Recipe: Oatmeal with cranberries

Here's a recipe adapted from a Cook's Illustrated magazine recipe. I am craving this right now. Perhaps I'll make it tomorrow, since it's not a school day and we'll have the 20 minutes it takes to simmer it.

1 cup steel-cut or Scottish-style oats (we recommend Bob's Red Mill Scottish Oats)
1 tablespoon butter
3 cups water
1 cup milk
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup dried cranberries
Optional: 1/3 cup pecans (toasted for 7 min. at 350 degrees), chopped

Heat the butter in a 2-qt. pot on medium heat, until butter stops foaming. Add the oats. Stir to mix the butter into the oats. Stir every few seconds and cook the oats until they start browning. The mixture will smell like butterscotch.

Add the cinnamon and stir it into the oats to toast it for a few seconds.

Add the three cups of water, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon or a whisk to break up any lumps.

Stir in the cup of milk. Stir in the cranberries. After the mixture comes to a boil, reduce the heat to cook the oatmeal at a simmer for 15 minutes.

Add salt to taste and simmer for another five minutes.

Top with brown sugar and toasted pecans if desired.

Randall Grahm must be doing pirouettes of disbelief

In 1985-86, we happened to be geographically linked with a winemaker who worked with a newcomer in the wine world named Randall Grahm, who had bought land a few minutes up the coast, between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, in Bonny Doon. Grahm had planted a lot of French Rhone-style wines and in 1984 released the first Le Cigare Volant. We knew about none of this until our neighbor*, Daniel, the assistant winemaker at Grahm's new winery, Bonny Doon Vineyard, started bringing home wines for us to try. The chardonnays had none of that stingy sugar nor over-oakiness that had made us dubious about the few chardonnays we had tried in our heretofore brief drinking lives. These filled our mouths with butter and sunlight and honey and flowers and pears and herbs.

One day Daniel brought home some Le Cigare Volant, the flying cigar wine, a blend of Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvedre. Daniel had shown us by then how to breathe as we tasted, about the different mouthfeel of every wine. Our newly awakened palates and vocabularies discovered plums, berries, cherries, leather, tobacco, smoke, wood, earth. We scraped together some extra money for a case while Daniel worked there, a stretch for us poor college students but worth it.

Our neighbor soon became disillusioned with "working for snobs," as he put it, and in rapid succession he got a degree and a job as a professor of environmental sciences. Meanwhile, Grahm's fame as a winemaker grew, based on the reputation he had built with his "flying cigar wine," as it was affectionately known. Our knowledge of wine varieties also grew as we continued living in the sleepy town of Santa Cruz, near our little gem of a market a few blocks away, Shopper's Corner. The wine buyer at "Shopper's" had a special passion for finding inexpensive gems, and we're talking not Three-Buck Chuck here but three-dollar bottles of Cotes du Rhone, Burgundy, Chardonnay. Pinot Noirs from France and yet another world of Pinots from California. You could get bottles of Ridge Zinfandel for six or seven dollars -- what an education those wines were in how the stresses of heat and time and locale could affect a single variety.

Giving his wines irreverent names was one of the methods Grahm, the driven director of Bonny Doon Vineyard, used to stoke the buzz about himself and his new wine blends. The coinage "Rhone Ranger" told of Grahm's quest to bring Rhone varietals to California's north-central coast. Le Cigare Volant was the first of these, and now having had a case of a 1980s vintage of that wine into the early oughts seems like something worth remembering. The wine called Big House Red was an early and successful attempt at cracking the mass market and has allowed Grahm more time and money for his pursuit of his own synthesis of growing grapes and blending them in new ways.

This morning I scanned the Wednesday liquor-store ad, and no, Le Cigare Volant is not on sale (you can buy a few-year-old vintage for about $35 at our local mart), but wacky names from the list of sale wines were popping out all over the page. I've gotten used to Big Ass Cabernet and Red Bicyclette and Goats do Roam, but here is an import called Mommy's Time Out and a sparkling shiraz (a wine I have been wanting to try very much since I learned of it from an Aussie mate) called Naked on Roller Skates. Methinks the cute-name trend may have exhausted itself. Randall, what do you think?

*We have awfully good luck with neighbors, don't we?!

Choosing to be gluten-free

As someone who believes that things "happen for a reason," I am finding that whether or not my child is sensitive to gluten (or something else), it's been a good experience to try living without wheat. I stopped cutting it out because it seemed like I was the same before and after, and when I tried it after a couple of months of strict, gluten-free eating, nothing seemed to change. So now I'm not going out of my way to avoid it, but I am still baking gluten-free things and trying to rotate new grains and vegetables and starches into our daily diet.

No one likes risotto as much as I do, but polenta works if, like tofu, you season it well and serve it with highly flavorful things (like veggies roasted in olive oil and cheese, and/or a rich marinara sauce), or if you fry it and serve it with something tasty and bright. Quinoa hasn't caught fire in our household, but I still serve it once in awhile anyway.

But now I know more about what is out there. Now we're eating buckwheat and amaranth and coconut flour and teff. We're using tapioca and arrowroot powder instead of cornstarch. Brown rice flour is a good staple, but tends to be bland, dry, and gritty when baked; brown rice flour needs to be mixed with other flours for added flavor and texture -- sweet, nutty sorghum flour is a good addition. (Now I get why people have recipes that call for six, seven, eight, and more kinds of flour.)

What I find missing from the gluten-free living sites I've seen so far is a more systematic discussion about baking and living gluten-free. A couple of organizations are trying to organize gluten-free information on restaurants, and there are lots of ambitious home and professional cooks with great recipes online, many of them on their blogs. But what I don't see is a breakout, for example, of each type of flour, with descriptions of how they behave in cooking and how they taste, with optimum preparation methods suggested for each. Wouldn't that be a great resource? It would be a lot of work. You'd have to test like crazy to get all that data, but wouldn't it be wonderful to look at a table that allowed you to find the best flours when you wanted to make pancakes or cream scones or yeasted bread or pie crust or crackers or hamburger buns yourself? You could take it even farther and test the mixes and products available on the market today.

I would also like to see a more comprehensive information set about gluten-free dining in the forms of cards that diners can present to servers, training for restaurants on gluten-free food preparation, etc. I know you can find this stuff out there, but it's not all in one place. We've had so many experiences when I have wished I could just send someone to one page on a website for more information. Misconceptions abound: "You can eat spelt, right?" "You can just take the bread/bun off." "Just eat the ice cream, not the cone." "No, that peanut sauce doesn't have gluten in it -- just hoisin sauce [which contains soy sauce, which contains wheat]." That last one is a variation on this one: "If there's no wheat flour in it, there's no gluten in it." We have heard all of these ourselves, just in the last four months of cooking and eating out gluten-free, when eating at the homes of friends and families, on playdates at friends' parents' houses, and dining out at restaurants. It would be great to steer people in the right direction. That said, I appreciate absolutely every relative, friend, and waitperson who has tried to work with us during our trial of this diet.

For us, we are no longer convinced gluten is the culprit, since many of the same complaints persist in our daughter. And she had the same experience I did when she had a "gluten challenge" and we tried some white wheat flour a couple of times: no change. I now wonder about the gluten-free/casein-free diet -- our daughter eats so much dairy -- and I wonder about eggs (we'd be sad to lose them -- what a staple they are in our diet).

We don't even know if it really is our diet that is causing our child's tummyaches. We have also theorized that she has a more limited set of perceptions (a classic symptom of sensory integration disorders) of her body's signals than we have; when she says, "My tummy hurts," it could also mean different things: "I have sensation in my tummy," or even: "I have pain somewhere, but I'm thinking about my tummy because I just ate."

But I know we're better off eating this more diverse diet. I feel healthier knowing that I'm eating so many different foods, even though I don't have much direct evidence that my overall health has changed significantly (unless you compare photos of me six years ago and now -- I do think I look healthier).

Best dinner this week: Kale with bacon and balsamic vinegar, black japonica rice, fresh yeasted bread (flours: brown rice, white rice, arrowroot, potato, amaranth, coconut, sorghum, flaxseed meal, and oat flour), tomato and avocado salad. Served with toasted pine nuts, for any or all of the dishes.

Mmmm. Cheese!

I had been through the cheese drawer and found a hunk of Irish Blarney (yes, really), which we had sampled and loved at Whole Foods. My little one was excited at the prospect of a snack of that and we cut some into little sticks, which we followed with some apple slices.

"How come Whole Foods has such good-tasting cheeses, Mama?" the young one asked.

"You're right. They seem to go out of their way to get the best cheeses," I said.

"Yeah. They have all these cheeses that go whoop all around your mouth," she replied happily.

-rk

Eleven observations on my new gluten-free life

A few conclusions after a few weeks of living gluten-free:

1. The hardest things for me to give up were beer and soy sauce (or anything with soy sauce in it).
2. People can appear to be sensitive and aware of the importance of being gluten-free and still be completely clueless. And you still have to let it all go by and not get all worked up about it. Otherwise you'll drive yourself crazy.
3. A corollary: You must always be willing to send something back at a restaurant, or have alternatives on hand at group events. Best idea: call ahead if you need to know whether you have any options, so you can plan accordingly.
4. Garbanzo bean flour smells terrible in wet batter. As bad as wet dog.
5. It's really important to have snacks around that you can eat. There's nothing worse than looking around your kitchen and through your pantry and feeling that all this stuff is off limits.
6. You must always do the due diligence by reading every label, and by knowing what to avoid.
7. We are so lucky to be doing this now, when we can bike to a store two miles away that has all the new flours and substances we are experimenting with.
8. Some people on the internet who are gluten-free seem to enjoy making you use as many different kinds of flour as possible (you know who you are!).
9. It takes a fair amount of baking to figure out what your personal preferences are.
10. I no longer cut in half or two-thirds the amount of leavening a recipe for gluten-free baked goods call for, to adjust for high altitude. I use all the yeast and all the baking powder called for.
11. I expected to find lots of bread recipes using baking powder and baking soda, but instead find that lots of recipes for breads use yeast. Yum!

-rk

My inner epidemiologist

A friend of my relatives' wrote to me recently and talked about discovering she was allergic to gluten, and said that doctors had been telling her for so many years that if she would just fix the way she was thinking, her gut problems would disappear. I wrote back and said that is exactly what I have been learning about in reverse: I have heard if you heal your gut, your brain can work the way it is meant to. (Which reveals my own presupposition that there is some kind of bodily intelligence, a seeking out of equilibrium, if we can tap into it.)

Learning that there are neurons in the gut has set off many chains of ideas for me. It feels like things are falling into place about disease and the people I know and what so many of them are suffering from. Some of what I learned came from a book called Dangerous Grains, and an interesting film I screened last fall discussed the possible connections between diet, GI, and developmental issues, such as autism and sensory integration disorder. I have been fascinated by this idea and have been doing some research. I mentioned my "inner epidemiologist" to the friend in a reply and I have been thinking about studying this seriously ever since. It fits with some of the research I have done on pharmacological drugs and their effects. I do wonder whether we are pounding the heck out of our heads and bodies with these chemical sledgehammers when we may need to be concentrating on healing our guts instead.

Meanwhile, I'm curious about what I could do now to improve things for kids at school. One of our kid's greatest frustrations, aside from not being able to have the same treats everyone else has on birthdays, is no longer getting to have hot lunches at school. I spoke with the person in charge of our district's lunch program, and she said, "I don't see gluten-free anywhere on the horizon." All the school lunches are loaded with gluten, and the rest have cheese. I was hoping that the nachos might have been a good choice, but even the cheese sauce contains "modified food starch," a substance far too indeterminate to be classified as gluten-free. But what if, like the new "harvest bar," stocked with all the usual suspects (the cut-up fruits and veggies and iceberg lettuce salad you usually find in the lunches anyway), you had a gluten-free stand that had a selection of protein-rich, whole-grain muffins and energy bars? What if someone came in now and then and made buckwheat crepes at lunch and filled them with steamed asparagus or sliced almonds and fruit? I have long been disgusted at all the white-flour laden snacks I see at school -- the ones the teachers and parents often pick up on their way to school. The donuts, the cookies, the cupcakes. White flour and transfats galore. Ick. I wonder whether a series of talks on "Food and Mood," would appeal at all to teachers, other school personnel, and parents. It would be so interesting to gather some experts and allow them to field questions about the current research on diet and behavior.

I see kids who have allergies or behavioral issues and wonder sometimes, what if you stopped eating white wheat flour? Or gluten? Or dairy? How would you behave if your guts were not continuously* being injured by a large proportion of the food you ate every day?


*Incidentally, I love the mnemonic for how to remember the difference between continuous and continual: continuous means one uninterrupted sequence (the word ends in ous, get it?). Continual is the one that is ongoing yet intermittent.

-rk

Panisse!

Panisse rocks. I'm going to go make a fresh batch in a minute, but it is the thing that is making the switch to gluten-free baking easier, oddly enough. It is a great way to get used to the nutty flavor of garbanzo bean flour, which is a major ingredient in some of the gluten-free flour blends I'm using.

A few weeks ago, our local paper ran a recipe from a local restaurateur for panisse. Everyone's heard of Alice Waters' Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, but few know that panisse is a dish made from chickpea (or garbanzo) flour.

4 cups water
1-1/2 cups chickpea flour
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
6 tablespoons olive oil

Boil water, and with a long-handled whisk blend in the chickpea flour. Add the salt and cook on medium-low heat, stirring often so the mixture doesn't burn (do watch your hands and face -- I keep the mixture covered and use a silicone oven mitt to stir this to keep from getting burned by any spatters). Cook about 4-5 minutes until the mixture is thick (like polenta or oatmeal). Stir in three tablespoons of the olive oil. Pour and spread the cooked mixture into an square pan (8- or 9-inch), oiled with one tablespoon of the olive oil, and put a sheet of plastic wrap on the surface so a skin does not form. Refrigerate for a minimum of four hours or overnight. Cut into cubes and toss with the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil. Fry on the stovetop or bake at 400 degrees F. for 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally to brown and crisp the panisse cubes evenly.

I haven't gotten as far as making a sauce for dipping the panisse cubes, but I will; so far I've just enjoyed them as a side dish with a main and vegetable. They are so delicious -- and they feel so much better for us than french fries!

-rk