This morning I attempted to make a gluten-free Spanish tapa-- in theory it is a puff pastry filled with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes ona slice of zucchini (I used charred eggplant.)

However, I made it using white glutino corn bread squares (mostly becaue I bought some to try and didn't like it plain and I figured the oils would help. I sprayed it with truffle oil-- that ought to improve just about anything, right?)

They are servable, but the glutino bread is really not a good substitue for the puff pastry, as you can imagine.

So is there something out there that is satisfactory? Or even better, has somebody figured out a gluten-free recipe to make it?

Thanks!

Lisa

Hi,
I've been trying to come up with a gluten-free replacement for Phylo which has not been easy and often comes closer to voul au vent. So far its a mix of soba buckwheat flour and quinoa flour. When I roll that out I use mochiko or rice flour. If you try buckwheat you just have to make sure its 100% and not mixed.

Good luck!
Ken

Hi Ken!

do you use a 50-50 blend (of the soba BW and quinoa)? What is the proportion? Thanks! the bread is just so sad...

Lisa

Sorry, I forgot the important part!
(it was 5am here in Kona!)

It's 70% soba 30% quinoa then the rice flour dusting.
I mix the soba first with ice water then add the quinoa.
It takes some time to get it well mixed. When I used to make "juwari" soba noodles in Japan the ice water helped.
I've read on the forum that others use different mixes and think its just matter of finding one that works best for things.
I still dont like this mix for phylo but it makes a great pizza crust!
Ken

Thanks Ken!

I had read that about the soba noodles-- have you ever seen the film Tampopo? I love them-- plus I read that the rutin in the buckwheat helps regulate high blood pressure. It's a winner all around.

I will play with the flours and see what I can come up with. It really seems to me we ought to be able to get something decent. But then again, I have thought that before.

I am going to tap a few ethnic cuisines and see if I can find anything that might work. I will let you know if I have a stunning success of some kind.

5 am and Kona kind of go together

Lisa

5am and Kona go together if its Kona Coffee!

I remember Tampopo well. It was a great movie. The Director Juzo Itami did a numberof other good films too, The Taxing Woman 1,2 and 3 are really funny, perhaps more so for me as I have had a place in Japan 30 years. Last March I went back to take a class on soba and making noodles. Didnt have to spy either! Tampopo was ramen which is wheat -- I still miss the taste of miso ramen at a place near my office that looked like it came from the movie. We moved offices a few years ago to Saitama, about an hour out of Tokyo and a few blocks from an old soba museum.

I'll look forward to hearing about what you come up with. I may find time to try again later this month. MIght up the percentage of rice flour.

Take care

Ken

Ken! Ken!

I did it! I found a phyllo substitute! A decent one! At least I think so.

Okay-- so after you told me about the flours I got to thinking and I thought of Teff (see other post). But then my eye fell on that pesky packet of rice wraps (gallettes de riz) from my previous post. And I thought how much they look like phyllo. Ding! A bell went off in my head.

So I thought I would try an experiment (that's what I was doing in between posts). So I took about 25 of them out of the package and ran them under warm tap water and then put them in a baking dish and brushed melted butter on them one by one. And I stacked them all up like this, pushing the air out as I went. They were absorbing the butter!

I stuffed my big old rice phyllo round with boursin cheese and pecans and I folded it over (crude, I know, but it was an experiement) and sealed the ends a bit. And I put it in the oven at 425 until it started to bubble up and turn a little brown. It took longer than with regular phyllo and it let a lot of butter out (I had to pour some off at one point.) Maybe I used too much. I like butter.

And I took it out and cut a bit off one end and put a slice of Mexican mango on it and ate it and it was good. Really good. At least to me. Pretty close.

Oh! I am so excited to find this! Way cool. I am jumping up and down!

I have zero training so I know that somebody with REAL training and experience can make this even better and I bet you can even figure out how to get it into shapes and everything.

Please let me know what you think and if there is a way to improve it.

I will try to mess with the teff next if I can get some. This is so exciting to me! It is a whole new world.

WOW-- sounds great -- I only have one pack of the rice wraps here so I'll have to find some more and try it.
Just too bad I couldn't send you a Hawaiian mango to slice! I also use too much butter but usually put chopped fresh dill or thyme in it when I melt then bush the herbs on with it.
maybe I'll try it tomorrow with fresh figs, spinach and feta.

There are 6 chef buddies from the hotels here and we rotate cooking for each other once a month. My turn was January so I'll have to perfect something like this for my next turn.

Thanks a lot!
I'm happy it worked out well for you.
Anything with boursin has to be good ()

This morning the phyllo leaves were a little on the hard side so I figure this is a dish best served hot (granted, my boyfriend forgot to cover it last night.) I was thinking spinach next myself-- or maybe pistachio baklava.

In my excitement I forgot to tell you that I showthe film Tampopo every year to my ethnic food class. My favorite part is the old lady in the grocery store who goes around squeezing everything! I giggle like a kid.

I actually get to eat a lot of Japanese food (even here in MN!) because my boyfriend got his PhD in Japan (Keio). I like the soba noodles much better than the ramen because they are so hearty. I wonder if there isn't a way we can have miso-- seems like there ought to be, since there is such a decent gluten-free tamari soy (so they can ferment w/o wheat). I bet a soba museum is really interesting.

Anyway, I am glad you are going to try it. My wraps were a mix of rice and tapioca-- probably they are all kind of the same.

I too wish for a slice of HI mango. The Mx mango we get here in the winter is not always very sweet, but my tropical BF buys them anyway because that's all there is. And he would kill for a durien or a jackfruit.

Lisa

Sounds to me like your boyfriend and you should head out here --last of the ripe durian sitting in the driveway( I can smell it now even at 430 am). Jackfruit happens around June. My wife does not want either in the house although makes an exception when I make half dried jackfruit dipped in Chocolate. I get the farmers market set up around 530 and expect a lot of durian from another grower this week so I'll
have the smell with me most of the day. At least its gluten-free!

Grat idea to show tampopo to the class. We have an Asian Cookery class for 2nd year students where it would be a nice addition. Usually we have guest chefs come in an lecture. (Huck Finn Tom Sawyer method of teaching<G>)

I used to know a number of people at Keio although more at Waseda as they were affiliated with U of Chicago. I stillhave a place there and lecture at Chiba Daigaku a few weeks each March. Leave on the 5th this year. Also go to the worlds largest Food show called FoodEx
there. Eight football fields of foods and drink from darn near every country. Last year I went to a seminar on the growth of food allergies in Japan -- thanks to an increased western diet I suspect.
Take a look at http://www.hawaiifruit.net/V2posterweb.gif which shows the fruit I work with here. Some of the figs at
http://www.hawaiifruit.net/index-figs.html
Want to make a figsaw puzzle from that picture!
Take care

You are a lucky man, Ken. Fabulous fruiits. Breath-taking.

My BF's family has a coconut plantation and also grow a number of fruits. It always sounds like paradise to me- until you turn on the news and see they are still killing each other over there.

When I teach my class, I have guest speakers too (not to mention movies!)-- but even better, I have about 5 international students come in during the semester and do cooking "labs" with my students. So far I have had students from over 45 countries come and cook. It is so interesting! And of course, my students love it. Many have never left the state, let alone tried an ethnic cuisine. The international students get hours towards a cultural sharing scholarship that gets them in-state tuition. I also do biology labs that look at how our sense of taste works. It is so much fun! There is lots more in that class too... like food histories (I regularly get to read papers on the history of yogurt or rice or bananas or mangoes or chocolate!) etc. It is my very favorite class.

I love the picture of the figs-- it brings back a lot of memories. When I lived in Spain I became very fond of the type they call the "novio" fig. I sometimes crave it, but we can only get figs preserved in a super-sweet syrup and we have to go to the ethnic markets for that. We eat them all on the way home with sticky, dripping fingers.

What a pleasure to meet you! If I ever get to Kona, HI I will certainly visit your stall at the farmer's market.

And good luck with the phyllo!

Lisa

Busy market this morning which is unusual for this time of year. Always wears me out but fun talking to people from all over the globe.
Where's the coconut plantation? I've visited a few dozen in 5 or 6 countries. Also lived in Barcelona but only 4 months prior to and during the Olympics.
Took my then 15 year old son who is now as chef here. Our school is the smallest unit in the culinary institute of the pacific which is part of the Hawaii Community College System which in turn is part of the University of Hawaii at Manoa who I work for. The culinary school is part of the system from Hilo
but located in Kona. Since I work for Mano in Honolulu I can get away with a lot of things the others cant which is a lot of fun. Things like getting the students to use juiced sour fruit like bilimbi and green starfruit instead of vinegar. Hope you guys make it Kona!
Take care
ken

He is from Sri Lanka. We are a real East meets West (I was born here) couple and it makes for a refrigerator full of interesting ingredients and some real winners and some real flops. Wasabi and stinky tofu next to the heinz ketchup.

Thank you for the poster link. I showed the BF your fruits and he recognized most of them (the japanese names helped sometimes) and started explaining excitedly about them and how they are used and how they grow and how you harvest them. And he reminisced about the trees his father planted. He said he has always had the dream of starting a jackfruit plantation back in SL. Who knows what the future holds? If they grow in HI, maybe I can sell it as an alternative.

I often come home to find him slurping fruits I have never seen before over the kitchen sink-- whole wooden boxes of the small yellow mangoes and giant papayas just disappear overnight. But these things are hard to get here. And just as often it is maldive fish, seer fish or onion pickle. I think he is homesick--midwestern food is dust in his mouth. My biggest triumph was finding him some rampe (pandan leaf) here and discovering that moroccan harissa tastes like his favorite chile lime pickle.

I hope I can talk him into a trip to Kona one of these days. I will ply him with spicey food or bribe him with fruit!

Your school sounds divine-- like the perfect dream job. And your students are lucky students. I cannot think of a better place to do what you do. I will try some of the things you mentioned-- the green starfruit sounds quite good. And that is cool about Barcelona. I was also in Spain at that time. That part has its own regional cuisine and it is quite different from other parts of Spain. I was in Sevilla, Madrid and Vigo (Galician coast) for years and I often went to Portugal, Morocco, France or Italy. Those are the flavours I love and that is where I learned whatever I may know.

Lisa

Wonder if he knows the Sri Lankan restaurant at Shinjuku minami guchi. Used to go there often. Bet he did too since many Japanese were leary of something that was not Indian. Some of the guys there really taught me a lot about the subtle differences. My grad student is from Kerala and we lived a few streets from the Indian section of Chicago where we ate many times a week. My wife, also from Chicago is also hooked on the food but cant handle the spices anymore.

Perhaps as incentive, tell your BF I get spices from Jodhpur http://www.mvspices.com/
I make many types of achar including lime pickles from abhay apuri lime that I grafted from wood from Karnataka.
My grad student Jyotsna and her husband Krishna say it's better than their mothers make<G> My 12 trees project is now being mirrored in Kerala and I may have to go there in April. Never been to SL though. My designer of the fruit park I made here for the university was with the USDA and assigned to design the national park in SL. He's always trying to find a way to get back.
The largest single jackfruit planting here is only 80 trees although most farms have one or two. He can also get rampe here, off the trees, betal, well just about anything in SL is also here.
Wasabi and stinky tofu too!

I was also working at the worlds fair in Sevilla for a few days but never made it to Madrid. Will be in Northern Italy all of July though.
Going to stay at a celiac guest house on lake Guarda for a week too. Can't wait to get back to Europe! It wil lbe the first time for my wife
although I've dragger her around Asia a number of times.

Take care
Ken

I am excited about trying to use the rice wrappers to make spinakopita. Have been having cravings for it. I alo have a question. Do orientals have celiacs? The girl that cuts my hair is about a size minus zero. She is anemic and has had a couple of miscarraiges. I wonder if she could be celiac?

It's pretty rare but increasing.
I think in 2005 there were 12 reported cases in Japan. Last year they didnt give a number but said that along with serious wheat allergies in school children were rising dramatically.
I've missed spanakopita too and anxious to try it...

It is hard for us to imagine because our culture is so wheat-based, but some cultures are totally gluten-free. The BF says that growing up, he ate wheat maybe once a week or twice a month (naan)-- and that was only when they had run out of rice. He says that for some reason their government is subsidizing wheat flour very heavily, so it is just pennies a kilo, but there is a resistance to it. Their diet is rice and coconut based and they could be very happy without wheat at all. In fact, he doesn't consider that he's eaten a meal unless he's had rice. Interestingly, their government did the same thing with manioc back in the 1960s, with a bit more success. We eat the root sometimes.

After many years of watching me be sick and trying to help me with ayurvedic foods, he was delighted when I finally found out what was wrong (I was still eating largely a Western diet.) He told me, "My people have been cooking without wheat for over 6000 years-- maybe we knew something was wrong with it." I bet he is right. And I bet that is why the numbers will be lower in general-- they just don't eat it! But if the subsidies do their job, people will start getting sick. You can bet on it.

I would say it is easier to be gluten-free when you live with somebody with this kind of diet-- however, he does love, for some reason I cannot fathom, buttermilk EGGO waffles. He wraps them around leftover spicy curry for breakfast-- never sweet with syrup.

To answer tha question about the restaurant, he says that he knew that there were SL restaurants there, but didn't go to them because he was a poor student at the time, trying to eat on 50-100 yen per meal. He was sending the money he made back home to helphis family. But he does tell a funny story about taking the train on a free day to Osaka, where there was a restaurant that was famous for a very spicy dish. It was so spicy that if a customer could eat it all, the would eat free. I guess he and his brothers took advantage of the fact the SL cuisine is the spiciest in the world!

Well...back to dinner. I just finished a bonchi (green bean) curry and I am onto the chicken next. Then the string hoppers.

Happy dining!

I wonder how much of these wheat subsidies are tied into big US based agribusiness. Your right that the incidents of celiac and other allergies will increase in all Asian cultures if they succumb to the use of wheat. It's already happening in Japan. Manioc or cassava root is great. Had to go to a party at the governors in Guam and that and ulu / breadfruit was all I could eat. Loved it! I use breadfruit often here. I hope in time that the western culture adopts some of the pacific and Asian foods. In the early 1900's banana flour was the top export in Hawaii, prior to pineapple. Can't find it anywhere anymore.

Funny about the eggo waffles. My wife likes them too. Don't think I ever had one and now I know I never will.
I remember seeing that place on TV in Japan. If you can eat it all you get it for free, kind of like some ice cream shops in Chicago serving a dish with 30 scoups. No wonder there is an obesity problem in the US! I rather have the curry. I miss being able to use the quick mix S&B stuff. I make my own but there are only so many hours in a day. Takes me 5 hours to cook down the onions when I do it.
I'll be at the SL restaurant in Japan in March and be thinking of you guys!
Take care

I wonder how much of these wheat subsidies are tied into big US based agribusiness. Your right that the incidents of celiac and other allergies will increase in all Asian cultures if they succumb to the use of wheat. It's already happening in Japan. Manioc or cassava root is great. Had to go to a party at the governors in Guam and that and ulu / breadfruit was all I could eat. Loved it! I use breadfruit often here. I hope in time that the western culture adopts some of the pacific and Asian foods. In the early 1900's banana flour was the top export in Hawaii, prior to pineapple. Can't find it anywhere anymore.

Funny about the eggo waffles. My wife likes them too. Don't think I ever had one and now I know I never will.
I remember seeing that place on TV in Japan. If you can eat it all you get it for free, kind of like some ice cream shops in Chicago serving a dish with 30 scoups. No wonder there is an obesity problem in the US! I rather have the curry. I miss being able to use the quick mix S&B stuff. I make my own but there are only so many hours in a day. Takes me 5 hours to cook down the onions when I do it.
I'll be at the SL restaurant in Japan in March and be thinking of you guys!
Take care

This is the most exotic thread I have ever read on this forum!

Just wanted to tell you guys that. I am sure I won't even attempt this phyllo/voul-au-vent of which you two are speaking......but gosh, everything you describe - the foods, the locations, all of it - just sounds so.....delicious and exotic. Reminds me of a movie - a Vietnamese film, maybe? Scent of Green Papaya - you guys would probably enjoy it. I don't know the movie you're talking about but I"m intrigued.

Thanks for sharing - fascinating reading and I wish I could eat whatever you all are preparing!

p.s. Ken - have you ever tried the Patek curry pastes in jars? they're pretty good - esp. the Vindaloo - and gluten-free - they work for me in a pinch.

Hi Dingo girl!

I dearly love that movie too. I sometimes use sequences of the servant cooking in the food class. The filmography is wonderful! And we actually do use the green papaya as a base sometimes at home. We have papaya troubles here-- the little ones come from Latin America and they are picked green and then shipped here like that so they jump right from the green to semi-rotten stage fast. But you can use the green ones-- you shave them, just like in the movie. We put a spicy fish sauce on it like a kind of salad with thoe tiny red bird's eye peppers.

The phyllo dough is pretty easy-- you have to brush the regular stuff with butter anyway, so it is about the same.

There are lots of great cookbooks out there and recipes on the web fromSri Lanka, India, Thailand (I adore Thai food!) and Vietnam. You can also find stuff from Africa-- I strongly recommend Ethiopian food. It is much better than French food, and a much older tradition. When I was little we had an exchange student from Ethiopia take care of us when my parents went out and she used to cook the most wonderful food. To this day Ethiopian food literally brings tears to my eyes.

I really hope you give some of these flavors a try!

Lisa

Lisa,

I live in the San Joaquin Valley - the most major agricultural area in the nation (read: BORING!) and I was shocked and delighted beyond belief when an Ethiopian restaurant opened here....the chef was thrilled to make gluten-free teff for me, and everything was absolutely to die for! I'll go there again, and soon. I am afraid, however, due to the very mundane community in which we live, that this restaurant won't be there long.

I am glad you got the movie reference. Speaking of food movies - - one of the all-time best, though entirely different region - Like Water for Chocolate. I actually own that one and must watch it again, soon. But I remember The Scent of Green Papaya being one of the most beautiful movies. I would never think to cook w/ papayas, and using fish sauce.....my mind is way too western, and this is sad.

Do you teach cooking classes at University? I have family in Minneapolis (Apple Valley) - what a great city. Wish I'd known about Aqua Vie (is that the name? doesn't sound right) when I visited.

It takes a lot of effort to make the wonderful foods you and Ken are speaking of....it's sad that most of us don't make these efforts - - we are a fast-food and microwave nation. I was very proud of myself today for roasting beets and making a salad with more than three ingredients......good food takes effort! But this thread has inspired me to venture into more exotic things. Phyllo dough or its facsimile - too fattening - - I am pretty low-carb, or the pounds creep on.

You two are an inspiration to try more things.

How lucky to live in CA where you can get fantastic produce! We spent a year in Davis (my dad was doing a post-doc at the U) and I remembr the peaches seemed as big as my head and there were these giant strawberries-- almost a meal in themselves. And in the summer Davis smelled like stewed tomatoes!

If you ever make it back up here, we have a couple of great Ethiopean restaurants in the cities. The oldest one is called the Queen of Sheba. There is even one in Mankato, the town where I was born. I hope your restaurant guys make it there in CA. I do not know why that particular cuisine hasn't caught fire in the US. It is certainly fine. I am sure its day will come. I hope so.

Where I am there are no cooking classes at all-- the class I teach is an oddball and it was meant to fill a diversity requirement. But we do have a kitchen facility in the International dorm where my office is and we use that.

I also love that movie-- I show it in my Spanish classes. Mexican cuisine is another world wonder. Everyday I thank them for chocolate, vanilla, corn and tomatoes! How sad the world would be without those.

I used to think it took a long time to cook, but this is not really true. Some of the best stuff is super fast. And I guess I would rather spend my mornings or weekends cooking multiple dishes that make me happy than reading bad news in the paper. It is about the same time.

For example, the curry I made didn't take long at all-- it was a coconut-based mango chicken curry and I bet it took all of 20 minutes. I think the hardest part is having the ingredients. But once you start buying them for one tradition of cooking, it seems like there is a kind of base flavor-profile and you can use them for lots of other dishes too. And all of a sudden you are cooking that food every day.

I hope you start playing with this stuff too! You are in a primo location to do it. I bet you can get a decent papaya

Hi,
Glad you enjoy our ramblings! Scent of Green Papaya was a great movie. Some of our students here make it for the public lunches they serve a few times a year. Try to find Tampopo in foreign section. The director is Juzo Itami who made a number of other good films that have been release with subtitles.

Patek is not available on my Island but when I go to Honolulu I usually pick some up. Good stuff. I tend not to order too much online as the shipping to Hawaii is crazy.

Take care

Funny you mentioned the peaches at Davis. I was there last Sept. and talked to a raw food group in Sebastopol. Went to the farmers market in the morning and ate 18 peaches that day. Really! Reminded me of going to You-pick places in Michigan when I was a kid.
We NEVER get a good peach here for the same reason you cant get a decent papaya. They are picked way to green and ripened artificially with ethylene gas during shipment.

A few other food movies I was thinking of while reading,
Woman on Top was really a fun movie and got me doing some Brazilian dishes for awhile. Have some relatives there too.
Chocolat got me hooked on Mayan chocolate
http://www.vosgeschocolate.com/product/oax...otic_candy_bars
Monsoon Wedding from India
My Big Fat Greek Wedding hit close to home since I learned Greek cuisine before anything else.
Decided that going to movies is bad for my diet!(^^)
Do get a lot of ideas from them though
take care

Yes, those peaches are a dream! I also could get really good ones ('hot Thomas peaches") when I lived in GA. We need a better fruit distribution system! That's all there is to it. I also remember the Ag part of UC Davis where they did all the horticulture and experiments. You wouldn't think it would stop a fifth-grader in her tracks,but it did. What a marvelous world (although I could do without the cow with the window in her stomach! Nightmares for years...) Sitck with the peaches, I guess.

I found out the subsidized flours are, in fact, American. It really makes you stop and think think-- we are trying to sell them poison! And we are doing it all over the world. I guess there is a KFC and Mac Donald's in Colombo now. The politics of food are another topic we cover, from labor to marketing to subsidies. It is enough to make you sick, celiac disease aside. The more you know the worse it gets.

We also watch "Eat, drink, man, woman"-- amazing, really. It is an Ang Lee movie set in Taiwan. The father in the film is a chef who loses his sense of taste. I adore Chocolat (the scene where the puritanical mayor ends up in a fetal position in the display window with chocolate all over him clutching a half-eaten bunny!) and Woman on Top is great-- the scene where all the cooking students sniff the peppers is wonderful. We have watched them both. I never thought of MBFGW, but I could use it for the dinner scene when his parents come over and experience Greek food (and ouzo!) Opa!
We also do "Soul food," which is another wonderful film I would recommend if you haven't seen it.

Oh, and Moonsoon Wedding! Divine! We listen to the sound track of that one and dance around the kitchen. It is our happy music. Especially "Allah hoo"! I never thought to use it in class. There are so many good ones!

There is a fantastic one called "The Gleaners and I" in English and it is by a very old French female director and she looks at the practice of gleaning in France and interviews poor people who glean after the Paris farmer's market and she looks at farmer protests there where they just dump an entire crop and people glean from it.... that is really interesting! We use it too. And there are many more.... I guess these movies are becoming more and more popular because every year it seems like a new one comes out.

Lisa

OH! And I forgot "A Chef in Love" set in Georgia (the country) during the revolution and "Babette's Feast." How could I?

Well... off to cook some bitter gourd....

Need to make a list of the movies I've not seen. "The Gleaners and I" sounds great. I had forgot about "Eat, drink, man, woman".
Should rent it again since I didnt see it since it was first out. My wife cant figure out why I like Chocolat as she usually teases me about watching some James Bond movie for the 430th time. Well at the farmers market we do offer a James Bond Breakfast kit in a box.
"Yoghurt, Stewed Green Figs, Coffee very black". Anyway, Chocolat is about freedom of choice is what I tell her<G>.

Greek Town in Chicago in the 60s and 70s was an amazing experience. Hard to hear English spoken there. It's much more touristy now but still a great place to visit. MBFGW hit close to home and I could easily imagine being invited to it. Oh, and I now use windex to kill ants!

take care

Maybe if you are really brave you can use it on the DH! (just kidding.... I bet it would really hurt like heck. I get it too. )

Greek food is another wonderful thing. One of my friends in college was Greek and she actually told me that Greek cooking is very labor intensive as it was designed to keep women at home cooking! I do not know if this is true (she did have anthro articles to back this up.) There is a pastry with cherries that I dream about.....

Haha maybe not a bad idea -- windex on DH.

INteresting about the way it was designed. I always read that in Ancient Greece the chefs were male and protected by guards so that they were not killed by invaders. It can be labor intensive, for pastries like Loukomathes. I miss those too!

well... it was a women's college, after all. Maybe there was some kind fo shift from men cooking to women cooking after the middle ages. I bet there is a good paper topic in that!

You know, it never ceases to amaze me how a food from your childhood can produce such strong emotions and waves of nostalgia. It sounds like the Greek food does that for you. I know for my mom it was her Polish mother's cooking-- stock with yellow chicken feet bobbing inside or cherry kolachke or the blue eggs laid by the Polish chickens.

I once saw a Cuban man break down at a food conference when he reminisced about his mother's special dish. He was so surprised (and probably a little horrified that it happened in public). Other people in the audience started talking about their childhood foods emotionally too and it was quite a nice experience. We truly are what we eat-- it is our identity. And I suppose in a way we spend our whole lives somehow trying to recapture the joyful feeling associated with that special food.

There is a cool movie about this (to some extent) by Jaglom-- it is simply called "Eating," but parts of it are painful because it also deals with eating disorders. I don't use it, but it is interesting.

I feel so lucky in my life! I have gotten to try a lot of different foods and met a lot of wonderful people from all over and connected with them over food. There was the older Japanese lady in Honolulu that I met on the beach who didn't speak a word of English but who laughed like a maniac when I pointed at the little fish nibbling at my legs and said-- "sashimi!" Food transcends petty human divisions and little things like a language barrier.

And I feel like even though I have this disease I can still enjoy so much of the world. And there is so much left to explore! Thank you so much for the delightful chat!

Cooking is such an art form.....and my creativity, unfortunately - since due to Celiac I am now required to cook nearly every day - takes its flight in so many other media.....cooking is just drudgery to me! I WISH that I enjoyed it more......but chopping, measuring (or not - I only measure when I bake), the acquisition and preparation of food has alwyas been the LEAST interesting facet of life to me.

And yet, for years, way before the cooking channel was invented, all I did was watch cooking shows on PBS for hours on Saturdays, quite often. I am fascinated with it as an art.....have seen nearly all of those movies you two have mentioned (I even own Chocolat - and I only own about 10 DVD's!).......have got The Gleaners on my Blockbuster queue.

We are madly spoiled with this produce here, and in fact, take it for granted. Eighteen peaches in one day????????????? We see them all over the place and so to us, they're quite ordinary, as are the wonderful citrus fruits. A good mango I get excited over.....we buy all the stone fruits all summer until we're sick of them....there is a Japanese grower a good 20 miles away from me, worth the drive for his tomatoes at peak season.....nothing like them.

Stewed figs? What are you guys talking about? I"m not much of a fig lover....maybe I don't know the right kinds? We have SO many figs here, also.

That chart of fruits - - mygawd - absolutely gorgeous. I have been a botanical illustrator (by avocation) for over 20 years - - what I couldn't do with some of those specimens!






funny!

Anyway, I wish I could just hire you two to be my personal chefs. It just seems to come quite naturally to those who make it their profession.......the rest of us - we're just appreciators.
I lived in Monterey for seven years and worked in the wine industry........those were the days....I ate out from one to three times a week.....some of the best restaurants in the world, but even just the neighborhood bistros everywhere were fabulous. Great to live there and not be Celiac (or - not KNOW you're Celiac).....

Sute about the Japanese lady. Something I can imagine. Your grandmothers cooking reminds me of my grandmothers cooking. She was born in the US but her family came from the Polish Russian border area. I do remember the chicken feet she always talked about. Also remember the first KFC in Singapore. They had people waiting in line to buy chicken feet! Not something that would go over in the west any more.

Your right, it is amazing how food triggers memories and emotion. At our market or my fruit park I often meet teary eyed immigrants reminiscing about some fruit they remember from their youth in Vietnam or Columbia or Haiti.

Like you I feel extremely lucky to experience these things and the wide range of emotions they conjure.
Like you I dont want to let celiac get in the way of things too.
When people ask what I want to do when I retire, I just laugh. If I live to be 300, I cant do all the things I still want to do!
take care

Sure sounds like your enjoying things there too. We take mangos for granted here and would kill for a real peach at times -- or apple.
At the USDA collection in Davis they have 139 types of figs planted in a field and another few hundred they plan to put into a new field.
Amazing collection. Besides the 18 peaches, I ate 126 different figs over 2 days and rated them for both culinary use and horticultural attributes. I have a 3 year project to test 30 to 50 varieties here in Kona. We jar stewed figs often to use in sauce reductions. Just figs sugar water and usually some cinnamon which I shave off the tree outside. Some figs are just like raspberry jam and if you tried them side by side it would be hard to tell the difference, others like honey. There is such wonderful diversity out there. Have 50 types of bananas too.
Lost os things to play with which keeps cooking fun.
take care

Lisa, our daughter, who was adopted from India (age 2) in June, was recently diagnosed with celiac disease. My husband is from Sri Lanka. We could never do without Sri Lankan foods. Wondering if you know of other Sri Lankans who are concerned about eating gluten-free. What we need is help in determining whether or not the items sold on kapruka website are gluten free or not - the ones from Larich and Marketing Department.

While it is true that most of the cuisine is rice based, it is also true that there is a long history of wheat based foods such as the Sri Lankan roti and the savories and cakes from the Dutch and Portuguese (e.g., Love Cake). Close family friends own the bakery Perera and Sons in Colombo.

We are mainly concerned with pre-packaged food items - the ones that come in bottles that one would buy at any Sri Lankan grocery store in Sri Lanka or imported and in Asian food stores in other parts of the world or through a distributor like Kapruka, which distributes to the UK and USA. Don't want to have to make seeni sambol from scratch or brinjal pickle, for example. Have you contacted the manufacturers in Sri Lanka?

Do you know any Sri Lankans with celiac disease and/or other Sri Lankans like your boyfriend who is connected to you so is concerned about a gluten free lifestyle?

Thanks,

Tawnya K

After doing the research on Sri Lankan and Indian products, we wanted to let you know that it is not advisable to consume any commercially prepared food items that were prepared and processed in India and Sri Lanka. At least in Sri Lanka, gluten is often added and is not always reported on the label and when it is reported, it is not often labeled as gluten. In addition, cross contamination is a real factor. The only substitution is to make foods from scratch. It is ok to consume Sri Lankan and Indian processed foods that were prepared in countries with good labeling practices and in a facility that prevents cross contamination (e.g., Canada, Italy, and the USA).

Tawnya K.