Cooking and kids

Teaching kids to cook makes them aware of what's in the food they are eating.  This is a pizza made by my nine-year-old.  The crust is flaxseed and the cheese is low lactose.  The sauce is organic while the pepperoni has no additives, preservatives.  The meat has no hormones or antibiotics.

He is getting so much better at reading labels on foods.  The ingredients matter, not just the labels.  That happened with learning to cook.  The pizza came from Wheat Belly, by William Davis, MD.  While not specific to celiacs the wheat free diet goes a long way in eliminating the gluten that damages so many who are sensitive to it.

Cooking is another fun activity with the kids, and it imparts insight into food realities.  I'm very proud of my son for stepping up.  He checks labels and ingredients, and now wants to cook more of his own food.

Bake your own bread

So I am not all that thrilled with #glutenfree bread that's available commercially.  They are all frozen, except one that I found which was like a small brick of sawdust, and that makes them dry.  Crumbly, stale tasting bread is what you get when it is frozen no matter how good the initial bread.

That said, for me to find some good bread for toast or sandwiches I broke down and got a bread maker.  It has a setting for gluten free breads.  That means there is only one rise.  The machine, as a real baker, normally lets a standard dough rise once only to be punched down to let rise again.  Gluten free doughs do not have the structure to rise again so can't go through this process.  The program in the machine took away from any manual parts to the process.

The above loaf is from my own dough concoction.  I had recipes but not all the ingredients.  My local supermarket had almost all gluten free flours and stuff so I was able to get this done.  It's not the really airy white bread, a tad on the cake-y side for that, but it is good with nice texture and crust.  I will experiment some more with my new toy.  Looks like I am eating a lot of bread in the near future. Apparently have to make up for the seven months of no bread.

update on baking

So a whole lot of baking did not happen this weekend.  But managed to make a pizza, gluten free.  It's a bacon and cheese.  It was good.

Time to Bake

For now I have been buying all the gluten free breads and stuff.  This weekend it might be the time to make some of my own.  I have some gluten free mixes for things like brownies, cookies, and corn bread.  And I do have a recipe book for baking, now's the time to put it into action.

If I can find a good doughnut recipe and then find a way to add cocoa to it so I can finally have chocolate doughnuts, I will be very happy.  In the mean time I think I will have to eat my way through a lot of attempts.

It's the internet, I know, so there are a lot of blogs, sites, etc. with lots of information.  I may try to go through all of these again, but I also want to discover things for myself.  When I get more comfortable I will get to baking bread on my own, gluten free of course.  I hope I can find something that acts like gluten so the loaves are not as dense as gluten free bread and still rise to a good size loaf.  Somehow we deserve both in our bread.

Among all the other things happening this weekend,  Happy Fathers' Day to all the other fathers out there, some time in a kitchen with a hot stove churning out the tantalizing aroma of baking bread just might happen.

That's the plan anyway.