I bought the Science Teacher Culinary Artistry for Christmas one year. Towards the end, the chefs featured in the book rattle off their desert island lists, the ten or so ingredients they would choose to spend eternity with if stranded on a desert island. I seem to remember that olive oil recurs the most.Enter the desert island cookbook list.With o...

Better (way) late than never.For a holiday that's infamous for a week without bread, Passover sure involves a heck of a lot of food that contains matzo. Everyone has an odd favorite food to eat while being afflicted--matzo brie, for instance--and there are whole cookbooks devoted to soaking, pounding, and grinding matzo into food that's meant to be...

I probably used millet for the first time in preschool. Remember those pinecone bird feeders smeared with peanut butter and rolled in birdseed? I've never been particularly interested in birds or the composition of their food, which means I didn't actually learn that millet is a key component of ordinary birdseed until I was an adult.My first encou...

The Little Potamus sucking down a pint of smoothie.I've never thought of a smoothie as a meal in itself. A great addition to a weekend breakfast maybe. A good use for last-summer's berries. A reminder that it won't snow forever. But smoothies never seem to have the staying power or the chew factor that I usually deem necessary in my breakfasts. Pro...

When I saw Michelle Obama on the cover of O Magazine with Oprah, I winced then yanked open the magazine to the interview. Like a lot of people, I think I get my American royalty fix from reading about their lives but I also hate feeling like this incredibly professionally experienced woman is reduced to a great pair of arms, nice clothes, and sound...

Physically but not virtually. The Science Teacher and I just accepted teaching positions in Tbilisi, Georgia, for the next two years. Wow.There's a back story here that needs to be told. Once upon a time there lived an undiagnosed celiac girl who loved all things Slavic. She discovered Russian in high school, majored in Russian in college, spent a ...

The snow is piled up to the window sill after the storm last week (and the Science Teacher still didn't have a snow day!) and the forecast calls for the temperature to sink to 10 or 20 below night. We're hunkered down with cups of coffee, Car Talk, and the blessed quiet of the Little Pottamus's nap time. What better time to bake a loaf of bread?Yea...

I've wanted to participate in one of the Adopt-a-Gluten-Free-Blogger events--conceived of and sponsored by Book of Yum--for quite a while. It's such a great idea--giving us bloggers an opportunity to interact with each other on a somewhat deeper level than the normal reading and commenting. When I saw this month's theme (Healthy Gluten-Free Recipes...

I got pregnant a month after going gluten free. All I wanted was to wake up to starchy comfort food, but being new to the world of GF buying and cooking, I had a hard time finding anything I wanted to eat. I wrote an entire post a while back on gluten-free breakfast ideas hoping to help newbies out. I have found quite a few hot breakfast cereals th...

After a long absence, I'm back to the Gluten-Free in the Greens. Thanks to those of you who wrote asking if all was well. Your emails made me feel part of a community, not just a lone voice talking to the void. My last post at the end of June came just as we embarked on a lonnnggg road trip to see family and friends (a great reason that I wasn't po...

I'm participating in the "Go Ahead Honey, It's Gluten-Free" Blogging Event for the first time! The theme is "One-Pot Meals." Maybe soon I'll actually get around to hosting an event...In any case, tamale pie is my one-pot entry. It's a natural one-pot meal. You get your veggies, protein, and grain all in one whack. It's also versatile: I've made thi...

I grew up pretty much unaware of tofu as food that I might actually want to eat. Most of the meals I remember centered around meat: chicken casserole, hamburger goulash, baked flounder, etc. Not terribly unusual for someone whose grandparents grew up on farms.I first encountered tofu on a regular basis in college, where firm tofu was ubiquitous on...

I'm back after a two-week hiatus! I've just started a new part-time job and am still juggling my old part-time job (as well as my full-time+ job as a stay-at-home mommy). All of that has led to not as much cooking experimentation. We've been eating some old favorites and emptying out the freezer--after all, it's almost blueberry season here, and I ...

Our menu this week comes mostly from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. Recently, he's inspired me to cook my own beans instead of buying canned. I never realized how easy it is. With a 12-hr soak, the beans are usually cooked in less than an hour. I plan to use them in a few meals and freeze the rest. For the price of two cans of P...

The last time I was in Washington, D.C., I discovered Teaism and their gluten-free menu. We just returned from another visit--and, oh, were the azaleas gorgeous! No Teaism this time, as delicious as it was during my last trip. I was hunting for new gluten-free territory, and I found it at Java Green, a downtown cafe on 19th, near K St.After a morni...

Passover's almost over, and I'm surrounded by people who are sighing over their matzo and guiltily buying non-kosher-for-Passover food because they're starving and can't find any other food. I could feel bitter. After all, when Passover ends, I don't get to return to wheat, barley, oats, rye, and spelt. Instead, I listen with bemused detachment and...

I've been eating yogurt for years, but until I lived in Russia, my yogurt consumption was limited to Dannon and Yoplait. I hated dumping Dannon Fruit on the Bottom yogurt into a bowl and watching it hold its cup-like, gelatinous shape. Reminded me of cranberry sauce from the can (which, I admit, I love, but the can ridges are a bit scary).In Russia...

The Gluten-Free Menu Swap is being hosted this week by Gluten-Free Sox, so head on over for some great menu-planning ideas...Passover starts next Sunday. In our household, we celebrate Shabbat on Fridays and major holidays, but, not being Jewish, I don't fast on Yom Kippur and don't purge my house of chametz (which does actually include some things...

In How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Mark Bittman suggests that one strategy to preparing vegetarian meals--that might involve many "side" dishes rather than one main dish with a few sides--is to prepare a big pot of beans and/or grains early in the week and find ways to incorporate them differently into several meals. This week I'm trying this me...

I've always loved pizza. Pizza for sleepovers. Pizza for end-of-season elementary school basketball team parties. Pizza nearly every night in college (remember someone knocking on doors around 11 or 12 trying to get together enough people to buy pizza at $1/slice?).I grew up on Pizza Hut and Little Caesar's, usually on Friday nights. Those days, af...

Thanks, food bloggers, for the fabulous food we made last week! I didn't post my menus so I'll let you know how they turned out:The Science Teacher made Ginger-Lemon Girl's Cheddar Baked Hominy (see photo above). We added 10 oz. of spinach and some cottage cheese and used Cabot 50% Reduced Fat Cheddar to great success!I cooked up Gluten-Free Bay's ...

Kimchi, a fermented cabbage dish, is a staple of Korean cooking. "Staple" might be a bit of a misnomer since when I think of staples, I think of eggs, cheese, raisins, and oatmeal--all ingredients that show up fairly regularly in the foods I eat each week. But I don't include all of them in most meals, which seems to be how kimchi figures into the ...

I love to travel. After I finished my MA in English a few years ago, the Science Teacher and I took off for 5 weeks of sightseeing, training, swimming, and eating through the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, and Bosnia. We had a blast. One of our more amusing post-trip jokes came when we realized that in practically every picture I'm toting a litt...

It's taken me longer to get back in the real-life groove than I thought. We had a great off-line, trip to South Carolina: no computers, no iPods, no blogs (for me), no video games (for the Science Teacher). We played the Settlers of Catan Card Game, and the Science Teacher cooked up lots of gluten-free seafood dishes (think: paella and pasta arrabb...