Wheat Delete

You might have noticed that I was giving away all my wheat stuff in my last post. I have just come to the conclusion that wheat gives me a tummy ache. When I eat it, my stomach feels hard and bloated and it hurts. I feel sluggish and tired and blah. I have, over the last few years, moved over into the SPELT camp. I bake exclusively with spelt and we eat spelt pasta. I use barley couscous and eat rye crackers as spelt, rye and barley all have considerably less gluten than wheat. Plus there are great gluten free options as well such as millet and quinoa and of course, rice. I have felt enormously better and being vegan I am used to making substitutions for stuff when I cook so what’s one more thing, eh?   We used to occasionally get a take away pizza and I loved the taste of it. But all that wheaty crust would leave me feeling horrible and constipated for days. I have tried in the past to make a spelt crust in my bread machine where the machine does the mixing and rising and you are supposed to just turn it out and roll it into your pan. Never had much success with that as you had to remember to start the bread machine hours before you wanted to make dinner and then the dough was mega sticky. So I wondered could I make a vegan, gluten free crust that actually tasted good? Here were the potential problems:

1. Most gluten free bready stuff tastes like ass.

2. Most better looking gluten free bready stuff has eggs in it.

3. Most gluten free recipes I found on line were from the US and either recommended sorghum flour (which I can’t find here) or Bob’s Red Mill brand flour mix--which contains sorghum--but costs £5 for a weenie little bag and I ain’t doing it.

So I looked at what purpose gluten free ingredients serve to put together my own recipe and this is what I found:

Tapioca flour: helpful where binding a moistening properties are required.

Buckwheat flour: Which despite having wheat in the name contains no wheat and is actually from a seed and is related to rhubarb. Who knew? It also has binding properties but is dark and strongly flavoured and is best combined with other bland flours so it won’t be so overwhelming.

Oat flour: Lightens baked goods. If you are really a celiac then make sure to get gluten free oats.

Chickpea flour: used a lot in Asian cooking. Can provide an "eggy" taste when making french toast.

Cornflour (cornstarch to my US peeps) makes lightly textured baked goods but can be a bit powdery so combine it with other flours to add moisture. If you have a corn allergy then sub in some arrowroot. Cornflour is just cheaper here.

Xanthum gum: Helps to replace gluten by giving the flours some elasticity.

Lots of recipes call for rice flour but I find it gritty and so I left it out. I also wanted to include some flax meal (ground flax seed) as it is a powerhouse of nutrition as well as goes all gooey and eggy in liquid and I thought it would help me bind stuff together.

Well after only 3 tries I invented the *perfect* gluten free vegan pizza crust recipe which also makes a killer flat bread that could be dunked in soup. It is also yeast free as some of my mates have yeast issues as well as the fact that yeast means you have to wait for it to rise and all that jazz and I haven’t got the time or the patience for that. It does contain those cheesy flakes of goodness nutritional yeast but those are an inactive yeast and therefore are acceptable for mates who are on a yeast free diets.

Spidergrrl’s Groovy Multi-grain Vegan Gluten Free Dough recipe 

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F

Sift together in a big bowl:

½ cup tapioca flour

½ cup buckwheat flour

½ cup oat flour (this is just ½ cup oats whizzed in your food processor until powdery)

½ cup chickpea flour

1/3 cup cornflour (cornstarch)

 2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

 1 tsp xanthum gum

Then add:

1 tsp salt (I used lo-salt)

1 TB dried Italian herbs like basil, oregano, marjoram

2 TB nutritional yeast

Wisk all the dry ingredients to mix the flours.

Combine the liquid measurements in a small bowl or jug:

1 TB apple cider vinegar

1TB agave syrup (or honey if you exploit bees)

1 cup warm water

2 TB flax meal (or substitute 1 egg if you are an animal abuser)

Wisk together and then add the wet to the dry and stir until combined. I had to add a splash more warm water.

Line whatever pan you are using with parchment paper (round for a pizza/rectangular for flatbread) Then use a wet spoon or wet hands to flatten the dough into the shape of the pan. This really worked to keep the sticky down and didn’t make the dough too wet.

For pizza:

Bake for 15 minutes, take out of oven and add toppings (we used homemade tomato sauce, caramelised onion and pepper, olives, pineapple, sweet corn and smoked tofu) and bake for 10-12 more minutes.

Top with a sprinkle of “Parmesan cheese” (3 TB nutritional yeast/3 TB ground almonds/½ tsp salt blitzed in a blender)  

For flat bread:

Bake for 25-27 minutes.

This was really yum and not that difficult to do. I liked that it had a whole grain healthy slightly nutty flavour but without being overwhelmed by any one flour.

  I am not sorry to see wheat deleted from my life. It also helps in social situations where there are biscuits (cookies) that want to leap into my mouth. Much of the time they have eggs and milk in them so I feel happy declining, but there are some like ginger nuts and bourbons that are accidentally vegan and I could scoff the bag and then really regret it after not being able go to the loo for days. So it just helps on those tempting moments to know I have healthier, less sugar, less fat, wheat free vegan treats at home rather than cheap and nasty store bought rubbish full of palm oil and the metaphorical blood of orang-utans in it. 

Roasty Toasty Crunchity-Crunch Chickpeas

Anyone remember Ren and Stimpy? The best bits of that show were the adverts for products like Log (and Log for girls) and Powdered Toast (“Are you clinging tenaciously to my buttocks?”) or my personal favourite-- Sugar Sod Pops. I loved watching the whole cartoon family chowing down on slabs of earth with that “fresh mown taste” and showing their chlorophyll tinted green smiles to the tune of the incredibly catchy jingle:

If you like grass

If you like dirt

Eat sugar sod pops

It can’t hurt!

And  don’t forget there is a free praying mantis (blink blink) inside specially marked boxes!

Anyway, this has nothing to do with Ren and Stimpy. I just wanted to make some sort of tenuous link between their cleverly named food and my cleverly named new favourite snack.

I give you: Roasty Toasty Crunchity-Crunch Chickpeas. 

 I love a crunchy savoury snack. As I have previously mentioned I could eat my weight in wasabi peas. But I can’t seem to find a brand that doesn’t have palm oil and I try really hard to avoid palm oil if I can as the rainforest is often cut down to make way for palm plantations which displaces many animals and generally pisses me off. I buy a few things that say orang-utan friendly palm oil (meaning  no orang-utans were kicked out of their homes) but wasabi peas generally don’t come with that guarantee. So I figured I could make something cheaper and tastier and possibly healthier.

Then there was a food exchange at work where we all cleaned out our pantries and traded stuff we didn’t want. I gave away all my wheat stuff (bulgur, flour, pasta) as well as some split peas and among the things I got were some dried chickpeas. I have never cooked dried beans before so I was searching for a way to cook them and came across advice for roasting them.

Here is what you need:

1 cup dried chickpeas

1 TB oil

Spices of your choice.

Soak your chickpeas in twice their volume of water for about 14 -15 hours. I put mine on to soak before I went to bed and then let them continue to soak until I got home from work at 2:00. Drain and rinse the chickpeas and put them back in the pot with plenty of clean, cold water and boil rapidly for 10-12 minutes. Then drain and let them dry a bit in the colander whilst the oven preheats to 200C/400F.

Drizzle with 1 TB oil and spices of your choice. I did 3 tsp cajun spices. Then bake for 40 minutes on a baking tray lined with parchment paper and stir every 10 minutes. I know that sounds like a pain, but trust me it is worth it. It is no worse than making party mix from chex cereal. In the end the chickpeas with be dried all the way though and crunchy like popcorn or crisps. Plus you can store them at room temperature in a airtight container. These taste bloody amazing. And a serving is ½ cup (makes 6 servings) and so it will last a week if you are the only one eating it. Spiderman dislikes things that are that crunchy so all the more for me. I did try a second batch with no oil and they were soggy and really stuck to the pan. But I might do a compromise and do less oil. Or not. Really a TB olive oil divided between 6 portions is not that bad and our bodies need fats to help us feel full and lubricate our joints.  

I was thinking of how many combinations of flavours there might be.  So a drizzle of oil plus a TB tamari soy sauce and Chinese 5 spice powder or a TB lime juice and chilli powder or 1 TB malt vinegar and salt or 1 TB maple syrup and a wee bit of powdered ginger? The possibilities are endless.

But no matter how you season them they remain Roasty Toasty Crunchity-Crunch Chickpeas! Nom nom nom! 

Somewhere over the rainbow

Answer these OZ related questions:

What colour were Dorothy’s shoes that she got from the Wicked Witch of the East?

Answer: silver. If you said ruby then you are a victim of the 1939 film. They were made red for the film to take advantage of Technicolor.

Where was Glinda the Good Witch from?

Answer: the south. If you said the north then you are a victim of the 1939 film. The Witch of North who has no other name in the book appears to Dorothy in Munchkin land and they travel south to see Glinda after the wizard has gone up in the balloon and left Dorothy behind. When the film was made there was still a lot of anti-south sentiment after the Civil War and so it was decided to make Glinda the witch of the north because surely something good would not come from the south.

How old is Dorothy and what is her personality like?

Answer: 7 years old and clever, outspoken, practical, brave and a problem solver. If you said a weepy, wimpy teenager who sits around blubbing while the male characters do all the work to rescue her then you are a victim of the 1939 film. In the book, Dorothy melts the witch, frees the lion who has been tied up outside the castle (the witch had been starving him but Dorothy had been sneaking him food) then goes out into the forest and locates her 2 badly injured friends the scarecrow and tin man. She then goes to the Winkies and asks for assistance in getting them put back together. All at 7 years old and all without being a blubber box.

What happens at the end?

Answer: In the book it was absolutely real. If you said it was all a dream then you are a victim of the 1939 film. Dorothy went back many times to Oz and finally when they couldn’t pay the mortgage and the farm was about to be seized Dorothy made the secret sign to Ozma who watched her every day at a certain time in her magic mirror and Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry were all taken to Oz to live.

The point of all this is to say many people think they know Oz because they love the 1939 film. Tommy Kovac and illustrator Andy Hirsh clearly know their Oz book trivia. Together they have made a comic about a man named Jasper Fizzle who is obsessed with Oz and always tries to write Oz stories but the Official Oz Society (really just gay men with dogs named Toto) keep shooting him down. And rightly so with dreadful sounding books like Percival T Cozy in Oz.  His obsession is getting in the way of his relationship with his teenage son Frank (named after L Frank Baum) who has heard all the Oz stories his entire life, but can’t see the magic. The magic really begins when Jasper finds the silver slippers in a junk shop (they fell off Dorothy’s feet as she flew over the Deadly Desert) and he is transported back to Oz  where he gathers artifacts to bring back to the Mortal World to show that Oz is real and is as amazing as the books show it to be and to help him get better stories that will not be rejected by the Official Oz Society.

Here is where the fun begins. Drawing from all corners of the 14 books Tommy K and Andy H bring out nuggets like one of Jack Pumpkinhead’s old rotting heads, the WoggleBug’s pill system for learning, a winged monkey, a kalidah (body of a bear/head of a sabre tooth tiger), a scoodler who can take off its head and throw it at you, some bun people from Bunbury (“What’s with the donut people?” his son asks), some mist from the waters of oblivion, the nine tiny piglets owned by the wizard--just to name a few. If you are not a serious Oz devotee like me then probably this all sounds really quaint and interesting, but lacks meaning. My mum is probably bobbing up and down with recognition as it was she who read me all the Oz books 2 chapters a night in the big brown chair.

Anyway, several characters from Oz--some you know like the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion and Tin Woodman and some you don’t like Scraps the Patchwork Girl travel to the Mortal World to retrieve what was stolen with exciting results! Even if you are not an Oz devotee like me you will find this series wonderful. You can still get it from Slave Labor Graphics if you are interested: http://www.slgcomic.com/

But here is our next piece of loveliness: Spiderman has bought us 2 pieces of original art from the comic!!!!!!     

In the comic the characters from Oz kidnap Jasper’s son Frank in order to force Jasper to return what he has stolen. Frank is face to face with all the things he has heard of all his life, but never believed. In the upper left panel we see Dorothy, Betsy Bobbin, Jellia Jamb and Ozma sitting down for a cup of tea. You can also see the glass cat Bungle from the Patchwork Girl of Oz checking herself out in the mirror. This cat was very vain and proud of her ruby heart and pink brains (“You can see ‘em work”). Frank is trying to run away from Oz on the Sawhorse who was brought to life by Tip with the powder of life. He is the fastest creature in Oz because being made of wood he never tires--Ozma had his feet shod in gold so they’d never wear out. He is even faster than Jim the cab horse who was transported to Oz by a Californian earthquake. Anyway, this scene is where Frank and the Sawhorse run into the Glass Cat. Literally. With disastrous results for our glass friend. Click on this to check out the picture bigger:

The other original art we bought from Andy Hirsh is the Wicked Witch of the West Water Cycle. Try saying that 3 times fast. This is my favourite bit from the comics. Check out this cleverness. Again, you'll need to click to read the words--and the words are the best bit!

Anyway, we have blown our remaining food budget for the month on art because we are hardcore that way. But art feeds the soul and lentils and rice will feed the body (at least until payday.)

Joy, Aranea and Nellie

Any ideas? Ring any bells? Hmmm? Hmmm? These are the names of Charlotte’s 3 spiderlings who decide to stay and keep Wilbur the pig company after they hatched. This is from the book Charlotte’s Web  by E.B. White if any of you still don’t know what I’m on about.  Why is Spidergrrl testing us with such trivia? Well take a lookie here and you will see:

Isn’t that gorgeous? It is by one of my favourite people Tommy Kovac. He is the coolest gay librarian on the planet (or perhaps that should be the gayest cool librarian) but whichever way you think of it he is downright amazing. I follow his 2 blogs--his personal one   http://tommykovac.blogspot.com/ and his librarian one—

http://smellslikelibrary.blogspot.com/ . As well as his husband’s blog http://www.pop-circus.blogspot.com/ .

Tommy Kovac is a librarian who  puts a tremendous amount of thought into his displays and really tries to make that connection about the magic of reading with kids without being boring, overbearing and fusty which can really put kids off. He also is a writer and an artist. He does these clever little “doodles” on old library cards which makes him an artist who reuses materials that would normally go to waste. http://www.tommykovac.com/LB%20library%20card%20art.htm  A-okay in my book.

We *puffy heart* his work so much that when we saw this picture of spiders on his blog we knew we had to buy it. I love that the spiders are so anatomically correct. Nothing pisses me off more than spiders with one body part and 2 big googly eyes and lopsided grin like you forever see on Halloween stuff for kids so spiders won’t look so scary. Bosh. These sorts of spiders often appear in children’s books which is a shame. But not Tommy K’s spiders! Look closely at the detail. Click on the picture and it will magically get bigger before your eyes. I love the one fanciful detail of the curly feet because it is so adorable. I know if our spiders could curl their feet like they definitely would. We have hung it over “Tarantula Towers” where the girls live and they love it. They spend all day gazing at it and begging us to read Charlotte’s Web to them.  Ok, that’s a bit of a lie as despite having 8 eyes, none of the girls can see worth a damn. . But we spend all day gazing at it and rereading bits of Charlotte’s Web which is how Spiderman came up with the name for it.

How did we discover Tommy Kovac you may ask. He is, like me, an Oz fanatic and we share the same favourite Oz book The Patchwork Girl of Oz (although for me The Tin Woodman of Oz where Nick Chopper goes back to the tinsmith who made him and he meets his old head and has an argument with it comes a close second) Tommy knows that L. Frank Baum wrote 14 Oz books in all and many people have never even heard of the books because they only know the 1939 film which is a shame because the books are rich with wonderful adventures and characters. I’m not knocking the film--I have lots of film related Oz memorabilia, but the stories by Baum are so good it just breaks my heart that more people don’t know about them. For many years, despite the fact that kids really loved the books, uptight librarians disliked them because they weren’t “literary enough.” Poppycock. As a child I was completely immersed in the land of Oz and felt as if I knew all the characters personally. It has been so wonderful lately that Oz is having a bit of a revival. Marvel comics is committed to published graphic novel versions of all 14 original books. They have done the first 2--The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz and the next one Ozma of Oz comes out in a few months. These gems are put together by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young  and rock my world and I hope will bring the magic of Oz to a new generation of munchkins.

The other recent Oz excitement (for me anyway) is how we discovered Tommy Kovac. He has written (although not illustrated even though he totally could) an OZ comic called The Royal Historian of Oz --which was Baum’s name for himself, if you want a spot a trivia. This brings me to my next post. Stay tuned for more Oz awesomeness.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sofa

This is how it happened:

Last night Spiderman lost his pen. He had been doing a crossword before dinner and after we ate our delicious Jamaican jerk tempeh and pineapple rice he wanted to finish his pooh-zle. That’s not a misprint--that’s what we call them in this family. Get over it. Anyway, he thought it might have slipped down the back of the sofa as sometimes that can happen to a pen.

He bade me get up so he could take off the sofa cushions. Nothing. He stuck his hand down the back and came up with a pen. But it wasn’t his pen. He kept reaching down the back of the sofa and he kept coming up with pens. But never his pen.  It was like a magic show by Bo Bo the magician (who could really pull his thumb off). Those of you who did not grow up in the 1970’s in Central Louisiana will not recall Bo Bo the magician, but he came faithfully to Cherokee elementary and you could see his dazzling magic show for the price of a quarter. Good times.

Anyway, every time Spiderman reached in and pulled out yet another pen I wanted to applaud. I was squealing with delight and he went all Queen Victoria “we are not amused” on me, but I thought it was hysterical. In the end he pulled out 3 pens, 1 pen lid, 1 pencil, 1 sharpie and 2 red markers. Plus a handful of almonds.

Spiderman would like me to make note of the fact that every single one of the afore mentioned items was lost by me. We almost have enough to start our own stationers giving WH Smith a run for its money. You never know.

Oh and fear not, oh best beloved reader, we did find his pen on a chair hiding under a stack of papers. I didn’t want you to go off and be anxious thinking Spiderman was not able to finish his

pooh-zle.

You (shark) me all night long

Just when it couldn’t get any weirder:

Heavy Metal Under the Sea: Sharks Act Calmer When Listening to AC/DC

The great white shark—the toothy, aggressive predator known for its “man eater” depiction in Jaws—has long been a source of fascination. But when it comes to musical preferences, great whites are just like the 50 million-plus humans who turned AC/DC's Back in Black into one of the best selling albums of all time.

They're fans.
According to Australian news outlet ABC, Matt Waller, a tour operator in Neptune Bay, discovered that great white sharks act more calmly when listening to music by AC/DC, the Aussie heavy-metal band that reached its peak during the 1980s. The two songs favored by the sharks: “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “Back in Black.”
After Waller played the songs using underwater speakers, the sharks became “more investigative, more inquisitive and a lot less aggressive."
“They actually came past in a couple of occasions when we had the speaker in the water and rubbed their face along the speaker which was really bizarre,” he said.
It all started when Waller met up with some divers on Guadeloupe who played music in the water. Certain songs, they told Waller, seem to change the behavior of the sharks. With his company Adventure Bay Charters, Waller began experimenting with underwater speakers attached to diving cages. AC/DC became a smash hit for the sharks down under. The larger question is, why?
“Sharks don't have ears, they don't have long hair, and they don't head bang past the cage doing the air guitar,” Waller told Australian Geographic. So if the great whites aren't necessarily rocking out to AC/DC's greatest hits, what's the appeal? Waller notes that there is a connection between a song and the frequency and vibration in the water that the sharks enjoy.
Waller is not a shark expert, but this discovery is significant. By using music and not bait to attract sharks during tours, his company is helping cage-diving operations become more eco-conscious and environmentally sustainable.
What other albums will have the great white meandering like a rolling stone through Australia's serene waves? Waller thinks Zeppelin is the next crowd-pleaser, though his kids are banking on The White Stripes.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/06/06/heavy-metal-under-the-sea-sharks-act-calmer-when-listening-to-acdc/#ixzz1PPupMni8

Well, I know where we're *not* going on holiday this year

Feared "deadly shark" spotted off Cornwall

A species of shark thought to be to blame for hundreds of attacks on humans has been reported off the coast of Cornwall.
One sighting of an oceanic whitetip shark was made by a fisherman who said his wooden boat was rammed as he fished for mackerel.
The harbour master's office in St Ives confirmed that a second person on a separate boat had also reported seeing one of the sharks a mile off shore.
The species is blamed for many attacks on humans and brought terror to the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh last year when a 'rogue' whitetip reportedly killed a German woman .
A spokesman for the harbour master in St Ives said they were not "100%" sure if the sharks spotted were oceanic whitetips and stressed that people should not blow the reports "out of all proportion".
The pelagic - or ocean-going - species is usually found far further south in deeper waters away from the coast, with Portugal being the usual northern-most reach of its habitat.
from: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/feared-deadly-shark-spotted-off-cornwall-110415724.html

Merde and double merde with a good helping of merde on the side!!!! This is my worst nightmare come true. I leave you with my favourite hymn by Monty Python that I sing to myself to calm my nerves in times of overwelming shark terrors. Well I say hymn.....

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.

Amen.