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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Apricot Glazed Pork Chops by Amy of Sing for your Supper (used with permission)

Whenever anyone asks me for advice about going gluten free, the first thing I tell them is to look for naturally gluten free dishes that don’t require any alterations at all. You know, the ones that don’t have lists of a dozen different flours in them and other ingredients that the average person might consider a little “strange” if they are not the most familiar with gluten free cooking and baking. I also like to stress cooking naturally gluten free foods because I think it’s important to recognize that gluten free doesn’t have to be limiting. Yes, making pizza from scratch and baking cupcakes might get a bit trickier, but it’s important not to stress about “losing” one’s favorite foods in exactly the way they are remembered. And there are just so many wonderfully flavorful and exciting foods that already are totally gluten free. While I get just as excited as the next person about a successful recipe conversion to GF, I think we should also be excited about those dishes that require no converting at all.

So this year, I’ve been thinking about how many great naturally gluten free recipes get put out into the blogosphere all the time, and how they should be celebrated. Starting this month, I am keeping a running list of naturally gluten free recipes I come across that I think would be great to recognize – they may come from a gluten free blog, they may not – because many people already eat and make naturally gluten free dishes. I think this will be a new monthly feature here on Jenn Cuisine, to highlight some great looking naturally gluten free dishes.

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Cauliflower – a vegetable I grew up with, and wasn’t often thrilled about. Mom you know I love you, but I do not love the way you like most of your veggies cooked.

However, on my quest to enjoy more fresh produce this Winter season, I’m giving it a try again.  Cauliflower seems to abound in the markets right now and as fortune would have it, my friend Simone chose a lovely cauliflower recipe for this month’s Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge (DHSPC).  I enjoy participating in these challenges because they always make me reach and do something new that I might not otherwise try.  In this case, that meant not only the photo but also the recipe featuring heads of cauliflower! In fact, in the near four years that this blog has been on the interwebs, today marks the first time cauliflower has ever even appeared on Jenn Cuisine, let alone received a spotlight feature.

This month, Simone challenged us all to make a creamy cauliflower soup, which appeared in Donna Hay issue #51 (June/July 2010) and was photographed by Ben Dearnley. The soup was wonderful – cauliflower and potatoes cooked together in broth and milk and puréed until velvety smooth.  A perfect Winter bowl, better than plain boiled veggies. And even naturally gluten free!

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Croutons are one of those things that my gluten free husband usually has to deny himself.  And inevitably croutons cause him some of the most frequent problems for eating out, as they invariably end up on soups or salads when someone doesn’t understand that croutons are made of bread and thus fall into the “no bread, pasta, or flour because I am allergic to gluten” request that my husband is so well experienced in asking.  This also means asking the server “yes can you please give me another salad prepped in a clean bowl” and “no, it is not ok to just remove the croutons”.

This has always been more of a problem for my husband in the U.S. than in Europe it seems – in Europe, while there may not be many gluten free options depending on the country and their culture of cuisine, it seems everyone we’ve come across knows what gluten means.  In the U.S., explaining that he actually has a problem with gluten, isn’t doing it just for a diet, and yes gluten does include anything made with bread, pasta and flour (including to check the sauces) seems to be a more common occurrence.  It’s almost so laborious to make sure everything is ok dining out that it’s not even worth it.

And on top of that, in the U.S. gluten free is becoming so popular for reasons other than celiac or sensitivities (some even use the word “fad”, despite the fact that for many like my husband staying gluten free will be a necessity for the rest of their lives), that the seriousness of the issue often becomes diluted – it’s been more than once that my husband has dutifully explained his intolerance to gluten at a restaurant and his requests have been ignored or forgotten.  Sometimes I wonder if some restaurants think people use “gluten free” as an excuse to cover up being a picky eater, and thus don’t know to treat an allergy request as an actual health issue could affect the safety of their customers (really, should a restaurant be questioning the motives of the diner?).

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I have hit the ground running with my expedition into the land of root vegetables.  This week I have eaten celery root, parsnips, jerusalem artichokes, and there are even carrots sitting in my fridge.   My first foray of the year into root vegetables was to try them simply – I wanted to taste their flavor, with mere accents to the palate rather than covering them up by drowning them in butter or cheese (as tempting and always tasty as that may be).

I believe in understanding the true flavor of an ingredient before getting too inventive with it – after all, what is the point of a food that cannot be tasted?  How do you ever really know if you will like it or not if you cannot identify its inherent flavor?  I think roasting vegetables is a great way to try new ones, because it’s an easy cooking process and yet still preserves the texture unlike boiling something forever. I grew up with enough over-boiled veggies (well, at least I consider them over-boiled) in my day to know that boiling is not my preferred method for cooking vegetables – well except maybe beans.  So when I have no idea what I am going to do with something, oven-roasting is usually the route I tend to go.

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Au revoir 2011!

This has certainly been an eventful year for us – my sister got married, had a gorgeous baby boy, and we are going to have a baby of our own next year! As I sit writing this currently sipping tea in Vienna fantasizing about what pastry delicacy I am going to enjoy today (or maybe just a steaming luscious hot chocolate  and whipped cream?), it’s pretty cool to reflect on how fortunate I have been in 2011.   I’ve been able to travel a bit this year and see some amazing sights – Germany, Spain, France,  Italy and the Alps of Switzerland!

I’ve met some amazing people this year, some of whom I’ve only recently gotten the pleasure to know, and others who I feel like I’ve known forever and finally was able to meet in person.  The Gluten Free Ratio Rally started this year as well, and each month continues to inspire me at the amazing talent in the blogosphere as well as the potential for fabulous gluten free recipes.  I’ve become ever more passionate with photography, and hope that continues to grow as well.

This blog has seen some changes, some evolution, and also some new features.  I have kept a running list of Food Blog Conferences and Events for well over a year now- which I keep as consistently updated as I can.  If you have information of conferences, tutorials, workshops, etc. related to food and/or food photography, please let me know to help keep this as complete and up to date as possible.  I also have a static page linking to various Photography Tips and Tutorials that I have come across on the interwebs, as well as my own blogging series which I have titled Amateur’s Food Photography – for tips and tricks that I, the amateur, have learned over my time ever fascinated with food photography.

But enough about ramblings of my life and blog this  year, let’s look at some food! Below are my eleven favorite posts and recipes from 2011, in no particular order – Hope you have also had a great year, and wish you all the best for 2012

Mountaintop Rösti with Ham, Potatoes and Fried Egg

This naturally gluten free dish was inspired by our trip to Zermatt to see the Matthorn, where we sat at 3100m elevation enjoying rösti, one of the most popular foods in Switzerland – comfort food at its finest, best after hiking or skiing outside on a chilly breezy day.

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Over the past couple of weeks I have been making these savory muffins.  I could eat them for breakfast.  Or with dinner.  Heck even for dinner!  They are surprisingly simple to make, and I think are sure to impress.  I knew I would be excited about them the minute that Simone posted this recipe for this month’s Donna Hay Styling and Photography Challenge.

As always, the first obstacle is converting the recipe to gluten free – but being corn meal based, I knew this would not be difficult.  I have made gluten free cornbread quite successfully on several occasions, and did not see any reason why these would pose any other difficulty.  Since all of the recipes Simone has posted so far list the ingredients by weight, this makes the gluten free home cook’s life much easier to come up with a substitution – as I have been learning over the past year from participating in the gluten free ratio rally, often merely replacing the same weight of conventional flour with gluten free ingredients seems to work rather well.  In this case, for the flour component, I used 2/3 rice flour and 1/3 potato starch – I kept the substitutions simple here rather than using a lot of varying ingredients because I knew gluten wasn’t really important in this recipe – it often isn’t in muffins and cakes – and so I didn’t have to worry about replicating all the culinary effects of gluten.

Next came one of my favorite parts of this blog, creating the photo!

I studied the original photo to first see what type of light was used and where it was coming from.  To me light is always the most important feature so it’s what I try to figure out first, before anything else.  The more I take the time to analyze food photos, the better I am able to glean what type of behind the scenes setup might have been used to create it.  In this case, I look at where the shadows and bright spots are – I see a shadow around the lower left of each of the plates, and notice the sheen on the cakes also indicating that the light is coming from slightly back and right, around 2:00.  The pepper shaker also gives clues – sometimes it’s easier to look at the shiniest (i.e. most reflective) element in a photo, because it will often giveaway highlights and shadows more obviously.  To recreate the image though, I would need a background that was large and light colored – one that wouldn’t take away light and that wouldn’t distract from the food – I have no such background, so decided to manipulate the light slightly differently, by putting fabric over my windows and having the light coming from behind, in a way to replicate that background but still let a lot of light in.  By angling the table 45 degrees to the window, I was still able to get a nice sheen on the cakes.  A folded white foam core helped soften shadows on the left, and an aluminum tray that I held up reflected more light to the right side.

As for the styling/composition, I kept things fairly similar.  A stack of muffins front and center (well, lower center), a plate in the background, a wine glass, and something off to the back left.  Lacking pretty white plates like the original photo, I opted for metals ones that I had instead, and lined them with white napkins so that they would still be nice and light.  The wine in the original was rather orange and honeyed looking, but not wanting to open up our fancy dessert wines from Piemonte just for a photo (which with a baby on the way I wouldn’t be able to enjoy anyways), I opted for not worrying so much about the color – in fact I lightly brewed green tea and poured that in the wine glass! Since the feature is the muffins, and this is not an ad in any way, I felt I only needed to bring about the feeling of wine and the fact that it was really tea was not so important. And lacking a silver pepper shaker, went with this pewter piece which I could envision being used to maybe spread honey or something on the muffins, and also omitted the napkin behind it.  I did add food to the back plate – it just seemed empty without something there.

When it came to the treatment of the photo, I didn’t try to replicate the original at all, but went with what I felt I liked for the image I had created.  I always like a bit of color and contrast, and I think that shows in most of the images I create.  However what I have started playing with recently is white balance.

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One of my favorite things about writing here is getting the chance to explore.  Blogging and interacting with the community involved with food has led me into so many wonderful directions – I’ve learned a lot about cooking, tried new recipes, flavor combinations, experimented in the kitchen, and made some awesome friends.  And just about every culinary milestone I’ve shared with you, in hopes that my trials and failures as well as my successes can be helpful to others.

Usually, I am overly enthusiastic, anxiously waiting to push that publish button and share about my latest experiences.  But lately, I have found myself at a loss for words.  Why? Well for one, crazy awesomeness is happening in life that has kept me on my toes a bit the last few months, but also, I have been searching for my voice – what is it exactly that I want to say here?  Why am I writing this? Am I simply just sharing what I made for dinner and hoping you all enjoy it? Well, I do hope you all enjoy what I cook – but what is my purpose of writing in this space to you??

I found myself searching through my favorite sites to see what magic inspires me so – I love a variety of food blogs out there, and realized it’s not about the writing quality, snappy design, or the photos or even the recipes.  It’s that my favorites have something to say.

Something to say beyond “Hey, I made this, I liked it and ate it”.

Something to say beyond “Enter my giveaway now (and like me on facebook, twitter, etc. etc.) !!!”

Something to say beyond “I got this product for free so now I’m writing about it in hopes that you’ll buy it and the company looks favorably upon me”

While each of those things may indeed be very cool in their own right, if not surrounded by any substance then they aren’t really that exciting, now are they? Would you want to read some variation of those three phrases over and over post after post? I don’t.

I prefer something stimulating, that sparks conversation – that makes me think about food or myself or my life in some way I didn’t before.  Whether that be through words, photos, or recipes (I do not think the medium so important), it’s that voice that shines through – the personality, as if I can imagine them in the room communicating their story to me right then and there.

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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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It’s amazing how I can go visit my family for two weeks and come back to find that there has been an abrupt yet complete transformation into Winter.  No snow here yet, but that nip is in the air and the wind blows with a chill that makes anyone want to bundle themselves up in a hat and scarf, maybe thinking twice before venturing outside.

Most would consider this the official season for warm Wintery comfort foods – baked potatoes, fondue, stews, and the like.  However while it may not be so pleasant outside, inside our apartment is a sweltering sauna – we have yet to ever activate our heating, and most of the time often crack a window to help relieve us a bit – maybe our neighbors love the warmth too much and so their heat finds its way to our place? I don’t know – but when home, the last thing I want to eat is a thick hot meal.

So instead I have been stocking up our kitchen with my favorite fruits – mangoes, clementines, pomegranates, avocados, whatever looks refreshing when we go shopping.  Dinners have been salads – something light to enjoy the fun tropical flavors that come out in Winter, that aren’t going to heat up our apartment so much (well more than it already is).  On top of that, most salads that my husband and I make are naturally gluten free – that is, we don’t add in croutons or complicated dressings that require substitutions, we simply prepare fresh ingredients and dress with simple dressings for something easy that doesn’t require much thought.

This mango avocado salad is one such salad, and after making it more than a few times in the past month alone we have yet to tire of it:)

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