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Okay, maybe that’s an obvious statement. But sometimes it’s hard to remember a world where food ingredients weren’t mysterious, where “seasoning” was something the average at-home cook was responsible for. Making your own breakfast sausage does not require a factory, it just requires a pound of ground pork and a spice drawer.

The spices we’re going to use are sage, savory, nutmeg, and ginger. There should also be salt and pepper in this picture, but I didn’t have space to fit them in. In fact, after deciding I’d do them in a separate shot, I then completely forgot to photograph them at all. Come back to me in August when school’s back in session, and I’ll be less of a mental wreck, I assure you.

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So that’s 1/2 teaspoon of sage, 1/4 teaspoon of savory, 1/8 teaspoon of nutmeg, and 1/8 teaspoon of ginger. Nevermind that my cute little measuring spoon calls it a “dash,” I’ve measured and confirmed that the spoons in that set are 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, and 1/64 teaspoon respectively. (They’re useful for measuring tiny doses of powdered medications as well, incidentally.)

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We’re also going to add 1 1/2 Tablespoons of grapeseed oil to help everything bind together. As always, you could substitute canola, olive, whatever kind of oil you have on hand.

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Then add 3/4 teaspoon of 100% real maple syrup. Please, please don’t use one of those bottles that are nothing but high fructose corn syrup and “maple flavoring.” They are not only terrible for you, but many have gluten as well. Real maple syrup has a completely different taste, and that’s what we’re trying to add to our sausage here, not sugar.

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Toss in 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper, then squish and knead everything around until the seasonings are all evenly distributed.

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I form them into little link shapes, because I already make miniature hamburger patties for the kids out of ground beef, and it might blow their minds to have two foods that look the same but taste different. So sausage gets one shape, beef gets another.

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As each side browns, roll them forward a bit to get the next side. (Or just flip your patties, if your kids aren’t as neurotic as mine.)

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In the proper order of things, these should be served with a full breakfast, which would allow you to sneak maple syrup onto the sausage under the auspices of syruping your waffle. But if you’re not actually having a waffle, don’t be ashamed to just put extra maple syrup right on the sausages themselves. It’s so dang good.

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Happy Eating!

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Maple Sage Breakfast Sausage

1 lb. ground pork
1/2 tsp sage
1/4 tsp savory
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp ginger
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 1/2 Tbs grapeseed oil
3/4 tsp 100% maple syrup

You can make your own! Seriously. It’s way easy, and costs about 1/3 as much.

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This isn’t a recipe so much as it is a process, which is to say, having the right kitchen equipment is key, including a yogurt maker. But before we get to that point, you’ll need a double-boiler. (If you’ve never heard of one, that’s a special kind of pot that is actually two pots, one nestled inside the other. You put water in the bottom pot, and this allows you to warm things in the top pot extremely evenly and carefully without scorching. It’s generally used for melting chocolate and other delicate things like that.)

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Anyway, pour in two cans of coconut milk, turn on the heat, and watch the temperature with a thermometer until it gets to exactly 180 degrees. Don’t forget to stir occasionally so you’re getting an accurate reading.

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Meanwhile, get out your yogurt starter. This is the polite name given to the living bacterial critters that make yogurt what it is, also known as probiotics. But be careful! Anything that is officially sold as “yogurt starter” almost certainly has dairy in it. If your kid already takes a good probiotic supplement (and they probably should be,) you can just open up one of those capsules and use it. Or if they don’t, and you’re not sure where to start, Culturelle is a good brand that is gluten- and dairy-free, and comes in individual packets you can use for each batch of yogurt.

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Just as the temperature is right at 180, pull the top pot off of the double-boiler. You just want to graze that upper limit; any higher and it might start boiling, which we don’t want. The only reason we’re heating it up at all is not to cook it, but to sterilize it. Making yogurt involves creating an ideal environment for bacteria to grow, so we have to make sure that there are absolutely no bad bacteria hanging out anywhere near our coconut milk before we start.

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Now it’s sterile, which is great, but it’s still so hot it would kill our good bacteria too if we put them in there, which is not so great. So we have to let it cool down again, to 110 degrees, which happens to be the perfect temperature for making little buggies happy. (The same goes for when we’re baking bread with live yeast, you may recall.) You could just set the pot aside and be very patient, or you could be like me and dip the pot in a large bowl of water to cool it down faster.

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Once you’re back down to 110 degrees, scoop a small amount out of the pot and mix it with your probiotics. Make sure all the powder dissolves thoroughly.

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Then mix the dissolved concoction back into the pot.

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Pour the whole thing into your yogurt maker’s inner container…

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Then close up the outer container around it and let it hang out on your counter for 24 hours. Some instructions might tell you that you only need a few hours, but in my experience that just doesn’t give the bacteria enough time to flourish unless you’re using multiple doses of probiotics. Ideally, when you open that container up, it should be noticeably thicker than it started, and that’s how you’ll know the probiotics have really multiplied. If it’s still completely runny, you may need to use a double-dose of your probiotic, or you may have accidentally killed it at some point, perhaps by adding the bacteria in while the milk was still too hot, or by using a questionable brand of probiotics that was mostly dead to begin with.

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But even the heartiest of probiotic colonies probably aren’t going to result in the kind of yogurt thickness you’re used to buying at the store. To achieve this, you have to strain the yogurt, also known as dripping it. Your yogurt maker should come with a bag of cheesecloth (so named because it’s what you use to make cheese!) Set the bag inside a large bowl, pour the yogurt in, and then lift the bag and hang it by the strings, allowing the clear liquid to drip out.

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I usually tie mine to the microwave door handle. If we were making yogurt out of milk, that liquid would be what’s known as whey, but as it is, it’s just coconut water.

How long you let it drip depends on how thick you want it; at some point enough liquid will come out that you’ll move beyond yogurt into the consistency of cream cheese, which may even be something you want to try to make sometime. I’ve never been able to get it anywhere near a truly firm, grate-able cheese consistency, but I suppose it might be possible if you let it sit long enough. Some people also prefer to drip it in the refrigerator rather than out at room temperature, but my refrigerator doesn’t have nearly enough space for that.

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Ultimately, you’ll have to turn the bag inside out and do a fair bit of scraping to get the yogurt into a storage container. Make sure you make a big mess while you’re doing that. It’s what I would do.

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And I figure, if I’m going to all this work just to have yogurt in the house again, I deserve to be downright decadent in enjoying it. That right there is a banana, topped with coconut yogurt, drizzled with honey. I could eat that for breakfast every single day, y’all.

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Happy Eating!

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Homemade Coconut Yogurt

2 cans coconut milk
1 packet/dose of GFCF probiotics, or more as necessary
banana (or other fruit as desired)
honey (not optional!)

Anyway, that programmer who wanted to be a personal trainer was a bit of a health nut, as you can imagine. He always brought his lunch from home and drank these nasty-looking concoctions in a big insulated thermos. One day I joked about how I could easily be as muscular as he was, if only I drank a protein shake every day like he did. He informed me that it wasn’t a protein shake, it was just a plain old smoothie. (He preferred his protein in bar form, apparently, but that’s beside the point.) I accused him of being a liar (very politely, of course,) since the number one rule of smoothies in my world is they have to taste good, and I could only assume that his tasted like it looked–which is to say, gross.

“Au contraire!” he cried. Actually, I think he just said, “No, seriously, taste it.” And he was right! It tasted just like a regular smoothie. Fruity and frothy and delicious. “It’s only ugly because I put greens in it, but you can’t taste them at all.”

Greens, huh? Huh. Shortly after that, he left to embark on his personal training career, and I went to go have a baby. Haven’t heard from him since. But his weird greens-in-smoothies notion stuck with me, and I ended up trying to make my own during those days when I desperately needed healthy stuff I could eat with one hand while nursing a baby.

I failed miserably. What came out of my blender was nothing but a smoothie with coarsely chopped salad in it, no matter how hard I tried. I abandoned the idea and moved on with my life.

But then! A reader recently alerted me to another awesome GFCF cooking blog called Whole Life Nutrition. One of her signature items is the “green smoothie,” which as you may have guessed is just a smoothie with greens in it like my old coworker used to make. And while reading her writeup about them, I realized the key mistake I’d made with my misguided attempts years ago.

See, a regular blender just can’t cut it, so to speak. What you need is an immersion blender. There is actually a commercial-grade blender out there that can get the job done, but it’s a little pricey. I’ll shell out $180 for a professional waffle-maker, but a $400 blender crosses the line for me. Plus, an immersion blender is great for soups too.

This one came with a handy little blending cup, but any tallish container will work. I cram mine full of as many greens as I can fit, and then add about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of juice.

The less juice you can manage to use, the smoother it will blend. See how there’s no choppy leaves left, only green puree? Immersion blender, baby.

Use whatever fruit you want for your main smoothie ingredients. I’m a fan of the classics, like strawberry-banana. If you’re going to freeze your own bananas, by the way, make sure you peel them first. Frozen peel does not come off easily, and peeled bananas won’t go brown in the freezer.

A cup of frozen strawberries, and we’re ready to…

Pour in our green concoction! Doesn’t that look appetizing? No? Oh, but it will taste wonderful, I promise you. My computer-programmer-turned-personal-trainer friend would never lie to you.

Sure, it’s not so pretty after it’s all blended together. Red strawberries + green lettuce = yucky brown. But there are a few things you can do to get your kids over the visual hump. First, you can put it in a plastic cup with a lid and a straw, or even one of those opaque water bottles. Or, you can use a dark fruit like blueberry or blackberry, and that will mostly overwhelm the green.

Or finally, you can embrace the green. Mine had some red leaf lettuce mixed in, so my green was already a little muted. But a blend of pure romaine, or arugula for example, will give you a really vibrant green color. Pair that with only very pale smoothie ingredients, like bananas, apples, pears, green grapes, pineapple, or coconut milk yogurt, and your final product will be so green that it enters the realm of fun. Call it a Ghost Slime smoothie for Halloween, or a Leprechaun Smoothie for St. Patrick’s Day. Once they taste it, it’s in the bag, because I’m telling you, you absolutely cannot taste the veggies one bit.

Happy Eating!

Sneaky Smoothies

1-2 cups packed greens
3/4 cup fruit juice or coconut milk yogurt
1-2 cups frozen fruit

Imagine how shocked I was to discover that I actually like these gluten-free muffins! I mean, I really like them–I sneak them between meals when the kids aren’t looking, which is the highest compliment I can pay a food.

This may have something to do with it: the recipe starts with 1 cup of sugar. (Actually I know for a fact the sugar plays a big role in my appreciation, because the first time I attempted this recipe I was dumb and forgot the sugar, and they came out inedible. Fortunately I realized my mistake before I threw out the recipe altogether.)

Then mix in 1 cup of applesauce. Applesauce is one of those things that any sane person would want to assume is gluten-free, but as you’ve probably figured out by now, food manufacturers are anything but sane. Check your labels and make sure it’s got nothing but apples in it.

Next, mix up this neato slurry of 4 Tablespoons of potato starch in 2 Tablespoons of water. The result will be this kind of gooey consistency that is a liquid if you are gentle but resists if you try to move it too fast. You may have even played with something like this in school when you were a kid like I did. Anyway, this is actually a basic egg substitute, so if you’d rather toss in two beaten eggs instead, you could do that too. But the potato starch mixture is good for those with egg allergies or concerned about cholesterol.

Then add 1/3 cup canola oil…

And 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon and ground cloves.

Also, 1/2 teaspoon each of gluten-free baking powder, and baking soda.

Now, mix in 1 1/4 cups of gluten-free flour. Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Blend is usually my go-to choice, but in this case that’s actually amaranth flour up there. I’ve made it with several different types, and they all come out good, so use whatever you want.

Drop the batter by spoonfuls into muffin cups. I like making mini-muffins, because they make better serving sizes. You can have 2 or 3 at breakfast, or toss just one in a lunchbox… or snack on however many you want between meals, for example. They aren’t going to rise much, so fill them about 3/4 full. I usually end up with about a tray and a half’s worth of these mini-muffin size.

I also smooth out the tops with a wet finger. It just makes them look better, and appearance is important when you’re trying to get a kid to try something new. It might look tedious, but it goes really quickly if you just put a cup of water right next to the tray. Dip, dab-dab-dab, dip, dab-dab-dab… takes 30 seconds. Of course ugly muffins still taste good, too.

Bake at 400 degrees for 22 minutes. If you’re making larger muffins, you’ll need to extend the baking time a bit. They’ll be done when a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean, just like everything else. Let them cool as long as possible before digging in, because they’re so moist the middles stay hot for a surprisingly long time. They’ll store for several days in a tupperware, or you can go so far as to freeze them for future use.

Also, unless you’re trying to take a picture of them, don’t bother with the kind of restraint I’m showing here. Pop them in your mouth all in one bite. It’s the best way, I promise you.

Happy Eating!

Applesauce Muffins

1 cup sugar
1 cup unsweetened applesauce
4 TBS potato starch in 2 TBS water
       (OR 2 eggs)
1/3 cup canola oil
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp GF baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/4 cups GF flour

I don’t know if I buy it, but I’m desperate for approval, so I’ll try to conform in my own lazy way. Let’s cook up some breakfast tacos!

I don’t know about you, but I like potatoes in my breakfast tacos. Ore-Ida also makes a more traditional hash brown product, which would strictly speaking be more, well, traditional here. But you know what you would have if you took a bunch of hashbrown pieces and squashed them back together? A french fry! And by the transitive property, it is therefore completely legitimate to cut these fries up and call the result a suitable potato ingredient for breakfast tacos.

Also, it was what I had in my freezer.

We like the Zesties fries, but you could go with a plain Ore-Ida frozen potato product of pretty much any kind. [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change their formulas without warning. Always check your labels!]

Anyway, the whole point of getting the potatoes out first is they have to cook in the oven according to package directions. And toss the bacon in there while you’re at it.

Wait, what? Yes, I said cook the bacon in the oven. A friend of mine taught me this trick, and I’m telling you, it has changed bacon consumption in this house forever. Just spread some parchment paper on a large pan, and lay out your bacon strips. A general cooking guideline for them is anywhere from 15 to 35 minutes at 350, depending on how crispy you like your bacon. But if the oven has to be hotter for the potatoes, don’t sweat it, just keep an eye on the bacon and pull it out whenever it’s done. It will come out perfectly, with far less mess, and then you too will be a bacon-in-the-oven convert. (And for the record, you don’t have to use turkey bacon, regular bacon is fine too, though you will need to stick with a brand that uses no gluteny preservatives, like Applegate Farms.)

Now, grab some Food For Life brown rice tortillas out of the freezer, and pop them in the microwave for about 10 seconds. Then peel off the actual number of tortillas you need from the now not-quite-frozen stack, and toss the rest back in the freezer for another day.

Okay, it’s finally time to cook the eggs. See why I don’t put out this much effort often? Although I will admit that in dinner terms, it’s not as much work as most other meals, so half the time we’re not actually eating these for breakfast at all. But regardless of what the clock says, you’ll need to grease your pan. I use tub stuff for pans because you can use more or less than an exact tablespoon without messing up those handy measurement markers they put on my margarine sticks. Please note that not all Smart Balance products are casein-free–as far as I know, this one “light” flavor that says “Now with Flax Oil” is the only one.

Scramble your eggs in a bowl, and dump them in the heated pan. Resist the urge to shove them around the pan too much while they’re cooking, just let them sit until the bottom starts to set, then scrape it up so more liquid can flow underneath it. Repeat this a few times, and it will naturally create the right texture. Seriously, don’t stir them all over the place the whole time, it messes them up. Scrambled eggs is one of the few things I was really good at cooking before embarking on this adventure (and I lucked into the technique just by ignoring the pan for the most part–see, sometimes being a lazy cook works out for the bettter!)

Finish heating the tortillas, and fill with scrambled eggs, bits of french fries, and a slice of bacon. Feel free to add a GF salsa, if that’s your thing. Down here, it kind of goes without saying: everything gets salsa on it.

Happy Eating!

Breakfast Tacos

Food For Life brown rice tortillas
Ore-Ida frozen potatoes
Applegate Farms bacon
Eggs
GF salsa (optional)

Oh, decadence. How long I spent without thee.

Don’t get me wrong, you can make some GFCF cakes and cookies that are passable, even darn passable. But that gooey moistness they always promise me never seemed to materialize, until I finally figured out that I should just quit trying to make these ridiculous gluten-free flours and milk-free milks do things they’re not capable of doing. There are plenty of foods on this planet that fall into the category of gooey, and it turns out that more than a few of them are good for baking.

Like pumpkin, for example!

We’ll still need flour, of course, we’re just taking the goo burden off its shoulders. I make these with amaranth flour, but that’s only because we’re attempting to rotate our flours around here for food sensitivity’s sake. (Before I started adapting it left and right, the original recipe came from The Kid-Friendly ADHD & Autism Cookbook.) Bob’s All-Purpose Flour will work just fine too, or pretty much any other gluten-free flour you have on hand, because the taste won’t be coming through in the end. Truth be told, the amaranth flour goes in this recipe specifically because it’s apparently “yucky” in everything else I bake with it, but they never notice it here.

Right, so! Two cups of GF flour, and 1/2 teaspoon of xanthan gum.

Then 3/4 cup of sugar. Like most of the things I make, that’s just the starting amount. Once the kids acknowledged that they liked them, I started scaling back the sugar with each batch.

2 teaspoons of gluten-free baking powder…

1 teaspoon of cinnamon…

1/2 teaspoon of baking soda…

And 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

Then 8 Tablespoons of potato starch, and it’s finally time to blend all the dry ingredients thoroughly.

Now for the wet ingredients! Add 1/2 cup of canola oil to one 15-ounce can of pumpkin puree. Make sure you use one that’s just plain pumpkin and not some pre-flavored “pumpkin pie mix,” because you can never be sure what weird gluten-y stuff gets put into that sort of thing.

Then add 1/4 cup of almond milk.

Mix it all together thoroughly, then dump it in the bowl of flour and mix it all together thoroughly some more. If you’re not going to use an electric mixer, be prepared to do a fair amount of work getting it all evenly blended. On the upside, you will end up with massively ripped biceps like me.

And just in case the sugar content wasn’t enough to convince the kids, you can throw in 1/2 cup of GFCF chocolate chips to tempt them. (Enjoy Life and Tropical Source are two good brands.) You could also use GFCF mini-marshmallows, or even your favorite gluten-free crispy-rice cereal for added crunch.

Also, add in 1 Tablespoon of water. Why didn’t I add this earlier with the other wet ingredients? I forgot. Don’t tell anyone.

Spray a 9×13 baking dish liberally with canola oil, and scrape in the batter.

Then use a very wet hand to moosh the batter into place. You will probably need to shove your hand back under the faucet periodically to keep the batter from sticking to your fingers.

I can be pretty neurotic about getting the surface totally smooth. I certainly can’t imagine where my son got his OCD genes from…

Bake in a 350-degree oven for 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Set the pan on a wire rack and let it cool completely before slicing. I like to cut them into long bars, because it helps me pretend they’re more of a snack than a straight-up dessert. Ooh, you know what else these are great for? Halloween treats! Don’t kid yourself, it will be October before you know it.

Happy Eating!

Pumpkin Bars

2 cups amaranth (or other gluten-free) flour
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp GF baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
8 TBS potato starch

1 15-oz. can pumpkin puree
1/2 cup canola oil
1/4 cup almond milk
1 TBS water
1/2 cup GFCF chocolate chips

The first thing she had me do was cut back on the sugar in the old recipe. So now we start with 3 eggs, and only 3 Tablespoons of sugar. TheGFCFBoy never missed it.

Then came a major change: she wanted me to switch flours to one that is higher in protein. “But I don’t use flour,” I protested, “I use a baking mix.”

“Pah!” she said. “That’s just flour with xanthan gum, salt, and baking soda mixed in. You can do that, no sweat.” And she was right! So add 1 1/2 teaspoons of xanthan gum…

1 1/2 teaspoons of salt…

And 2 Tablespoons of baking powder. Make sure your baking powder is gluten-free–mine’s a generic brand, but Clabber Girl is one national brand that’s also GF. [As always, the brands I use were GFCF at the time of posting, but manufacturers can change formulas without notice. Always check your labels!]

Give it all a good stir, and add 3/4 cup of grapeseed oil. (Or stick with canola oil like in the original recipe. I don’t even remember at this point why grapeseed oil was supposed to be better. Sometimes I think our nutritionist is deliberately making me hunt down weird things for her own personal entertainment.)

Now apparently, even though I switched flours to one that’s higher in protein, this still wasn’t enough to appease the protein gods. (In all seriousness, the majority of kids don’t get enough protein, especially early in the day. Turns out a big breakfast of ham and eggs is actually really good for a growing kid. Too bad my kid won’t eat either of them.) So we supplement the mixture with 1/3 cup protein powder. Yes, it’s hemp. No, it doesn’t make you high. Moving on… This does make the final product ever so slightly green-tinted, unfortunately. I started small and added a little more each time I made a batch so he didn’t notice. You could instead use rice protein powder or golden pea protein powder if the color is going to be an insurmountable issue, but the hemp powder has the most bang for the buck.

The other thing we supplement our waffles with is calcium. Being dairy-free means it’s hard to get enough calcium, and adding this completely tasteless powder into their waffles meant the kids had one less vitamin to take each day. Just 2 Tablespoons ends up being 500 mg of calcium per waffle, which is a lot.

Incidentally, please remember that nothing on this website is intended to be taken as medical advice. Always consult a professional nutritionist or physician (one who’s DAN certified, if you want my personal opinion on the matter.)

Whew! Okay, we’re finally ready for the flour. And hey, turns out it’s the same stuff we use any other time we need a flour substitute, so that’s really handy. Who knew Bob’s All-Purpose was so high in protein? (Well, the nutritionist did, I suppose.) Add 4 1/2 cups to the mixing bowl, and stir it about gently with a fork until it’s a gooey, clumpy mess.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped having trouble getting the lumps out of my batter. I think part of it is just the consistency of the new ingredients, but part of it is I started adding the water gradually instead of all at once. So add just two cups of water to the bowl…

And mix as well as you can with a hand mixer. Then add another cup…

Mix again, and add one more cup of water, for a total of 4 cups.

Now, here’s another incredibly important lesson I’ve learned recently: it’s all about the waffle iron. The quality of your waffle iron will 100% determine the quality of your waffles, end of story. You can tweak your recipe forever looking for a better texture, but the day you get a professional-grade waffle iron you will realize just how meaningless it all was. Say it with me now. It’s all about the waffle iron.

Now, let me warn you, this King of All Wafflemakers is not cheap. Not at all. But you get what you pay for, as I learned the hard way. In just six months, I broke no less than 3 different mid-priced waffle irons–that is, I wasted over $100 on junk–before I decided it was time to get serious about the value of my product. I’ve actually been using this one for a few months now (which is a new record for this house,) because I wanted to make sure it would last before I officially recommended it. But even if there had been a problem, this one comes with a complete no-questions-asked one-year warranty, so already it’s cheaper than a new $35 waffle iron every 2 months. And that’s before you even get to all the reasons why this one’s better than all the others!

Reason number one: when they say nonstick, they actually mean nonstick. You do not have to spray this waffle iron with oil of any kind, ever. No, I am not kidding.

Reason number two: see that little digital timer? That’s the actual amount of time it will take to cook these waffles. The cheap waffle irons all took about 10-12 minutes to cook each set–just think about that time difference for a moment. I can make an entire batch of waffles (including cleanup!) in under 30 minutes now, as opposed to an hour and a half. I don’t know how often you have to restock on waffles, but in my house it’s about every 10 days, so this is a huge quality-of-life improvement for me.

You can manually adjust the cooking time, by the way, and there are settings for both texture and color. I like it on “crisp exterior, soft interior” and halfway between 3 and 4, myself.

There is one drawback to this model, however. The timer beeps very loudly, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn the sound off. You can just imagine that if this were in a busy cafe somewhere, it would need to be heard over the din of cooking and customers and everything else, but in my kitchen it’s pretty startling.

The waffles come out as one giant waffle, but they tear apart really easily. You may notice this wafflemaker makes very tall waffles; that is, the squares are very deep. So these new waffles don’t lend themselves as well to making sandwiches as some of my old waffle iron shapes did. Then again, those are broken, and this one’s not. Firmly squashing the waffles into a flatter shape with my palm seems to work just fine.

I’ve also figured out a better way to store them in the freezer, separating the stacks with strips of parchment paper rather than wrapping the whole bundle in plastic wrap. Cheaper and less waste this way.

Oh, and here’s how you clean a waffle iron, which I completely neglected to mention at all last time. After you’ve pulled your last waffle off, dump a Tablespoon of water on the grill and immediately close the lid. Any remaining residue in the crevices will be steamed right out. But there won’t be much, because like I said, there’s no need to oil it, so there’s no oil leftover.

And here’s my soldier line of waffles, ready to go into the freezer. I only get 25 out of a batch nowadays, but on the other hand, with the hemp powder they are definitely more filling, so the kids almost never eat more than one anymore.

Happy Eating!

The GFCFLady’s Waffles

3 eggs
3 TBS sugar
1 1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 TBS baking powder
1/3 cup hemp protein powder (optional)
2 TBS Kirkman’s unflavored calcium powder (optional)
4 1/2 cups Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose Flour blend
4 cups water

This is the very first GFCF thing I ever learned how to make. It was, in fact, the success of this waffle (wherein success is determined only by the whims of a picky toddler) that gave me the strength to believe I could really do the diet at all. This was, believe it or not, substitute waffle recipe number five. The first four were received… poorly. Those of you with autistic children will understand what I’m talking about.

The point is, these waffles are sentimental to me, in an odd way. So forgive me if the recipe seems unimpressive: it is, in fact, just the suggested pancake recipe from the back of the Bob’s Red Mill Biscuit and Baking Mix bag. (Note that it is NOT the official pancake mix bag that Bob’s Red Mill also sells. It’s the pancake recipe from the biscuit mix.)

Check out my one-handed egg-cracking skills, eh? I once knew a guy who worked in the kitchen when he was in the army, and he could crack four eggs simultaneously, two in each hand. They’d race to see if they could crack a hundred eggs in 30 seconds. True story.

Because I do everything in bulk, I’m tripling the recipe from the bag. So that’s 3 eggs in the bowl, plus 6 Tablespoons of sugar…

…3/4 cup of canola oil…

…and 4 1/2 cups of the baking mix, all stirred together.

Now, here comes the hard part. You’ve got to keep breaking up that mixture until it’s got a tiny, mealy texture. Use a knife in a cross-cutting motion, as if you were slicing meat. Your great-grandmother would recognize what you’re doing: back in the day many baking recipes called for “cutting in the butter.” Except my great-grandmother would probably be appalled at the lack of real butter in all of these recipes. At the very least she’d probably insist that I ought to churn my own partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil to build up character.

Your arms will get tired, but every minute you work now is at least two minutes you save later. Gluten-free flours tend to clump more than regular flour, and once you start mixing in the water it’s almost impossible to get those lumps out.

When you get down to the smallest bits you can squash them against the back of the fork, like this. Man, look at that texture. That’s what I’m talking about!

Now add 6 cups of water, and stir for half an hour.

Just kidding, you can get out your trusty hand mixer for this part. But don’t tell my great-grandmother.

Now here’s one of the major reasons I think this waffle recipe was the one that finally won the GFCFBoy over: I added a bunch of yellow food coloring so they would have that same unnatural hue as Eggo waffles. Since then I’ve been slowly scaling back the amount with each batch, so they’re not nearly as Technicolor as they used to be, and soon they’ll be dye-free.

If you haven’t already figured it out, gluten-free batters are much thicker than traditional flour batters. Don’t be alarmed if you’re used to seeing a different consistency in your mixing bowls. This was one way in which my complete ignorance of cooking was a benefit to me when I first started out: I had no idea this wasn’t what normal pancake batter looked like, because I’d never made pancakes before. What can I say, I had other priorities.

Spray your waffle iron with canola cooking spray, and glop some on. How much will depend on the size of your waffle iron, but I do find that what looks like “the right amount” is usually too little. And if you don’t fill the crevices completely with batter, the waffles won’t cook right because of the pocket of air between the batter and the heating element.

Use the back of a spoon to push the batter outward into the corners. This will help it spread out evenly when you close the waffle iron, and also give you a better idea of whether you have the right amount of batter in there or not.

Sometimes I still guess wrong though.

Gluten-free batters in general take longer to cook, and I find that I have to let them stay in there for a good 10-12 minutes. But that may also be because I have cheap waffle irons that don’t get very hot. This is why I use two of them at once, otherwise I’d be making waffles all night long.

When they’re done the surface of the waffle will be completely dry. Pry them out with a fork, re-spray the waffle iron with cooking spray, and you’re ready for round two.

Sadly, you can’t stack these while they cool like you can with the chicken nuggets. They steam themselves and get all soggy. So they’re kind of a space hog while they’re cooling. 28 waffles out of this batch, not bad. In my house, that’ll last… about a week and a half. See why I make a triple batch?

To store them, I roll them up in layers with plastic wrap so they don’t freeze together. Just lay down a pair, flip them over, stack on another two, roll again…

Then put each bundle of eight an airtight bag. If you have lots of freezer space, you can actually ”flash freeze” them, which means you let them freeze for a half-hour or so while they’re all laid out separately, and then you can just toss them together without the plastic wrap and they won’t stick. But I can’t do that, because I have no freezer space.

Seriously, I have none.

Happy Eating!

Bob’s Red Mill Baking Mix waffles (triple batch)

3 eggs
6 TBS sugar
3/4 cup oil
4 1/2 cups baking mix