It's been a while since my last all-food-and-drinks post, so I've got some catching up to do. But first, my two new food obsessions:
I've been buying kaffir limes at my new health food store, Integral Yoga Natural Foods, and using them in salad dressing. If I put some sliced apple and radish in the salad, I've got sweet, tart, and bitter all in one bite. Outstanding.
My second obsession is dried pineapple. I bought some of it maybe three weeks ago from the Organic Avenue near where I work, and I really enjoyed it. But it was very expensive and packaged in plastic. Lately, I've been buying it in bulk at IYNF. It's more reasonably priced, I can carry it off in one of the bigger reusable cloth produce bags that Dad and Jean got me for Christmas, and I'm almost certain it's organic. (I think that's what the sign at the store said.)
And my first attempt at gluten-free cookies:
At my request, Tony gave me the BabyCakes Covers the Classics baking book for Christmas. I have yet to visit the well-known vegan and mostly gluten-free bakery on the Lower East Side, but I've heard nothing but raves about it. (And I'll get there eventually.) And when I checked out this book at the Barnes & Noble near work, it looked like a winner. It's got recipes for things like waffles, breakfast buns, and all-time-favorite cookies, like chocolate chips and Snickerdoodles, all made without gluten or dairy ingredients.*
And donuts! How could I not mention the donuts? In a cover blurb, Mark Bittman says BC's donuts are "the best I've had in twenty years." I don't think it will be too long before I try out one of the donut recipes. But I'll have to buy donut pans first. Because these are baked donuts.
Two weekends ago, I asked Tony to select a cookie out of the book for me to take a stab at, and he chose Lace Cookies, which was the least-complicated cookie recipe in BCTC that didn't contain oat flour. (Tony is unable to eat oats even though some people with celiac disease can.) The majority of the recipes in the book contain arrowroot and xanthan gum, and BabyCakes proprietor Erin McKenna highly recommends using refined coconut oil as the butter substitute in most of her recipes, though canola oil is named as an alternate. And unsweetened apple sauce shows up a lot too, in combination with the oil. IYNF had only unrefined coconut oil, which would have made the cookies taste strongly of coconut, so I ended up buying the refined stuff and the arrowroot at Whole Foods.
I liked the cookies, but Tony was a bigger fan. Which was better than the reverse would have been. :-) I took some to the Game Party, and they were well received there too.
Here's the bowl of dry ingredients:
Here's the dough:
And here's the finished product:
***
The brunch photos in my previous post reminded me of the very good brunch I had at Malaparte back in October.
Mashed potatoes and eggs! At another, more recent brunch there, I got a classic Spagetti alla Carbonara.
At the end of October, Paula and Mark P. joined us for dinner at Commerce.
The waiter took photos of the four of us with my iPhone, but they all turned out somewhat blurry. And I looked possessed in every single one of them.
Commerce was our old favorite place. Bistro de la Gare is our new favorite. The owner/chef is very friendly and comes out of the kitchen to check on her customers. We like that. And because they use rice flour as a sauce thickener and use butter in only those items on the menu in which it's specifically mentioned in the description, it's a great place for Tony to eat. (And as I mentioned in one of my 86 or so Christmas/New Year's posts, we had said we'd treat the Gerbers to dinner there. And we did that. On Friday. But that's a story for the pending blog post about my nephews' visit this past weekend.)
We took Bob for dinner at BDLG back in early November because he visited and helped us with some technology-related apartment issues.
As usual, he wouldn't smile for the camera. Because he sucks that way. :-)
On a visit later that month, just the two of us, there were some handsome cyclamens outside the door, planted with cabbages and ivy.
*As author Erin McKenna explains in a note about the complete gluten-free-ness of the recipes in the book, BabyCakes sells some products made with spelt** flour, but she worked hard to create spelt-free versions of Wonder Buns and other bakery favorites for her GF readers. Thanks, Erin!
**Spelt is a wheat variant that some people with gluten senstitivies can eat without digestive difficulty.
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