These Wednesdays when we do ratio rally reveals easily makes the first week of the month my favorite week ever.  Every single rally offers up a new delicious array of inspiration from all the participants – and I look forward to these events not just for the chance to learn and play with new recipes, but also to enjoy all of the fabulousness that everyone else creates.  And this month I am sure is no exception, as we got an extra tasty challenge – brownies!!

This challenge was hosted by the wonderful Mary Fran of Frannycakes.  Honestly, I did not do much recipe development this time as a little over a year ago I had the serendipitous pleasure of stumbling across an ingredient combination that my husband and I absolutely loved – a very dense, chewy, almost like a fudgey cookie – a dark chocolate brownie based off of nut meal and cocoa.  Since it has become our go-to recipe for all things brownie, all I had to do was convert the ingredients to units of weight and have fun

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

I’m not really one for mushy gushy romance, and so like most other “greeting card holidays” (i.e. holidays I feel were made popular just to perpetuate the need to spend money on treats and cards), I simply use it as a good excuse to cook some tasty food (and for my husband’s gluten issues it is often much more convenient and enjoyable for us to cook than try to go out anyways).  In fact, my husband and I already “celebrated” Valentine’s Day this past weekend, cause work nights make it difficult to spend much time together relaxing.

We spent a lazy day together this weekend, with an indulgent dinner of buckwheat crêpes filled with braised duck, fennel, and chestnuts, and dessert of chocolate fondue and fresh fruit ( my favorite!).  After all, this may be our last quiet alone Valentine’s together, and while I am very much looking forward to our upcoming parenthood, I also wanted to cherish some quality together, just the two of us, for one more “holiday”.

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These were supposed to be gluten free chocolate popovers.  Popovers are like muffins but rise more and have more air inside, hence they “pop over” the tin they are baked in.  As you can see, I didn’t quite get all the kinks worked out by the deadline for this month’s ratio rally

This month, Mrs. R from Honey from Flinty Rocks challenged us all to make popovers – and as Erin mentioned on twitter last week, this challenge is not for the faint of heart!  Whereas muffins are downright easy to make gluten free because they are dense and cakey, popovers depend on trapping air so that they can rise a LOT and be fluffy, which can be a bit difficult without that gluten in there to help keep the air locked in.

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Today marks another fantastic gluten free ratio rally day – this month, the theme is cookies hosted by the lovely Caroline of The G-Spot Revolution! Cookies, which have been my gluten free baking nemesis for years (along with puff pastry).  Be it complicated macarons or simple chocolate chip, I can never seem to get them right.  In fact, I have an entire category on this blog devoted to stories of my gluten free baking flops, and quite of few of them are taken up by cookie trials.

So when the theme was announced, a bit of anxiety overcame me – must I really face my long-standing baking foe?  What if I can’t figure out a working version in time?  Will cookies forever be my GF baking downfall?

But we all know where worry and negativity gets us in the kitchen.  Nowhere.  I think I need to come to terms with the fact that you are never going to see a chocolate chip cookie recipe on this blog, nor a beautiful macaron either.  If you are ok with that, then I am too.  Let’s just cut our losses and move on.

Thankfully, there is a whole wide world of cookies beyond macarons and “Tollhouse” style chocolate chip.  So I started looking to other cookie traditions to see what other types of options there were – afterall, if there were only macarons and chocolate chip cookies in the world, then we would all be sorely missing out on a number of delicious treats in life.  There are flourless cookies made from nut butters, bar cookies like these colorful seven layer venetians, and let us not forget the macaron’s totally unrelated but similarly named cousin, the macaroon, made with coconut and often dipped in chocolate, and much much easier to execute.

As it turns out, Switzerland loves cookies at Christmastime, and there are myriad lovely varieties that seem to turn up in stores and the markets about as soon as the roasted chestnut stands appear outside.  Basler brunsli, zimtsterne, mailänderli, chräbeli, spitzbuben, berner haselnusslebkuchen, berner honiglebkuchen, and tirggel to name a few (and I am sure I am missing others).

I was looking through the various Swiss cookies, and noticed that a few are actually mostly made of nut meals which seemed like they would be very amenable to making gluten free – and nothing complicated like the infamous macaronage!  So I decided this month, rather than continue to beat my head against the wall with failed cookie after another, I would try something completely new.  Different.  Let’s move on from chocolate chip cookies and macarons, shall we? :)

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Every time a major holiday event comes around, I am not afraid to experiment.  I hold on to the philosophy that if the dish doesn’t come out awesome, my family will still love me, and if it comes out great, everyone will be pleasantly surprised with a new taste to try.  So I never view making a dish for the first time as a risky endeavor, and often see the holidays as an exciting time to see what new traditions I might be able to create.

This Thanksgiving was no different, as I decided to use our family event to create a totally brand-new-to-me dessert, gluten free dumplings.  These dumplings were the feature recipe for Simone’s Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge (DHSPC) #3 – as is tradition with these challenges, the goal is to take an image chosen from the lovely Donna Hay magazine and recreate it.  This rendition of the challenge was a cover photo by the ever talented William Meppem, of apple and caramel dumplings – perfect for the Autumn season!   While I am usually all about making new foods, I have to admit after some of the other participants’ experiences I was a little hesitant!  It seems there were a few errors in this recipe, and so it had the extra challenge of figuring out how to make it work – no matter, I’m usually improvising as I go anyways, we’ll just see what happens and hopefully there is an edible result at the end.

The first time I participated in Simone’s challenge, I had a bit of a philosophical challenge with the task of recreating an image.  This time I decided to go for a more interpretation based approach, and as always had a few extra challenges to go with it

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Thanksgiving is tomorrow.

Many people think Thanksgiving is a day to overeat filled with too much turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce, but really, Thanksgiving is much more than that.

Growing up in New England, the Thanksgiving story is one I’ve heard told many times ever since I can remember.  The Plymouth settlers, i.e. those who sailed over from England on the Mayflower in 1620, suffered greatly their first Winter on the Massachusetts coast when nearly half didn’t survive to the Spring.  But that next year they managed to form relationships with the native peoples of the area, a Wampanoag tribe (an alliance that would last some 50 years), as well as being helped immensely by the famous Squanto who helped teach them about the crops that could be grown and how to manage the harsh New England climate.  That next Fall when the harvest came, the settlers held a large feast with their native friends to celebrate their alliance together – but the settlers, being a Christian people, also celebrated simply surviving and the good fortune that had befallen them through a harvest season and the help they received by giving thanks to God.  After that, days of thanksgiving became practiced in other New England settlements as well.  And while Lincoln may have been the initiator of the annual nation-wide feast day Americans partake in every November, even the early presidents had issued their own days of thanksgiving for everyone to express their thankfulness for the good things in life – including Washington, Adams, and Madison.

You see, Thanksgiving is about American a holiday as one can get, started from the very beginning.  And even in our modern day, while we may not all be celebrating a harvest, everyone has their own life story.  Those first settlers were survivors.  They were resourceful, and they understood very well the value of working together and bridging new relationships.  In our own lives, I’m sure we all have our own adventures to tell – and many of us are survivors in our own right.  Maybe I view this holiday a bit idealistically, but whether it be surviving a hardship or illness, or you just want to celebrate a friendship or time with family, we all have something to be thankful for, to share with each other.

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I love how when a cold front comes in, the lake becomes enveloped by its own foggy cloud, bathing the land in a softened dewy light.  And while it may be chilly out, there is an unexplained warmth by the light wrapping herself around us – and looking out to the lake is a wall of bright, making one wonder if something different might lie out there beyond the mist….

The wall of light silhouettes the world looking out to the lake, and for a split second one wonders if nature is just showing us the simpler bare version of ourselves, our souls…

In this light everything seems in harmony and at peace.  And while I lament not being able to see the mountains beyond, it is only for an instant, as now I can see the beauty within the lake itself, here on the shore.  For the mountains don’t define the lake.  The lake is her own being, fully of splendor all in her own right, shining from within herself.

And then I begin to wonder what defines me.  Am I too, often mistakenly defined by that which surrounds me? Or is there an inner quality that makes itself known to the world?  In a day where society desperately wants us to put ourselves in many ever increasingly confining boxes with everyone else, how do we even know who we are anymore?  What is it that defines us?

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It’s another been another adventurous month for the gluten free ratio rally!!!  This month we were challenged by Meg of GF Boulangerie to make doughnuts.

I don’t have great memories of doughnuts – for the most part my childhood experiences eating them were less than awesome because there was usually some dried out cake with too much sickly sweet glaze that gave me a headache.  So I was super excited when this event came around, because one I got a chance to learn how to make them and two, I could try to make a version that would better suit my tastes.

I didn’t expect doughnuts to be very difficult to convert to gluten free – after all most cake-like foods don’t really depend on the gluten, and in the case of doughnuts either a molded pan or hot oil will form the shape quite well – unlike my gluten free chocolate chip cookies which always seem to run off the edge of the baking sheet down onto the bottom of the oven.  Given my track record with absolutely covering every surface of a kitchen in oil when I attempt to deep fry anything (but man were those chestnut pumpkin fritters good!) , I decided to go the baked route.

And then we got the most gorgeous raspberries that weekend in the market, and well, they found their way in too

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Is this a crumble or crisp? Ha I’m still not entirely sure myself what I have made, and the definitions do not seem to be mutually exclusive.  We had an abundance of beautiful Summer fruit in the house (and by house I mean tiny two-room apartment, but for some reason it’s a habit of mine to call every home “house”, I’m not sure why) and wanted to make a dessert that celebrated all of the gorgeous variety – plums, peaches, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, currants – that Summer has to offer.

But this dish has a bit of an identity crisis.  It seems that American and Euro definitions of crumble are not the same, so depending on who you ask this will either be a crumble or a crisp.  Given that I’m living in Europe at the moment, I decided to go with crumble

What made this entire dessert possible for me was that I got to meet up with a fellow blogging friend, Valerie from City | Life | Eats earlier this Spring, who was so sweet and a delight to be around – we had such a fun afternoon together!  And she was so generous, bringing us a bag of certified gluten free oats and some chocolate chips, a real treat for us as I have yet to be able to find them during my year and a half living en Suisse.

And  yes, there were mountains behind us, I promise!

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Now that Summer is in full swing, how do you beat the heat??

When it comes to food, I stay as far away from my oven and stove as possible – lots of salads, fresh fruit, anything we can do to not have to cook.  You know it’s funny, I never grew up with air conditioning.  But we lived in what essentially is a forest, and opened up windows on all sides of the house turning on the ceiling fans, and even on 90 degree days it wasn’t fun but it was bearable.  Then, in college and grad school I found air conditioning and became hopelessly spoiled.  When it was 100+ outside, I loved that it was only 80 inside.  What a magical device the A/C is!

And then we moved to Switzerland.  Where we live, there is none of la climatisation to be had.  We have a little fan, and with windows only on one side of our apartment, absolutely no air flow.  So on days like the past few we’ve been having, it gets warm.  The chocolate in our cupboards turns to a pile of goo.  We turn to a pile of goo.  The lake provides a great source of moisture for humidity, and the haze sets in while we all patiently (or not so much) wait for that predicted rain to fall.

Over the weekend, we decide to escape the heat of these lower elevations, and head into the Bernese Oberland in the village of Lenk.  From there a post-bus leads us to the foot of the gorgeous Simmenfälle waterfalls, and we decide a hike in the mists of the falls and the shade of the trees at about 1200m elevation seems like a great plan.  We start at the base of the falls:

Eventually the path turns into a small bridge which crosses over a loud rushing part of the chilled spring-fed water, and we stand in the sunshine letting the cool mist fall on our skin – ah refreshing!!

Now that, my friends, is the perfect way to deal with a crazy hot day

But what should we eat to stay cool????

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