Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Eighth Step


What could be more natural than cookies? Okay, you might think it's a stretch, but there really was a goal here. In these pictures, we are on a quest ("What kind of a quest?" Pippin asks) to find a good gluten-free cookie recipe. And since we are staying with a resident cookie expert, I decided to enlist her help. Mary Lee has killer cookies, and I was incredibly sad when we went gluten-free that I would not be able to partake of them any longer. But never fear--we did make some killer cookies, definitely by gluten-free standards, and most probably would not notice they were gluten-free except that we were dealing with such a connoiseur. Mary Lee thought they were slightly grainy, but I said, "You haven't had gluten-free cookies before! There's some really bad gluten-free stuff out there." Which us gluten-free people know that it's like a slap in the face when the gluten-free ones are bad because you have paid $5.50 for said cookies.

Here comes some gluten-free advice. People who've been gluten-free for under a year, beware: Do not go on a gluten-free buying spree. Take someone who has made those foolish mistakes along with you. And anything you make yourself will be at least 5X better than anything at the store, because gluten-free stuff doesn't last that long, and to get it shelf-ready does diminish the quality, if it even tasted OK to begin with. Also, skip the bread mixes and make your own flour mixes ala Carol Fenster cookbooks or online recipes...you'll never find gluten-free bread as good as you can make it. But sadly, once you have good bread again, you'll go through bread too fast to solely depend on baking it yourself. And it will probably have a lot of of "white" type flours in it. I would like to "brown up" the gluten-free options out there, but it is definitely hard to make good-tasting brown rice bread, for instance (I did find a recipe online tonight though that I will try soon). As Moto Moto would say, "EH-nee-ways," let's get on with the cookies already.

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