Soon after I met Danny, I learned his three favorite foods: avocados, crab, and artichokes. At the time, this was a sign to me. I like this guy.

Every year for his birthday in July, I find some way to combine avocados, crab, and artichokes into his birthday meal. We always eat well on that day.

A few years ago, Danny decided it was time for a new tattoo. He already had the word Imagine, a portrait of John Lennon, and a tangerine tree on one arm. (This was another sign to me. I really like this guy.) But after Lucy arrived in our lives, he wanted something to mark her aliveness. He had a young man on the island tattoo a picture of Lucy’s hands holding a fresh artichoke.

Last year, for Father’s Day, Lucy and I planted two tiny artichoke starts in our brand-new garden. They grew, the leaves longer and more silvery each week. But nothing else grew. Just leaves.

This year, the plants grew enormously tall. Strong stalks reached toward the sky. And when we returned home from Italy, we saw them. The first small artichokes.

Lucy will tell you, “I grew artichokes for my Dada, all by myself!”

Yesterday, we harvested the first of the artichokes. Danny boiled them in hot salty water, then made warm lemon butter for dipping. We dipped the thick leaves in the butter and dragged them over our teeth to reach the fleshy bites inside.

It’s amazing how life comes full circle. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

The post the first artichoke appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

For years, I’ve tried to treat the seasons with balanced attention. Like a mother who tries to love all her children equally, I work to find the best from fall through spring. Winter is dark and cold but it’s a good time for contemplation. Spring is a riot of sounds and smells returning to the earth. Summer? Ah, summer. It’s hard not to love you best but I also have to remind myself of the beauty of the fall. I make it through the year by loving each month equally. Carpe diem, and all that, you know?

Ah the hell with it. There’s no use in pretending anymore. Summer, I love you best.

In summer near Seattle, you can sit outside all day, talking with friends on the porch while the kids jump on the trampoline and chase each other around the lawn. In summer, there are blue skies, warm air, and the feeling of being lifted with every passing hour the sun makes an appearance.

In summer, small girls sit on the back deck for hours, having tea parties with imagined hot strawberry tea.

In summer, there are picnics.

Oh sure, we can picnic indoors, any time of the year. Lucy often asks for a picnic in front of the couch. We spread out a dozen dishes of food — roast chicken, pickled cabbage, hard-boiled eggs, salad with sunflower seeds, the last nubs of cheese, leftover roasted asparagus — and we each choose our own plate. It’s a great meal for a Sunday night, when the week is done and we have bits of leftovers from through the week. She’s convinced we’re having a picnic. (She eats well those nights, since she loves to choose her own meal.)

And when I was a kid, my mom tried to make the meals we ate on the road more exciting by calling them car picnics. We’d go to the closest grocery store, grab salami and cheese, bread and chips, and something to drink. And then we’d balance food on our laps as my father drove. “See? Isn’t it fun to have a car picnic?” my mother tried. My brother hated them. He still winces when you say the phrase car picnic. Now that I’m a parent, I understand what happened. Take two hungry kids and the lack of time to pack a lunch? Car picnic!

Still, nothing compares to a picnic in summer. We had one on Saturday, spurred by the visit of our friends Jess and Eli from Boston. Ashley brought her darling kids, which made Lu happy as heck. Sam and Megan loped in a little later, due to ferry traffic, but that only made the party stretch into the afternoon. We ate Ashley’s chicken wings with pickled celery, her chickpeas slicked with harissa tossed in fresh arugula, Danny’s coffee-roasted almonds, his sorghum-lentil salad, Megan’s cold potato salad with fresh peas, salamis from Olympic Provisions, cheese from Beechers, slices of watermelon, and fresh Rainier cherries. We snacked all afternoon, discovering new bites between conversations.

It was a very good afternoon.

It was an afternoon fueled by the food. The food was the center of a large wheel, each child running toward a new adventure on the green lawn a spoke of that wheel, each new topic of conversation turning the wheel slowly.

And in a way, absolutely nothing happened. That was the loveliest part.

We seem to be a culture that thrives on feeling busy. I know I fall into that trap sometimes. Who can be the fastest hamster to drive that wheel around and around, going nowhere but doing it quickly? Picnics are a wonderful antidote to busyness. Nothing happens. We moved slowly from the back deck to the garden to the kitchen to fetch a glass of cold water to the trampoline to watch Sam lead 4 small children in jumping games to the back deck again to talk some more. The sun moved slowly across the sky and we had nothing to do but be with each other.

After an entire day outside, jumping and laughing, playing with her friends, eating well then pretending to be Peter Pan, dancing dancing dancing and following two bigger boys running? Lu passed out at 6:30 in the evening, sun-warmed and happily exhausted. This is summer.

Summer, I love you best. I don’t care who knows it.

The post sun-warmed and happily exhausted appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

We were thrilled to bits that so many of you cooked with us last weekend. Every weekend, we’re inviting you to cook with us out of our new cookbook, Gluten-Free Girl Every Day. Last weekend, we made biscuits and sausage gravy.

Many of you wrote to say you found the recipe easy to make. More importantly, you enjoyed your biscuits. This comment made me and Danny so happy:

“This was the second recipe I tried in your new book. My husband (a southern boy) told me they were the best biscuits he has ever eaten… and he doesn’t have to be GF!”

Whoo hoo! Thank you, Rebekah.

So, if you’re missing good biscuits, take a look at our book.

Now, let’s cook together again, shall we?

Each chapter of the book is a different strategy for getting dinner on the table. Want something fast and nutritious? Try the stir-fry chapter. Want to feel like a kid again? How about breakfast for dinner?

One of the most useful chapters — and perhaps the most requested — is the breaking down a chicken chapter. It’s an amazing waste of money to buy chicken in plastic-wrapped parts. If you buy an entire chicken, then break it down into its parts, you can use every part of that chicken for meals that week.

Avgolemono soup is one of my favorite ways to use the chicken breasts. It’s a great last-minute, what-do-we-have-in-the-refrigerator-for-dinner soup. It’s so simple: chicken breasts, stock, rice, eggs, and lemon. In fact, avgolemono means “egg lemon.” You might be surprised at how filling and creamy the soup is, but never dull with that hit of lemon.

Here’s one note for you. Danny and I love that acid tang of lemon in a dish. Especially me. So this soup might be assertively lemony for you, if you’re new to it. Try using the juice of one 1 less lemon than called for the first time you make it, then taste it. If you want more lemon, squeeze away!

So, if you want to make a light spring soup that’s filling enough for dinner, let’s cook avgolemono together this weekend.

And if you don’t have our new cookbook, Gluten-Free Girl Every Day yet, you might want to order it so you can cook with us next weekend.

Happy cooking, all!

The post Let’s Cook Together: avgolemono soup appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

There were days of sunlight, of food so good we stopped our talking and smiled, of cherries right off the tree and a little girl sitting in a windowsill eating as many as she could.

It was such a jovial time in Italy in May.

This is the second time I have stepped foot on this property and wondered if I wasn’t on a movie set instead of my own life.

It’s real. This is the villa across from ours, a mirror image of our home for a week, in a villa complex in the hills above Lucca, in Tuscany.

This is one of my places of peace.

Once again, we were in Italy to work with the good folks at Jovial Foods. They flew us over to Italy and put us up in that incredible villa to teach three cooking classes in one week. We taught a gluten-free baking class, a bread and pizza class, and a cooking with whole grains class to 20 people eager to be in the kitchen with us. We laughed and cooked together and figured out teff flour and made more food. These were good people.

The first night of that lovely week, we were fed well by Aurelio Barattini, the chef at Antica Locanda di Sesto in Ponte Mariano. The building housing the restaurant was built in 1388 and it has been in the Barattini family as a restaurant since 1911. In fact, Aurelio’s mother is still the pastry chef and the greeter at the restaurant, which we had the pleasure of visiting twice this visit. Aurelio made us some of the local dishes he loves best, including this fried polenta with mushrooms and truffles and this pomodoro with gluten-free bread.

The pecorino from the hills of Garfagna knocked us all out. We gathered in the ballroom for appetizers as strangers and stood up from the long dinner table hours later as friends.

The villa sits high in the hills outside Lucca, a beautiful walled town first founded in 180 BC. Lu still remembered it from last May and asked us several times on the airplane if we could go on the merry-go-round again. (“Ephelant!” she shouted. Her pronunciation of elephant is one of the few that still stays in baby talk. I want her to hold onto it for years, please.) We walked its streets, marveling at the women riding bicycles in stiletto heels and the street performer painted white as a ghostly centurion, at the slow pace of walking and strolling by store windows. Also, we ate at Grom gelato, where all the young people working take great care to make sure there is no cross-contamination with gluten for those of us with celiac. Their Sicilian lemon gelato is a puckery revelation.

Lu danced through the streets, in and out of sunlight.

One of the days that week, most of the group took a bus together to the Cinque Terra, one of the most stunning places I have seen on this earth.

I’ll tell you more about that day in a post next week.

One our days off, we walked through small towns with our dear friends Debra and Rod, who were there to photograph and make videos for Jovial. One day we meandered slowly through Barga, a tiny town no tourist seems to visit. As we walked through the narrow streets, we marveled at the silence. Partly it was because cars cannot drive in the old part of the city, so we could hear the conversations of shopkeepers instead of the roaring of engines. But mostly, the silence suffused the town because no one but us seemed to be speaking English. We all seemed to whisper as we walked, not wishing to be obtrusive.

In one piazza, an older Italian man opened the green shutters on his third-floor window, leaned out, and started speaking to me in Italian. With large gestures, he told me a story about the black cat wandering outside. Was it his cat? Did he want me to fetch it? I have only the most rudimentary Italian —— Danny says I gesticulate like an Italian —— so he lost me pretty quickly. When I shrugged, after a few moments, and told him I was American, he shoved his shoulders up by his ears and closed the shutters.

I laughed to think I somehow fooled him into thinking I was Italian for a few moments.

And then we five climbed the stairs slowly toward the church at the top of the hill, made our way to its front doors, and turned around. This is the sight that greeted us.

I can see why someone built a church on that spot, long ago.

As much as we enjoyed those meandering days, Danny and I loved best the days in the villa kitchen, cooking good food with people who love it. As we had last year, we were lucky enough to visit one of the wholesale markets in Lucca, one that supplies chefs and markets with the produce of the day. It astonished us again. Look at that display of onions!

When we pointed toward crates of zucchini blossoms, the man who ran the market shrugged and looked away for a moment. When I asked Carla, one of the owners of Jovial Foods (and one of our favorite people) what was wrong, she said, “If he had known you were going to buy squash blossoms to stuff them, he would have asked you to come earlier. He says these are too wilted. He doesn’t want to sell them to you.” Now that I had not encountered before.

One of the things I like best about eating in Italy is that no produce is sold out of season. Tomatoes are in the markets when the tomatoes are ripe. Artichokes show up in every restaurant for a month or so and then they are gone. It’s simply not possible to walk into the market and buy zucchini in March or cherries in January. Wait. Wait until the earth says it’s time to eat tomatoes and then go crazy eating them with everything.

I really wish this were true in the United States.

Pasta with sautéed fresh vegetables tastes better in Italy than it does here because every one of those vegetables offers its full taste.

And when you have waited months for fresh beans to show up in the market, I imagine there’s nothing more beautiful than those speckled red ones. The bowl of freshly shucked ones is pretty inviting too.

We made a lot of food together in those three-hour classes, especially the classes that stretched on longer because there were so many questions and good food ideas.

In our baking classes, we made these little lemon polenta cakes dairy-free to accommodate some of our guests. The taste was tremendous, since we used the Jovial extra-virgin olive oil, made from heirloom olives. The group went through bottles and bottles of it during the week. Several people told me they felt better at the end of the week than they had in years. I’m sure Italy had something to do with it. So did that olive oil.

And in our whole-grain class, we used a brown rice mushroom risotto to stuff the squash blossoms and coat them in buckwheat flour before lightly frying them. That was a good lunch.

I think everyone’s favorite class was the bread and pizza class. You might think every gluten-free person’s favorite cooking class would be the bread and pizza class. But this one wasn’t really about the bread and pizza. Sure, we talked about the miracles of psyllium, the texture of the dough for a successful loaf, the ways to make great pizza dough without stretching it out.

But mostly, the joy of that day was watching Danny put pizza doughs in the wood-fired oven with a long metal paddle and pulling out wonderfully chewy and crunchy pizza crusts. (He had to keep leaning in, because he was clearly taller than the person who built the stove, so he ducked his head inside to make sure the crusts weren’t burning. We all had a good laugh about the fact that the front of his hair was singed off.)

Mostly, I will never forget the joy of sitting at this long, white-tablecloth-covered table with 20 people who had become friends, sharing glasses of wine and good food in the sunlight.

This really is as good as life gets.

The bread wasn’t bad either.

The best part about this trip was these people in the kitchen.

Every time Danny and Lucy and I walked through the villa kitchen, we saw a group of people at the stove. Someone was simmering lamb stew. Another was making fresh pesto. There were bowls filled with pizza dough rising, fresh vegetables being chopped, and eggs sizzling in cast-iron pans. The long table was filled on both sides with new friends swapping stories and telling jokes about their driving adventures in the countryside. On their days off, these folks went out. But on the days we taught classes, this amazing group of people simply stayed in the kitchen, cooking and enjoying each other’s company.

Four or five days into the week, we decided to cook our dinner in the kitchen too. Lu had fallen in love with Jenn, who spun her on the green lawn at that lunch. “She is such a funny woman!” Lu said. Lu also loved Jenn’s husband, Mark, who took photographs of her cooking in the kitchen. “He is going to take photographs of me for 20 days, Mama!” (We all sighed at that. If only we had 20 more days in Italy together.) So Lucy played with Jenn and Mark while we began making our dinner.

Danny prepared a small chicken to roast. I started grilling zucchini and green beans, coated in that olive oil. We were busy working with each other, side by side at the stove, so we didn’t look up for awhile. I lifted my head and saw almost everyone in the group sitting around the long table, talking. Not cooking.

“Danny,” I whispered. “I think they all believe we’re cooking dinner for them.” He turned around, looked for a beat, and then said, “Well, let’s cook some potatoes.” He chopped up and boiled a big pot of potatoes. I swiped the pizza dough I had been meaning to refrigerate that night and started making grilled naan with it. We roasted both the chickens and put on more vegetables, then made a salad.

After an hour or so, we filled our plates, and Lu’s, and then put all the food out on the wooden island where we taught our classes. “Hey everyone!” I shouted. “We weren’t making dinner for everyone, but then it seemed you were hungry. So, come get some food!”

This is everyone digging in.

My friends who were there? We miss you. What a time this was.

I am profoundly grateful that we can bring our daughter to this place, to many places around the world. We want to show her that there are so many different ways to live, and opinions to have, and languages to speak. But when we sit at the table together? Something good happens. Always.

She loves those streets and that rain and that giant umbrella that lives in our villa. And gelato. Oh yes, gelato.

I hope somehow she’ll remember these days in Italy.

We’re thrilled to announce that we had such a tremendous time on this trip, as did the Jovial folks, that we’re teaching another week of cooking classes in that villa in the hills outside of Lucca this September.

We’d love to see you there.

Would you like to see a little of what this week was like in video form? Here’s the video Debra and Rod put together after being there with us.

Jovial is giving away one of these 8 day/7 night stays in Italy on their Facebook page. Enter now, because the contest ends on July 15th. All you have to do is like them on Facebook.

We’d love to teach gluten-free cooking classes in Italy to you. We’d love to share food with you.

Full disclosure. Jovial Foods is one of the sponsors of this website, because we truly believe in the food they make. They paid for airfare for the three of us, as well as putting us up in the villa and providing train tickets. All opinions expressed here are our own.

The post what a jovial time it was appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

As I sit down to write, it’s nearly 9 pm. Outside, it feels like bright daylight. These days, these almost-summer days of light until late and light early in the morning —— they feel like a happy fugue state suffused with sunlight. We’re moving through the days slowly, lightly, not clinging to anything. Lucy’s doing a lot of dancing on the back deck. This June, for the first time in years, we are living what feels like the loveliest words: “70 degrees and sunny.” Usually here, we have to wait until after the 4th of July to truly say it’s summer.

Danny has been cooking up a storm, humming in the kitchen. He made beet chips today, along with an eggplant chutney with fennel and turmeric, a simmered tomato sauce for Lu’s pasta at lunch tomorrow, pickled carrots and radishes, and a green cilantro-listen-to-the back-of-my-mouth-sing marinade for prawns, which he threw on the grill. We’ll probably post them all here, over the next few weeks. Lately, we feel like playing even more than usual.

I have to tell you about our trip to Italy with Jovial, about our time in the Cinque Terre eating farinata with friends on the top of a long set of steps in the sunlight. And the trip to the produce market where the borlotti beans were speckled red and so bright they hurt the eyes. I still think of the view from the top of the hill in Barga. And of course, there was prosciutto, stuffed quail, gluten-free pizzas baked in a wood-fired oven, fresh pecorino made in Garfagna, and prosecco. And laughter. And so much cooking. I’ll start telling you stories in a day or so.

But for now, the kitchen is clean, the kiddo is asleep, and I want to share some of what we have been reading on these long summer days.

Lucy has always been a fan of the Knuffle Bunny books, some of the funniest and sweetest children’s books I’ve ever read. Lately, she has asked me to read her Knuffle Bunny Free many times a day. The ending of that book always makes me cry, especially now, with Lu turning 5 next month. (5?!)

I might be the last person to finally buy Brené Brown’s beautiful book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. I’ve adored Brené and her work for years, so I’m not sure how this slipped into my Kindle list only now. Oh goodness. It’s such a great book to be reading as I’m preparing to turn 47 in 6 weeks. (47?!)

The Theodore Roosevelt quote that Brené Brown cited in her book has been rattling around in my mind for weeks: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs.… [And] if he fails, at least fails while Daring Greatly.” (You can read Brené’s interview with Oprah here.)

I loved this piece in the Modern Love column in The New York Times about a man having to tell his mother to stop cooking for him so often, now that he’s married.

One of my favorite writers of all time, Colum McCann, talks about his writing life —— he sits in a tiny office that used to be a closet, to seal off all distractions —— and the powerful phrase, radical empathy. Yes.

Brace yourself for this one. But you must read this haunting, restrained piece about Newtown parents trying to hold on and live after losing their 7-year-old. Please read it. Please.

Finally, this is less reading and more listening. Go to this site to hear acoustic versions of The Beatles’ White Album. I’ve been listening all week, enthralled.

In a bit of news we’d like to share with you, Danny and I have begun writing a gluten-free column for one of our favorite food websites, Food52. Would you like to make these gluten-free rhubarb scones you see up there? Here’s the recipe.

The light is gathering into dimness outside. I’m closing up the laptop now.

The post slowly, lightly appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

photo from Gluten-Free Girl Every Day, taken by Penny De Los Santos

Let’s cook together.

There are a lot of different parts to writing a cookbook. There’s the idea, the spark that strikes without warning in the middle of a yoga class or the shower. Let’s do this! There are the machinations of deals, contracts, advance, and signatures. There are conversations with the editor, with each other, with friends and family and sometimes on Twitter — what should we cook? There are doubts and many hours at the stove and more hours at the computer, and brief moments of feeling like you’re on the right track. There are manuscripts sent with a flourish over the internet, a space of silence, then edits, then copyedits, then proofreading. There is the photo shoot, watching someone brilliant capture the light you hoped was in your food. There’s the excitement of seeing the design for the first time. There are galleys. Requests for blurbs. Hundreds of emails to compose and answer. There’s the waiting. Finally, there’s publication day. It’s in the world!

And then there is the business of promoting books. Interviews, readings, the next event. There are hopes and hopes dashed, quiet surprises, and more waiting. There are hundreds of emails to compose and answer. There are wonderful connected conversations with people who have bought the book or who are thinking about buying the book. Most of the time, there is silence and waiting and hope. There is the daily drift toward hoping for more and, if you’re lucky, someone who pulls you back to balance by reminding you how lucky you are. Sometimes, there’s the joy of hearing from people that they love the cookbook, that they can’t wait to cook from it, that they are cooking from it, that their cooking has changed because of it.

That last part is my absolute favorite. There is a delicious thrill in seeing a recipe that Danny and I imagined — created, and cooked again and again until it felt right — turn up as a photo from your kitchen. Seeing that someone is cooking because of a nudge you gave? Nothing like it.

So, while we’re firmly in the world of promoting a cookbook, we’d like to spend a little more time with you. We want to cook with you.

Let’s cook together.

We’re going to post a photo here every Friday for awhile, a photo of one recipe from our new cookbook, Gluten-Free Girl Every Day. If you want to join in, make the dish this weekend. You can ask any questions you have about that recipe in the comments section of this post. We’ll also be talking about the recipe through the weekend on the Facebook page for this site. Feel free to ask questions. This is a collaboration! And on Monday, come back and let us know what the experience of cooking was like for you. Or, take a photo of your dish and post it on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook to let people see what you made in your kitchen.

Let’s cook together.

This week’s dish is gluten-free biscuits and sausage gravy.

Biscuits intimidate people. There’s no need, however. The best way to learn how to make biscuits is to make biscuits. Practice. This weekend is your chance.

Biscuits and sausage gravy. Go!

The post let’s cook together: gluten-free biscuits and sausage gravy appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

For years, I have yearned to be a gardener. How could I not want to have the power to strew seeds upon the earth, water just enough, and watch green leaves unfurl toward the sun? It’s magic, I tell you. Magic.

But me? As a kid I killed every tiny sunflower that sprouted in a Dixie cup from grade school. House plants must have formed an association to stay away from me, since I killed so many of them inadvertently. And planting a garden — a square space of planned rows with lovely greens and good things to eat — and seeing the hope turn into dinner? It has, until this year, eluded me.

Here on Vashon, being good at gardening is almost a requirement for living on the island. All spring and summer, the weekends are booked with garden tours, open houses to enormous gardens filled with spiraling copper raised beds lavish with French herbs and exotic plants. Almost everyone has a garden worthy of a spread in Sunset magazine.

(As you drive on the island, you’ll see gardens in big cages all around you. We’re not imprisoning our plants. The deer rule this place. There’s a family of five of that lives among the handful of yards on the gravel road where we live. If we don’t build tall fences, they chew down everything. Gardens are fiercely protected spaces here.)

However, since we moved to Vashon, my dream of a glowing garden has been a failure every time.

There were the stray herbs in pots. A handful of small strawberries from a patch of dirt that sprouted them spontaneously. Some Swiss chard leaves. A few bunches of lettuce that turned out to be edible. And tiny German butterball potatoes no bigger than my thumb. Those were my sole accomplishments in the garden.

They were, however, enough to make me keep trying.

This year we have artichokes. Artichokes are growing in my garden! There are gorgeous heirloom lettuces, more than I can eat, even with my daily salad for lunch. There are onion sprouts, baby kale, glossy green leaves of Swiss chard that grow every day, snap peas and snow pea tendrils climbing the fence toward the sun, and broccoli. I’m actually growing broccoli.

And spinach. Oh my, the spinach.

The day we returned from our trip to New York and Italy, Danny stopped the car in the driveway and I immediately walked to the garden. I froze when I saw it.

Holy hell. We have a lot of spinach. 

Seriously, does anyone need a bunch of organic spinach? Because we have about 35 left, and we’ve been eating and eating it for days. Spinach pesto will be part of our dinner all winter long.

What happened this year?

I let go.

In the years past, I have planned and thought and talked and asked questions and researched online. I’ve drawn up drawings of where everything should go. I’ve pestered my gardening friends with questions. I’ve carefully studied the growing tips in at least three books before planting starts.

This year, I turned off my targeting computer and listened to Obi Wan Kenobi. Trust the force, Luke.

Instead of planning, I planted.

Always before, I was imagining the final outcome. Lucy and I are going to wake up in the morning and eat peas, first thing after sunrise. That happened a couple of times in our old garden. But not much. On the way there, I fretted about the ending instead of enjoying it.

This year, in March, I started putting my hands in cold soil. I dug up old plants and weeds. I amended the earth and watered and then I forgot it. A few weeks later, I threw some seeds in the ground. I’m not kidding. I kind of just threw them and patted them down. I planted more.

Every day, I spent 3o minutes in the garden. After a long winter, my skin wanted to feel the sunlight. I just worked, every day, until I had worked for 30 minutes. I dug and pulled and hoed and said hello to the worms and planted some seeds and stood up, wiped off my knees, and went inside. I left the garden where it was.

I did that every day for months.

And one day, I looked around and there were things growing. Baby green leaves and tiny sprouts of broccoli. Little red leaves of lettuce. Going out to the garage one evening, I thought, “Man, it’s cold.” So I cut off the bottoms of the plastic jugs that once contained filtered water we had in the recycling bin and put them over the lettuce and broccoli sprouts to keep them warm. That’s when I knew I had the bug, when I made little warm hoods for my plant sprouts.

I think, this year, I just enjoyed it.

And I’ll refrain from turning this into a metaphor for anything else.

All I know is that enjoying this, thoroughly, has meant that Lucy and I are in the garden, eating snow peas for breakfast, every morning.

One of my favorite discoveries of the garden this year? Broccoli leaves.

Our plants have grown stalky and tall, the broccoli florets still tiny. While we were gone, the leaves took all the sunlight and grew enormous. I looked at them the other day and thought, “Wait, those look like collard greens.”

I’d never eaten broccoli leaves before. Dope that I am, I wondered if they were poisonous. I googled recipes for broccoli leaves from the garden, which yielded lots of good advice, before I stripped them from the plant.

Turns out they’re a little like young collard leaves and a little like dark lacinato kale. You heard it hear first, people. Eat broccoli leaves. Slice them into thin ribbons — even thinner than the ones you see pictured — and throw them in a hot pan with oil. Chile flakes, a little garlic, a tumble of sea salt. Shake them in the pan until they are wilted and soft. Done.

After we grow so tired of spinach we feel like Popeye in the middle of a hallucination, we’re going to start having sautéed broccoli greens for breakfast every morning.

It’s an eat-from-the-garden kind of year.

The post back to the garden appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

My friend Sharon and I had a strange habit back in the 1990s. We took photographs of our food.

Sharon and I took photos of peach pie in a tiny restaurant in South Dakota, barbecue in restaurants in Wyoming on burbling rivers, and even the Dr. Pepper the size of our heads she insisted at getting at that one gas station offering it free with a tank of gas. Our epic road trip from Ithaca to Ashland mostly meant a lot of food, even driving 60 miles out of our way for chicken noodle in an Amish café. We took photographs of it all.

I still have a glossy print of a poorly composed shot I took at Le Pain Quotidien, one of our favorite restaurants in New York when we lived there. We always sat at the communal table, ordered café au laits as we studied the menu, and then waited for plates of sandwiches with curried egg salad and piles of arugula, thin slices of ham with gruyere cheese, and smoked salmon with soft gobs of avocado and sprigs of dill. We savored those little open-faced sandwiches (that was before I knew they were called tartines), Sharon smacking her lips as she reached for the next bite, and we sighed with happiness at the perfect afternoon. One day, just before I left the city, I grabbed my flimsy Kodak camera and took a photo of Sharon’s slim fingers reaching for another sandwich. I was nowhere near the window so the light was terrible. This was long before digital cameras, so I had no way of looking at my composition. I would never post it on the blog now. Not good enough.

But then — and now — I cherished that glossy print as a record of the afternoon with my dear friend. Now that she’s teaching in China, and I haven’t seen her in nearly a year, I would give anything to have lunch with her there again. (No tartines for me now, though.) At least I have that crummy photograph to remind me.

Today, I had lunch with a dear friend and her very darling baby, whom we all adore. When June grew a little fussy while we waited for the bill, I pulled out my phone and showed her the photos I had taken of her a few moments before. She calmed right down, fascinated. (And then she pulled the phone toward her and tried stuffing it in her mouth.) How much times have changed, when an 8-month-old knows already what she looks like in photographs, taken three minutes before.

And how strange it is that we all take photographs of our food now.

I have over 1000 photos on my phone right now, photos of salt-cured anchovies we ate in the Cinque Terra, slices of watermelon with ribbons of basil and drizzles of olive oil, and my daughter just about to eat a cone of Sicilian lemon gelato from GROM in Lucca. (Someday soon, I’ll download them and delete all the multiples. Someday.) I’m a big fan of Instagram and I have to stop myself from posting little moments of light all day. (I’m glutenfreegirl there too.)

However, we have to admit that things have grown a little weird.

This weekend, on a warm day, I remembered the asparagus salad we posted here years ago. Our favorite farmers’ market on Vashon had opened that morning, and we went a little crazy with the asparagus, the radishes, the mustard greens, and cherries. (Oh the cherries! Lu had red-streaked cheeks all weekend from eating them.) With so many spindly stalks of asparagus, what should we make?

Danny peeled about a dozen stalks of asparagus. I grated three enormous radishes on top of the pile of asparagus. We tore up mustard greens and threw in salted marcona almonds we had bashed a bit with the rolling pin. And then I drizzled on lemon-tahini dressing (with an emphasis on the lemon) and tossed it around with our hands. That and a fillet of Copper River salmon was our Saturday evening dinner.

Taken with the colors, I made a shot of it. Later, I posted it on Instagram. I’m conscious of the fact that every time I show something delicious we’ve eaten — something vibrant in color and desirous — it’s possible that someone will see it and think, “Hey, maybe gluten-free isn’t so bad after all!” So I post photos of our dinner, knowing full well this is one of the silliest habits I have.

Still, I persist.

And almost immediately, the comments started pouring in. “I need that.” “Can you please post the recipe?” “Man!” By the end of the evening, the photo had 262 likes.

Isn’t the world strange? I made something in our kitchen and people in Boston and London and Kuwait dreamt of making a version of our salad in their own kitchens.

We’ve come a long way from flimsy Kodak cameras and glossy photos that aren’t composed well to sharing our dinners immediately on our our phones. To be honest, I’m not sure which world I prefer. But we’re here now.

The post how strange it is appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

Eight years ago today, I opened up a new blogger page, chose green for the header, and picked out a blog name. Gluten-Free Girl.

My friend Dorothy named me Gluten-Free Girl because she had been calling me The Sick Girl for months. Bludgeoned by pain and lethargy, numbed after dozens of medical appointments and trips to the emergency room, feeling muffled inside as the sun grew stronger outside, I had been so sick that nearly everyone around me was sure I was dying. When I found out I had celiac sprue, and all I had to do to be healthy again was cut gluten out of my life? I cheered in the doctor’s office. And after I had been living a week without gluten, Dorothy came over to see me, remarked on my sudden health and said, “Now we’re going to have to start calling you the Gluten-Free Girl!”

I had no idea that last day in May 2005 that I would ever be stopped in restaurants in New York City or farmers’ markets in Santa Fe or grocery stores in San Francisco by someone shouting, “Oh my gosh, aren’t you the Gluten-Free Girl?” I’m still kind of freaked out by it. And grateful. Because, even though I never had a clue that anyone would be reading the words I typed out on May 31st, 2005, I knew what I wanted to do with my writing.

I wanted to help people.

From one of the first entries of this site:

“I’m so happy to feel my body restore itself. I can’t even tell you what a remarkable difference there is in me since I stopped eating gluten. I’m starting to feel better than I ever have in my life. Energy is surging through me, for the first time in years. And frankly, that’s worth more than anything else in the world. To feel alive, and feel as though I finally have energy to give to other people, because that’s true life for me.”

I don’t remember most of the 991 posts I have written here. (Today’s will be 992. Goodness!) So many of you have been coming out to our book readings and parties, quoting me passages from posts I wrote four years ago or citing ideas I wrote when I was single or pregnant or trying to endure those first sleep-deprived years of Lucy’s life. Thank you. Thank you for making this girl who wanted to be a writer into the woman I am now.

When I began writing here, I wrote with urgency, a desire to pound words onto the page — I still hear the sound of a typewriter in my head when my fingers click on the keyboard — and pour out my heart. I wanted to play with words the way I was learning to play with food. I wanted to reach someone, even if it was just a future self reading those words, eight years later.

I’ve learned so much from writing this site that I don’t know where to start.

Instead, I want to say that I’m still thrilled to be here. In fact, there have been some shifts in the last six months that have made me (and Danny too) happier than ever to be putting up pieces and recipes in this space. You see, when I started writing, I had no expectations. Then, I found a community of like-minded people through comments. Then, a few years later, food blogs became a thing.

Suddenly, I felt like I needed a better camera, some scratched-up tabletops for photographing, even twine tied around cookies and striped straws. I felt the need to write often on Twitter and Facebook and whatever Google+ is and pin up photographs on Pinterest. Danny and I needed a brand strategy, a PR person, a schedule for posting, a line of products, and whatever it took to keep up and be successful.

I felt like I had to be Gluten-Free Girl.

I was exhausted. There were some years here I didn’t enjoy myself much.

It took me a long time to realize that those bits and bobs and all those expectations were preventing me from being here fully. I didn’t start this site to please anyone else, especially an imagined audience. I just cooked and created and wrote out of joy. For a time, I lost my joy to fear and hope and trying to be what I thought people wanted me to be.

Now, I’m back again, joyful, energy surging through me, alive. This site is ours again. If you like it, we’re thrilled. If you wish there were more baked goods or dairy-free recipes or Paleo tips or hemp seeds or shorter pieces or tips for how to live without sugar or less of our lives or a lot less goofy joy and gratitude? Well, now you have hundreds and hundreds of other places to go. This long ago ceased to be the only gluten-free blog on the internet. Or the best. Or the most gluten-free.

We’re just here, singing our song.

You’re always welcome to change the channel.

Now, for those of you still here? Here’s a bit of our joy. We’re playing with our food, Danny and I. And there’s still so much to learn and experience and share. I’m still here. Imperfect. Mostly laughing.

As Mary Oliver wrote: pay attention. be astonished. tell about it.

Add laugh often to that list and you have my only real rules for life.

So here I am, eight years later, filled to the brim with gratitude at my health and the abundance that a life without gluten has become.

The post still here appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

Sometimes I eat better when we don’t have that much in the refrigerator.

We’re still emerging from jet lag, organizing the pantry before we add more to it, slowly making our way back to our kitchen. (Lu said this morning, “I don’t like our kitchen anymore. Couldn’t we have the kitchen we had in Italy?” Well sure, honey. I want a kitchen the size of our house as well.) When I went to make breakfast this morning, I found we were out of eggs.

Hm. What to make?

I sauteed up the last of the multi-grain salad Danny made for lunch yesterday. (Millet, quinoa, brown rice, plus mung beans and asparagus.) We have about 35 full-grown spinach plants going crazy in the garden right now — I know, it’s kind of a problem — so I cut down an entire bunch and sauteed it in good olive oil with a pinch of salt. (I love how spinach wilts so dramatically from an enormous bunch to a small green lump.) And then I crumbled in some leftover seared salmon and plopped some of the ricotta I made last night, mostly so I’d have fresh whey to make bread.

Lovely way to start the day.

We receive lots of questions about what to eat for breakfast, gluten-free. It’s as though we can only imagine pancakes, waffles, cereal, toast and eggs. Folks, think of breakfast as the first time in the day to eat well. If food is what keeps making our bodies, why not eat well every time we eat? Who says we need eggs and bread products for breakfast?

The post to start the day appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.