I’m a little incredulous that I’m posting this right now. When I started making crème fraiche, I told myself that there was no need to make a fuss over the thing. It’s hardly a recipe—not to mention that everyone and their mother has already posted the ridiculously simple method.
And then yesterday, while making a batch to accompany another recipe I’ll be sharing this week, I thought why the hell not?
People, this is sincerely the easiest thing I have ever made. I’ve tried very hard to come up with something that took even a smidge less effort and I couldn’t. And because it’s so shockingly simple, it’s almost unfair how impressed people are when you pull out a jar of thick, tangy crème fraiche and tell them that you made it yourself.
And just in case you’re wondering what one does with crème fraiche, I’ll give you a few applications: dolloped on fruit, smeared on cakes, dropped into soups or chili, slathered on pizza, wrapped around pasta, or licked straight from a spoon. Basically, any place you could use whipped cream or sour cream—and on everything else as well. Truly, I’m having difficulty coming up with something that wouldn’t be made better with the addition of crème fraiche.
You can see how it’s almost a problem that it’s so easy to make.
My dad started dating a woman named Laurie about two years ago. She’s sharp and successful and a joy to be around—and she keeps him in check, since I’m too far away to do that anymore. They’re great together. Over the past couple years she’s introduced him to many of the things that she loves, which have become things that he now loves as well: weekends at the cabin, Caribbean cruises, cats (Monumental this, since he despised the creatures back when I was a kitty-crazy little girl and all I wanted in the world was to have half a million of the things to snuggle and love forever and always. Now, as an adult, I am severely allergic to them and need to load up on Zyrtec before visiting any house that a cat has even looked at in the past ten years. There’s some sort of irony or something in that, right? But I digress….), and avocados.
During a phone call sometime last year he told me all about avocados. About how much Laurie loves them and how much he loves them and about how he bought one to slice up for a salad or something. He then proceeded to tell me about how he attempted to get into the thing. If memory serves, it involved a vegetable peeler(!) and consequently hacking the flesh away from the pit. I bit my tongue and let him describe it then, cringing, much as I’m cringing now reimagining it. Once he finished, I very gently told him that there is a far, far easier way to prep an avocado.
Which got me thinking: not everybody has spent an obscene amount of hours watching the Food Network like I have. I know so many basic cooking-related tips and tricks as a result of both that and my time in the kitchen—why not put some of it up here? I have no illusions about being an authority or the only/best resource for this type of information, but if someone that doesn’t watch cooking television shows up here and consequently never touches a vegetable peeler to an avocado? I’d say such a post will have been well worth publishing.
So, this hereby marks the beginning of a new series of how-to posts on GF in the City. I have a couple more in mind and will continue to keep my eyes open for things worth explaining, but if you have any ideas for something you’d like to see here, in step-by-step photos, please let me know.
Welcome to month three of the Gluten-Free Ratio Rally! If you’ve stumbled upon this post and are interested in reading more about what the Rally is all about, check out the post from our inaugural run when we all shared ratios and recipes for pancakes. This month we’re sharing our recipes and ratios for scones. Mine is below, read on to see how it came to be.
3 parts flour : 1 part fat : 1 part liquid : 1 part eggs
When I graduated from college, it was a strange sort of non-event. There was no ceremony, no Pomp and Circumstance. I took my finals, turned in papers, and was done.
A little into my second year at NYU, after juggling classes with a full schedule of auditioning and film shoots, I had decided that something had to give. I was either going to drop out and focus on my work, take a leave of absence, or kick things into high gear and get this whole school thing over with. After some parental urging, I went with option three and wound up officially graduating two summers later, just a few weeks shy of my third anniversary in this city.
So while the people I had met during orientation week were preparing for their last year of school, I was facing that wide expanse ahead called Life. It was perhaps a bit odd to have completed that one phase and entered into this other so seamlessly (there were always ceremonies along the way, weren’t there?), but it worked for me.
While I was in the throes of wedding planning late last summer, my mom was organizing some big life changes of her own. Namely, moving out of the townhouse that she’d owned for over a decade. With my brother and me grown and gone, the three-bedroom home had become more than one person—and an admittedly oversized cat—really needed. Moving out was one of those decisions that, on paper, made a whole lot of financial and logistical sense. In real life, it also meant sorting through and packing up, or saying good-bye to, all those years’ worth of stuff.
Nearly every day, and often a couple times a day, my mom would text or call me to ask about something that she had come across. Sometimes it was something from my childhood or high school years—cheerleading sweatshirts and hand-knotted blankets made at squad sleepovers, colored modeling clay that predated my teens, boxes full of essays and stories and poetry. Other times, she’d send me photos of things that had been hers, that had decorated the house or been tucked in the back of a cabinet somewhere, rarely or never used. Many of those things wouldn’t have been worth the cost to ship them, most wouldn’t have fit in our apartment had they been sent.
One day she sent me a photo of a squat, two-tone glazed clay pot.
I’m a sucker for frosting. Always have been, always will be. I blame my dad’s genetics for this. I can remember way, way back in the day, my mom eating her cake and forking the frosting over to my dad—lifting fat purple rosettes and scraping up smears of inky blue piping, handing over whole panels from the top and end of her slice. I’m pretty sure there were similar exchanges between my brother and me as well. My dad and I share a lot, but if we sit down to cake together, you can bet our greedy, frosting-loving forks will remain on their respective plates—unless they’re fighting over what’s left on someone else’s.
I recently started following a great blog called The Kitchn. They post more frequently than Ree, but it’s not a personal/narrative-type blog, so it’s really easy to sift through the feed and pick out the things that are of interest to you. The posts range from cooking tips and kitchen remodels to recipes and tools (I actually never thought I’d buy a citrus reamer, but I saw this post and finally have one pretty enough to be worth owning). Most of the blogs that I follow are wordy and wonderful, but they require a time commitment to keep up with. The Kitchn, on the other hand, offers a nice, casual read when my mind needs a little break during the day.
A couple weeks ago, The Kitchn posted this recipe for Buttery Lemon Angel Biscuits, an adaptation of a recipe they featured over a year ago for regular Angel Biscuits. While lemon and butter are certainly a heavenly combo, the flavorings weren’t the thing that caught my eye—it was the fact that the biscuits employ three (yes, three!) different leaveners to achieve their lift.
I’ve had some success with gluten-free biscuits in the past, but I also know it’s a pretty common thing to have a great deal of difficulty getting them to emerge from the oven with a proper rise. Heck, even people baking with gluten can have a tough time producing light, lifted biscuits. But with three separate leaveners on your side? It seemed impossible to fail.
And after making them? I firmly believe that you’d really have to try to mess these up.
There are a lot of really great gluten-free snack foods on the market these days: potato chips, crackers, tortilla chips, cheesy puff type things, and even pretzels. The one thing I’ve yet to come across, however, is a gluten-free cheese cracker. It seems like such an obvious thing to recreate. Cheese crackers were always among my favorite snack foods. I remember mindlessly downing entire bags of Goldfish during late night sessions of Facebook stalking paper writing in college. How can they not exist yet in gluten-free form?
A few weeks ago I came across this post from Deb. A couple weeks later I somehow wound up on another site looking at a similar recipe. Forget waiting for them to show up in a box on a shelf somewhere—it was time to bake up a batch of cheese crackers myself.
Once a week for over a year now, Chris and I get together with two other couples to watch TV.
It all started when Lost was in its final season. We attended a party where a bunch of our friends had gathered for the premiere. As the season progressed, attendance quickly tapered off until there were just six of us.
During that season, we found a rhythm. Our weekly parties became a sort of potluck. Whoever was hosting was responsible for the main dish and the other two couples (okay, let's be honest here, the other two ladies) would bring an appetizer and a dessert. We all began looking forward to “Lost Night,” and, when the show finally came to its unsatisfying end, we decided we wanted to keep things going. New shows were auditioned and we chose Breaking Bad, which has been phenomenal, heart pounding, and yell-at-the-screen-worthy.
It’s still called “Lost Night,” though. “Breaking Bad Night” doesn’t quite have the same ring.
Being that this weekly gathering is a dinner party of sorts, our friends have faced some challenges with the gluten-free thing. They’ve taken them on beautifully and without complaint—something that I appreciate to no end. My challenges, however, lie elsewhere. The difficult thing for me about rotating responsibilities for a potluck: I have a really hard time coming up with appetizers. Main dishes? I do that every night anyway. Dessert? Please, asking me to bake something is like asking a five-year-old if they want to go to Disney World. But appetizers? I get, well...lost.
Welcome to round two of the Gluten-Free Ratio Rally! If you’ve stumbled upon this post and are interested in reading more about what the Rally is all about, check out the post from our inaugural run when we all shared ratios and recipes for pancakes. This week we’re giving youquick breads, a category that comprises muffins as well.
The nice thing about quick breads is that, in addition to being delicious, they’re pretty darn quick. That is, quick compared to yeasted breads, since they employ either baking powder or soda (or a combination) as leavening. Use roughly 1 teaspoon of baking powder for every 4 oz of flour, though I tend to think gluten-free baked goods benefit from a little extra oomph. Rulhman’s basic ratio for quick breads, which was used to create the recipe below, is:
2 parts flour : 2 parts liquid : 1 part egg : 1 part butter
For a few years when we were young, after my parents’ divorce, my brother and I would spend the summers at my dad’s house. He worked during the day and we passed the time watching Nickelodeon, playing Nintendo, and biking to the local “aquatic center”. One day, bored and in the mood to bake, I sifted through the kitchen cupboards and came across a blue box of date bread mix.
I remember very distinctly opening the package and pulling out the tiny packet of flour-dusted dates. What were dates anyway? From what I could see, they were hard little brown bits and unlike anything I knew. I placed them in my mind somewhere between a dried fruit and a nut. Maybe they were somehow a bit of both?
My food-centric wanderings in Austin were made a bit more complete with a visit to the Downtown farmer’s market. I approached the market on that sunny Saturday morning, surprised to find the quiet little park that I’d walked by over the past couple days suddenly full of color and life.
My belly was empty when I left the hotel and I was hoping to find a late breakfast. There were stands with carrots and greens, jams and honey, handmade soaps, pastries, but nothing ready-to-eat and gluten-free. I had almost made my way past every stand when I came upon this one.
Why hello, Tacodeli with your gluten-free options.
