Gothic Granola

If you have some Italian in your heritage and you have two X chromosomes, you should know how to make sauce. And pizzelles...you should know how to make pizzelles , tiramisu , and cannoli.

Continuing the theme of "so basic it shouldn't need a recipe and I'd rather be writing" posts, here is the vegan and gluten-free fried rice recipe TC makes for me when we have leftover fried rice.

This is not a coffee cake in the sense of something that's covered in streusel. Sorry. This is a coffee cake in the sense of a cake that's not quite sweet enough for dessert but is perfect for a mid-morning or mid-afternoon caffeine break. Not sorry. I don't even drink coffee. I have no clue if this will "go" with coffee or not. Pairing sourdough with sour coffee doesn't make sense to me, but I don't make the rules, I just follow them . This is my first time participating in one of these link-ups.

This is not a coffee cake in the sense of something that's covered in streusel. Sorry. This is a coffee cake in the sense of a cake that's not quite sweet enough for dessert but is perfect for a mid-morning or mid-afternoon caffeine break. Not sorry. I don't even drink coffee. I have no clue if this will "go" with coffee or not. Pairing sourdough with sour coffee doesn't make sense to me, but I don't make the rules, I just follow them . This is my first time participating in one of these link-ups.

Ordering at Chinese Restaurants when you're Gluten-Free Pro Tip: Order the dish you desire without soy sauce or any sauce at all (steamed, you're even safer.) Do a little research, figure out how the dish is made. Understanding how certain dishes are prepared helps you understand possible sources of gluten-containing products. Finally, if you don't care about cooking, heaven help you if you're gluten-free. Or Maybe Not The continual availability of new gluten-free products hasn't ceased to amaze me. People with actual Coeliac disease make up less than 1% of the US population , yet the GF foods market is valued at >$10.5 billion (in 2013) . Since I pinpointed my gluten sensitivity in May 2011, I went from barely being able to find sorghum flour at ShopRite to being able to buy GF (and vegan) bread at Trader Joe's, Whole Foods (duh), Sprouts, and Safeway.

OMG! It's a hippie lentil loaf! Miriam at Mouthwatering Vegan created this Epic Veggie Loaf . I have nothing to add other than my substitutions:

Regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal is not vegan and gluten-free. HOWEVER, Van's makes a reasonably close VGF alternative, Cinnamon Heaven . I reviewed this cereal last year. TC challenged me to make a coffee cake with cinnamon toast crunch. Pinterest yielded several recipes, precious few from scratch. For my junior paper on diets and religion, I picked up a series of essays on women and food, and I recall one that was elaborating on why women in the '50s felt pressured to "do it all": keeping the perfect house, dressing neatly, managing the children, and making dinners with all the new electric gadgets and convenience foods. That drive to use convenience foods is why I find some 1950's cookbooks gross (et tu, ridiculous Sunset cookbook in my grandparents' home library). I think the essay was from this book?

More strawberries and chocolate chips this week. My harshest critic was in town and TC asked me to make him a "moist" baked good (AKA: my other father-in-law, Bandit the dog's owner).

When Greek yoghurt became popular a few years ago (or to use my husband's phrase, it "blew up"), naturally bakers of all stripes put it in their products. Three tablespoons, though, is superfluous. It's not enough to add flavor or a preponderance of acidity to make a cake rise, especially when the leavening agent is baking powder, not the basic (as in pH, for all of you who failed chemistry) baking soda ( Na HCO 3 ). But I may just be an old vegan codger. Greek yoghurt does make good traditional cheesecake, and I used to eat a lot of it before I became lactose-intolerant. Anyway, strawberries were on sale at Lucky's.