October 30, 2005

•    Food!  
   
  
  Glorious Food!

  
  
  Well, Winky Jack’s body part pie is all gone.  When I went to bed
  last night, I stuck the pan with the last piece into the oven, hoping
  that if Doug didn’t see it he would forget about it and there’d be one
  last slice left for me.  I had it for breakfast this
  morning.  Then I started looking at Jack, thinking about how many
  pies are there in what’s left of him. 

  One problem:  I’m down to my last can of evaporated goat milk…
  there are several quarts of whole goat milk in the fridge, and they
  would do, but it wouldn’t be so creamy-rich.  It has taken me
  three years to develop a good gluten-free pumpkin pie
  recipe.  Previous attempts were adequately edible.  They
  worked, but
  this one SANG!  The downside to it is now Doug no longer thinks
  that he
  doesn’t like pumpkin pie, and there’s less of it for me.

  There is a small clue to how food-obsessed I am in the fact that I’m
  considering demolishing the jack o’lantern on the day before Halloween,
  to turn it into pie.  Yes, the pie made from the scraps carved
  from the pumpkin was very good, but even as I fantasize about making
  another one RIGHT NOW, I know how absurd that is.  It can wait
  until after Halloween.  Meanwhile I have a basket full of winter
  squash:  delicata, uchiki kuri, blue kuri, and sweet mama, all of
  which taste better than pumpkin.  The kuris are so sweet and
  creamy that my pie craving can be satisfied just by baking one, without
  the mess and fuss of making pastry.

  In Sandcastles‘s
  comment on the pie entry, she mentioned the expense of having “exotic”
  foods shipped to Sweden.  It has to be more expensive than
  shipping them to Alaska, but this is pretty costly, too.  When I
  order my “alternative” flours from Bobs Red Mill,
  the shipping charges amount to more than the cost of the flour, but by
  buying in 25-pound bags I save a little, compared to what I would pay
  in local stores here for the smaller bags.

  The comment from maggie_mcfrenzie
  also mentioned costs, saying that she has had expensive failures as she
  tries to cook gluten-free.  That has been a problem for me,
  too.  Even with my successes, I’m usually the only one in the
  family who will eat these things I bake from bean flours and
  sorghum.  My Scots-descended parents trained me not to waste food,
  and in my youth working in restaurants taught me the rule of the
  kitchen:  the cook eats her own mistakes.  Choking down some
  of these things isn’t pleasant, but I try to console myself that the
  food is at least nutritious and non-toxic for me.

  I have had food sensitivities all my life.  Doctors recommended
  that I not be given cow’s milk as a baby, and we fortunately had some
  relatives who lived on farms and kept goats.  After my father
  died, we moved away from there and I started drinking cow’s milk
  because goat milk, when available at all, was very expensive.  It
  still is expensive.  A quart of goat milk for me costs more than a
  gallon of cow’s milk for Doug and Greyfox.  I rationalize the
  expense by using it sparingly and thinking of the nutrition. 
  Without adequate nutrition, I’m more ill, more of a burden on others,
  less able to care for myself.

  After my father’s death, my mother and I had to economize on many
  things just to get by.  We ate a lot of pasta.  Beans would
  have been just as cheap and more nutritious, but they took longer to
  cook.  When we came home after work and school, the faster we
  could prepare a meal, the better.  That was the 1950s, pre-crock
  pots and at the peak of the quick-to-fix mix craze.  Spaghetti
  dinners from a box, and mac and cheese, were staples for us. 
  Often on a weekend, one of us would cook up a big enough batch of beans
  to last a few days.

  When I first learned of my sensitivity to wheat, Doug was small, I was
  divorced, and we were eating cheap just as Mama and I had done
  thirty-some years earlier, but I was working at home so the quick-fix
  wasn’t important.  We ate so many beans then that he still doesn’t
  like them.  But we didn’t stop using wheat products.  Maybe
  if the kid had been the one with the wheat allergy, I’d have found a
  way to get by without it.  I  had to get really ill before I
  took the need seriously.

  Almost without fail, when I tell someone that I have had to eliminate
  wheat from my diet, I get incredulous looks.  It’s hard to
  imagine:  no cheap spaghetti or macaroni, no bargain bread or
  pastry, reading labels on soups and such to be sure the sauces and
  gravies aren’t thickened with wheat.  I had already gotten used to
  reading labels when I kicked the refined sugar habit, so that has
  become routine.

  The really frustrating part has been the scarcity and the relative
  expense of foods made without wheat, sugar, nightshade family foods
  (potato, tomato, pepper) or dairy products.  One of my favorite
  foods, pizza, is made up entirely of things I’m not supposed to
  eat.  I almost ate myself to death before I gave up on that one.

  I tried macaroni made from corn.  Yeccchh!  It didn’t taste
  bad, but the texture and mouth feel are all wrong.  Okay, no more
  pasta for me.  That was rough, but then I discovered that I like
  the flavor of sorghum-flour breads.  I was paying almost $4.00 for
  a little 22 oz. bag of it, rationalizing the relative expense with the
  very effective argument that cheap food would kill me, when both of the
  Wasilla stores where I’d been buying it ran out.  After a few
  months, during which I got by with rice flour, corn and bean flours, I
  started asking about it.  In one store they said they had
  discontinued it, and in the other one, the clerk told me she’d never
  seen or heard of it.

  I searched the web and found a family farm and milling operation in
  Kansas where I could buy sorghum flour very cheaply in large lots, but
  they wouldn’t ship by US Postal Service and the UPS air shipping (no
  ground service to Alaska) was absurdly expensive.  By default,
  that left Bob’s Red Mill.  Spending around $50 to $70 to get 25
  lbs. of sorghum or garbanzo and fava bean flour shipped up here seemed
  like a lot until I calculated what I had been paying at the
  supermarket, and recalled how often they had been out of those two
  flours that I like best.  I went for it.

  One of the supermarkets in Wasilla has rice flour cheap in their bulk
  foods department, and by buying Quaker masa harina (corn flour) in ten
  pound bags, I now have everything I need for my gluten-free baking
  (except, of course for the xanthan gum, which costs about $13.00 for a
  half pound… good thing it doesn’t take much to hold a pie shell or
  muffin together).  The rice, corn and sorghum flours all have a
  gritty texture that is fine for bread and pancakes, but not so good in
  pastry. 

  As I was decanting the new bag of bean flour into a big old 20-pound
  restaurant size coffee can for storage, I spilled some.  As I
  cleaned up my mess, I noticed that it has a silky texture as smooth as
  white pastry flour.  That was why I tried making yesterday’s pie
  shell exclusively from bean flour and it was such a success. 
  Another plus, as far as I’m concerned, is that in the raw state bean
  pastry doesn’t taste very good.  After baking, it’s yummy, but I’m
  never going to be tempted to eat big gobs of unbaked pie crust dough
  again.  When I baked with wheat flour, sometimes I’d eat as much
  of it raw as I baked.
  
  P.S.  It’s snowing again here.  I still don’t have my winter
  tires on the car.  If I can’t get that job done by the local
  mechanic tomorrow, I think I’ll reschedule my Tuesday blood work for
  after I’ve got the studded snow tires installed.  I didn’t enjoy
  the skidding around last week.

  • 3:51 pm
  • 7 Comments