Scones and sympathy

Both given to me by Imogen, and both greatly appreciated.

Drop scones - gluten-free version

Drop scones are my "I have no bread and can't be fagged to make any" solution. Dead easy, tasty and using really basic ingredients. Even the gluten-free version isn't exactly complicated. The only "trick" is the tiny amount of vinegar which seems to make the bicarb work faster and better by acidulating the milk slightly. Buttermilk (officially correct) is way too pricey in my humble opinion.

1 1/2 oz rice flour

1 1/2 oz fine maize flour

1 oz ground almonds

1 heaped tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 dessertspoon poppy seeds (optional)

1 dessertspoon sugar

1 cup skimmed milk (may need more or less)

2 drops wine or cider vinegar

Sift the three flours and the bicarb together, then stir through the poppy seeds and sugar. Put 2 drops - literally just 2 drops - of vinegar into the milk, stir in and then immediately blend the milk into the flour mixture to make a fairly wet batter. It needs to be fractionally thicker than pancake batter, if you can remember what that looks like. Rub a smudge of vegetable oil over a clean griddle or good non-stick frying pan and put it on the hob to heat - it needs to be pretty hot for these. Test the heat of the pan with a drip or two of batter; it should cook through and go brown quickly (ideally golden brown, but they tend to be blotchy and as often as not are dark brown in one patch while still pallid in another). Put dessertspoonfuls into the pan, keeping them well apart, and spread slightly using the back of the spoon. Cook for a couple of minutes on each side, turning carefully. Keep cooked scones wrapped in a clean tea towel to prevent them going hard as they cool.

Nice with soup or sloppy stews, or served warm with butter and/or jam. This recipe is for a semi-sweet all-purpose drop scone. Add a spoonful of grated parmesan for an extra-savoury version, or put in an extra spoonful of sugar for sweeter ones. Can be cooked in big batches, cooled and frozen with greaseproof paper between individual scones. You could treat these like American breakfast pancakes, I should think, too, and serve with crispy grilled bacon and maple syrup.

Cornbread!

I've bought a cookbook that's almost as amazing as the name of the person who wrote it: The Cornbread Gospels by Crescent Dragonwagon. It does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, giving over 200 recipes for corn bread, pancakes, tortillas and muffins.

It's not written as a gluten free cookbook but after looking through it I'd say over half of the recipes are gluten free and a fair few more could be made gluten free with a tactical substitution or two. It also has a bonus chapter on things that go well with cornbread, many of which are gluten free and all of which look delicious - I'm really looking forward to trying the tahini salad dressing, caldo verde and swoon tequila chocolate sauce.

A word of warning for Brits though, all the measurements are American - temperatures are in farenheit, cups are used instead of weights. There is a conversion table in the back but bizarrely it gives weight conversions for various dry goods but not cornmeal. I used this mug:
I'm not sure if it's the same size as an American mug but it seemed to work pretty well.

I tried out one of the recipes for the first time tonight (humouring my upset stomach doesn't seem to have worked so I decided it was time to show it who's boss),: Perfect new south-style cornbread on page 14 and it was absolutely delicious. I'm really looking forward to working through the rest of the recipes.

Here's some corn porn for you:

Genius Bread - so good it's frightening

Blimey, it's been a while hasn't it? This is what I've been doing in the meantime. Anyway down to business.

I don't usually plug products on this blog, mostly because I tried it and no one sent me the free samples I'd been hoping for, but I've just discovered Genius Bread and it's amazing. It's soft, moist, as good raw as toasted and tastes exactly like I remember bread tasting. It is in fact so good that I freaked out halfway through eating my first jam sandwich, thinking that they'd accidentally put a gluten-full loaf in the gluten-free packaging, and was too scared to finish it.

I don't understand how this company can make such good bread and no one else, least of all me, can. It's probably made out of kittens or something. Or people.

Great, now the plants are out to get me too

I'm a big fan of buckwheat flour, and was delighted to discover that instead of running the gauntlet of arnica-pushers at my local healthfood shop I could pick up the Doves Farm variety at my local waitrose (instead having to resist the temptation to buy damson and elderflower squash and bacon that costs $5 at the same time). I was a little confused however to find that it didn't say Gluten Free on the packet, so I emailled Doves Farm to check and got this response:

"There is a problem with ‘self-sown’ wheat growing in the fields of
buckwheat. It is harvested with the buckwheat and being a very similar
size and weight it will not clean out of the buckwheat when the seed passes
through the cleaning equipment. The amount of wheat contamination varies
and is usually under 200ppm, which used to be the old Codex Alimentarus limit
for gluten free products. Acceptable levels of gluten have now reduced and
we no longer claim that our buckwheat flour is gluten free.

Buckwheat seed is naturally gluten free as the packet states. I have
spoken to our Marketing Director about the wording on the packaging which does
not explain the situation clearly. She is aware of the problem and is in
the process of changing the wording on the next batch of bags to be
printed.

All the products that are gluten free (rice flour, gluten free plain white
flour, gluten free white & brown bread flours, gluten free self raising
white flour) are tested for their gluten content. Samples of the flour are
collected and samples of each production run are sent away to an outside
laboratory for gluten analysis. Hazard Analysis has been carried out on
the whole process of milling Doves Farm Gluten Free Flour and these measures
ensure that the product that is purchased by the consumer is ‘Gluten
Free’."

First of all I was very impressed with Doves farm for sending back such an informative response so quickly, but I'm not entirely sure what to do with this information. As I had been using the flour with no ill effects, presumably because the level of contamination is so low and (as anyone who's ever been on the receiving end of a tactless comment about their choice of apparel will verify) I'm not the most sensitive person out there) I'll finish the bag rather than hiding it on the Bad Shelf with all the other glutenful ingredients we've bought whilst drunk or confused and now have no idea what to do with. But should I buy more afterwards? Presumably if Doves Farm are having this problem with contamination all other manufacturers of buckwheat flour might also be getting self-sown wheat in their harvests?

Jeff tarte

So called because my Mum made this for us at Christmas and my bloke's been nagging me to make it ever since. She's finally given me the recipe, which I'm posting here in the hope it'll prompt someone else to make it for him :P

• 180g ground almonds
• 4 eggs
• 150g caster sugar
• 180g unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 35g crystllised ginger in syrup, taken out of the syrup and roughly chopped
• 150g stoned prunes, or prunes that are just starting to get slighly giggly and a bit peckish
• Whole almonds to go on top
• 3 tbsp brandy

1. Preheat the oven to 170
2. Mix ground almonds, butter and sugar, then stir in the eggs one by one.
3. Mix thoroughly then add the ginger and prunes.
4. Put into a greased ovenproof ceramic dish, scatter the almonds on top and bake for 40 mins.
5. Leave it to cool, poke holes in it with a fork and pour the brandy on before serving
   

Wrap star!

After reading this post over on Gluten-free London I had to go and visit Danny's Gourmet wraps, convieniently close to both the British Library and the LSHTM. They do a variety of fillings in gluten-free corn wraps, as well as GF soups, jacket potatoes and rice dishes. I was served by Danny himself, who is wheat intolerant and so completely clued up about cross-contamination. They clean the counter for you and put on clean gloves if you say you have coeliac disease, and he also took the trouble to warn me that it wasn't a coeliac kitchen so he couldn't guarantee there might not be some flour floating around, which I appreciated but I was prepared to risk it because everyone seemed to know what they were doing - most restaurants don't bother warning you and probably have a much bigger cross-contamination problem.

I had the Camberwell wrap, which is basically bacon and egg with a bit of green stuff thrown in so you can convince yourself you're being healthy, and it was bloody lovely. I also had the dhaal soup which was very good and tasted homemade. They have some gluten free desserts too, but I was too full by that stage to investigate. Just to convince you that I'm not being paid to write this the only thing I wasn't 100% satisfied with was the tea which tasted a bit funny to me, but that's probably because it was a posh brand and a bit too fancy for the likes of me who likes hers stewed till it turns your teeth black. But I'll certainly be going back and would recommend the place to any other hungry London coeliacs.

Why I’m glad to have had coeliac disease.

Coeliac disease is a pain. It’s annoying to be unable to plan a holiday without having to think about how I’m going to eat, or to have to skip dinner because the pub I’ve gone to for a night out doesn’t serve anything safe. If asked “What would you do if you only had 24 hours to live?” most people would answer with a list of activities they’d always wanted to do or celebrities they’d like to get to know a little more intimately. I’d have a fish finger sandwich with brown sauce on thick slices of white bread, followed by a slice of apple pie, washed down with a pint of Belgian beer. (And ok, maybe then Jamie Foxx. But definitely in that order). But bitching aside, I do think that having coeliac disease has actually enriched my life, although I say “glad to have had” rather than “glad to have” because I’m not going to pretend for an instant that if a miracle cure existed that would allow me to pig out on takeways and order whatever I liked in a restaurant I wouldn’t take it.

For a start it’s meant that I’ve had to learn to cook - after leaving home, it was that or subsist entirely on Trufree pot rice at university (the only junk food that costs four times as much as a meal made from scratch and still tastes of hoover bag). I know I probably come across as a pretty lazy cook on this blog, with my rule that I won’t make any sort of bread requiring more than two different types of flour, but I do genuinely enjoy choosing nice ingredients and trying to do something new with them. Not being able to just reach for a ready meal if I can’t be bothered has taught me to be a lot more creative with food.

I’d like to think that all that resisting of glutenful food has taught me willpower, but I suspect that this isn’t the case; willpower certainly doesn’t seem to be very much in evidence when the prospect of writing anything for my PhD looms! Still, if you tell yourself something often enough you might eventually start to believe it.

I also think that I’ve come to appreciate food in a way I don’t think I would otherwise have done. I get hungry on train journeys or if out for the day, in a way that people who can just buy a chocolate bar from the nearest vending machine probably don’t, and I think this makes me appreciate food more when I do get it. Interestingly Spider experienced something similar when attempting a hundred mile diet, eating only food sourced from within a 100 mile radius.

This leads me on quite neatly to my interest in all things treehuggerish – I’m one of those annoying people who hoards recyclables and tuts disapprovingly at people who take weekend breaks by plane. I honestly think my concern for the environment stems from having to read food labels and starting to think about where all these strange ingredients come from, as well as having to spend a lot of time in healthfood shops in close proximity to the be-sandled and be-dreaded. And perhaps this is too much of a leap to make, but I do think I can attribute my political outlook to coeliac disease; as a sickly teenager I was acutely aware that some people found life a little bit more difficult than others did, and that this wasn’t quite fair, and next think I knew I was a rabid socialist. I still am, just a slightly quieter one.

Coeliac disease has made me more confident; I learnt pretty early on that I needed to stand up for myself, not to be too embarrassed or too polite to ask what was in something or query the answer if I was unsure. I realise that this makes me a nightmare guest, but more importantly I have also learnt that my friends will understand. For me then, the greatest benefit of coeliac disease has been to teach me the people who are worth bothering with and the people who aren’t. The person who said they wouldn’t go out with me because they didn’t want to take the chance of ending up with unhealthy children falls into the latter category. Into the former category go my Mum, who made incredible sacrifices to look after two sickly kids, the friend who always keeps a cupboard full of gluten free pasta and cakes even though I only manage to visit her twice a year, the friend who drove miles to find a gluten free treacle sponge and then stuffed me so full of gluten free home cooking that I couldn’t eat it, and my lovely bloke who goes out of his way to accommodate my diet without once making me feel that it is an issue for him. Even though he does eat my biscuits when his own are a third of the price.

In my first term at university I was very upset by the fact that the people on my corridor referred to me as “The girl who can’t eat bread”. In retrospect I was being rather oversensitive – people just getting to know each other needed some kind of handle on each other, and for plenty of others that tag was “the guy who supports Chelsea”, “the really tall bloke” or for one unfortunate “the guy who masturbates really loudly” - but it hurt that my entire personality seemed to have been distilled down in peoples’ minds to one aspect of my genetic makeup, and one I was just coming to terms with at that. But nine years on I recognise that while coeliac disease does not define my personality it has shaped some aspects of it, and on reflection those are aspects for which I am grateful.