Learning How to Cook - Again

Patrice Lewis, on her excellent blog www.rural-revolution.com recently posted about cooking from scratch.  The gist of the post was making "box" dishes from scratch instead.  Along with some very good advice on cooking utensils to have on hand and items to keep in the pantry, she posted some recipes and invited her readers to post their favorite homemade items that most people these days make from a box, such as mac and cheese, pancakes, muffins and such.

It all sounded so delicious it made me hungry.  I found though that I couldn't really use any of the recipes that were posted much to my dismay.

Last year we discovered that my mom is lactose intolerant and my sister has gluten issues.  Since then cooking has become quiet adventurous in our house.  With wheat and milk out of the picture, most of the "box" recipes that are "go-to" for home cooks just don't work for us no matter if they are from scratch or out of a box. 

Basically now everything is from scratch, because wheat and milk are in just about everything in a box (explain to me why beef broth needs wheat in it.?  Check out the label on College Inn broth.  It's there.) 

Anyway, rant aside, we don't eat a lot of baked goods due to the issues, but I've been experimenting with various flours and liquids to achieve some tasty treats.  My two main flours are corn and rice.  I bought a grain grinder to make my own fresh instead of buying those expensive little packages in the exotic foods section.  I can buy a 50 pound bag of rice for about the same price as five pounds of ground rice flour.  I can make my own flour, it's fresher, cheaper and still make rice the regular way if I want to.

 I'm not real excited about using the gums and pastes normally put in store purchased food (weird and very expensive) to make non-gluten flours stick together, so I'm playing with my flour to egg ratio to up the protein needed to hold it all together (good thing I've got chickens!)  I've had lots of practice runs ending up being chicken food (another reason to buy a cheap bag of rice and grind it yourself) instead of gracing our table, but I'm getting there.  A peach cobbler made with corn flour can be downright tasty.  I try to do a lot of converting of recipes I find that sound great, but you have to work at it, because just replacing wheat flour with rice flour won't work and you won't like the results.

Rice flour cookies are very crisp straight out of the oven, but after a day, they can be like chewing on a rock.  I'm finding that a bit of applesauce in the mix helps to soften them up.

A cup of self-rising corn meal run through the grinder for a finer flour mixed with a tablespoon of baking powder, one egg, a half-cup of sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon and a cup of lactose-free milk makes an absolutely fabulous cobbler dough.  Melt a stick of butter in your favorite baking dish, pour the dough in, drop the fruit of your choice on top and bake until golden brown.  Yum.

Lactose free milk is available out there now as are milks made from soy, almond and a host of other grains and nuts.  They're okay and in cooking you can't tell the difference. There is also a host of pastas made from different grains.  Some are good, some just cook into mush.  Finding out which ones do what is a matter of trial and error.

I'm also finding out that some things just don't need wheat.  Libby's canned pumpkin has a great pumpkin pie recipe on the side of the can.  On a whim, I made up the pie filling and then poured it into a pie plate that I sprayed with non-stick spray and stuck it in the oven - no pie shell.  It turned out great.  The filling held together wonderfully and the taste wasn't interrupted with pie crust thickness.  I've also tried this with an egg custard pie with similar results.

What I can't seem to find a substitute for is cheese.  There is a soy alternative out there, but it's not very good and doesn't cook worth a flip.  Oh well, maybe someday.

In the meantime, the experiments continue.....