Real Fake Pizza, a taste test!

 We went over to someone's house the other night and they bought a gluten free pizza for my son, which was very thoughtful, but the only brand they had at our local store was also a vegan 'meatlovers' pizza with vegan 'cheese and meat' as well.  I had often laughed at the ridiculous idea of a vegan, gf meatlovers pizza but this was my big chance to see how bad it truly was.  I had a dubious flirtation with fake cheese once upon a time, even making my own, but I couldn't stomach the stuff no matter the ingredients, my gut didn't like the consistency so I gave it up, though I did have fairly good success using kappa carrageenan, at least to make it stretchy and chewy rather than mushy which the tapioca starch tends to do.  There is just no replacement for real cheese.  You can make a passable gluten free bread, the crust on the thing was lovely.  The sauce was good.  The onions (the only real topping) were mushy but this was a frozen pizza and they added a nice flavor.  The 'cheese' melted into dubious globs of tapioca starch and was mushy no matter that I put it under the broiler.  The 'meat' was a highly spiced, slightly plasticky substance that looked like pepperoni, sort of like they don't use real food for commercials or movie props or ads but use sturdy, delicious looking stand ins, yum!  My son hated it, my husband said 'it wasn't as bad as he thought it would be,' and I agreed with him though it most certainly didn't agree with me, as I knew it wouldn't but it was for science!

Verdict: stick with real food.  Lose the fake meat and cheese obsession and focus on making actual fruit and vegetables as delectable as possible instead of terraforming a pizza out of tapioca starch and pea protein, which is about as tasty as it sounds, sort of like making food out of play dough and expecting it to taste like the real thing!  This would have been an excellent pizza if they had done a veggie supreme and used real cheese, not vegan but also real pizza.  I don't get this obsession, especially when everyone also insists on organic, non-gmo, and all natural and unprocessed.  This pizza was anything but natural and way too processed, but there is a subset of the population that can eat organic Oreos with a straight face and think it is somehow virtuous or healthy or something!  Maybe they'll eat the leftovers?

Permission to cry

 Do you have any personal tragedies that you won't allow yourself to grieve because the world thinks you're nuts, petty, or ridiculous?  Forget the world and let yourself grieve!  The world is there for you when your parents or children or spouse die but otherwise you are on your own, and even then you only get a three day grace period and then life is back in the fast lane.  But what if you are estranged from your family, had an abusive or absent parent and never got to know what a good dad is, never got to realize your dream of doing X, you just miscarried or can't get pregnant, you have to forego some major and favorite food group due to health reasons...whatever the reason, you are allowed to grieve.  It only adds insult to injury when the world sides against you, not only can you not grieve but they say it is your fault that your mother's abusive or you have nothing to cry about since you never had a relationship with your absent dad and now he's dead so get over it already.  Forget the world's opinions and censure and seek out a good friend who will listen and let you grieve, someone who won't give advice or opinions or trite comfort or criticize you, but just somebody who will have your back even when you are sobbing over never getting to eat real cheese again.  Bottling it up, ignoring it, or lapsing into despair will only make it worse.  You have permission to be human, to hurt, to grieve, to cry, no matter why or what or who.

Listen to the mustn'ts?

 Shel Silverstein penned a little poem that went, 'Listen to the mustn'ts child, listen to the don'ts, listen to the shouldn'ts the impossibles, the won'ts,' and then it goes on to say, "anything can happen, child anything can be!"  While there are obviously restrictions to 'anything,' such as walking to Mars or flying by flapping your arms, in general he makes an excellent point, especially if you go online looking for information about any particular sort of health topic or lifestyle or diet.  My biggest advice to new moms is disconnect your internet, as it will only make you crazy or neurotic!

I'm already on a very restricted diet, have limited energy, and sometimes just feel downright lousy, and now I have a fully body attack of eczema: itchy!  So I hope on google to figure out what is going on and how to stop it...bad idea!  Every article says something different, especially if they are selling supplements or coaching expertise.  From what I could gather, you basically can't eat anything but kale and salmon for the rest of your life and you are a terrible person for eating anything non-organic, gmo, grains, sweeteners (real or artificial), any fat but olive oil or coconut, dairy, most fruit...or pretty much anything except kale since salmon is obviously not vegan so you can't eat that either?  I was actually losing weight earlier this year because I just didn't want to eat, couldn't make myself eat, couldn't get enough calories because of my dietary restrictions.  And I can't even eat kale because it ranks right up there with wheat on my food sensitivity list, what do I eat, rocks?

I need to cut back on the sugar, that's probably what triggered this eczema flare-up, but I'm not sure I can cut it completely out of my diet as I have so much other stuff, there is literally nothing left!  The whole thing made me rather depressed and nigh on despair, I know I can't live like that, but the pictures of all these scrawny smiling women and their patented gut repair systems just might guilt me into it.  You can't just make broad and sweeping claims about diet and gut issues, inflammatory disease and food sensitivity, everybody's issues are different.  Saying dairy and wheat (or whatever) are toxins that nobody should eat and the main problem doesn't help anybody.  Individuals need help, not a list of nos they can't live with, otherwise they'll just give up before they begin or sink into even worse eating habits.  And what about the stuff that's okay on one site but anathema on another?  What about those of us who can't eat kale or any source of carbs but oats?  Where can you find some of this stuff if you don't live in a posh urban area that caters to the vegan keto crowd?  How can the average Joe afford it?  Why the guilt and condescension to someone who is ill and looking for answers?  Just buy my system/supplement and your problems are over, except a dozen other people say the same thing with different stuff, who is right?

Ignore the self-proclaimed experts.  Find community and support.  Find a doctor that will listen and work with you.  Do what works for you, no matter how many internet gurus say it will kill you!  Consider your quality of life, can you and will you eat something every day for the rest of your life?  If you can't stand kale, don't be guilted into eating it.  Also make changes gradually, pick one monster and attack that before going after the whole ravening hoard.  Allow yourself to grieve, it is okay to feel sad that you can't eat cheese.  Find alternatives that work for you and you actually enjoy.  Learn to cook and shop based on your dietary needs, personal tastes, and budget: learn to enjoy the hunt, the joy of a new culinary skill or recipe, instead of focusing so much on diet, focus on the process.  Be careful with supplements, they can have side effects and weird interactions with one another, some may help but some may also cause problems.  Take it slow, give yourself time to learn new skills, grieve, to adjust to new things.  Most of all, stay hopeful, remind yourself of the small victories, surround yourself with supportive people, and remember it is a journey not a destination.  And you don't have to drink a salmon and kale smoothie to get there!

The effect of fat type, dough temperature, mixing method, baking time, and percentage flour content on texture, thickness, and taste in gluten free cookies.

 If the onerous title sounds a trifle scientific, that was the point.  We've been having an enforced snow-cation the last couple days and I was out of cookies, so I whipped up a couple batches and thought I'd play with a few variables to see what actually makes a difference in gf cookies.  I used the same recipe but varied some of the variables to see what would happen: oil vs plant butter, room temperature dough vs. refrigerated dough, cream the fat/sugar or just mix it until combined, a slightly sticky dough or a stiff, dry dough, and varying the length of time in the oven.  I ended up with about eight different experimental doughs and baked them in various combinations and carefully assessed the results, which were interesting.

I discovered that chilling the dough does nothing for gf cookies using 100% oat flour and a little xanthin gum (along with real sugar and eggs).  Neither does creaming the butter/sugar.  I used oil in half the dough and plant butter in the rest, to see if that made a difference.  The cookies were a bit thicker with the solid fat (could also use coconut oil, lard, shortening, or real butter) but I found the taste less pleasing for some reason (though I have been using canola oil for my cookies lately so it may just be a personal thing in this case) whereas the oil cookies tended to spread more and were a little thinner.  Liquid vegetable oil is a lot cheaper than plant butter or shortening right now, hence my preference for canola oil at the moment.  I also found that under baking the cookies, no matter which dough was used, made for thinner, uglier cookies, but over baking makes them too crispy.  Adding extra oat flour made for nice looking cookies but they were a bit on the dry side.

Overall results: gf oat flour cookies can be made with oil and still achieve satisfactory results.  Chilling the dough or creaming the fat/sugar doesn't improve the end result.  Baking the cookies until they just begin to brown around the edges and crack on the top and then allowing to cool several minutes on the baking sheet give the best results.  Adding enough oat flour to make a thick, slightly sticky dough results in a chewy cookie with the appropriate texture but too much makes it dry and too little will make it run all over the baking sheet.

The Cure for the Commonly (awful) Gluten Free Cookie?

 I can do cinnamon rolls and croissants gluten and dairy free but I struggle with cookies?  Yep, I have a friend who can't make a boxed brownie mix to save her life but can do lovely sugar cookies from scratch, so it isn't just me with this odd tendency.  Rather it is the nature of the beast, or rather beasts.  In most gluten free baking you want wet, wet dough or actually batter and use a container to give the product shape and structure, which obviously doesn't work for cookies.  I've tried dozens of recipes using shortening and vegetable butter but they still want to dissolve into a gloppy pool of goo and run everywhere, even when you freeze them, mound the batter high, and all the hundred other things the internet recommends to make edible cookies that are both chewy and gooey.  I did have good luck with monster cookies (lots of peanut butter and 100% oatmeal) and those cookies you make with just peanut butter, sugar, and an egg, so obviously peanut butter makes a nice cookie base but what about when you want a non-peanut butter cookie or can't have nuts?

I fiddled with the fat forever but it didn't seem to help, then I started adding enough flour to make the dough fairly stiff, still sticky compared to wheat cookies, but way too thick to result in a moist cookie, at least if you think along the lines of traditional gluten free baking theory, all that extra flour is going to suck up all the moisture and leave them dry and crumbly, they won't run all over but it will be about like eating a dog biscuit.  Happily I was wrong about that, at least as long as you don't overtake them, which means you need to pull them from the oven when they are barely set around the edges and still goopy in the middle, letting them cool on the pan.  They tend to be thin and a little crispy, but certainly better than before but I still wasn't very happy with my flour/starch mixture.  Then I started tampering with 100% oat flour, it worked in my monster cookies, why not try it in other recipes, except grind it up to make it less like a monster cookie?  And it works!  I've done double chocolate chip, chocolate chip, and even converted a wheat molasses cookie recipe and they all turned out, the oats give them structure, flavor, moisture, chew, and crispiness and you don't even have to use xanthin gum, at least assuming you are using real eggs and sugar.  Then I did the unthinkable and thought to use vegetable oil instead of crisco or vegan butter (both of which are getting ridiculously expensive and are basically just that, save in a semi-solid form).

My former fiddling with fats showed that they didn't make a significant contribution to structure in a gf cookie except in the case of peanut butter, so why not?  I found an oil based wheat flour chocolate chip cookie recipe and ended up adding twice the recommended amount of oat flour to get the right consistency, but they turned out as good as my other gf cookie recipes I've tried and I had also doubled the amount of flour to fat/sugar and made them whole grain besides (obviously healthy cookies now, right?).  You can't cream the butter and sugar for obvious reasons but as you don't have gluten to hold in and maintain that gloriously fluffy structure I'm not sure you'll miss it.  Don't substitute cup for cup oil for butter/shortening, rather do 2/3-3/4 cup vegetable oil for each cup of solid fat, as the solid fats contain some percentage of water (20-40%).  Then add your oat flour until the batter is stiff but still a little sticky (use a danish dough whisk or your big mean mixer!).  Flatten a little before baking and watch carefully, pull from the oven when they just begin to crisp around the edges and firm in the middle, let cool on the sheet and remove to a wire rack.  This little trick can be used for many recipes, obviously you may need to tinker with your specific recipe and if you can't have oats it may be hard to find a good substitute, as oats really have a nice neutral flavor, a great texture, and are naturally moist and chewy.  Quinoa and buckwheat have strong flavor, coconut flour is really absorbent, maybe almond flour or possibly brown rice?  You also don't want to substitute the eggs or sugar as they add their own flavor, structure, and texture.  Have fun!