Prompt: Introductions

[runpunkrun]

Hello, gluten-free friends and family! It is I, Punk, speaking to you with my words. If you haven't already, please read the community guidelines for your safety and mine.

If I can keep my act together, I'll be posting a weekly discussion topic to prompt conversation about gluten-free cooking. This week I thought we could introduce ourselves and do some light mingling.

Let's do name, rank, and preferred pronouns. And maybe answer one or more of the following questions:

• What's the last gluten-free thing you made with your own hands?
• If your answer is "coffee," that's valid.
• What kind of foods do you like to prepare?
• How much baking experience do you have?
• What type of recipes are you interested in?
• Are you here to post, comment, or just be a friendly lurker?
• If you are going to lurk friendily, please say hi just this once. We'll say hi back.

Also, as the comm opened on Pi day (3.14), why not tell us your favorite pie?

Come join me in the comments!

Comments

[fred_mouse]

Hi, I'm Fred-Mouse, and I answer to Fred, Mouse, Fred-Mouse, and my wallet name (although I prefer to keep that away from Fannish spaces). Preferred pronouns are they/them.

Hmm. I'm going to ignore tisanes and reheating pre-cooked items in answering the question of the most recent gf thing I made, and list the dessert I made on the weekend, which was approximately an apple crisp. Chopped apples (Gala), covered with a mix that started out one cup of mystery (definitely gf) flour, half a cup of cocoa (probably Dutched?), and a generous amount of cinnamon. This was stirred together with rice-bran oil, and when it made a loose paste, the same volume of puffed grain (millet? quinoa? whatever was in the cupboard). And then baked. Tasty. The apples do the sweet.

I've been cooking gf since the mid-90s; eating gf for the last decade (or more). I despair of most gf mixed flours, because they aren't as good as the mixes I used to make, but I've lost a lot of my oomph when baking, and do a lot of throwing things in a pan and hoping. While I intend o post about the successes, it requires me to remember, and have time and oomph to do so.

[runpunkrun]

Good to have you here, Fred!

I envy your ability/courage to just throw things together like that. I'm only just now getting comfortable with experimenting with recipes and coming up with my own substitutions. Even my apple crisp had a recipe behind it at some point. :D

[fred_mouse]

Definitely courage when it comes to throwing things together, and the fact that I'll eat things even if they taste weird, as long as they don't have any taste of mould or off about them. I found that making American muffins was the way to go to get confident -- I used the leftover porridge* as the base, and whatever I knew my kids would eat!

* In the days that I could eat oats, and my kids (now mostly adults) would eat oats.

[runpunkrun]

Muffins are, in general, very forgiving. I just made some chocolate almond flour muffins that came out a bit too dry (because I was futzing with the recipe), but I'm eating them anyway because they still taste okay. I'll fix 'em next time.

[fred_mouse]

Pretty much this. And really dry ones can be heated in the microwave and served with ice-cream or preferred equivalent, and become dessert quite well.

[runpunkrun]

A quick zap in the microwave definitely helps, and I just read last night that some cakes/muffins with almond flour get better the day after they're made because the almond kind of moistens the crumb.

[fred_mouse]

Oh, that's an interesting idea I hadn't heard about the almond meal! I do have a couple of syrup cake recipes that are basically 'too dry almond meal cake, just add syrup'.