Tag: gluten free recipes

Alligator Pie

No alligators were harmed in the making of this pie.

As have so many people, cooking and baking is part of my quarantine routine. Perhaps not so much like many people, I’ve been sifting through my grandma’s recipes. These are recipes I saved in my 20s, before she died but after she was able to talk to me about them. One by one I’ve made them and decided whether or not to keep them, alter them, or get rid of them.

Some of the recipes weren’t hers, per se, but ones she’d trimmed from one of her many magazines. Alligator Pie is one such recipe, although that’s the name I gave it. No, Grandma Rae saved the not-as-creatively named Ricotta Spinach Pie recipe. After I made the crust, I had some pastry left over, so I improvised with an alligator cookie cutter (hey, spinach is green, so it kind of hangs together!)

Below, find the recipe with my modifications.

2 Tbsp. butter
1/4 cup chopped shallot
1 package (10 oz.) frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
1 container (15 oz.) ricotta cheese
4 eggs
1/2 c. grated Parmesan cheese
1/3 c. finely chopped prosciutto
Dash teaspoon salt
Dash pepper
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1 c. sherry
Pastry for 9-inch double-crust pie (I made a gluten-free one but you shouldn’t if you don’t have to)

Preheat oven to 425º

In medium skillet melt butter. Add shallots and saute until translucent; cool slightly. Add spinach and sherry ; cook until all butter is absorbed and the sherry has cooked down. In separate bowl combine ricotta, spinach and prosciutto. Add eggs, Parmesan, prosciutto, salt, pepper and nutmeg; mix well.

Roll out half the pastry and line a 9-inch pie plate. Bake 12 minutes.

Remove from oven and add filling.

Roll out remaining pastry and place over filling; seal edges. Cut several slits in top. I used an alligator cookie cutter to fashion the remaining pastry into alligators. With oven rack on lowest position, bake 20 min-
utes. Reduce temperature to 350°F and bake 20 more minutes. Serve warm.

#BecauseGluten: Pizza!

It’s not the same when gluten-free, but still pretty damn good.

While writing this, I’m sitting in a place called V Pizza in Jacksonville Beach, eating a delicious gluten-free margherita pizza and chatting with the owner about why we cannot abide New York (guess where we were both born?).

Too rude, too cold, too busy, too crowded… the list goes on and on. 

And yet, New York has one food item we don’t: real pizza. Even as I type that, my mouth remembers Sal’s Pizza in Mamaroneck, where my mother — who has a pathological aversion to returning to her homeland — insisted I dine when I made a voyage north three years ago. That was, of course, pre-celiac diagnosis. A quick check of the menu confirms what I suspect — Sal’s doesn’t make a gluten-free pizza crust. Though the restaurant is able to ship a pizza anywhere in America, alas, that does me no good. 

In all the ways that having celiac has made me bitter (hey, acceptance doesn’t mean not bitter), pizza has, oddly, not been one of them — because pizza hasn’t been the big deal I thought it’d be for me. It helps, I think, that, aside from a doomed-from-the-start love affair with Pizza Hut’s Priazzo, I was always a thin ‘n’ crispy gal rather than a pan pizza type. I blame New York, again; with pizza, I’m used to disappointment.

Eating GF pizza, you see, after a lifetime of eating Florida pizza is about the same as eating Florida pizza after a lifetime of eating New York pizza. No, it’s not the same, but what the fuck, man? It’s pizza, and it’s still pretty damn good. 

I’ve been blessed, too, by the GF craze sweeping across the country. I live in a society where you can buy the most ironic ingredient ever — gluten-free flour. Suck on that, Alannis. I can go to Westshore Pizza or Craft Kafé in St. Petersburg. I may hate — and I’m using the word hate here — Trader Joe’s for discontinuing the “good” pizza crust (pro tip: cauliflower is not the same), but I can continue to make the drive to Palm Harbor’s Ozona Pizza and get a truly fine GF pie.

In Tampa, the options are vast (well, not exactly — calling GF pizza options “vast” is akin to calling your grandma “old” when the earth itself is billions and billions of years older). Gourmet Pizza Company brags about its GF pies in South Tampa (I’ve yet to try it), and the Channel District location of Precinct Pizza delivers to our offices in Ybor City; when I made Ray and Meaghan taste Precinct’s variety at work, they didn’t even wince.

So, yes, I can suck it up and piss and moan my way through an Udi’s crust if I have to. Luckily, however, I don’t.

We have decent gluten-free pizza here.

The key, I suspect, is in the other ingredients. Fuck cauliflower. Seriously, y’all. It’s yummy in a salad and OK as a rice substitute, but as a pizza crust it’s like watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time on VH1 — ain’t nobody gonna be throwing toast at your ass at 1 a.m. Get some buffalo mozzarella, juicy plum tomatoes and the extra-ist of extra virgin olive oils and 12 minutes later you’ve forgotten that the dough isn’t made with wheat.

I guess what I’m saying is: GF pizza isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Bad gluten-free pizza is.

Thankfully, I’ve yet to find it in the Bay area.

This article initially appeared in Creative Loafing.

#BecauseGluten: A return to baking

It’s a weird holiday, and an ugly cake, but I baked for the first time this year — sans gluten.

Food gluten free Peep O Ween cake Cathy Salustri
The power of cake compels you. Photo by Cathy Salustri.

If you’ve never attended a Peep-O-Ween — and I’d wager almost no one reading this has — you’re likely looking at that picture and thinking (or, perhaps, actually saying), “what the actual fuck am I looking at?”

What you’re looking at is my first foray into baking without gluten. 

When I threw out all my “good” flour on New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t imagine baking again. I’d yet to try a gluten-free baked good I found tasty, and I had no interest in making any of my friends my guinea pigs. I remember thinking, too, that as much as I loved baking, I wasn’t good enough at it to succeed where others had failed in making a GF cake or bread that didn’t actively make people chew for far too long before swallowing hard and assuring me, “no, no — I’m just not that hungry right now.”

The 2016 homage to Ouija and my first successful foray into fondant. This, incidentally, is probably the best a PeepOWeen cake has ever looked. Photo by Cathy Salustri.

But then Peep-O-Ween came around this year. My friends and I have this bizarre tradition that started with a poorly decorated cake that tasted awful, and an even worse movie. That first year, my mom and I decorated it with marshmallows, but that next year, we graduated to Peeps — yes, those Easter-centric mallow chicks that people either love or hate. Part of the “tradition” is that she and I make the cake, she bitches about what a stupid tradition it is, we laugh a lot, and she refuses to come to the party with me. The scene atop the cake must be from a horror movie, and if anyone can tell what it is, I have failed. Past cakes have included Psycho, Poltergeist (complete with a pool made of blue gelatin), Jaws, Alien (that was the year Amanda was about to give birth; it was made in her honor), Plan Nine From Outer Space, Ouija and, this year, The Exorcist. The horror movie we watch, selected by Stacey, must be so bad that if, at any point we start to care about the characters in the film, she has failed (the best so far was Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive — yes, that Peter Jackson). Leah orders pizza from Cappy’s; Dan picks it up. Calypso wears a costume she hates (she hated I Dream of Weenie the most). Dan outdoes himself with the decor (one year there was a moving alien tentacle emerging from a spaceship crash-landed in their front yard, complete with smoke and flashing lights, making them the envy of Broadwater).

It’s every bit as awful as it looks, and totally worth it.

This year, I figured I’d make the cake and simply not eat any, but then my friend Sandi brought over two bags of Trader Joe’s all-purpose gluten-free flour. What the hell, I shrugged, the cake’s supposed to taste like crap. And one of you sweet people — who happened to be a former book editor — sent me a copy of The Gluten Free Bible a few months back, so I used the yellow cake recipe from that. The batter didn’t taste horrible, but the real test would come after the cake baked.

Yellow cake gluten free recipe Cathy Salustri
I used butter, not margarine and cow’s milk, not soy or almond, and it was a touch grainy, it tasted more like cake than other GF cake I’ve tasted. Photo by Cathy Salustri.

I dumped the cakes on a cooling sheet late the night before Peep-O-Ween. They looked like real cake. As they cooled, I swiped a fingerful of what remained in the pan. To my shock, it tasted good. But it was late; everything tastes good at 11 p.m. The next morning, my mom came over for our annual decorate-the-cake-and-bitch-at-each-other tradition. I did not grow up with “everyone is special” parents; this is a woman who once turned to me and said, “honey, I love you, and you usually are a good cook, but please don’t ever make that again.”

We both ran a finger through the cake left in the pan. 

“That’s really good!” she said. 

And for the first time in history, the cake didn’t suck at Peep-O-Ween.

In 2015, the PeepOWeen cake honored the best worst movie ever: 'Plan Nine From Outer Space.' That alien Peepship, complete with alien Peep, still sits on my desk at CL. The Peep looks exactly the same as it did two years ago. Photo by Cathy Salustri.
In 2015, the PeepOWeen cake honored the best worst movie ever: Plan Nine From Outer Space. That alien Peepship, complete with alien Peep, still sits on my desk at CL. The Peep looks exactly the same as it did two years ago. Photo by Cathy Salustri.

Of course, taste itself isn’t the problem with GF baked goods; it’s the texture and cohesiveness. The texture was a bit grainier than real cake, but not so far off that it reminded me of every other GF yellow cake I’d ever tasted. Xanthan gum; who knew? 

I called Leah and asked if it would be OK for me to bring over a pizza crust (again, Trader Joe’s makes the best GF pizza crust outside of Ozona Pizza) and she informed me we weren’t eating pizza this year, but brisket, potatoes au gratin and a salad. 

“What kind of asshole would I be to invite you over and serve food you can’t eat?” she asked me

“But it’s tradition!” I said. “I don’t expect the world to bend to this celiac thing.”

“It’s six people, Cathy, not 30. We’re having brisket, potatoes au gratin and a salad,” she said. “And explorateur cheese. I couldn’t find any gluten-free crackers, though.”

I grabbed a box on the way out the door that night. No way was I missing that cheese.

Sorry, Cappy’s. 

This article initially appeared in Creative Loafing.

#BecauseGluten: Celiac cheat days are a thing, right?

Maybe I can have gluten one day a month.

As long as I’m being honest here — and, really, I find when discussing my intestines for roughly half a million of my closest friends, honesty works best — I would’ve happily wallowed in anger for a lot longer than I did if not for Meaghan Habuda, CL’s intrepid food editor and my appetizer BFF.

See, I’m familiar with anger. I’m comfortable in it; I know how it feels against my skin, and, yeah, it’s like an itchy wool coat that doesn’t flatter my figure at all, but I know where to find it. So staying there would’ve been easy, except Meaghan made me feel bad. We had decided to go grab something to eat and get a drink after work, and — for reasons not at all related to anything we stand for at CL, like local, fresh ingredients or innovative dishes — found ourselves at the Tyrone Square Ruby Tuesday (we judge us more than you ever could).

Meaghan wanted to write about a new ice cream something-or-other in the area, so Calypso and I sat on the dog-friendly patio and perused the menu (well, OK, I perused and she lay down, bored with life and unable to get to any of the good crumbs). Certainly something here would be gluten-free, right?

At this point, I continue to cling to the idea I don’t have to tell people I have celiac and that I can find workarounds with maybe a little gluten here and there to accommodate what I still refuse to admit is a disease.

By the time Meaghan arrived, I’d found a compromise: some sort of dip with Parmesan, and we’d get it with corn chips instead of pita. Still unwilling to utter the words “gluten” or “celiac” in public, I ask in what I thought was a casual tone if the topping had breadcrumbs in it, and if I could get the corn chips instead of pita. The waitress answered my questions — she didn’t think so, and of course I could — and she walked away, turned back and fixed her gaze on me.

“Are you gluten-free?” she asked.

I felt the white rage bubble up.

“Apparently.”

She nodded and disappeared inside.

“You were so mean to her,” Meaghan (unquestionably the nicer of us; see above) said. “She was only trying to help, and you yelled at her.”

I only had a moment to ponder what a jackass I’d been before a man with a walkie-talkie wire in his ear came over to our table, introduced himself as the manager, and informed us the cheese dip we’d ordered likely had come into contact with gluten and, as such, wouldn’t be set down in front of me.

My anger dissolved into abject horror. It was as if a secret agent from the bowels of the Ruby Tuesday lair had come out with a top-secret gluten warning. So much for trying to surreptitiously order gluten-free food. So much for walking a thin line between gluten and gluten-free without anyone noticing.

To his credit, he tried to help me find something for a pre-dinner snack. I settled on cauliflower, which tasted nothing like cheese dip.

I didn’t apologize to the waitress, who came over and apologized for not being able to bring me the food I wanted. I started to strategize in my head. 

Maybe I can have gluten one day a month, I told myself. Like a cheat day.

Then I floated this past my medical team.

“No,” said Dr. Gorgeous’ PA. “If you have celiac — and you do,” she said, seeing the look on my face, “you shouldn’t have gluten. Ever.”

“Not ever?”

“Not ever.”

Nevertheless, I persisted.

“OK, but, I don’t get sick, right?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “So, if, say, I had gluten every now and then, or in small amounts, how much could I have before it damaged the villa in my intestines?”

“With an actual celiac diagnosis, the amount of gluten you can have,” she said, and my eyes widened with hope, “is none.”

“Even if I don’t get sick?”

She didn’t sigh with great patience, which is to her credit.

“So, here’s the thing: Gluten may not make you sick now, but once you’re gluten-free for a few months, if you have gluten, it will probably make you sick.”

Great.

Next up: Depression.

This article originally appeared in Creative Loafing.

#BecauseGluten: Read the label, swear, put it in the bin

In which I find myself firmly out of denial about my celiac, and full-throttle into anger.

These people are fucking crazy.

If you read my first column about my recent celiac disease diagnosis, you know I dallied with denial. I transitioned from that right into anger and, well, let’s simply say I have lots of feelings about this stupid new lifestyle, none of which you would call “calm” or “accepting.”

Here’s how that went:

So, OK, I have celiac. Sure. So, um, give up breads, right? I can probably swing bread. It’ll suck some, because nothing compares to a hot loaf of bread with feta and smoked beef, or my dark chocolate bread smeared with Brillat-Savarin, accompanied by a glass of dry merlot and maybe a few walnuts. And the occasional late-night English muffin, like Barry and I do sometimes, with a little butter and strawberry jam…

Stop. Thinking. About. Bread.

You know what sucks? I gave up most “white” foods years ago because of the sugar (diabetes runs in my family). So I’ve been eating those goddamn whole-wheat English muffins for, what, 10 years now, and it’s done me no good whatsoever. Sure, I don’t have diabetes, but hell, at least every now and then diabetics can have a slice of white bread.

Oh, shit, pasta. I’m going to gave to give up pasta. Listen, that’s not exactly a Dutch name up on my byline, there. One of the best memories of my grandmother is making macaroni with her — cutting them on her hand-cranked machine and letting them dry all over the house. It’s safe to assume there was gluten everywhere, from the distinctively Italian wrought-iron wall by the stairs to the crushed-gold velvet striped wallpaper. This is like watching my childhood die.

Although I have a few days before I meet with Dr. Gorgeous (whose PA has asked me not to ask Dr. Google about my condition) and a week before I’ll have a session with a dietitian, I can’t wait that long. I’ve decided that I’ll quit gluten New Year’s Day, so I want to be prepared. I head over to Facebook — after all, that’s not Google and the PA didn’t say anything about social media, right? — and start seeking out celiac groups. Taking a deep breath, I post in one, explaining that I’m a recent diagnosis who previously viewed the GF movement with disdain. But now, in a turn of karma so severe 2,000 years from now Buddhists will meditate about me, I need advice.

“You’re going to have to throw out all your pots and pans and cutting boards and dishes.”

Um, excuse me? I can understand the wooden stuff — wood’s porous, so maybe some gluten got ground in there. However, I have my grandmother’s pots. When my father was a baby, she cooked breakfast for him in those. No way in hell do those go. And the dishes? Jesus fuck, it’s not like they’re made of bread. They’re ceramic. One set is depression glass. No fucking way. 

“Make sure your makeup and lotion are GF!”

GF? WTF? I absorb gluten through lotion? Aside from my Sephora stuff, I don’t buy cheap lipstick. I’m not throwing out my Dior, not even if it’s made with camel feces, which, come to think of it, might be gluten-free, so maybe that’s the way to go. But no. The Dior lasts forever and looks amazing. And my lotion? My conditioner? This is too much. These people aren’t doctors. Some of these comments are helpful while others are clearly over the top. For example, the lady who won’t let gluten in her house. Can you even accomplish this? It would be easier to move than to do that, right?

I scroll away from my post and read others.

“I pooped my pants!” one post reads.

These people are fucking crazy. 

I shut my laptop.

Grocery shopping also makes me rageful. See, I’m trying to buy things that don’t have gluten in them because in a few weeks I’ll be totally GF, so I have to start studying labels like there will be a test later (and there kind of will). And of course I forget my damn glasses. Trying to figure out if Trader Joe’s Carolina Gold Barbecue Sauce has gluten in it or not, I about lose it in front of the Lululemon-clad suburbanite and the middle-aged hipsters stocking up on Three-Buck Chuck for their shitty dinner parties and the poor cashier who doesn’t understand why I have a nasty look on my face.

In our pantry, I have two shelves filled with bread flour, whole-wheat flour, whole-wheat pastry flour, White Lily all-purpose flour, semolina flour — you get the idea. I start putting everything I can’t have anymore into a big copper basin, the kind you use to hold drinks at a party. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m thinking that arranging it all pretty-like will make this easier. I develop a rhythm: Read the label, swear, put it in the bin.

Flour, the stuff of bread, macaroni, pie crusts and muffins.

Oh, bloody hell.

Basin.

Durum wheat semolina elbows. Mixed with peeled tomatoes and butter and salt…

Dammit. 

Basin.

Peanut butter pretzels. 

Shit. 

Basin.

Soy sauce.

Wait a minute, fucking soy sauce? *Rereads label.* Fucking soy sauce.

Basin.

This fucking sucks.

Next up: Bargaining.

This article originally appeared in Creative Loafing.