Gluten-free Banana Bread

Holy smokes! I'm back! The kiddies and I flew out to visit family and it was an incredible trip. The sun feels a bit closer to the Earth in the most southern part of Canada. I don't know if I can properly express how much I miss the way the morning mist swirls across fields to wrap up the trunks of solitary trees dotting the corners of bean, corn and wheat fields. I don't always catch this mist because by a decent time in the morning it has begun to burn up, only to work itself around the stems of flowers and trees and blanket the crickets as dusk settles.

I would not be a proper food blogger unless I mentioned the food. Oh, the food. My mom has a beautiful and tremendous garden and rest assured I took full advantage of it at mealtime. We had stuffed eggplant, fried green tomatoes, and just a plethora of fresh herbs that were clipped from the plants just steps from the door. The city is beautifully multicultural as there are sushi restaurants next to gluten-free bakeries, some of the best dim sum I have ever eaten (although there is an incredible place at the bottom of our street), Caribbean restaurants where the heat of the food heats the sidewalk. The cheese section at a privately owned grocer nearly made me cry, the variety of goat and sheep cheese was immense and a very helpful worker walked by my side to point to each cheese and explain its origins.

Upon returning home and after a good rest - did you know that staying up all night with your older brother at a campfire will result in you being incredibly tired? Who knew. But then, it won't really matter if it's the first time you've had the chance to properly hang out with him in a long time and you haven't even seen him in a few years.

After a tremendously long sleep and a day of blindly watching television I finally wandered back into the kitchen. The result was a perfectly moist banana bread with just a hint of cinnamon and gorgeous plump raisins. When baking banana bread, whether it is gluten-free or not, that sucker can dry out on faster than you would expect. At the one hour mark of baking, you will really need to start to keep a sharp on that bread otherwise you could have a pool of batter in the very centre or a dried out log.

The Recipe

2/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup butter

2 eggs

1 cup mashed bananas (about 4)

2 tsp. pure vanilla

10 g millet

20 g amaranth

40 g almond flour

2 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. guar gum

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

20 g plump raisins

1. Pre-heat oven to 350.

2. Cream the butter with the sugar. Add vanilla. Once the butter is smooth, mix in the mashed bananas and the eggs.

3. In another bowl mix all of the dry ingredients.

4. Add the dry to wet ingredients, mix well. Finally, add the raisins. Pour into a loaf pan. I didn't grease the pan because of the added oil coming from the almond flour.

5. Bake for 1 hour, perhaps 5-10 minutes more depending on your oven.

Photo Friday

Eggs • Bacon • Toast • Decadence

Dinosaurs!

You tell your kids to eat their vegetables, brush their teeth, drink their (goat and soy) milk and generally really healthy stuff that makes the little monkeys roll their sweet little eyes and sigh. Or not because children are contrarian and one day they love pak choi and the next it is weird. The point is that you are likely doing your absolute best for your kids because you love the little creatures, but sometimes you need to be a cool mom or dad so you go to the market and after you safely tuck into your shopping bag the pork chops, eggs, zucchini and all those vegetables you'll cajole your children into eating, you wander down to Rosemary's Chocolates and swat little hands away from all the beautiful baskets of chocolate so you can buy a small bag of chocolate dinosaurs. Because a little chocolate is good for kids, and it's good for you to hear that your kids think you're awesome.

The Beach Sandwich

It is likely there will be sand in this sandwich as it was hastilly thrown together to prevent a fight between siblings. The ingredients will have been chosen after great deliberation in order to appease the ever-changing tastes of my children and my desire for healthy food. What the sandwich doesn't show was that today my daughter floated in the water without my help, my son wandered down to the water's edge to fetch a bucket of water without clutching his sister or mommy's hand. The beach sandwich won't tell the secrets of a young couple who were much sweeter than anyone could have given them credit. The beach sandwich is a humble sandwich, who risks bringing a whole bottle of mustard to the beach, but it was there for the sweetness of one day.

Gluten-free Chocolate Chip Cookies!

It is difficult to properly introduce through written word a perfect gluten-free cookie. So often they are too crumbly or a weird, moist texture that is runny and spreads to create one giant cookie sheet shaped cookie. These cookies are not of that persuasion. These chocolate chip cookies are soft with enough firmness to hold up against an ice cold glass of milk and the flavour of the flours melds beautifully with the chips so that there is no after taste or even initial taste of the flours. I think this is my least favourite aspect of gluten-free baking: The flavour of the flours. I have found that an extra egg here, double the vanilla (always use real!) there and you are on your way to having this whole gluten-free baking thing figured out.

Today was an extraordinarily chilly and rainy day, particularly in comparison to the rest of the week where we have been at the beach in a state of melting. Today's weather made it perfect for baking cookies and an afternoon trip to the library. My little people are impressive bakers, Bubs is in charge of whisking the flours and Miss N always cracks the eggs and creams the butter. As it turns out, my job mostly involves making sure we have enough chocolate chips left for the cookies. It was a close call today.

We tried a gluten-free brand of chocolate chips that were fantastic, no unexpected flavour (anything alternative has the potential to be unexpected, I'm adventurous but the familiar is reassuring), the texture was top-notch as the chips melted and retained their shape. Remember the Friends episode were Monica applies for a job at the "Mocklate" company? Yeah, these chips aren't like that. Also, the chips are still chocolate and I certainly appreciate that. I regret that I threw out the bag before writing down the name... I'll check on it the next time I'm at the store.

The Recipe

98 g glutinous white rice flour (despite the name, it's safe!)

102 g millet flour

81 g amaranth flour

1 tsp. guar gum*

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1 cup golden shortening - feel free to use butter, I used what I had in the pantry

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup lightly packed brown sugar

2 tsp. vanilla

3 eggs, lightly whisked

2 cups gluten-free chocolate chips

*I've been given to understand from other food bloggers that many people cannot tolerate guar gum and use xanthan gum. I'm the opposite, go figure.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

1. Mix dry ingredients. Don't forget to whisk the flours so that it melds into one consistent flour.

2. Cream the shortening/butter and add the sugars and vanilla. Add the eggs and mix well.

3. Combine the two bowls. Once fully mixed, add whatever chocolate chips your kids haven't eaten.

4. Bake for 8-11 minutes. My children love to scoop out the cookies and I am not joking when I write that I've had to bake some cookies for close to 15 minutes, while the others were finished in a mere few minutes. Use your discretion, check the lovelies at about 7 minutes and judge from there, optimally the cookies should be a sweet golden brown.

5. Enjoy!

A Summer Dinner

These little beauties are destined for the flame of our barbecue. The eventual destiny of the beautiful tuft of dill, I am currently unaware of, but I look forward to it. For a tragically long time I did not like dill, nay, I hated it. I still hate cilantro but I firmly believe that we should constantly try new foods and old foods because you never know when you will walk into your vegetarian restaurant, order the hummus and the sweet hipster in oversized glasses frames will pack a container of dilly hummus in your bag, thus sparking a revolution of taste/likes v. Dislikes for you. Let that be a lesson: Try food all the time. Do it gingerly, brashly or even blindly. Just get out there and do it.

Live blogging: Summer Dinner

We are now in the deep throes of summer. The sunlight has taken on a distinctly baked white quality and it is perfectly acceptable to delve so deeply into the type of book that is guaranteed to draw tears, laughter and sighs of contentment (and the unnerving feeling that you are in some ways like your least favourite character) that your loved one will quietly put away his own reading and gently placed two halves of an onion on the barbecue. Onion halves impart an inelegant image of love, but it's there.