Food, cooking, eating, and me

As the weather warms up, my thoughts turn to cold composed salads, things lined up on top of salad greens. Think of Cobb salad, not as itself, but as a starting point for inspiration.

The past couple of days I have put dry greens in the bottom of a rectangualr glass baking dish, and put rows of things like cooked asparagus, rinsed canned black beans, halved hard boiled eggs, chopped cooked bacon, green olives, and walnuts. Yesterday I cut the tomato and put it into the salad first. Today I held it back and put it in at the last minute, preventing the salad from picking up too much water.

I include a little covered takeout cup of homemade mayonnaise to dip into.

To eat, I pick off the pieces, and when they are mostly gone, I put salt, pepper, vinegar, and olive oil on the salad greens and stir before eating them.

It’s an incredibly attractive lunch. Everyone is always very jealous…

It was time to make some almond milk.

I never really had any use for fresh milk aside from cooking, even before I realized I was lactose-intolerant. But I did like almond milk, at least the homemade non-sweet kind.

Have I ranted yet about how Americans insist on having everything sweet? So all available nut and soy milks are quite sweet, to cover up for the fact that they’re not cow’s milk. Horrors! Imagine being able to taste what you’re eating or drinking because it’s not sweetened! The trend is for everything to be sweeter and sweeter, and most Americans follow the trend blindly, not even realizing how they are ratcheting up the sugar themselves. Yogurt? Sweeter than ice cream, but that’s ok, it’s fat-free. Thai or Chinese restaurant food? Americans insist on sugary sweet sauces. I’d better stop now before I get carried away. You know how I get.

Back to the almond milk. It is white and delicately flavored, though you might not guess it has almonds in it if you didn’t know. You can use it in a baking recipe, but don’t boil it by itself, as it will curdle. You can mix it with equal parts of carrot juice for a nice morning juice drink. You can use it to make panna cotta, though it will be light and delicate, not the heavy, rich creamery type.

Best of all, for us cheapskates, you can make a gallon for the cost of a pound of almonds, currently going for $4.89 here at the natural food store.

Almond milk

My father was always a pumpernickel kind of guy. When I was growing up, we would share store-bought pumpernickel bread spread with Liederkranz cheese. My mother would make him keep his Liederkranz in the milkbox on the porch, rather than the refrigerator. Ah, Liederkranz cheese!

Over the years I’ve made a fair number of loaves of pumpernickel bread. I have tended to make natural dark breads rather than those composed almost exclusively of white flour, as I find these more satisfying. One of my favorites I recall was a loaf made of dark rye flour, high in bran, and dark buckwheat flour, sifted to remove gritty chunks of seedcoat. Rye flour alone will make quite the dense bread. When you add other flours to it, it just hasn’t got enough gluten to hang together, so I added vital wheat gluten. It was incredibly tasty and filling, and it was naturally espresso brown. Yum. Of course, nobody at work would taste it. Most people pay lip service to healthy eating, that’s all.

Let’s flash forward now to the present. It’s been a couple of years since I intentionally ate any gluten, so I haven’t been doing any baking to speak of. But I just discovered xanthan gum, and I have been experimenting at making breads that are not only passable as regular breads, but even better, because I can make them just as I like them, not having to engineer my product for mass distribution to people who want all their bread to be high-fiber and dark, but taste like Wonder Bread.

So the recipe is made with buckwheat flours, both white and dark, cornmeal, xanthan gum, and various other normal bread-making ingredients. I mixed it in my Kitchenaid stand mixer until it was a non-sticky dense dough, and shaped it into a traditional round loaf. These don’t seem to rise as much as regular loaves, which is still ok for a pumpernickel.

When the bread is cooled, it slices into neat, thin slices. It makes great sandwiches and is good for toasting if a little dense. Next, a white type bread?

Buckwheat pumpernickel bread

I’ve always had a thing for brownies, and not just any brownies. They had to be chocolatey, the chocolatier the better. And not too sweet either. Of course they had to be sweet, being dessert, but there is something about a too-sweet cookie or pastry that, while addictively making me eat on, makes my tummy hurt.

So as I did with the chocolate chip cookies, I have always reduced the sugar in baking. My favorite brownie recipe is the one from James Beard’s American Cookery, which calls for 4 full ounces of unsweetened chocolate. None of this wimpy 1-1/2 ounces of chocolate, no siree!

After a first gluten-free casein-free recipe of mouth-melting chocolate chip cookies, I figured it was time for brownies. I substituted 2/3 cup white rice flour + 1/3 cup sweet rice flour + 1 teaspoon xanthan gum for the cup of flour called for, and 1/2 cup coconut oil for the butter. The finished product firmed up a little more than regular chewy-type brownies, but oh! it was good and chocolatey.

It is much better to eat a little something intense and satisfying than a whole, whole lot of something that is soul-suckingly unsatisfying. I don’t believe in substitute food. I make food that may be different, but is just as good as things I can’t have. Try it!