Gratitude Monday - The Flour Downstairs Edition

Today I am grateful the flour downstairs is still good.
It's been a bit of a glutenfest around here lately. I craved proper toast the other day and rather than go out to a restaurant, get an order of toast and coffee, and be done with it I decided to bake bread.
Rice toast is fine, but at the end of the chew it gets a weird consistency like one is chewing cooked sugar. Essentially, one is.
Further, I'd had a nagging thought to eat a bit of gluten again and that's what really put it over the net. Five years ago I had a nagging thought to stop eating gluten, "for a week" as an experiment. It's been great, and it is not over, but it was time for a wee change.
I dug out the spelt I had in the cupboard, sniffed and sorted through it to make sure it was okay, and then fired up the bread machine.
I am so grateful for toast and coffee that I made myself. It was the best.
Then I decided to try making bagels with the rye and barley flours we had in the cupboard.
Yesterday I decided to try making pretzels. That meant a trip downstairs to the stash in the big tote.
Not only was it in fine form it does not require sifting. The stuff we had upstairs did.
I am grateful for that.
There are several large (ice cream sized) pails of it and that's wonderful because I have an urge to make tortillas and buns, and maybe more bread, and anything else that comes to mind.
It's fun. And I realized as I was rolling out the dough in ropes to make pretzels it is not the eating, it is the procedure that I am enjoying so much.
For that, I am grateful.

The pretzels:

are very tasty. 

Gratitude Monday - Pizza Edition

I like pizza.
I am not alone.
I am gluten intolerant.
I'm not alone in that either.
It's not a difficult thing to manage as gluten free pizza crusts are reasonably easy to make and fairly tasty.
But sometimes they just don't do the trick.
I am grateful that I can handle a bit of gluten now and again.
To that end I raided our spelt flour stores the other day and made pizza dough.
It had to be sifted as it has more than its fair share of bran in it. It'll work that way, but I was in the mood for a soft, easy to manage dough.
While it was based on a recipe I made my own variations including playing fast and loose with the measurements of flour and olive oil.
I like what I did:

I really missed fluffy dough.

It was topped with emmentaler, a three year old cheddar ostensibly made from unpasteurized milk, and goat mozzarella, along with a pepperoni that had cheddar in it, elk smokies, mushroom, onion, green pepper, and tomato sauce.
Also, I threw chipotle pepper flakes in the dough.

It worked out and it was reasonably tasty.
For that I am grateful.

Gratitude Monday -- It's Wine O' Clock Again

For Christmas Eve dinner this past season, along with the roasted turkey and wildcrafted cranberry sauce, we had a glass of wine.
It was good.
Back in the old days I could hold my liquor with the best of them. I don't know that's anything to brag about, but neither is it a point of shame. It was a simple fact and I relate it for a reason.
One fine day I developed a number of food allergies including to alcohol. Not only could I get looped on the mere smell of it, I couldn't even handle de-alcoholized beer.
It was sad.
I'd have the occasional snort of something at bed time, or perhaps a swallow or two of wine of an occasion, but that was it. Any more and I'd be unable to control what I said. Also, liquor makes me red from ear to ear. For some "getting a glow on" is figurative. For me, literal.
Several months ago I decided to honour my gluten intolerance just to see what would happen. I followed the blog Wheat Belly and learned many things about wheat and gluten.
Commenters noted food allergies clearing up.
I wondered.
Then one day shortly before Christmas I looked in a little-consulted kitchen drawer. What should I find but a bottle of  3 Blind Moose merlot we'd purchased in a Montana service station a few years back.
On Christmas Eve afternoon I popped it in the refrigerator for a few hours to bring it below room temperature. My husband cracked the bottle near meal time to give it time to breathe, and then poured us each a generous glass.
For the first time in years I
a) finished the whole glass
b)drained mine before he'd finished his
c)was still sober
I glowed a lovely flame red from it, but it didn't matter. I tolerated it.
So thrilled was I that Saturday evening I decided to have another to help me enjoy the fourth season opener of Fringe. I only had a half-glass, but it was enough to satisfy me that Christmas Eve was not an anomaly.
It's wine o'clock in my house again.

Fluffy Bread Makes The World Go ‘Round

Last night, while I was re-grinding some Spelt for bread, I started thinking about how many other people would bother doing this? What happened was we ordered some Spelt flour and at last one of the two bags was filled some very coarse whole Spelt.
It looked like the wheat dad ground in to chop to feed the pigs. It felt nearly as coarse, too. The biggest difference is I think the chop had a finer layer of flour on it than this mess.

While all this Spelt bran is healthy, it does not bake well. So we sifted it and used the bran for bran muffins, to line the bottom of pans that need to be floured as well as greased, and my husband eats it for breakfast.

We have an overblessing of it. I thought about it recently and wondered if I ran the flour through the blender, would it bake better?
It does. It’s not ever going to be light and fluffy, but it’s adequate, tasty, and healthy and that’s what’s important.

How many people know this? How many would form the thought to do this and act on? How many would care?
The problem is most of us don’t know much about flour or grain or what’s in a loaf of bread or the various other things we commonly eat. We have advertising and fast food and the silly idea that we don’t have time to look after ourselves and to care about what we ingest. We trust the food in the stores to be good and good for us and we don’t have a clue, or even want a clue, that white flour has the nutritional value of bunny fluff.

We’re so used to fluffy white bread that many people, if confronted with a loaf of the whole grain variety, would turn up their noses at it.

White flour has plenty of gluten. That’s why it’s all stretchy and bendy and rises high and light and stays together. It's what celiacs are allergic to and it's about all that’s left after all the healthy stuff is stripped away when the bran is removed.

I can’t recall offhand how many vitamins and minerals can be found in whole wheat, and I’m currently too lazy to search, but it’s something like two dozen. So two dozen healthy things are stripped away, maybe three are put back, and we’re sold fortified white flour.
It’s the absolute truth. It has been fortified. It was useless fluff to start with and then some good stuff was put in and we are gullible enough to be happy about it.

For as much as I’d like people to understand about food and what is really good for them, I understand why this simply must not be.
The last thing the world needs is an educated public. If we knew what we are were getting as opposed to what we should be getting in our food supply, then there just might be a revolution.
We’d want real food. Then we’d be healthier and we’d think more clearly. We might not need expensive health care products.
The world as we know it would collapse due to so many people, from junk food makers and fast food workers to medical personnel being out of work.

I’m sorry. I should never have brought this up. Ignore me. Go back to your fluffy white bread and for the good of the economy do not think.