Getting started…

I love food.  I love to cook. I love to bake.  Beyond the sheer corporeal enjoyment of eating good food, there’s the creative process of concocting a dish and attending to the aesthetic details of it. Baking is therapeutic.  Sophomore year of college I took organic chemistry which was a notorious class amongst the biology majors.  Studying for the exams usually just stressed me out and left me more confused on all the different rules and hierarchies that determined which chemical reactions will take place, so my ritual the night before all the exams was to look over my notes and then bake a batch of oatmeal cookies.  Somehow I managed to pull a B- both semesters.

I also love how food is such a social focal point—when I have parties, people always congregate around the food—and how sharing food can create intimacy.  Some of the best nights with friends include gathering around a kitchen and preparing a meal.  I’ve had friends from different parts of the world who have shared their culture with me by teaching me how to make certain dishes.  Food makes great gifts—a homemade cake to celebrate a friend’s birthday… or as a thank you… or just to break up the monotony of the week…

A little over two years I discovered that gluten, a protein present in wheat, barely, and rye, was the source of the increasing achiness in my hands.  When I indulge in bread or glutenous goodies, I feel it in my joints—especially during the colder month (which there are quite a few here in Fairbanks).  And so I had to change what I could eat, what I could cook, and what I could bake.  Initially I thought I would elaborately alter the way that I cooked, but quickly realized that it was much more feasible to make easy changes and to focus on recipes that were naturally gluten-free or could have gluten-free ingredients swapped in.  While I love that scene from ‘Stranger than Fiction’ when Will Ferrell’s character presents Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character with a box of different types of flours (instead of flowers), I don’t have the pantry space to keep an extensive library of flours and odd ingredients.

With the increasing awareness of gluten and some people’s sensitivity to it, I get lots of requests from friends for gluten-free recipes.  I’m also fortunate to have recipes shared with me.  So, I’ve decided to start this blog as an easy way to share recipes and inspire myself to test out new ones.