Vegetarian Freedom from Gluten

I once read about a funny, bot-generated list of the opening lines of blog posts, in which the blog authors had offered sincere excuses for why it had been so long since they last blogged. So I'm just going to move on without apology, acknowledging that the Earth's various environmental crises haven't somehow resolved themselves in the past six months. Therefore, you might still need motivation to eat less meat, because raising animals for food is environmentally problematic, and you want to be part of the solution.

Oink

Going forward, I will be offering you my thoughts on foods and recipes that are not only vegetarian and sometimes vegan, but also gluten-free. "Freedom" is an inspirational word, but achieving freedom from gluten is difficult and, frankly, often sad.

Take cinnamon rolls, for example. Remember how I used to make cinnamon rolls that I described as GOOOOOOOOOOOOD? I tried to make a non-yeast version with gluten-free (GF) flour to enjoy on Christmas morning, and they were BAAAAAAAAAAAD. While I got them to roll up okay, the result out of the oven was a bit of a mess, and did not really offer the taste, texture, or appearance to remind me of a true cinnamon roll.

Speaking of Christmas, my backup dancer and I have a tradition of making a gingerbread house every year and decorating it with all the sticky and hard candies collected at Halloween.

Four years ago

But when we tried to bake the pieces of the house using GF flour this Christmas, they fell apart. Sadness.

I tried a GF version of our beloved pan pizza and it came out the way it was supposed to, but we weren't fond of the sour taste of the crust.

For medical reasons, despite the disappointments, we must persist in our pursuit of freedom from gluten. There are some bright spots! GF crackers made from rice are delightfully crispy and delicious, for example. And gingerbread cookies made with the same dough as the failed house turned out perfectly, and were pleasantly soft thanks to the GF flour.

We also aim to make the best of failure, as when I crumbled our broken gingerbread house pieces in a food processor, and then pressed them into a springform pan to make a truly marvelous crust for a cheesecake. I might even prefer it to a graham cracker crust.

Appealing GF entree recipes are not difficult to find. I've been cycling through recipes featuring rice, GF (usually rice) pasta, quinoa, lentils/beans, and potatoes. A few weeks ago, I made "Stuffed Roasted Yellow Peppers in Tomato Sauce" (NYT Cooking; subscription required) and they tasted great, although getting the skin off a pepper is always an ordeal for me. In this case, I gutted the peppers and then rotated them over a burner flame, but it took forever and the char was problematically uneven, so it was hard to get the skin off.

Chili is another decent GF vegetarian entree, and it's a breeze to make in the slow cooker. I really liked the meaty tofu crumbles in "Ultimate Vegan Chili" (Nora Cooks), although I found this recipe unusually acidic - perhaps using roasted canned tomatoes would help? Worth a try. (Update as of Jan. 1, 2023: I used roasted crushed canned tomatoes and did not notice the acidity, so maybe that was the answer. Unrelatedly, you can also get away with one fewer cans of beans and indeed, only two cans fit in my slow cooker; I think you could safely reduce the tomatoes too - this recipe makes a lot of chili. And as a final note, I found myself unable to remember whether you need to saute the onions before putting them in the slow cooker: you don't.)

We've gotten a little rusty at posing for blog photos