Two Pies and a VFD

I made an Easy Vegan Pecan Pie for our Christmas dessert, and it was a big hit with our guests and us. The recipe, from the cleverly named website It Doesn’t Taste Like Chicken, was perfect: pecans, bourbon, vanilla, a hint of cinnamon, and loads of sugar, including brown sugar.

I deviated from the recipe only to use agave in place of the corn syrup (a substitution endorsed by the recipe’s creator, Sam Turnbull) and arrowroot in place of the corn starch, so I could avoid consuming products of the corn industrial complex.

For New Year’s, I made a Cranberry Chiffon Pie. It was somewhat disappointing but not at all bad.

My main gripe was that I could taste the pomegranate juice used in the recipe almost as much as the fresh cranberries, with the result that the pie tasted more like a Cranberry-Pomegranate Chiffon Pie to me. Maybe the recipe creator tried cranberry juice, but the result was too tart?

I had planned to buy or make some vegan whipped cream to decorate the top, but the vegan whipping creams I found contained either oats or fava beans, neither of which would be good for Tony.

I decided not to make the decorative Sugared Cranberries because I didn’t feel like buying sanding sugar for this one recipe. As it turned out, I needed to make an extra run to Sprouts to buy more cranberries because I burned the cranberry-pomegranate jam the first time I attempted it because I was trying to get ahead on other steps in the process at the same time and wasn’t paying enough attention to my jam.

I once again, for both pies, used a Wholly Wholesome gluten-free and dairy-free crust. Someday, I’ll try making my own GF and DF pie crust, but Tony and I are both pleased with this store-bought kind. And making the filling was a good deal of work in and of itself: First, you make that jam—the recipe actually calls it a “loose jam”—out of the cranberries, pomegranate juice, and sugar. Then you dissolve gelatin in water and cook egg yolks combined with milk (I used cashew milk), salt, and more sugar. Then you add the gelatin to the egg yolk mixture and then that combined mixture to the cranberry-pomegranate jam.

The most time-consuming part was making meringue, which I chose to do by hand for some reason. I’m pretty certain my meringue got to the called-for stiff peaks stage.

Finally, you add the meringue to the cranberry–egg yolk–gelatin mixture, put the completed filling in the prebaked pie shell, and chill the pie until the filling is set.

I made the pie on Dec. 29, the Sunday before New Year’s, because I had plenty of time that day and didn’t know whether I would the next two days. We polished it off on New Year’s Eve.

On New Year’s Day, I made my second attempt at Eggnog Vegan Frozen Dessert. I was pleased with the final result but dissatisfied with the texture of the base after it was cooked and after it was chilled, so it’s still not ready for my cookbook.

This time, I tried incorporating two vegan eggs (instead of just one) into the custard base, and I tried cooking the base for longer—10 minutes—to try to improve the level of incorporation. The longer cooking time didn’t seem to make much difference; there was an awful lot of leftover vegan egg when I strained the base.

There were also little clumps of offputting, slimy egginess in the base after it was made and after it was chilled, and this base didn’t take on a pudding-like texture in the fridge like my bases always do when I let them chill overnight.

However, after I processed the base in my ice cream maker and froze the finished VFD solid, the texture was good. The VFD had little specks of egg throughout, but they didn’t bother me any.

The taste was perfect—a melding of bourbon (1 tablespoon), vanilla (2 teaspoons), and freshly grated nutmeg (1 heaping teaspoon). I used bourbon instead of rum this time because I already had a small bottle on hand that I’d bought for the Easy Vegan Pecan Pie.

My next attempt, which I may or may not blog about, will probably utilize only one vegan egg, and I will cook the custard for more than 10 minutes, hoping the smaller amount of vegan egg and longer cooking time will finally do the trick. I’m looking for a better texture at the in between stages of the VFD base, because I don’t think people will trust the recipe when they start to see unpleasant eggy blobs in their base.

A Handful of Errors in a Special Martha Stewart Holidays Magazine

There must have been some last-minute changes that didn’t get properly reviewed. Or some pages were rushed through production. Something had to have gone seriously wrong, because there were several mistakes in the Martha Stewart Holidays publication I bought at Whole Foods and anything with Martha’s name on it is typically scrupulously edited.

Let’s start with the cover, which is the scene of something that may not be a mistake but isn’t usually done. I would say “In The” should have a lowercase i and t, because short prepositions and articles tend not to be capitalized in headlines. Of course, the editors decided to lowercase the h in “holidays,” so all capitalization/lowercasing bets may be off.

I found what I would call two errors on the same page that was part of a package titled “The Thanksgiving Playbook.” (As far as I can tell, none of the articles I’ll mention are on marthastewart.com.) The first one is admittedly nitpicky.¹ I think leaves should be deleted after "1 bunch fresh sage." You don't get sage leaves in a bunch; you get sage sprigs in a bunch. And there's no "leaves" after "parsley."

The hyphen after white isn’t wanted in the stuffing recipe above. With the hyphen, it seems to read like “white-green and light-green parts only.”

In a collection of pie recipes, there’s an error that could have been caught by a spell-check²: fruit and filling need a space between them.

From an article titled “As Hue Like It,” there’s a comma splice, or comma fault, at bend in this caption; a semicolon should separate the two independent clauses that start with “The shammash has” and “position the other,” the latter of which has the implied new subject “you.”

Finally, in a collection of recipes headlined "The Main Event," the it that has all on both sides of it in the above caption needs to go away. Maybe there had been a concern about having all twice, separated by a comma, and an incomplete fix was made.

¹The adjective nitpicky, the nouns nitpick and nitpicker, and the verb nitpicking are hyphenless, but the noun nit-picking takes a hyphen, so says Merriam-Webster.

²M-W is fine with spell-check, spellcheck, or spell check as the noun's spelling but likes spell-check for the verb. The noun spellchecker definitely doesn't take a hyphen.

Missing Mushrooms in a Food & Wine Recipe

In the September issue of Food & Wine, there’s a collection of recipes under the headline “Autumn Pairings” and the subhead “Our favorite sommeliers share their go-to dishes and wine pairings for when the weather starts to cool.” One of the recipes is for lumpia, fried Filipino spring rolls that contain ground pork, napa cabbage, carrot, and scallions, among other ingredients. What they don’t contain is mushrooms, which is an issue because “mushrooms” are mentioned in the accompanying wine pairing note.

Maybe mushrooms were used in either the lumpia or the sauce at one point but were later taken out of the recipe. Or maybe the wine was initially going to be paired with both the lumpia and the recipe on the previous page, Cream of Mushroom Soup. At any rate, the association between mushrooms and the Chenin Blanc was taken away somewhere along the editing process, but the mention of “mushrooms” wasn’t taken out of the pairing note.

That error has been corrected on foodandwine.com, where the umami is attributed to the lumpia.

A Love Letter to Rioja

I’ve been meaning to write about wine here for a while now, because my favorite part of my job at Bloomberg Markets magazine was editing Elin McCoy’s Drinks column. I learned so much about wine from Elin, who is still writing about drinks, especially wine, for Bloomberg.

Today I’m going to share my love for Riojas, Spanish wines made mostly from Tempranillo that are often sold at a bargain price. Riojas are typically released when they’re at their best or almost at their best to drink, so you don’t need to have a wine cellar or huge wine fridge to enjoy them at or near their peak. Because they tend to be good values at retail, they’re also typically one of your best bets on an extensive wine list at a restaurant. If the food we’re eating calls for a red, we’ll often choose the Rioja.

Here’s wine educator Mark Oldman, in Oldman’s Guide to Outsmarting Wine, on pairing Riojas with food: “Like lighter styles of Pinot Noir and Chianti, Rioja’s lighter body and refreshing tartness make it one of the most versatile red wines for food, perfect for when your table is divided between red and white fans.”

Riojas carry one of three designations: crianza, reserva, and gran reserva. Crianzas are the least expensive. Reservas are more expensive but are likely to be of higher quality. And gran reservas are the most expensive (though rarely exorbitant) and of the highest quality; they’re made only in select years.

I’ve been buying the 2019 Herederos del Marqués de Riscal Reserva Rioja regularly at Whole Foods of late. It usually costs $22.49, but it was on sale the other day for $20.29. I also always get a 10% discount because I buy at least six bottles. (After doing a little research, I see I should be buying it from Total Wine instead.)

Tony and I get notes of vanilla and rose, with some peppery spice and a hint of citrus. This wine may not be for you if you love big, juicy fruit bombs, but it’s a steal if you enjoy elegant wines that will complement your meal.

Basset Tracks Vegan Frozen Dessert

I made my fourth test batch of Basset Tracks Vegan Frozen Dessert yesterday, and it was a success. I need no further tweaks to the recipe.

Basset Tracks was originally created as a dairy ice cream for my Huge Hound Frozen Desserts company in New Jersey. You can read about it here, at hugehound.com. In that same blog post, I wrote about making Anise Hyssop VFD, for which I utilized my own homegrown plants of that licorice-flavored herb.

As you might have guessed—or read in the blog post—in addition to being an homage to the huge hound in Huge Hound Frozen Desserts, Basset Tracks also references Moose Tracks, the national brand of ice cream. The original Moose Tracks (Denali Flavors now makes more than 20 flavors of ice cream) consisted of vanilla ice cream with a fudge swirl and peanut butter cups. My version, which is free of the most common allergens, consists of vanilla VFD with a chocolate swirl, a sunflower butter swirl, and chopped-up sunflower butter cups. It’s delicious!

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I figured I’m due to give an update on the VFD cookbook I’ve been working on. It’s coming along, but it won’t be ready anytime soon. It’s a tremendous amount of work, and as you can see from what I just wrote, I’m still in the recipe-testing phase. In addition, I’m making sure I have good photos of my VFDs, which is something of a challenge for me, because I’m not the most skilled photographer.

I also just bought the veganfrozendesserts.com domain, so I’ll eventually have a new website to use to promote the book.

Editing Changes I Would Make in One of the Best American Short Stories of 2023

I’m having a fine time reading The Best American Short Stories 2023, but as you can tell from the title of this piece, I’ve got some issues with one of the stories in the collection. As always, my intention in writing this kind of blog post is to point out these issues in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness, and, of course, to hopefully demonstrate that I’ve got solid editing skills. And the issues I found don’t at all prevent enjoyment of the story, which is “My Brother William” by Danica Li and which initially appeared in The Iowa Review.

“We cried when we were separated at school and the other kids made fun of us for it.” I would insert a comma after “school” because “the other kids” is a new subject.

“Towards the end of my stint with the website I flew to go visit him.” Another comma issue: Different publications have different rules about when a comma is needed after an introductory phrase, but because the introductory phrase in this sentence is so long, I can’t help but think a comma is needed, not just wanted, after “website.”

“—consciousness becoming like the trillion bits in a kaleidoscope which every ten seconds was given a vigorous shake—” The “which” should be changed to “that” because it’s the beginning of a restrictive clause that is crucial to the meaning of the sentence.

“Yearly its staff racked in journalism awards and fellowship grants, book contracts, top prizes in the field, plum speaking engagements.” I believe “racked” should be changed to “raked.” I don’t see any definition of rack that makes sense in that sentence.

“… secretly I thought that it was because our life paths were diverging, mine taking me deeper into the real world, him taking him deeper into worlds of his own creation.” Just like there’s (correctly) “mine” before “me,” the first “him” should be changed to “his” because Li is referring there to William’s path, not to William himself.

My Favorite Floral Arrangements From the Past Year

As I say on my About page, I enjoy making arrangements from flowers I buy at grocery stores. I figured I’d create a blog post featuring photos of my top 10 favorite arrangements from the past year. Here they are, in reverse chronological order:

This first one, from the end of September, consists of gerbera daisies, rice flowers, and what I refer to as fuzzy green filler.

This bouquet is a blend of roses and ranunculus, aka buttercups.

This one, from July, is all mums.

Purple alliums, white mums, and orange gerberas.

This photo, from May, is currently on my About page. Here we’ve got two kinds of mums and hypericum berries.

Astrantias, two kinds of mum, and leafy green filler.

Yellow and red ranunculus, carnations, and a filler named lepidium.

This arrangement from January utilizes sunflowers, mums (again), chamomile, carnations, and a filler I believe is called solidago.

For Christmas, I combined roses, mums, and winterberry.

Finally, from last November, here are carnations, mums, and leafy green filler.

Lemon Meringue Pie Fruit and Carrot Cake

I couldn’t resist the lure of a second tropical fruit named after a dessert, so I purchased some lemon meringue pie fruits from Miami Fruit. LMPFs are also known as rollinias, biribas (in Brazil), or, unfortunately, snotfruits, and they’re said to taste like either lemon meringue pie or peach cobbler.

I would occasionally get a hint of lemon but found them to be rather light in flavor overall. The texture of most of them was on the slimy side but nowhere near as slimy as to warrant the name snotfruit. They contained a lot of seeds, which I separated out from the flesh in my mouth and spit out.

The fruits varied in size and shape. They got blacker as they sat. I put some in the fridge once I was pretty sure they were ripe so we didn’t have to eat them all in, like, three days. I ate most of them when they were noticeably mushy to the touch. Maybe they only needed to not be rock hard.

Official taste tester Tony, my husband, got some lemon flavor from the first one he tried, but as the days progressed, he got less of it. I gave one to my friend Charlie, who didn’t find it to be all that amazing, but my coupled friends Bill and Chris really enjoyed theirs. Bill definitely got lemon meringue pie, which is his favorite dessert, and it reminded Chris of guanabana. (And this Specialty Produce webpage tells me it’s in the same family as guanabana.)

Bill is trying to germinate the seeds, so there may be more LMPFs in their future—and possibly mine.

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I’m so old-school, or maybe just plain old, I have two accordion folders of recipes I’ve clipped out of magazines over the years: mostly from Martha Stewart Living, Bon Appétit, and Food & Wine, with lesser numbers from Gluten Free & More (and its sad-trombone-sounding previous incarnation Living Without ¹ ) and Gourmet. While winnowing out some recipes I decided I’ll almost certainly never make, I came across a winning recipe from the May 2015 issue of Bon Appétit called Carrot-Walnut Loaf Cake in the Breakfast Treats section.

The recipe was in a section of the magazine called r.s.v.p. that allowed readers to ask for a recipe from a restaurant or food shop. In this case, a reader from Brooklyn requested the recipe from New York's Breads Bakery. Breads is still in business and still making this carrot cake, though apparently now with currants—a small type of raisin that's dark in color and also called a Zante currant—instead of golden raisins.

Because the recipe called for beating a lot of air into the eggs and sugar, I figured I had to use actual chicken eggs instead of vegan eggs for this recipe. Aquafaba eggs might have worked well, but Tony can't eat chickpeas, so the liquid from canned chickpeas is also a no-no.

The recipe is pretty much perfect, but the second time I made the cake, I used slightly heaping half cups of raisins and walnuts, so I'd have a little more of those flavor and texture enhancers throughout the loaf. I also slightly heaped the tablespoon of flour the nuts and raisins are coated in to make sure they don't all sink to the bottom of the pan.

The recipe is available at Epicurious, with no credit given to Breads.

¹ I can actually understand why the publication was called that during its earlier years: There just weren't a lot of great options for people who needed to avoid gluten and other harmful subtances back then, so the focus was on finding ways to live without the bad things.

A Post in Which I Catch the Same (Small) Mistake in Two Novels

I recently re-read a wonderful comic novel by Andrew Sean Greer called Less. There’s a scene in Less in which Robert Brownburn, a lover of the title character, Arthur Less, wins the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, so it’s a case of life imitating art that Greer won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2018 for writing Less.

I’m currently reading John Boyne’s The Absolutist, a not-at-all-comedic novel about World War I and its aftermath. In between those two books, I read Greer’s follow-up to Less, which is called Less Is Lost. I enjoyed it, but not quite as much as its predecessor.

In both Less and The Absolutist, I found the same small mistake, one I wouldn’t have bothered to write a post about except for their exactness. On page 91 of Less, the article a is missing before moment:

At the top of page 75 of The Absolutist, the same mistake appears. (There’s also a missing word, probably at, after We look.)

Isn’t that a strange coincidence?

A Card Game Recommendation

Tony and I have been enjoying a non-word-related card game called Lost Cities. It wasn’t too difficult to learn, and I don’t know that it can ever truly be mastered, which adds to the fun. As with a lot of card games, we’ve gained knowledge about what to do in certain situations through multiple plays—situations like “Holy shit! The game is almost over, and I’ve got three expeditions I need to close out.” or “I’ve got an awful hand. Which card am I least likely to regret playing?”

The gist of Lost Cities is to score points by successfully carrying out expeditions to discover you-know-whats. There’s no storyline really; the details of each expedition are only hinted at in illustrated cards that are numbered 2 through 10 and must be played in ascending order. The basic game has five expeditions, in yellow, white, blue, green, and red. I got the version with a bonus sixth expedition, which is purple, and we’ve been playing the six-expedition version almost exclusively since our second game day. (We usually play on Sunday afternoons.) We played with only five expeditions this past Sunday, and the match was low scoring and ended too fast, so I think we’ll be sticking with six-expedition play.

In addition to those numbered cards are three wager cards in each color. Playing one or more of these cards lets you multiply your points by either 2 (one wager card), 3 (two wager cards), or 4 (you guessed it: three wager cards). These special cards can only be played before you start laying down numbered cards. I wish there were a second chance at using wager cards: maybe after you play a 5 or 6. The game is so well designed, by prolific game designer Reiner Knizia, the option to use wager cards sometime other than at the beginning surely came up during testing and was rejected.

It’s not uncommon to get in your initial hand of cards, say, two wager cards for an expedition and no other cards at all in that expedition’s color. If you’ve got a lot of high cards for other expeditions, which you will want to play later in the game, and no other wager cards, you feel like you don’t have much of a choice but to gamble on that expedition. In that situation, your daring move is just an act of desperation.

The big point I’ve left out so far is that it costs you 20 points to fund your expedition, so if you manage to place cards valued at only 14, for example, before the game ends, you’ll lose 6 points on that expedition. If you had started out with two wager cards, you’ll lose 18 points, because losses are also doubled, tripled, or quadrupled.

Each player is dealt eight cards at the beginning of a game, and that’s the number you will always have in your hand at the end of a turn. Every turn, you must play a card on your growing lines of expeditions or into the discard piles of different colors that sit between the two players. You then take a card from the top of the deck or from the top of a discard pile. (You can’t discard a card and then immediately pick it up.) I’m certain the number of cards was also tested extensively, and eight must have been the right number for making decision-making neither too easy nor maddeningly hard.

Speaking of eights, if your row of cards for a given expedition (color) is eight cards or longer at the end of the game, you get 20 bonus points. The bonus points are not multiplied if you’ve played any wager cards.

You’re supposed to play three consecutive games to determine the overall winner, but sometimes Tony and I stretch it out to four, if the person in the lead at the end of three games is willing to do so. A game is over when the last card in the deck is drawn; it can’t be played, which lends an air of anticlimax to the final turn.

I started out more cautious, usually initiating only three expeditions per game, but I’ve learned from Tony that the winner is often the boldest player. I’m more likely to discard cards that could eventually come in handy for me, hoping I can scoop them back later if I need to, but almost inevitably, Tony will grab them before I can. I’m also more likely to discard a card I know or strongly suspect Tony can use, but never something so helpful as a 7, 8, 9, or 10. Tony hangs on to cards that would be helpful to me like he’s trying to turn them into diamonds. Ha!

He’s right to do that because foiling your opponent is the only way to consistently win at this game. During a game this past Sunday, I discarded some purple cards that helped Tony get a row of eight, cementing his victory.

I decided to buy Lost Cities after watching this video from British game enthusiast Actualol in which he names his top 10 games for couples and this video from Homestead, Florida–based board game site The Dice Tower of Mike DiLisio, Zee Garcia, and Tom Vasel listing their top 10 casual, two-player games. Lost Cities was Actualol and DeLisio’s #1 game and Garcia’s #2 game.

Baking With Buckwheat and Fun(?) With Fractions

Inspired by a dog biscuit recipe that’s suitable for dogs on a renal diet,¹ I’ve started baking with buckwheat flour. Buckwheat is naturally gluten-free, but as with any food product, it’s ultimately only as GF as the equipment it’s processed on.

My usual go-to brand for baking ingredients is Bob’s Red Mill, which I like because it’s employee-owned and reliably high in quality. Bob’s buckwheat flour isn’t labeled as being GF, so I’ve been purchasing Arrowhead Mills’ instead; it’s both GF and organic.

In addition to Missy’s biscuits, which she adores, I’ve twice made brownies, once with a hint of cardamom, and three times made chocolate chip blondies, once with walnuts, once with hazelnuts, and once without nuts. I’ll share my thoughts on the recipes below.

First, though, let’s talk about buckwheat. Here are some buckwheat facts I cribbed from this highly informative page on the Artisan Grain Collaborative’s website:

• It’s a complete protein, meaning it contains substantial amounts of all nine amino acids the body can’t synthesize and so must be obtained from food sources.
• It’s high in fiber.
• It’s not considered to be a grain because it’s not part of the grass family, Poaceae.
• Instead, it’s a pseudocereal grown from a broadleaf plant that’s related to rhubarb and sorrel.
• It’s native to China.
• Buckwheat flour is dark in color because buckwheat typically isn’t hulled before being ground.

Buckwheat flour has a distinct flavor that’s grassy, nutty, and earthy. I often like it better when it’s blended with flours that have less-assertive flavors, like white rice and oat, but it worked great on its own in my first batch of powerfully chocolatey brownies.

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I found my initial recipe for Missy’s biscuits—the one that started me down the baking-with-buckwheat-flour path—at PawsomeOldies.com. I prefer this recipe from Fanny Urbanhomesteader on YouTube. The dough is easier to work with, and the end result seemed more like a traditional dog biscuit to me. But it’s a bit more work, stamping out the biscuits with a cookie cutter and rerolling the leftover dough to make additional biscuits. (I actually didn’t use a roller; I just pressed the dough with my lightly flowered hands.)

If you read the comments on Fanny’s recipe, you’ll see two from me. One is in response to an assertion by another commenter that pumpkin purée is “very high in sodium,” which is ridiculous. The other is in response to what I believe was a legitimate concern about using baking soda in a renal-friendly dog treat. I suggested substituting sodium-free baking powder for the baking soda and baking powder because it had worked for me. Baking soda and baking powder often aren’t interchangeable—for reasons outlined very well here by baker and photographer Sally McKenney and here at Bob's Red Mill's website.²

I also mentioned replacing the whole wheat flour with a blend of 1 cup white rice flour, 1/2 cup gluten-free oat flour, and 1/2 cup GF buckwheat flour. That was the second time I made them. The first time, I used only buckwheat flour.

I didn't mention it, because I feared wearing readers out with too much talk of substitutions, but I also replaced the water with store-bought chicken broth that's free of added sodium. (Some commenters do go on about replacing four, five, or six different things and then have the nerve to complain the recipe sucked. That takes chutzpah.) We've also been giving Missy two servings of broth a day to keep her hydrated. She loves her some flavored water.

I got 70 biscuits out of the recipe. I placed the unbaked cut-out biscuits tightly on two half sheets because I wasn't concerned they would spread out and meld together.

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The enlarged image above shows the recipe I used for the brownies. It's on the back of the Arrowhead Mills buckwheat flour bag, and let me tell you, those fractions are tiny in real life. Even with my reading glasses on, I wasn't sure I was seeing the right numbers.

My first batch followed the recipe exactly except for substituting coconut oil for the butter.

For my second batch, I got the idea to insert a note of cardamom into the chocolate from this buckwheat brownie recipe³ created by Chicago-based baker Greg Wade. I incorporated 1/2 teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom into the dry ingredients, and that turned out to be a good amount. The cardamom was tangible but not intrusive. I also used 1/4 cup of white rice flour in place of an equal amount of the buckwheat flour.

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That's the recipe I used for the nut-free blondies; it was also on the bag of buckwheat flour. (These recipes aren't available on Arrowhead Mills' website.)

Because it's a drop cookie recipe, I had to convert it to a bar cookie recipe. Thankfully, ⁴ King Arthur Baking Company—which, by the way, is, like Bob's Red Mill, employee-owned—has a handy-dandy guide to doing just that.

I had a concern about the article's mention of having to multiply baking time by 3 when your dough is "around or over 3/4" thick" when pressed into a small pan. That's because 3/4" to 1" thick was given as "the general rule of thumb" for how thick your dough should be at the start of the article. Read my comment and the response from King Arthur's Barb and let me know whether you think my concern was valid and expressed well. Maybe I should have mentioned I was assuming the baker in question would be using only one small pan and all of the dough they had created?

Because I've twice mentioned this issue before on the blog, including once in a post about a blondie recipe, I won't make a big deal out of how the ingredients appear in different orders in the list of ingredients and the recipe instructions.

I liked these blondies better than Tony did. He found them to be too soft.

I made these gluten-free blondies from The Bojon Gourmet twice, first in a 9-inch-square pan, and then, after I’d bought two 8-inch-square pans, in a pan that size. Tony raved about the first batch, which contained walnuts. We liked the second batch even better; that batch is the one pictured above, with toasted hazelnuts that were a little too toasty, just before the pan went into the oven.

The Bojon Gourmet's Alanna Taylor-Tobin says in the directions that the final amount of cookie dough doesn’t look like enough to make a pan of blondies, and that's accurate and the reason I bought the 8-inch-square pans: It really didn't look like enough dough in the larger pan. But this recipe works like a charm and will probably become a staple in our home.

On another TBG page, about GF flour options, I found a suggestion to substitute arrowroot, which I always have on hand for my Vegan Frozen Desserts, for tapioca flour, which I don’t often keep in the pantry, so next time I’ll use 2 tablespoons of arrowroot instead of the 2 more tablespoons of white rice flour I went with in place of the tapioca flour. I used buckwheat flour in place of the oat flour.

You may have noticed that none of these recipes called for xanthan gum, which is often crucial for holding together GF baked goods, but I agree with the recipe creators that none of them really needed it.

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My last bit of questionable fun with fractions involves my remaking the Blueberry-Lemon Pie that was Tony's favorite pie from last summer. Last time I made it, I followed the filling recipe exactly except I omitted the two pats of butter, and in place of a homemade, buttery double crust, I used a store-bought GF and dairy-free crust on the bottom only. I found when I put the filling in the thawed crust that it was disconcertingly high and likely to bubble over a good deal without the top crust to contain it. I removed about a cup of the filling, and the pie turned out great.

This time, I purposefully went with only 5 cups of blueberries in the filling, as shown above. Since I'd reduced the volume of blueberries by one-sixth, I did the same with the other filling ingredients.

To find out how much less sugar I needed, I divided 3/4 cup by 6. That's the same as multiplying 3/4 x 1/6, which comes out to 3/24, which can be reduced to 1/8 cup. To find out how much sugar I needed in total (minus that 1/8 cup), I subtracted 1/8 from the equivalent of 3/4 cup in eighths, which is 6/8 cup. 6/8 - 1/8 = 5/8, so I had to use 5/8 cup of sugar, which is equivalent to 1/2 cup (4/8 cup) plus 2 tablespoons (1/8 cup).

To figure out how much less cornstarch I needed, I first converted 5 tablespoons into 15 teaspoons. Then I divided 15 by 6: 15 ÷ 6 = 2 3/6, which reduced to 2 1/2. To determine the new amount of cornstartch, I subtracted 2 1/2 from 15: 15 - 2 1/2 = 12 1/2 teaspoons. That's equivalent to 4 tablespoons plus 1/2 teaspoon.

Although I don't exactly miss word problems from elementary school math class, I felt a sense of accomplishment from solving that real-world math problem. But I enjoyed eating the pie more.

¹ Our Missy was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease in September. She's been doing well on her two blood pressure medicines and a low-sodium, -phosphorus, and -protein diet.

² I might have suggested using sodium-free baking soda too. And maybe also some sodium-free salt, based on what the Bob's Red Mill page says. I'm glad the recipe worked out OK without all of that extra fuss.

³I have a quibble with the image for this recipe: It shows a design on top of the brownies, which was probably made using powdered sugar and a stencil or a doily. (Does anybody have doilies anymore?) The recipe doesn't say how to make that design, so I think the photo should have been of unadorned brownies.

⁴ Thankfully acts as a sentence adverb in this sentence. That means it's an adverb that applies to an entire sentence, not just a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.

Gluten Free & More Is Back

Like bread dough after a second proofing, Gluten Free & More has risen again as a print magazine. There’s no word on the mag’s website on how and when it emerged from its merger with Simply Gluten Free, but its return surely must have something to do with SGF founder and editor-in-chief Carol Kicinski being charged with four crimes related to the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, by supporters of Donald Trump.

According to the plea agreement regarding her case on the U.S. Department of Justice website, Kicinski pleaded guilty to one charge, “Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building or Grounds, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(1).” Kicinski signed the agreement on October 27, 2022. There was no indication on the webpage about her case of when her sentencing would take place. The page was last updated on November 10, 2022.

According to the plea agreement, she faces a maximum of one year in prison, a $100,000 fine, and supervised release of up to one year. The federal court could also require her to pay back the federal government for any costs associated with her imprisonment, term of supervised release, and period of probation, if they are part of her sentencing. She also agreed to “allow law enforcement agents to review any social media accounts operated by [her] for statements and postings in and around January 6, 2021, and conduct an interview of [her] regarding the events in and around January 6, 2021 prior to sentencing.”

Two editing-related points, because this joint is supposed to focus on editing: I don’t know how federal legal code is written, but the way the part that’s pertinent to Kicinski’s case is phrased—“knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so”—isn’t grammatical in my eyes. You can’t remain “in … grounds.” If I had my druthers, I would make it say, “knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or enters or remains on any restricted grounds without lawful authority to do so.”

I also think the wording should be “on and around January 6, 2021” in the plea agreement. That preposition is used for specific dates; in is used for less-exact time frames, like “in April” or “in June 1968.”

Tony's Floral and Spicy Liqueurs and My First Attempt at a Boozy VFD

I was so psyched when Tony said he would make alkermes for us this past holiday season. He first tried this Tuscan liqueur he says smells like “Christmas in a bottle” on a trip we took to Rome in the summer of 2015 and made a homemade version in time for that same Christmas.

Inspired by an article about innovative liqueurs in Food & Wine magazine—and the large bag of hibiscus flowers he had recently purchased from Atlantic Spice Company—he decided to also make a homemade version of Sorel, the hibiscus-based liqueur created and produced by Jack From Brooklyn.

Both liqueurs, which feature a floral component and various spicy notes, were sensational, but I enjoyed his newer concoction a skosh more. Rose water provides the floral note in alkermes (which is also spelled alchermes).

That's a photo Tony took of his first alkermes, in New Jersey. He mostly followed this recipe from Len Poli, a sausage maker in Sonoma, California. (Note: The recipe page isn't a secure site.) Hmm. I'd forgotten that's where it came from. The alkermes is intended to be used in a Tuscan cured meat product called mortadella di Prato.

Back then, Tony used red food coloring from the grocery store in place of the cochineal. His recent alkermes wasn't as pretty; he didn't bother with any coloring. The recipe doesn't say when to add the dye, but it's presumably at the same time as the rose water.

The alkermes incorporates dried orange peel and vanilla bean and a mélange of spices: cinnamon, coriander, aniseed, mace, cloves, and cardamom. For the hibiscus liqueur, Tony kept it simpler: clove, cinnamon, and ginger. For the liquid components, he used a mix of vodka and cold water at the beginning and sugar water when it was just about ready.

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My first attempt at Eggnog Vegan Frozen Dessert turned out pretty well, but I'll need to keep experimenting with the recipe if it's going to become cookbook-worthy.

I knew I was going to use a vegan egg made of golden flaxseed as the egg in my nog. I was hoping using the golden kind of ground flaxseeds would result in a pale yellow VFD, but it didn't quite get there.

A lot of the vegan egg's gooeyness stayed behind in my strainer after I had cooked the VFD custard. The final product was as thick as usual, but I thought maybe next time I should cook the custard longer than I usually do to try to incorporate more of the richness of the egg. I also might double the volume of the egg to hopefully extract more of the gold color.

I knew eggnog should be spiced with nutmeg and spiked with some kind of alcoholic beverage. I researched recipes for drinkable eggnog and eggnog ice cream to see whether additional spices were sometimes used and what kind of booze was traditional.

Vanilla was a common addition to the ice cream recipes in particular. Cinnamon and/or cloves were sometimes included with the nutmeg, but nutmeg on its own was the most common spice contributor. Bourbon came up most often as the liquor, but rum was also common, and both were sometimes joined by cognac or another type of brandy.

The Food Network's website has recipes from Alton Brown for both the beverage and the ice cream, and the ingredient lists are identical except for the egg whites and extra sugar needed to make the meringue he incorporates into the liquid nog. His "3 ounces bourbon" is 6 tablespoons, which seems like an awful lot for only 3 cups of dairy product. I suspect I would prefer commenter Jennifer C.'s version of the ice cream if I got to try it; she dialed back the bourbon and added some vanilla extract and salt to amplify the other flavors.

A Classic Eggnog recipe on Martha Stewart's site calls for 16 egg yolks, vanilla—from a whole bean—and both bourbon and rum. The only spice is nutmeg, grated on top as a garnish.

A recipe called Martha's Classic Eggnog is extra boozy, with bourbon, rum, and cognac, and is enriched with meringue and whipped cream. And again, nutmeg is a garnish.

Finally, I looked to see what Dale DeGroff had to say about eggnog in his The Essential Cocktail, which I have on my bookshelf. His recipe, sourced to his Uncle Angelo, is reproduced at Liquor.com, with some changes that were presumably initiated by DeGroff himself, given his participation in the accompanying video. The amount of sugar in the meringue component is reduced by 1/4 cup. Nutmeg is strictly a garnish, while the book's recipe calls for using half a grated nutmeg berry in the liquid, before the meringue is folded in. (And the video shows DeGroff adding nutmeg to the serving/mixing bowl.) And you reserve some meringue for folding in as you're serving, while in the original, all of the meringue gets folded in at once. The amount of bourbon is doubled, to 8 ounces. And spicy rum is substituted for Jamaican dark rum. That's a lot of changes!

The Essential Cocktail also includes a recipe for Simplified Eggnog, which can be made by the glass instead of for a crowd. It's the recipe for Brandy Milk Punch—which consists of 2 ounces of cognac, 4 ounces of whole milk, 1 ounce of simple syrup, and a dash of vanilla extract—but with the addition of a whole egg. All of those ingredients are shaken vigorously together, and the resulting liquid is strained into a large highball glass and topped with freshly grated nutmeg.

One last note from DeGroff's book before I return to my VFD: Back in the day, nog referred to a strong ale, and that's what early English versions of eggnogs used for the alcoholic component. Rum was often substituted in America, because it was cheaper and more easily obtained, and DeGroff mentions an 1862 cocktail book—How to Mix Drinks by Jerry Thomas—that calls for Jamaican rum to be used in eggnog. So maybe that's how Jamaican rum ended up in the book's recipe, rather than spiced rum.

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I was happy with the taste of my Eggnog VFD. I chose to use Bacardi Gold rum, mostly because our local discount liquor store was selling a tiny bottle of it and also because I'm not a big fan of bourbon or whiskey in general. I thought the nutmeg, my only spice, and rum both came through nicely. I used 1 tablespoon of rum and a slightly heaping teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg, as well as 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract to help harmonize the dominant flavors.

I wasn't thrilled with the VFD's texture, but that may be unavoidable in one containing an alcoholic beverage. It was decidedly less creamy than my other VFDs, probably because the alcohol inhibits freezing of the final product and makes it more prone to iciness.

A Post With Updates About Gluten Free Oreos and My Strawberry-Rhubarb Vegan Frozen Dessert, Plus a Recommendation for a Phenomenal Yet Emotionally Draining Novel

I assumed the Gluten Free Oreos I used in my Cookies & Cream Vegan Frozen Dessert made Tony sick because of the explanation I gave in that linked post: the oat flour used in the cookies was produced from at least one of the specific oat varieties that are problematic for people with celiac disease (PWCD). And that actually may have been the case. But I wanted to raise another possibility I just became aware of: Nabisco isn’t disclosing how it ensures its ingredients for the cookies are GF, and two gluten-free watchdogs, including the one named Gluten Free Watchdog, are advising PWCD to be cautious about consuming this product because they’re not convinced every package will be GF.

Here is Gluten Free Watchdog’s statement on the cookies. And here is a post from Gluten Dude about Nabisco’s lack of transparency. (I think it’s a trustworthy article even though, I feel I need to point out, because it’s so highly visible, Gluten Dude’s first, declarative sentence has a question mark at the end. I appreciate the dude’s healthy skepticism when it comes to matters that involve my husband’s—and other PWCD’s—health.)

I also want to note that in the post linked to in my first sentence above, I neglected to mention a second way oats can become certified as GF. I had written that a certain, small percentage of oats are purposefully kept separate from wheat so they don’t get contaminated with that grain. But some (probably most) certified GF oats are produced by removing other grains from the oats until the resulting product has a small enough percentage of those contaminants to be considered GF. (Gluten Dude’s post does a good job of showing with individual grains of oat, wheat, and barley how that process works.) Understandably, PWCD are more comfortable consuming oats that were never tainted with wheat or barley.

In my earlier post, I also ignored the possibility that two or more of those three grains may be grown and harvested together and so are commingled right on the farm that produced them.

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I was able to buy fresh rhubarb at Sprouts the other day, so I made my Strawberry-Rhubarb Vegan Frozen Dessert again. And this time, I made a double batch.

I also discovered Sprouts sells 12-ounce bags of both frozen rhubarb and frozen strawberries. Those are exactly the amounts I need to produce a double batch, so I’ll no doubt be making that VFD using frozen fruit before too long.

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I’ve never been as emotionally invested in the ending of a novel as I was while finishing Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo. Stuart, who won the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, tells his follow-up story on two separate timelines roughly four months apart; the pages that introduce the parallel threads say “THE MAY AFTER” and “THE JANUARY BEFORE.” By the time the January thread caught up to the May thread and the May thread revealed what comes next/last for the 15-year-old title protagonist, I was an emotional wreck. But I loved this book so very much and ordered a copy to devour again someday. (I had read a hardcover from my local library.)

YM is a romance and a crime thriller, but most of all, it’s a family drama, as Mungo deals with his narcissistic and alcoholic mother (whom he adores anyway, despite their poisonous relationship) and his violent older brother, who heads a gang of young thugs. Mungo’s intelligent and kind sister, Jodie, looks out for him and keeps the house running, even though she’s not much older than he is.

All of these characters—and Mungo’s boyfriend, James—are fully realized people, as are even relatively minor characters like Mrs. Campbell and Chickie Calhoun, both of whom live in the same building as Mungo’s family. Stuart has a wonderful gift for metaphor, and he reels out his twin plotlines perfectly, but it’s his skill at characterization that made me eager to read each new chapter.

I hope the Young in the title indicates Stuart is at least open to the possibility of writing multiple Mungo novels—and maybe Jodie at University too.

The Vegan Frozen Desserts and Pies of Summer

It’s been another summer of Vegan Frozen Desserts and also a summer of pies, and most of them were made from delicious summer, summer fruits. And the pies were also made using store-bought gluten-free crusts. Because they work like a dream, and because even Martha Stewart¹ herself doesn’t always make everything from scratch.

My first VFD of the summer was the pretty pink one made from apriums in the photo above. It had the best texture of any VFD I’ve ever made. It formed the neatest scoops and didn’t have to sit out for as long as a VFD normally does before softening to a scoopable consistency. (The chopped fruit in the photo above is cherry plum, which was the star ingredient in my second VFD of the summer. I write about it a few paragraphs down.)

I don’t know why the texture was so amazing. Maybe the dark-skinned and orange-fleshed apriums were unusually high in pectin or some other thickening compound. Or maybe it had something to do with the ratio of oils I ended up using. I made a double batch, for a half gallon or so of finished product, and had planned to use all canola oil. But I didn’t have 2 cups of canola oil, so I topped off the measuring cup with about 1/3 cup of melted coconut oil.

I tried using that oil ratio—5/6 canola to 1/6 coconut—in a Vanilla Bean VFD I'll write more about below. Its texture was fantastic, but it wasn't quite as magical as the Aprium VFD's.

The long chilling time—about 24 hours—from the making of the VFD base to the churning of the base probably also contributed. I pulled a thick and delicious Aprium Custard out of the fridge. Tony and I could have eaten it with two spoons just the way it was, directly from the saucepan, but I gave it a spin in my frozen dessert maker. It was my favorite VFD of the summer for many weeks.

The first pie I made turned out to be my favorite: Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie. Tony requested the pie for his birthday. I used this recipe from Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food: A Grocer's Guide to Shopping, Cooking & Creating Community Through Food via MarthaStewart.com as the basis for my recipe.

The ginger crumb topping sounded like a worthy addition, but I wanted the strawberry-rhubarb combo to come through without any interference, so I didn't bother with trying to make a gluten-free and dairy-free version of the topping. And I loved the final result. Whoever first put strawberry and rhubarb—and a good deal of sugar—together in a dessert was a genius.

I followed the filling recipe faithfully except I added 1/2 teaspoon of salt and I used Bob's Red Mill 1-to-1 GF flour in place of the all-purpose flour.

I made my next VFD of the summer, Cherry Plum, twice because the first time the cooked base looked like it was flavored with chocolate instead of fruit. That's what you see in the photo above. The photo below is the second attempt, after churning, when the final product looked like it could have been made of pumpkin.

I didn't think the cherry plums² (the cross between a cherry and a plum) had oxidized the first time, but I wanted to be sure, so I added some lemon juice to the pieces of pitted fruit in my blender for the second batch. The base looked pretty much the same, maybe slightly more orange and slightly less brown than the first time, but there wasn't enough of a difference to make me think the lemon juice had significantly enhanced the color. And the final color, after processing and hardening in the freezer, was certainly orange enough to look like it wasn't chocolate. I came to the conclusion that was just the color the red-skinned and orange-fleshed fruit was going to produce in a VFD.

The flavor and texture were on point, but they weren't as good as they were in the Aprium VFD.

That's Tony's favorite pie of the summer, a Blueberry-Lemon Pie, just after I put it in the oven. I used the Blueberry-Lemon Pie With a Butter Crust recipe from Food Network's Amy Thielen as the guide for my filling.

I used arrowroot instead of cornstarch, added 1/4 teaspoon salt, and left off the pats of butter. I hoped the butter wouldn't really be necessary without a top crust. After I stirred the ingredients together and poured them into the unbaked crust, I ended up removing almost a cup of the filling because it looked so heaped up, I thought it might spill over the sides as it baked without a top crust to help keep it contained.

I really enjoyed this pie too, and I've got a feeling I'll be making it one more time before the summer is over. Or maybe in our fall, because it will still feel summerlike on most days then.

That's the Vanilla Bean VFD. I made it to fill a hole in my forthcoming recipe book because I realized I had my recipe for Vanilla VFD made using vanilla extract down pat, but I hadn't worked out the recipe using a vanilla bean.

Tony and I agreed this VFD needed more vanilla flavor. I used half of a bean, and I should have opted for the whole thing. The other half is in the freezer, awaiting another use. I've got another whole bean in my pantry, so I have what I need to give this VFD another go.

I will also try adding more salt next time. I used my usual 1/8 teaspoon in this first attempt.

The VFD's texture was wonderful, if not quite as perfect as the Aprium VFD's. In the photo, it reads a bit icy outcropping high in the mountains. That's because I didn't think to check on its progress until my 60-minute timer went off, and my super-chilled base didn't really need the full 60 minutes, so the churned VFD was super-duper frozen.

My Peacharine+ Pie was tasty, but it certainly looks, shall we say, rustic. You can tell it wasn't cranked out in a factory.

I thawed both GF crusts in the package, planning to give the pie a complete top crust. But the second crust fell apart in my hands—I should have only barely thawed it before trying to remove it from its tin—so I had to do a lot of manipulating to get the lopsided coverage you see here.

I mostly followed this GF and dairy-free recipe from MamaShire for the filling, but I substituted ground ginger for the cinnamon and arrowroot for the cornstarch. And for the fruits, I used mostly peacharines, a new-to-me-but-not-really-new cross of a peach and a nectarine.

I bought a bag of peacharines at Sprouts, thinking I might use them in a pie but without having checked how much I would need of them weightwise. Once I settled on a recipe, I figured out I was about a half pound short. When I went back to the store two days later, most of the peacharines were rock-hard. I was able to buy a few more that were ripe enough to join the earlier-purchased ones in the pie, but I had to supplement them with some ready-to-go nectarines and peaches.

We enjoyed this pie, but not as much as my two earlier efforts. The filling was plenty moist without being overly liquid.

My next VFD also utilized ginger: Chocolate-Ginger VFD, shown in the photo above alongside a scoop of Vanilla Bean VFD. I've had this recipe down cold for a while; I was just in the mood for a chocolate-based VFD, and this one never disappoints.

My Cherry Pie was the biggest disappointment. I'd had high hopes: I followed this recipe from Connoisseurus Veg that called for both vanilla and almond extracts. We didn't have almond extract—and I didn't want to run to a store to get some—so to try to infuse some almond flavor into the mix, I replaced some of the arrowroot I used in lieu of the cornstarch called for in the recipe with almond flour.

In case the almond flour wasn't as efficient at absorbing moisture as the arrowroot, I used some additional arrowroot, for a somewhat heaping 1/4 cup of starchy stuff altogether. I think that was a mistake. The pie was too dry.

When Tony and I ate the last of the pie, right from the tin, he poured the dregs of a long-lingering bottle of Luxardo maraschino cherry liqueur³ over it. That perked it up!

I didn't take any pictures of the creation of my last and favorite VFD of the summer, Strawberry-Rhubarb, and we ate it up quickly, so here's a photo Tony took of me anticipating a GF cone of it.

This VFD turned out as well as I could have hoped, considering it was my first attempt at this flavor. I cooked down equal amounts of strawberry and rhubarb with agave and a small amount of lemon juice, producing exactly 1 cup of strained strawberry-rhubarb sauce. I stirred that into a plain VFD base and ran it through my frozen dessert–making machine.

I was going to make a second, double batch last week, but Sprouts was rhubarb-less. I may have to wait until next spring to make this VFD again.

¹Martha Stewart Living's last issue was the one for May 2022. I'll miss that magazine. For many years, I kept every issue intact and stored them in cardboard boxes. Before we moved from New Jersey to Florida, I put an ad on Craigslist's free stuff page, and a woman loaded them all into her car. She said she would share them with a group of elderly women who would enjoy reading them.

²The growers and sellers of cherry plums should agree on a one-word name for the fruit. (The ones I bought were branded CherriYum! Cherry Plums.) I suggest cherrum. Who's with me?

³Tony had bought the Luxardo to make aviations.

How Much Water Falls From Dettifoss Waterfall?

Every few months, our friend Jack will mail us a handwritten note with some articles he thinks we would enjoy that he’s cut out of newspapers and magazines. It’s always fun to get these old-school packages in the mail. Jack’s latest envelope contained an article from the New York Times' Travel section about North Iceland that I can use to show the importance of consistency of wording throughout a piece.¹ And because that's not a whole lot to hang a blog post on, I'll also consider the question in the headline.

In the article itself, tourist destination Dettifoss is "said to be the most powerful waterfall in Europe":

In a photo caption, the superlative is hedged a bit more and is "said to be one of the most powerful falls in Europe":

The inconsistency regarding whether Dettifoss is the most powerful or only one of the most powerful remains in the digital version of the article, though the "said to be" has been dropped from the caption.

I'm going to follow the NYT's lead on this matter and not attempt to definitively answer whether there's a waterfall in Europe that's more powerful than Dettifoss, especially because it's hard to get a definitive answer online as to how powerful Dettifoss is.

On various websites, the waterfall's power is measured in some large volume of water dropping every second. Guide to Iceland gives 193 cubic meters as the average volume of water per second and converts that metric figure into 6,186 cubic feet. Online converters tell me the figure should be 6,816 cubic feet.

Visit North Iceland says the flow of water is more than 2.5 times higher: 500 cubic meters of water per second, which comes out to 17,657 cubic feet, or 132,086 gallons, per second.

¹Jack knows Tony and I visited Iceland a few years ago. We didn't see any waterfalls, but we enjoyed some great food and drink in Reykjavik and a stop at the beautiful geothermal spa called Blue Lagoon. The other article Jack sent us was a single-pager from WSJ. (that's not available online) about Jhumpa Lahiri's favorite things. When I lived in Brooklyn, Lahiri and her family were my upstairs neighbors for a year or two.

Two New Vegan Frozen Desserts, Including One Inspired by a Classic Ice Cream, and a Successful Replacement for a Key Ingredient

I’ve added two new recipes to my repertoire: Cookies & Cream Vegan Frozen Dessert and a VFD, or Vegan Sherbet, as I prefer to call it, made from pink lemons. I also used a new, cheaper, and more widely available ingredient in both of those recipes, and it worked perfectly. But I’ll wait until the end of the post to reveal it so as to keep you in sus … … … … … pense.

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I never attempted a C&C frozen dessert—neither vegan nor dairy—for Huge Hound. But given the popularity of this flavor, I figured I ought to have a recipe for it in my cookbook.

It seemed like way too much work, both for me and the purchasers of my cookbook, to have to make the chocolate sandwich cookies that would be incorporated into the VFD, so I’d been searching grocery and health food stores for a suitable candidate. Most had one or more ingredients that turned me off, though I understand this kind of cookie isn't about eating clean. It's a treat, like VFDs.

I came across Gluten Free Oreos for the first time in a larger Publix store in Fort Lauderdale, where I was looking for some products our smaller Publix here in Wilton Manors doesn't carry. I found out online this variation on the ubiquitous cookie has been available only since early 2021.¹

My Cookies & Cream VFD was a big hit with my friends Gerry and Ron, but it unfortunately made my sweetie Tony sick, apparently because of the oat flour in the Oreos.

Oats can be a crap shoot for people with celiac disease, which I'm going to abbreviate to PWCD. Some scientists and dietitians swear oats are perfectly safe for PWCD if they’re certified to be gluten-free. (Contamination from wheat used to be an insurmountable problem because oats and wheat were inevitably stored and transported together, but now some small portion of oats are kept separate to avoid contamination.) But a study by researchers from Spain and Australia found that certain oat varieties contain storage proteins² that trigger the same type of reaction as gluten in some PWCD. And that’s what apparently happened to my guy, who uses an oat-based, nondairy product in his coffee without any problem.

I was really pleased with how the C&C VFD turned out. It's been ages since I've had a "regular" Oreo. The GF ones were enjoyable enough on their own and held up well when crumbled and frozen in my vanilla extract–flavored VFD.

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My Lemon Vegan Sherbet, shown in the photo at the top of this post, came out a pale yellow, even though the juice I used to make it was pink. The lemon flavor was strong but not overwhelming, and as with other citrus-based VSes I've made, the levels of tartness and sweetness were nicely balanced. Even though I've got a sweet tooth as big as a (crowded) house, I sometimes appreciate desserts that are less sugary.

I'd bought a small package of pink lemons from Miami Fruit—my source for the chocolate pudding fruits—at the Vegan Block Party in Fort Lauderdale last month.³ I was hoping to score some mangosteens, which were crazy expensive when bought in a shippable quantity from MF's website, but the woman who waited on me at the stand said their season had just ended.

To ensure I'd have a cup of juice for my recipe, I bought two bags of pink lemons from our local Sprouts to supplement the three lemons I got from MF. Juicing the fruit is the most time-consuming part of making a sherbet, but the payoff is worth the effort.

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Because refined coconut oil was difficult to find for many weeks because of supply chain problems⁠—and also because it's always been rather expensive compared with other oil options⁠—I tried replacing the coconut oil with canola oil in both of these VFDs. I didn't notice any difference at all in terms of either texture or flavor. They were as creamy and tasty as any other VFD I've made.

Another thing that spurred me on to try the replacement was when my first attempt at the Cookies & Cream VFD got all clumpy as it was churning in my ice cream maker. It was like semifrozen rice pudding. Ugh.

The only thing I'd done differently was using a refined coconut oil that is liquid at room temperature and was described on the label as "Coconut Cooking Oil"; it was the only nonvirgin coconut oil I could find at that time (at Whole Foods). The oil doesn't contain anything but coconut oil, so I suspect the manufacturer must use some process to prevent it from solidifying. Whatever that process is apparently makes the oil unsuitable for cooking up VFDs.

¹ Oreos have an interesting history. They actually contained lard (pork fat) until 1993, and they weren’t certified kosher until 1997 or 1998, after the production ovens were blasted with blowtorches and the conveyer belts used to move the cookies through the ovens were all replaced. According to the Cornell Chronicle article linked at “kosher,” Nabisco was pressured to make Oreos kosher by ice cream manufacturers who wanted to use the cookies in their Cookies & Cream flavor.

² The specific storage proteins, or prolamins, in oats that may cause digestive harm to PWCD are called avenins. As that linked article explains, avenins have regions that are particularly rich in two amino acids: prolamine and glutamine. (You may remember from a biology class in your past that amino acids are the basic building blocks of proteins.) Cereal grains that contain storage proteins with these prolamine- and glutamine-rich regions tend to be associated with the onset of celiac disease. The article explains the differences between the size and structure of these storage proteins in oats versus those in wheat, barley, and rye, which are always harmful for PWCD to consume. (Just because they're interesting words to me, I'll list the avenin equivalents for other cereal grains: gliadin in wheat, hordein in barley, secalin in rye, zein in corn, kafirin in sorghum, and orzein in rice.) Gliadin and glutenin, another storage protein found in wheat that is not categorized as a prolamin, are the main⁠ components of gluten—and the ones that cause problems for PWCD. Because barley and rye contain neither gliadin nor glutenin, they don't really contain gluten. But those two grains' storage proteins are similar enough to gluten that they cause the same reaction in PWCD, and for simplicity's sake, we've been told to think of them as gluten-containing grains. The storage proteins in corn, sorghum, and rice are dissimilar enough from gluten that those grains are absolutely safe for PWCD so long as they haven't been contaminated with a problem grain. And to circle back to my main point—and the point of the study I linked to at "oat varieties"—the storage proteins in oats may or may not be safe for PWCD, depending on the variety of oat.

³I went to the Vegan Block Party with my friend Gerry. The number of vendors was overwhelming. I didn't try a frozen dessert while I was there, mostly because we didn't find the FD maker I was expecting to be there until we were ready to leave. (We had overlooked the outer ring of vendors that backed onto the highly visible ones in the area you entered after having your ticket scanned.) We ordered our dinner at Empress Eats, which had a good-sized but not offputtingly long line and whose menu was appealing. My coconut curry chick'n, with sweet potatoes and over rice, was delicious. Gerry got a dish inspired by short ribs with pineapple. It was outstanding and beautifully presented in a hollowed-out half pineapple.

Skill-less Safflowers and Peers Who Are More Twee Than You

I started thinking about words having—but mostly not having—the same letter three times consecutively because of safflowers, which are one of the flowers I regularly buy for making arrangements. I love their bright orange or reddish-orange petals that pop up out of green sacks, looking like less-threatening bull thistles.¹ And I like safflowers' smell, which I find to be similar to calendulas' or marigolds'.²

In this arrangement from January, I combined safflowers with bupleurums. Both flowers are packaged as unnamed fillers at Trader Joe’s, where I buy most of my flowers, but I think they looked simply beautiful paired together, without any showier blossoms to distract the eye from them. And the bupleurums' long-lasting, round foliage worked well with the leafless safflower stems, whose more-conventional-looking leaves I'd stripped off.

Where was I going with this post? Oh, yeah—words with three of the same letters in a row. I thought safflower was probably like chaffinch, the name of a European bird that lost an f when it went from two words to one. But I see nothing online to suggest that safflower was ever saff flower.

There are precious few if any words in the three-of-the-same-letter category that are accepted as standard English by the major dictionaries. A commenter in an eight-year-old Reddit thread I found online copied over an Ask Oxford piece that said "the complete Oxford English Dictionary does contain instances of frillless, bossship, countessship, duchessship, governessship, and princessship, and the county name Rossshire." OED.com doesn't permit you to search a word or two without having a subscription, so I can't verify that old claim is still valid.

The bottom line with these words in modern American English is: either they are hyphenated ("skill-less") or one of the tripled letters is dropped ("skilless"). I generally prefer the hyphen because it's so clear what you're saying and why you're saying it that way. Readers might pass by "skilless" without thinking twice about what it meant, but they also might get hung up on it.

Merriam-Webster.com's entry for skill names the word in question as an adjective derived from skill. The listing is worded "skill-less or skilless," which means M-W believes both options are acceptable and neither is better than the other; they are equal variants. (If also had been used instead of or, that would have meant the second option is less commonly used and is considered a secondary variant.)

Another commenter in the Reddit thread suggested paleooologist, one who studies fossilized eggs, should be recognized as a valid word. M-W doesn't have an entry for it.

Yet another commenter threw out the word laparohysterosalpingooophorectomy. Emery University Medical School's Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics has a webpage that says laparoscopic salpingo-oophorectomy is the removal of one or both ovaries and fallopian tubes using a surgical technique that involves only a few small incisions, so that explains most parts of the commenter's word. M-W says hystero-salpingo-oophorectomy is "surgical removal of uterus, oviducts, and ovaries." I couldn't find a word similar to the commenter's word in a source I trusted without a hyphen after the first of the three consecutive o's.

M-W lists princeship as a noun derived from prince but doesn't do the same for princessship and princess. It has entries for godship and goddess-ship, so I assume M-W's editors would opt for princess-ship too.

The last thing I'll mention about this subject is that while M-W often opts for using a hyphen in longer nouns and adjectives, it tends to drop a letter in short words that would otherwise require two e's, a hyphen, and another e. Freer and freest are the comparative and superlative versions of the adjective free, and freer is also the person who frees someone or something.

However, seer and see-er are both legitimate ways of referring to one that/who³ sees (with seer also meaning one who predicts). M-W doesn't recognize peer as meaning "one who pees." But, of course, we drop an e when we put pee in the past tense: peed. And, similarly, it doesn't say whether tweer and tweest are the correct comparative and superlative for twee, so maybe I should say that while Tony and I have been enjoying watching this 15-year-old TV show on HBO Max, it's definitely one of the most twee series ever to air in prime time.

I'm going to end this post with two shots of one of my favorite arrangements, which I made about a month ago. It consists of sunflowers, mums that look like small sunflowers, and what I refer to as fuzzy green filler.

¹Those "sacks" are made of bracts: modified leaves that support the flowers. The bracts and leaves of wild safflowers have spines, like thistles, but humans have developed spineless varieties.

²It's no surprise that safflowers should have similarities to those other three flowers because—like sunflowers, chrysanthemums, zinnias, and many other favorites—they're all members of the composite family: Asteraceae. What we tend to call these plants' individual flowers are actually many flowers, of one or two types, grouped together into a lovely whole. They may consist of disc flowers, ray flowers, or both. The classic example of the sunflower has disc flowers throughout its center, with ray flowers surrounding the disc. Both types of flower can become pollinated and produce a seed.

³For the longest time, I've thought it was incorrect to speak of a person "that"⁴ does something. (Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, once did too, so I'm in good company.) It's not wrong to use that in that manner, but who certainly sounds more natural and proper in that context.

⁴That linked M-W entry for that offers up further possibilities for word nerdery. Comparing the 4a definition with the 1a–d definitions could take up a blog post. And those is the plural of that when it's used as a pronoun! It makes total sense, but if you had asked me yesterday what the plural of that was, I'm not sure I would have come up with that answer.

Holiday Baking With Black Sapote, aka Chocolate Pudding Fruit

After ordering a box of a new-to-me tropical fruit called black sapote and tasting it on its own, I baked two desserts using its creamy brown flesh, one of which was the Black Sapote Bread With Orange Glaze pictured above.

Before I write about those treats, though, I'll write about the fruit itself, which, as the headline indicates, is also known as chocolate pudding fruit. And I'll get the disappointing part of this post out of the way: Black sapote (which from now on will be shortened to the unfortunate abbreviation BS) doesn't taste anything like chocolate. It looks like and has a similar mouthfeel to chocolate pudding when it's ripe, but its very mild flavor isn't reminiscent of chocolate at all. I also found the flesh of this persimmon that's native to Mexico and Central America to be only slightly sweet. So while spooning out the dark brown, custardy pulp was a fun food experience, BS doesn't deliver on its nickname in one essential way—especially for a chocoholic like me.

And to be fair to Miami Fruit, the company I bought the BSes from, its website (at the first link above) doesn't promise the fruit tastes like chocolate. It correctly says BS "has a light flavor with a rich texture."

You can find many people online, however, insisting BS tastes JUST LIKE CHOCOLATE PUDDING. Those people are full of the other kind of BS. Or when they tried it, they were high on something that altered their sensation of taste. Or maybe unbeknownst¹ to them, someone else had mixed the pulp with cocoa powder and some kind of sweetener before serving it to them.

As I've mentioned on the blog before, my husband is adept at picking up and identifying subtle flavors in foods and wines. He didn't taste² any chocolate.

The fruit arrived in great shape on Nov. 17. I didn't weigh the contents, but my large box should have held around 10 pounds of BSes. There were two layers of fruit, so what you see in the photo above is about half the mass of it. As you can also see, the fruits were of different sizes.

I didn't think to note the date when the last BS ripened, but I would say it was about two weeks after the box arrived. You can refrigerate the ripened fruit to help preserve them, and I did so with several of the later-ripening ones.

I also gave some away to friends, who were by and large meh about them and, in some cases, turned off by the appearance and texture of the ripe fruit. Thankfully, the BSes were on different ripening schedules, so I wasn't overwhelmed with a bunch of need-to-eat-soon fruits at the same time.

I had ordered the fruit back in May or, more precisely, I had made a reservation for the fruit then. I bought the BSes then because, I'm fairly certain, Miami Fruit had incorrectly listed the fruit on its What's in Season page. My credit card was charged two days later. When I saw the charge on my monthly statement, I called the company to see what the deal was. I was told my card was charged to reserve my delivery. I could get a refund, but I would be taken off the list of people who would receive the fruit when it was in season.

I don't like that policy. Taking my credit card info to reserve a spot was entirely reasonable, but a retailer—or a hotel or rental car company, etc.—doesn't typically charge the customer until the order is being fulfilled or the service is being provided. Still, I really wanted to try chocolate pudding fruit, so I didn't ask for a refund.

Ripe BSes are olive green or brown all over, and they have the texture of a squishy pillow when you pick them up or poke at them. Like astringent persimmons, BSes shouldn't be consumed before they're completely ripe. (That's a quarter off to the right for size comparison.)

The fruits have very large seeds, and they're situated in little membranes I took to calling seed condoms. The flesh contains more than six times the daily value of vitamin C and also delivers a significant amount of fiber.

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I knew I wanted to attempt a Black Sapote Brownie, and I found an appealing recipe by a native-Floridian blogger named Suwannee Rose. At the same time, I had been looking at a Black Sapote Bread recipe at The Travel Bite. (There aren't a tremendous number of recipes that use BSes in baked goods online.)

I went with the brownie recipe first, and in retrospect, I wish I had made it a second time. But Tony and I ended up enjoying my second attempt at the BS Bread so much, I used the last of my ripe fruit in a third loaf I've stored in the freezer for Christmas.

I omitted the chocolate chips from the recipe (which is in the linked post above at Suwannee Rose, in case you hadn’t already assumed that) because I wanted to experience the blend of BS pulp and cocoa on their own, without the intrusion of another source of chocolate flavor. Tony and I enjoyed the brownies, especially my sweetie, but I think we would have liked them even more if I'd included the chocolate chips.

The brownies were also more cakelike than Suwannee Rose’s appear to be in her gorgeous photos. The recipe calls for a cup of regular all-purpose flour “or all-purpose, gluten-free baking mix.” As it turned out, I had on hand a box of APGFBM that was past its best-by date, so I took that substitution suggestion to heart and used the baking mix in place of the flour so I could avoid having to throw it out when it was even more past its best-by date.

That paragaph of explication leads me to a complaint about the recipe in terms of making it GF: I haven’t come across a brand of APGFBM that doesn’t contain baking powder, so I think Suwannee Rose should have noted that if you’re using APGFBM, you must omit the baking powder (which I did).

Alternatively, the recipe could have called for a GF flour replacer, which will inevitably have some variation on 1-to-1, 1-for-1, cup-for-cup, etc. in its brand name. This substitute for regular AP flour contains various alternative flours and starches (usually white and brown rice flours and potato and tapioca starches) plus xanthan gum, which stands in for the gluten. The 1-to-1 product doesn't contain baking powder, so that ingredient would still be needed.

I have one other issue with the recipe: Mixing the baking powder into the melted butter or coconut oil while it's warmer than room temperature seems counterintuitive. Because baking powder starts to react in the presence of heat and moisture, it's typically mixed in with other dry ingredients and then stirred into the wet ingredients just before the batter goes into the pan.

Now, maybe Suwannee Rose wanted that reaction to start earlier so the brownies wouldn't rise as much in the oven and would be fudgier than the rather cakey, though still very moist, ones I ended up with. Anyway, I never followed the recipe exactly, so I'll stop with my complaining and say I'm glad I found it and was able to successfully use it with only minor changes.

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When I made the BS Bread the first time, I had only one smallish fruit that was ripe. It yielded about 1/2 cup of pulp, so that's what I used in the recipe. And that's one gripe I have with this recipe: Its writer, Rachelle Lucas, says to use one ripe sapote without giving any idea of the volume of fruit flesh or the size of the fruit.

My other gripe is that the ingredients aren't in the same order in the list as they are in the instructions. In the list, egg is third and sugar is eighth and last; in the instructions, sugar is third and egg is fifth.

I thought about adding some cocoa or chocolate chips but opted for closely following the recipe other than subsituting APGFBM for the AP flour and baking soda. I applaud Lucas's decision to double the amount of vanilla from her source recipe: this one-bowl Banana Bread recipe at Simply Recipes. I enjoyed the blend of vanilla and black sapote flavors; the bread tasted somewhat of caramel to me. Tony said the bread tasted like angel food cake (though with a very different texture) and thought orange zest would have been a welcome addition.

The texture was mostly good, but I took it out of the oven too soon, before the 1 hour called for in the recipe was up. I can imagine Paul Hollywood running his index finger along the not-quite-done area and saying, "You can see it's oonderbaked."

On my next attempt, I chose to embrace the source recipe and used 1 1/2 cups of BS pulp. I also added 1/4 teaspoon of allspice because I thought that spice—which Tony has been using a good deal in his cooking lately—would work well with the BS and vanilla.

We enjoyed the bread solo, but it was even better after, at Tony's urging, I drizzled it with an Orange Glaze. (That recipe also gives the ingredients in two different orders, though with only three of them—and only one instructional step—it's hard to get confused.) The allspice could have been stronger; I had been hesitant to use too much because I didn't want the bread to be an allspice bomb. And there could have been more glaze; a lot of it soaked into the cake.

When I made the bread the third time, I increased the allspice to 1/2 teaspoon. I didn't have quite enough APGFBM, so I completed filling my final 1/2-cup measure with GF flour (not the 1-to-1 kind) and added pinches of xanthan gum and baking powder. I also didn't have enough refined coconut oil, so I replaced some of it with canola oil.

I put the loaf in the freezer unglazed, but I have a fresh navel orange to make the glaze with when we're ready to eat the BS Bread.

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All in all, I'm glad I splurged on the BSes, but I don't see myself springing for another box of them. I'd rather try one of Miami Fruit's other offerings. If someone with a BS tree gave me some of the fruit, I'd make the brownies again, with chocolate chips.

¹Unbeknownst is one of those words, like nondescript, whose opposite is never used, is considered to be archaic, or isn’t considered to be an actual word.

²I acknowledge that what we taste in a given food or drink can be subjective. But I imagine there must also be a way to determine through chemical testing whether any compounds that lend chocolate its flavor are found in this fruit.

Conglomerates, a Corgi Calendar, Cold Missouri Waters, and Curly Hurdles

The word conglomerate was in the news last month because of General Electric Co.’s decision to split itself into three parts. Though it has divested itself of several businesses over the years—including appliances, financial, and entertainment—GE has remained a true conglomerate in that it’s an entity with diverse businesses.

I occasionally see conglomerate used to more broadly mean “a big-ass business,” as in this Vox story’s reference to “Stellantis, the Dutch automotive conglomerate.” Stellantis is a large company—it had third-quarter revenue of €32.6 billion—with a number of well-known brands, including Chrysler, Fiat, and Maserati, but it really has one business: to make and sell cars.

Another business term I sometimes see misused is spin-off, which takes me back to that GE story. The company will be spinning off its healthcare and energy businesses, leaving aviation as its only remaining industry. In a spin-off, the current shareholders of a company receive newly created shares in a division of that company. When I worked as an editor for a business magazine, I would occasionally have to change references to a company spinning off a division when it was actually selling it to another company.

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Cafe Press, the printer of the 2021 calendar I’ve been looking at all year, screwed up and put Thanksgiving on a Friday.

Or maybe it was the fault of the calendar’s creator? Anyway, the calendar (which has the same art in its 2021 and 2022 incarnations) features some adorable photos of corgis, as does its sister calendar, which focuses on corgi butts.

The rescue group we adopted Missy from called her a corgi mix, but I’m no longer sure she has any corgi in her at all. I’m pretty certain she is part papillon, mostly because of the way the hair on her ears grows, and I’m becoming increasingly convinced she’s part Australian shepherd, a breed I don’t really know much about, other than it was actually developed in California. Several people we’ve encountered on walks have suggested they see Australian shepherd in her, and I saw a photo of a dog in a Facebook group I follow that was the spitting image of Missy, and he was half Australian shepherd. The dog’s human told me he was actually a much bigger dog than Missy and was also half German shepherd, which seemed unlikely to me.

Where the hell am I going with all of this? Where I inevitably go when I write about dogs on the blog: to a cute picture of our baby girl, who was eager to find out what her Papa Tony was putting on the dinner table the other night.

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Even though I’m a word guy, most songs draw me in through a beautiful melody or a nonlyrical, super-catchy hook. But one of my favorite genres is folk, in which the lyrics are often the star and the songwriter can make you feel like you’ve heard a short story set to music.

The best story-telling song I’ve ever encountered is “Cold Missouri Waters,” which is written from the point of view of Wag Dodge, who survived the devastating Mann Gulch wildfire of 1949 only to die of cancer five years later. (I didn’t say it was a happy story.) Songwriter James Keelaghan created the song after reading Young Men and Fire, a book-length account of the fire and the people who fought it, by Norman Maclean.

I first heard the song on Cry Cry Cry’s 1998 self-titled album, and I got to hear the members of that folk supergroup—Lucy Kaplansky, Richard Shindell, and Dar Williams—sing it live back in the day.¹ I've since listened to Shindell's solo version, Keelaghan's original version, and various other live and studio recordings—eight of which can be found here.

Once you've heard or read the lyrics, you know all the key elements of Dodge's story. The words take you from his hospital bed back in time to an airplane above the fire (the people who fought the fire, led by Dodge, were smokejumpers), then into the path of the fast-moving fire, and, finally, back to the hospital, where Dodge says he'll soon be joining the 13 men who died in the blaze.

My favorite verse is the penultimate one:

Sky had turned red, smoke was boiling / Two hundred yards to safety, death was fifty yards behind / I don't know why, I just thought it / I struck a match to waist-high grass, running out of time / Tried to tell them, step into this fire I’ve set / We can't make it, this is the only chance you'll get / But they cursed me, ran for the rocks above instead / I lay face down and prayed above the cold Missouri waters

Isn't that phenomenal writing?

Because this is an editing-focused post, I'll point out two wording-related questions I pondered after listening to the song many times.

First, on "the hottest day on record," in early August, is the Missouri River still going to be cold, even in the northern state of Montana? Eh, maybe it was only cool, but "cool Missouri waters" doesn't carry the same weight.

The second question I had was answered by blogger Tony Dalmyn. In the earlier studio versions, Keelaghan and Shindell (as part of CCC) sing "north Montana," while in other versions, the lyric is "west Montana." Why the two different directions? West Montana looks to be more accurate according to the map in the Wikipedia article linked above at "Mann Gulch wildfire." Dalmyn writes that Keelaghan changed the lyric at the request of people who live near the Gates of the Mountains.

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I bought People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive issue—for the articles, of course. On a page about Paul Bettany, two sentences popped out at me, in addition to the actor’s blue eyes.

First up: “Life’s curly.” I’d never seen curly being used in a sense other than “having curls” or something similar. One online dictionary says the word can mean “difficult to counter or answer” to English speakers in Australia and New Zealand, so I assume Bettany is saying “Life isn’t always easy.”

And I think hurdle later in that quote should be hurtle. “Move rapidly” makes more sense there than “jump over” or “overcome.”

¹I didn't get to see CCC on their 2018 reunion tour; it didn't come anywhere near Fort Lauderdale. This YouTube clip shows CCC's performance of three songs from the Berkeley, California, stop of that tour: "Ten Year Night," which was written by Kaplansky and her husband, Richard Litvin; "Cathedrals," which was written by Jump, Little Children's Jay Clifford; and "Cold Missouri Waters."