Delicious Chocolate Cake!!

Unending thanks to Jeanne Sauvage and her Four Chickens blog for the recipe for this one! It was SO delicious and rich, and reasonably easy to make -- yea!

I added the strawberries as a little decorative touch. I think I was supposed to let the ganache (icing) cool a little more than I did, so it poured and spread more than it might otherwise have, but that's just aesthetics (and more icing to eat off the platter)!

Yum! Yum!

Another pancake mix

Are you sensing a theme here? Evidently, pancakes are a critical part of my happiness in life!

Well, I have even more good news. I have found a GF pancake mix that's even better than any of the other mixes I've tried AND I think is better than the rice-flour-based recipe I had decided was my favorite before this. The Kinnikinnik Pancake and Waffle Mix is AWESOME. Very exciting -- they LOOK like normal pancakes -- all the other GF pancakes I have tried have a kind of speckled or heavily freckled look to the surface, but these are smooth and brown like regular pancakes usually are. The mix smells like vanilla cake batter. I've looked at the ingredients to try to figure out what makes it smell that way but I can't tell (no vanilla in the mix or anything).

The downside is it has a LOT of sugar and about twice the calories of Bisquick (I hadn't looked at that till today and I'd probably be happier not knowing it, but I can't unlearn it now...). So perhaps I shouldn't use it EVERY time but it sure is good and even my kids don't say a word about it being different or weird or anything like that.

Yea pancakes!

Impatience

It's been over a week since I posted last and this one is mostly whining, so forgive me in advance but I guess -- it's my blog and I can whine if I want to (sung to the tune of It's My Party...)

I am very impatient for this to become second-nature easy. I'm certainly doing fine and making progress, but it's far more time consuming to deal with food than it was before. It's a huge up-and-down see-saw for me, balancing the pride I feel in making it work against the drain of having to make it work.

Some examples of this duality:

• I feel a great sense of accomplishment that I can duplicate condensed cream of chicken soup without the can (I modified the recipe I found to omit the added salt and it's just right), but it takes more time than opening a can (maybe only 10 minutes or so, but it's an adjustment I have to factor into my cooking).
• It's not a huge deal to pack some food in a cooler to take to a track meet or school carnival or whatever, but I have to be thinking that much further ahead to make sure I have suitable things in the house and that I budget the time in advance of our required arrival time to pack them. And if I don't, the consequence is that I don't have food to eat.
• It's kind of a pain to have to investigate every restaurant I want to go to, figuring out if I can even eat anything there, but it's also been nice to find some new restaurants to visit that I wouldn't ordinarily even know about, necessarily.

I'll figure it all out eventually and have it become close to second nature, I suspect, but it is annoying, at least at present.

More ranting about Pancakes

I tried the rice-based pancake recipe again this morning -- it's definitely the best -- better even than the King Arthur Flour recipe and much cheaper, if more time consuming b/c it involves mixing 8 ingredients instead of 3-4. But I can live with that.

Gluten-free beer

I had heard that there were several types of GF beer on the market shortly after my diagnosis. I'm not a big beer drinker, so it was extremely low on the priority list to check out, but just yesterday, someone told me our local combo beer pub/wine-and-beer store sold a GF beer. So I figured, if for no other reason than to encourage them to continue to do so for sometime in the future when I might be there again, I should go try it out. Turns out they only had one variety -- one called Redbridge that is an Anheuser-Busch product. I had heard from some (one in person and several online) that it wasn't great, but I had also heard that it had recently been reformulated to be better.

Well, turns out that those who think it isn't great have MUCH higher standards for beer than I do. When I do drink beer, though I'm generally not inclined toward a basic American beer (like Bud, Miller, or basic light beers), about the strongest flavor I can handle is a Fireman's Four or a Harp. Redbridge ran somewhere between the home-brew Mike used to make and a Sam Adams -- totally drinkable and flavorful. It's actually slightly more hoppy than I'm accustomed to, but it's tasty and I liked it. Turns out, though, that this one was one of the old formula ones -- the bottle labels have changed with the new formula. So I am now curious to know whether I will like it more or less when I stumble across the new one.

Either way, as I said, it's not a huge priority, but it is a nice-to-know.

Update: Anheuser Busch screwed it up! I got the new Redbridge this weekend and it's not as good at the old! Ugh! But the good news is that I also tried a different kind called Bard's that is better than the new Redbridge. I think I liked the old Redbridge better than Bard's, but Bard's is totally drinkable. I emailed A-B to let them know the old Redbridge was better, so maybe they'll get that feedback from lots of people and eventually change it back...

Doin' the Happy Dance!

I just made a batch of chocolate chip cookies using the King Arthur Flour brand GF cookie mix. Oh my gosh! I can't even tell you how good they are. They look like chocolate chip cookies, they taste like chocolate chip cookies -- and good ones too! I am just bursting with happiness!

The mix is currently only available via the KAF website (brand new line of products) but they're working on getting them in stores. They're over $5 per box, which is kinda insanely expensive, but it makes 3 dozen cookies and that's a substantially better price per cookie than the pre-baked ones I found at Whole Foods that is $6.99 for 8 cookies! And I gotta say, at this point, the mix is worth every penny!

Now, I still have 2 home-made recipes to try (not today but soon), so perhaps I won't need to spend that kind of money for my sweet treats eventually, but knowing I have that option ROCKS!

More Pancake News

After trying their amazing brownie mix, I bought a variety of the King Arthur Flour GF line (new and not even in stores yet -- only available online). So this morning, I attempted the pancakes. It was nice and easy -- butter, eggs, milk, and mix -- and mixed up to look just like pancake batter... promising...

Verdict: Very yummy! Not a sweet recipe like the ones I did that called for sugar and/or vanilla, so more like what I'm used to (where the sweet comes from the syrup). Not Bisquick flavored -- Mike said they tasted like buttermilk pancakes to him -- so once I adjusted my mindset (after a bite or two) and appreciated them for the pancakes they were, I was very happy! Cooked up the rest of the batch and am going to freeze them for future days' meals.

One thing I wish they'd do -- I'd like to know how much mix is in the box b/c the recipe calls for you to use the whole thing at once, not measure out a quantity, and it made WAY more pancakes than I need -- even if I'm feeding the kids too. I could have done a half batch and been fine if they made that easy. All the ingredients are easily divisible by 2, so I just have to figure out how much mix there is and divide that in the future. At $6/box, I'd like to be able to make it last!