And I only have one thing to say:
Gluten-Free Girl, will you be my best friend?????????
I made her pancake recipe (as solemnly vowed to you), and they were fantastic. They looked and tasted like REAL PANCAKES. And get this: they totally looked like restaurant pancakes.
I am not even kidding.
Plus, as an added bonus, they're made with teff flour, which is a whole grain. That means that it's completely healthy to eat these pancakes. Like eating whole-wheat ones, except gluten-free whole-wheat. It's a miracle!! Here are my only issues: 1) because of the teff flour, which is brown, the batter is brown instead of the yellowy color it usually is. Don't be freaked out by this. It will still taste fantastic.
2) because of all the baking powder and xanthum gum, the batter is extremely puffy (this is good because then the pancakes are light and fluffy). So that you don't come out with pancakes ten stories tall, smooth it around a little in the pan to make it thinner. Trust me, it'll puff back up plenty.
That's it! The recipe is below. Make and enjoy!
Other than the pancakes, I have been on a baking spree this week. I made Irish Soda Bread (also from a Gluten-Free Girl recipe, also with teff flour, and also fantastic), and Devil's Food cake, which was like heaven. I made it for my birthday so that we wouldn't have to get ice cream cake, and it was even better than pancakes. I'll give you the yummylicious recipe for that too, but next time. This post is long enough as it is!
Despite my many successful forays into baking, tonight my mom and I were making spaghetti, and AFTER I had boiled my water and made my garlic bread, I realized I had no gluten-free noodles.
This necessitated a last-minute drag-race to the grocery store. Not the good grocery store that has an entire aisle of gluten-free goodies and is a few towns over, but the stupid grocery store a mile away that decided to merge all of it's GF stuff with the regular stuff, so while I was searching fruitlessly for corn noodles I had to be taunted by shelves and shelves of bright yellow egg noodles. I was about to leave the store in the midst of a huge hissy-fit at their lack of GF noodles when I spotted an odd colored bag peeking out of the bottom shelf. Odd colored bags tend to mean GF, so I knelt down. There, under all the other shelves and a bit of dust, were the noodles I was looking for. Well, they were and they weren't. There was only one brand, and they were made of brown rice.
Like palm kernel oil, brown rice is one of my old enemies. The first GF bread I ever bought was brown rice, and it tasted like I'd cut up a refrigerator box and spread peanut butter on it. So I thought, maybe it's just the bread. And tried some brown rice noodles. This time it tasted like I'd shaved a refrigerator box into little curly-cues, boiled them so that they were mushy enough to not need chewing, and slathered them with tomato sauce.
Needless to say, I swore off brown rice immediately and haven't let one morsel pass between my lips since.
But what was I going to do? It was a total Hobson's choice situation. (I learned that phrase from dictionary.com, which sends me a Word of the Day every day. If you don't understand why I have dictionary.com sending me a Word of the Day, or why I'm giggling with glee because I actually got to use a Word of the Day in conversation, please consult my very first post). I had to buy the dreaded brown rice noodles. I tried to tell myself, "Hey, it's been five years. Maybe they've improved their brown rice recipes. Maybe it won't make me feel like I'm eating at recycling facility turned restaurant." Plus, I had garlic bread, which would help disguise any cardboard-esque tastes.
So I optimistically went to the self-checkout lane (read: stomped my way over with a One-Glance-My-Way-And-I'll-Mow-You-Down-With-My-Car look on my face). And as the cherry on top of the whole experience, I saw that Chairman Mao was in the checkout lane right next to mine.
Chairman Mao is the nickname I gave this guy who was in my Middle Eastern History class last semester. I loved the class. It was really interesting, and since beforehand all I knew was that the Mid-East was somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic and that we're at war there, the class was also quite informative. For example, I now know where Iran and Iraq actually are and can discuss (not at-length, but somewhat) the origins of the issues between Israelis and Palestinians. All well and good.
But there was this guy . . . pale, pasty, with the reddest hair I've ever seen, and the biggest mouth on the face of the planet. He was always arguing with the prof, acting like he knew more than her (in which case, why the hell was he taking the class in the first place?). And to make matters worse, he was a raging Communist and used every pause to breathe the prof took to acquaint the rest of us with Communist principles. Sometimes (read: 99.9% of the time) his comments didn't even gel with whatever we were talking about in class. They were just completely out of the blue.
Hence the nickname Chairman Mao for the red-headed freak (and no, the fact that he has red hair was not lost on me. That's the kind of irony you couldn't make up if you tried).
Anyway, I kind of hated him (read: loathed him with the burning intensity of a thousand desert suns). He ruined every class session he was in and, I think, really detracted from what the prof had to teach us because he ate up so much of her lecturing time.
Here's the worst thing he did. One day, when we were talking about the Palestinians and their lost homeland, he actually made a comment about "our persecution."
"Our persecution." As if he were Palestinian.
The boy couldn't be more white if he tried. He looks like a copper-headed Pillsbury Dough Boy.
I realize that anecdote has nothing to do with Communism, but it does highlight his complete, total, and utter stupidity. He's the kind of guy I just wanted to smack and say, "Listen, I know that right now you're full of arrogant, pretentious and pompous assumptions you honestly and passionately believe are true, but in a few years you'll be out in the real world and they'll all get smacked right out of you. So do me a favor and SHUT UP SO I DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM."
And this was the guy I had to confront in the self-checkout lane.
Read: paid with my head down and then ran as fast as my flip-flops could propel me so that he wouldn't recognize me as the girl who shot daggers and flames at him with her eyes all semester long.
Oh, and the noodles? Totally slimy and mushy. Thank God for garlic bread or I would have spewed.
So, long story short, don't get too cocky just because you bake a few things and they turn out completely yummylicious. Otherwise brown rice and Chairman Mao may raise their ugly heads . . .
P.S. I know my posts have been extra long lately, but now that the Pancake Games are over and there's no pressure to finish a specific recipe before I post, I promise from now on they'll be shorter and more frequent. That's my new solemn vow to you.
Gluten-Free Pancakes o'Yummyliciousness (from Gluten-Free Girl--see here)
¼ cup sorghum flour
¼ cup teff flour
¼ cup sweet rice flour
¼ cup tapioca flour
½ teaspoon xanthan gum
½ teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons organic cane sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder1 cup rice milk
2 eggs
3 tablespoons sour cream (or goat’s milk yogurt)
Combining the dry ingredients. Put all the dry ingredients into a large bowl and stir them with a wire whisk. (I have found this is like sifting the flours, without having a sifter.)
Combining the wet ingredients. Pour the rice milk (or whatever kind of milk you are using) into a different large bowl. Add the eggs and sour cream. Whisk it all together. Making them one. Add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, ¼ cup at a time. Stir well between each dry addition.
Patience. Let the mixture sit for at least thirty minutes, at room temperature, to settle into itself.
Cooking the pancakes. Turn a burner on medium heat. When it has come to temperature, add your favorite greaser here — canola oil, butter, or non-dairy spread — just enough to coat the pan. Using the ¼ cup measurement you pulled out of the drawer to measure the ingredients, dollop the pancake batter into the pan, from the height of a few inches. Allow the pancake to cook. Don’t be over eager to turn it. When bubbles have formed and mostly popped on the surface of the pancake, turn it. The second side always takes half the time to cook as the first, so watch this carefully. Remove the pancake from the pan and serve. Makes six small pancakes.
No comments:
Post a Comment