Internets to the rescue! Inspired by this recipe from the NYTimes and this one from A Sweet Life, I tossed some eggplant cubes and zucchini spears in olive oil, salt, and lemon juice and roasted them at 350 until just tender. Toss again with more olive oil, chopped mint, and capers, and stick ‘em back in the fridge overnight to chill. This morning I added some ground cherries because I am obsessed.

The even bigger winner, though, was a cold zucchini yogurt soup inspired by this recipe from Tobias Cooks! Having no onion, I fried a bit of garlic (ok, a lot of garlic) in olive oil, then added zucchini chunks. Having no potato, I used a parsnip instead for the starchy thickener. Add water to the whole thing (and some white wine, to make up for the fact that I also had no veggie stock) and boil until the veggies are blendable.

I toasted a handful of almonds and ground them in the food processor. Then I added the boiled veggies and pureed, using a little almond milk because it looked too thick. Finally, some salt and a couple of big spoonfuls of Greek yogurt, and back to the fridge for chilling. YUM. It’s definitely parsnippy, so I’d like to try it with the more retiring potato flavor next time. I bet it would also be good with mint, but as I have enough mint in my yard to put a cup of it in everything I cook until winter, I decided some self-control was in order.

Soup, salad, gluten-free Cracklebred crackers, leftover blueberry hazelnut bars made with gluten-free flour, my hilariously excellent picnic backpack (thanks, Redbeard’s mom!), a truly excellent production of Othello and some smooches… a perfect picnic.

One of my Summer Projects is to get a handle on vegan and/or gluten-free baking. (Yes, I realize that summer in Boston is perhaps not the ideal time to turn on the oven ever, let alone on a weekly basis, but this is when I have free time. Insert inappropriate joke about naked cooking here.)

Anyway, this afternoon I made a half-batch of the Almond Pie Crust from Jennifer Katzinger’s Flying Apron’s Gluten-Free & Vegan Baking Book. The fat she calls for is palm oil. I raised my eyebrows at this, because I know palm oil — I didn’t eat a damn thing cooked without the stuff for the entire month I spent in Ghana. It’s tasty, but the flavor is distinctive and overpowering, and it turns everything bright orange.

But fortunately I brought a bottle home with me from Ghana (how many people can say they’re cooking with local palm oil in New England?), and I was determined to resist my usual recipe-flouting instincts, because how else will I learn?

The resulting “dough,” made with mostly brown rice flour and some almond meal, was super-soft, more like batter. I added some sorghum flour (I’d run out of rice flour) until it was workable. I pressed it into two mini-tart tins and then decided to freeze them for 15 minutes while the oven preheated even though the recipe didn’t call for it. I was worried they’d melt before cooking if I put them in the oven as soft as they were, but palm oil firms up very quickly in the cold.

I pre-baked the empty shells on the lowest rack at 375 until the tops were fairly dark, then added strawberry pieces, which I’d mixed with sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, and cornstarch. Back in the oven for another 10 minutes or so.

The verdict: The texture is pleasantly light and crumbly, though sturdy enough to hold its shape coming out of the tart mold. It wouldn’t roll, so it wouldn’t do for a double-crust pie or galette. The tartness of the strawberries sort of works with the earthy sweetness of the palm oil. But the whole thing sure is bright orange and palm-y! Next time I’ll try it with Earth Balance fake butter. Maybe the dough would even be rollable if I used a hardened fat rather than a liquid oil.

3/4 c vanilla soy milk
4 egg whites (You can get a carton of just the whites! It’s brilliant!)
juice from 1/2 lemon
1 qt. home-canned peach slices in light syrup
2 c white flour
1 1/2 baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Glaze: juice of other 1/2 lemon
2 heaping T sugar

Preheat oven to 350.

Whisk together the first 3 ingredients. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Dump the wet ingredients into the dry, then add the can of peaches, juice and all. Stir quickly, just until it’s all combined.

Pour into a 9×5 loaf pan greased with a little Earth Balance fake butter. Bake for an hour, or until it’s done (toothpick in the middle comes out clean, you know the drill).

Whisk glaze ingredients together. When bread comes out of the oven, poke the top all over so the glaze will soak in, then pour it over the bread. (This would be better if I’d had more than one lemon in the house; oh well.)

It did rise (…ish), but it came out with a custardy, heavy texture; no crumb at all — maybe ’cause there’s almost no fat? I brought it to a last-day-of-school party for my 7th grade advisees, and it was generally deemed “weird” but with a good peachy flavor.

The winners:

We are huge fans of Pamela’s gluten-free mixes. Her pancakes are a breakfast staple, and I actually prefer them to regular pancakes at this point. Mix up some pancake batter with egg whites only, cook it thin on a griddle with oil instead of butter, and voila: crepes! We filled them with a stir-fry of spice-rubbed tofu, green beans, red peppers, and a lot of garlic.

Yesterday morning we used the same pancake mix to make muffins: again with the egg whites (which might be better for some gluten-free baking, actually, as heaviness can be a problem with non-wheat flours and losing the yolk lightens things up), and some stewed rhubarb for the liquid. Good stuff! We rounded out breakfast with a tofu scramble, including asparagus and roasted red peppers (and S’s suggestion of turmeric to make it look more like eggs, which I didn’t think mattered to me but turned out to be oddly comforting).

Last night’s dinner was corn pasta with pesto, and Stuff From My Freezer Gazpacho. Tonight’s was white rice with pesto, asparagus, roasted peppers, and chard. Are we sensing a theme?

The losers:

Today was not a good day for baking.

This morning’s “biscuits” (made from a non-Pamela’s GF bread roll mix, with baking powder instead of yeast as the rising agent) were weird little grey spongy patties that tasted like baked matzoh balls.

And tonight’s lemon “cake” (an assortment of flours, plus silken tofu) had yummy batter, but baked into a dense, slightly gritty bar with the flavor of a lemon Girl Scout cookie. It was improved by the addition of a ton of rum-based simple syrup and some strawberries from my garden, but then, what wouldn’t be? (A, J, and Roommate S were kind enough to profess enjoyment.)

I’m trying to see the whole grand Dietary Restriction Experiment as like writing a villanelle — the restriction of the form leads to greater creativity. Or if I’m in a less optimistic mood, soy pesto pesto soy, repeat ad nauseum. Is the glass half-full or -empty? Either way, it likely contains tofu.

1.5 c flour mix*
3 T sweet rice flour
2 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
9 T cold butter, cut into cubes
1 large egg
1.5 T lemon juice

Make sure food processor is really, actually clean of wheat flour, as opposed to just masquerading as clean. Mix dry ingredients in the food processor, then add butter and process until it’s the size of small peas (which is what you always do with pie crust). Be weirded out by egg in pie crust, but shrug and add egg and lemon juice and pulse until the dough starts to come together.

See that the dough is failing to come together as advertised, and start adding ice water until it can actually be pressed together into a ball. Make two balls, put them in tupperware, and chill in the fridge until it’s pie-making time.

Preheat oven to 400. Sprinkle rice flour on a cutting board. Attempt to roll out the dough. Have it crumble all over the place. Give up and press it into the pie plate with your fingers. Dump in filling — in this case, apple slices mixed with brown sugar, molasses, and cinnamon. (These were the last of the fall apples. Turns out Honeycrisps really do last forever in the fridge! Thanks, Tommy Nicewicz!)

Notice that S, who is more patient than you are, has managed to work the rest of the dough enough that it actually rolls. Yay! Unfortunately, there isn’t enough of it to cover the whole pie. Break his nicely rolled dough into ice-floe-like chunks all over the apples. Bake the pie for 15 minutes on the bottom rack, turn the heat down to 375, then bake for another half hour on the middle rack.

Wheat-eater and non-wheat-eater agreed: it tasted like pie! Or, you know, it tasted like molasses-y apples surrounded by crunchy butter, which is more or less what I want from my pie.

*Yes, I used a commercial flour blend, in this case Beth’s All-Purpose Baking Flour from Gluten-Free Pantry, because that’s what Harvest sold me. Using a mix offends my from-scratch sensibilities, though, so next time I will track down enough damn flours and mysterious powders whose names end in “gum” to make my own.

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