Gluten Free

I’ve never been one to challenge people about their dietary choices (I was a vegan for a year post-college, after all). I try to avoid saying, “that must be so hard” in a super serious voice when I hear that a new friend doesn’t eat dairy, avoids meat, or is gluten free. I pretty much figure that they’ve figured it out. And they hardly need my sympathy if they’re eating gluten-free quinoa salads or vegan roasted hash browns.

Still, dessert is hard. Sure, there’s always plain fruit. But if you’re gluten-free and craving a flour-filled cookie or cupcake, you might wind up disappointed. Fortunately, over the years, I’ve accumulated an archive of mostly accidentally gluten-free cookies, cakes, and other desserts, and I’m so happy to collect them all here today. You’ll see from reading through that a great technique for making gluten-free (and butter-free) sweets is using nuts. Whether they’re ground, as in the Walnut Cake, or in butter form, as in the Peanut Butter Meringues, they can turn flour-free treats into little masterpieces. Another important ingredient here is egg whites, which help the nutty desserts rise up and conquer your sweets craving.

P.S. Dairy-free desserts and everything gluten free.

P.P.S. Interview with me up over at Cupcakes for Breakfast!

These tacos defied all my attempts at food styling. I thought I’d gotten better at shooting food since the early blog days of dreary lighting and blurred images, but as the sun set on the windowsill where I take photos for BGSK, I could not pull off a single half-decent image of the tacos I’d just admiringly created out of the finest heirloom beans, artisan cornmeal, and organic multicolored peppers.

It didn’t help that the assemblage of all those ingredients was ridiculously messy. Piles of sautéed farmers’ market peppers in red, green, white, and purple slipped around beneath scoops of neutral-colored beans from Rancho Gordo and schmears of herbed avocado threatening to turn brown before we got a chance to eat, let alone photograph. Did it help the composition that my vegan tacos were wrapped up in yellow-ish-brown corn tortillas? Nope.

I climbed up on the Ikea stepstool and balanced one foot on the garbage can, like I often do. I upped my ISO, opened my lens all the way.

My arms shook. My images blurred. Finally, I called in the big guns. Alex has steady arms, and he pulled off a shot. Only then could we eat.

What a difference twenty minutes makes! In twenty minutes, you can go from pulling off a crisp shot of your sliced peppers to not being able to capture an image of tacos without the beans blurring into a muddled ochre mess.

Now I realize that these are not your woes. But hidden inside this sob story of photographic failure is the fact that these tacos take twenty minutes start to finish.

Yes, in the same third of an hour that it took the sun to melt below the Brooklyn brownstones, I sliced and sautéed peppers with shallots, seasoned pinto beans, blended avocado with garlic and herbs, and toasted corn tortillas in my cast iron skillet. That’s all that these vegetarian tacos require.

Creamy polenta has always seemed like a rather daunting dish to serve a crowd of guests. It takes longer to cook than one would imagine, and in my experience, it can transform from a soft, pillowy cushion into a rubbery, coarse brick in seconds. Because of this, I’ve always intentionally gone for the brick version for dinner parties.

Recently, I came across this Bittman article and discovered a different way of preparing polenta. Instead of pouring the cornmeal into boiling water in a steady stream and whisking furiously to prevent any lumps from forming, you start by creating a slurry …