Back To The Drawing Board

Looking at the ten day forecast, I have to say that I’m very glad that autumn seems to be here to stay.  And hopefully we’ll avoid Indian summer altogether.  Why?  Because I need to start spending some quality time in the kitchen.  With my oven and bread machine.

Almost two months after giving up foods that contain gluten, I find that I’m really missing toast.  I’ve come up with a great substitute for pizza crust.  Not take-out quality, but very similar to Chef-Boyrdee, Appian Way and Martha White mixes.  I can live with it.  But I’m not having as much luck – yet – with biscuits, crackers or bread.  And bread is pretty much a necessity for toast.

So my hopes were very high this afternoon when, after finally getting my car back from the mechanic (yay!), I traveled to a city about fifteen miles from where I live.  I’d heard rave reviews about gluten-free bread that you could find at one particular business there, and I couldn’t wait another second to try it out.  I anticipated an end to my search for a bread that looked, felt and tasted like real bread.

So…

This turned out to be a six-inch long, sort of lumpy, not very thick, and kind of hard (like it was a couple of weeks old)…sub bun.  Based on what I’ve learned from my own efforts, I’m guessing the main ingredients are rice flour and eggs (they make for a funky texture).  It took four dollars for that glob of baked dough to make me realize I’m not going to be a fan.

Frankly I’ve turned out better GF loaves of bread from recipes I’ve found online.  Not that any of those were fantastic, but they didn’t feel like they were scratching my throat on the way down either.  And right now it feels like I sat on the wrong side of a bonfire for too long.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Gluten free isn’t a horrible diet.  There are many things I could eat before that are still safe to eat.  But the whole bread/biscuit/cracker thing is getting a little harder to deal with.

I hope the recipe for saltines works out.  I miss those a lot, too.  And rice ‘crackers’ are never going to work for me-yuck!  The gluten-free version of Bisquick makes fairly good biscuits.  Certainly nothing like ‘real’ ones, but close enough.  They work for breakfast sandwiches and some gravies.  If I can’t solve the toast issue, I suppose I’ll just have to suck it up and use those with eggs.

However…my go-to food when I was hungry, and didn’t want to cook, was a couple of slices of toast.  I need toast!

But you know what?  If I have to take that off the table, even permanently, oh well.  If I can never have another roast beef or grilled cheese sandwich, if I can never have another slice of cinnamon toast, or French toast (I may cry about this), I can live with it.  The trade-off is worth it.

What might that be?  An end to constant fatigue.  Because the longer I’m off gluten, the better I feel.  At this rate I may wind up with my sixteen year old energy levels in a few months.  Okay.  So maybe not quite that much improvement.  But you never know.

For now, though, I’m going to continue trying, and tweaking, recipes.  You never know about that either.  I might just find something that works.  🙂