Home life

Since my last entry I left the country twice, returning last Sunday from my last trip. My daughter has been ill since then, and though she went to school on Monday (she came home for lunch for mom’s comfort food and a rest), she had to stay home on Tuesday, Wednesday, and today, Thursday (we saw her pediatrician yesterday and it’s all under control). So both of us have been home pretty much all week, and other than reading, playing, drawing and watching videos, what else is there to do at home but cook?
I thus resumed my gluten-free (GF) baking experiments, starting with a raspberry-yogurt cake courtesy of France’s darling Estelle Lefebure via Elle magazine. I would like to say that Elle a Table is a respectable food magazine in France, though many a French chef might beg to differ. It could be on par with Gourmet (R.I.P.) or Bon Appetit magazines. As for Estelle, she was a famous model in the late eighties and nineties, and was married to French heartthrob David Halliday, son of Johnny Halliday (if you’ve never heard of any of these people, never mind). The point is, France is just waking up to the concept of GF, so I pounce on any recipe that falls under this category, regardless of the author!
Estelle’s cake turned out too sweet, a bit gummy and not raspberry-ish enough. Of course I made few alterations, as any self-proclaimed cook would (don’t give me a sarcastic look, mom!), such as replacing the fructose (um I ran out of that…) with agave syrup (too sweet and caramelly in the end) and adding Xantham Gum (which was not called for). Xantham gum (XG) is used in anglo GF baking in order to replicate the texture of a finished product containing gluten. I have no idea exactly what it is or how it works (Wikipedia proved a bit too technical for me and what with my medium-to-short attention span I lost interest). It’s like cream of tartar. The Americans put it in their egg whites, and the French don’t…. so the cake was underwhelming, but with my daughter unable to keep anything down, I still ate it all up, sugar and XG and all, down to the last crumb.
Unsatisfied and unfettered by that venture, the following day, I dug deep into my kitchen closets and found coconut and chocolate. I had no choice but to bake another cake! This time I scoured the internet for a recipe, returning to the same French GF blogs, found a somewhat convincing formula, added extra GF flour and XG, and ta-da! Overcooked the damn thing.
After my two attempts I had to be realistic – the GF flour I bought sucked (it couldn’t have been about me!). How could so many yummy ingredients and so much TLC turn out so … blah? There was only one thing left for me to do, buy chestnut flour. Having ingested my quota of sugar for the rest of the month, I decided to make a “cake corse,” or Corsican bread (as in banana or zucchini bread, but savory, meaning to say soft and airy and not dense and tough as country bread or sourdough). This was my last chef’s recipe, and even he admitted that I surpassed him in making my version (I think it was the cooking time). It has brousse, a Corsican cheese resembling a light ricotta, figatelli (a Corsican sausage which I conveniently replace with bacon) and of course the chesnut flour. I have never been to Corsica but I imagine it full of beaches and hills and wild pigs and chestnut trees. Now this flour costs a prohibitive 15 euros per kilo, which is about $11 per pound at today’s exchange rate. If find this obscenely expensive, especially since as a kid I used to pick chestnuts off the ground in the forest near Paris for free, but hey, what’s a hungry GF cook to do. So here we are, day 4 at home, getting ready for greatness….