coke still stayed in the can.

So from now on I’m going to stick to the old-fashioned stuff with proper caffeine.

I also played some more MechCommander 2 this weekend. It’s a fun (old) game, and there are some decent user-created maps and extensions out there. I think I’m done with it now, and uninstalled it. I haven’t had much time for gaming, and probably won’t with the move coming up, but I’m still trying to think of what I want to get next. I still haven’t played through Civ IV: Warlords much, but I think that’s largely because it’s the sort of game that needs a whole weekend devoted to it. I’m pretty sure I’ll hit that pretty hard around Christmas though, if anyone else wants to try some multiplayer. In the meantime, someone at work pointed me to Star Trek: Legacy which won’t be released for a few more weeks yet… One thing I know is that I won’t be spending my free time trying to partake in NaNoWriMo, no sir.

Via DJ Paradise, comes this article about serving sizes.

Yep, people have trouble determining what a serving size is sometimes. I think it was a really poor choice of words — “serving” — it makes you think of a serving platter at a restaurant or something. Most people automatically make serving = meal in their minds, but really servings are quite small (a total of 20-24 or so servings a day over your ~3 meals + snacks). 2 cookies, a kid’s sippy glass of milk, half a bowl of soup: portions that are much smaller than we tend to have experience with. Unfortunately in this case it’s not the companies, but the government that’s to blame for not only creating the discrepancy between portion size and serving size, but also for giving it the name “serving”. [Though whether we should blame the American or Canadian government is a bit of an open question; if in doubt, blame both]

Also, I highly recommend you all go to YouTube and search for “How it should have ended” — they’re a funny series of clips.