B, as you may have read, is sensitive to gluten so we've been eating mostly gluten free for almost a year. We've experimented with the store bought substitutes and fancy menus in restaurants and come to the unanimous conclusion that it's better to just go without than it is to eat some of these replacement foods.
Over Christmas we experimented with some gluten free flour blends. None of them produced good results. The mixes had a laundry list of chemical sounding ingredients. The DIY blends required ordering a host of weird flour-like-things off of the Internet. And alllll of it required Xantham Gum which creeps me out solely because it starts with an, "X." Yuck.
Still, we made feeble attempts to bake things and those items would languish on the counter until they were thrown out. Any baked good that survives longer than 48 hours with a teenager in the house was not a success.
Last week it snowed and when it snows I want to bake something! So I hit the Internet and found a recipe from the baking maven herself, Martha.
It changed my life. Chocolate chip cookies that taste like chocolate chip cookies? The secret is home made oatmeal flour!!! I made it in my normal, El Cheapo, blender.
So then the next day we were still snowed in and I was day dreaming about back in the day when I used to bake bread. I love the whole homey process and it made the house smell amazing. I know that B misses sandwiches, his favorite food, more than anything else. Store bought gluten free bread always tastes really eggy and spongey to me....but maybe the oatmeal flour could save the day again?
Um, YES! This recipe is the best thing ever. It does have the suspicious Xantham Gum in it and I was worried about the eggs....but it looked and smelled like bread dough and it baked into some fabulous bread! B had ham sandwiches, butter and bread, jam and bread and peanut butter and honey this week.
Well, you know where this is going right?
Brownies.
Why not? Oatmeal is so cheap and my go to brownie recipe only has 1/2 a cup of flour in it anyway...it might just be crazy enough to work!
It did! (PS It's impossible to take a good picture of brownies, they are just too...well...brown..so I jazzed it up a little bit.)
These were delicious! No weird taste. No weird ingredients.
Here's the recipe:
1 c sugar
1/2 c old fashioned oatmeal ground into a fine flour
1/3 c Hershey's cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of gluten free baking powder
2 eggs
1/2 c of vegetable oil
1 teaspoon of vanilla
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and grease a square baking pan.
Grind your oatmeal in your blender if you haven't already done it. Keep grinding until it is as fine as regular flour. It clumps together a bit more than flour but that's ok.
Mix all of the dry ingredients together.
Add in the eggs, oil and vanilla and mix until everything is combined and pretty lump free.
Pour into your baking dish and bake for 25 minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment