Gluten-free week - day 2

Yesterday Albuquerque was erased with a giant eraser of wind and dust. Winds over 50 mph snapped trees and caused all kinds of havoc in the city on an otherwise peaceful Sunday. Friends on the West side said they couldn't even see us down here in the valley. It was like we didn't exist. And I'll have to confess, a bleak desolation grabs hold of me when I look out of my window and don't see the Sandia crest looming in the distance. The air was turbid and opaque and there were no more mountains. It was as if I was living in the plains again. Perhaps you know this, but after being around mountains for so long, flatness is decidedly tedious. I became immediately claustrophobic.

And so it was that I spent the better part of my Sunday in the kitchen, concocting new gluten-free ideas. I, just like many of you, am a creature of habit, and I especially enjoy getting into wholesome habits. Preparing my own food is one of those habits. And, much like everybody else, I don't have a lot of time to spare. So generally speaking, the meals I prepare are nutritious but necessarily quick to make. Any recipe that's over 20 minutes in prep time makes me lose my interest.

Now, if usually I'm not keen on spending a whole lot of time cooking, this Sunday was definitely an exception. And I wouldn't even recommend making the baked fries I spent over an hour making and another half an hour cleaning up after (yes, really), if they weren't really, really, unequivocally delicious. So yes, make this - if and only if you have lots of time on your hands and don't mind spending two hours making something that you'll gobble up in ten minutes. Otherwise, go with salads and fruit, throw in some nuts or cheese, you can't go wrong with that.

For brunch: over-easy eggs, cornflakes with kefir and apples with almond butter. This is the new-American breakfast, by the way, I'm starting a thing.

Have I mentioned how brilliant apples with almond butter are?

For dinner, salad from baby bok choy, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, olives and crumbled goat cheese.

These baked fries took a lot of muscle to make - not to mention they stuck to the pan, bastards - but they really were high on the scale of awesomeness, especially dipped in sour cream. They are supposed to be like Arby's fries only, you know, the version without all the poisons.

Recipe for irresistible fries from here.

A gluten-free week

According to the principle less is more, deprivation of certain things often opens our eyes to the existence of many alternatives. There is of course the possibility that the alternatives will turn out to be even better than the originals. Or, most likely, the absence of things we're used to will make us appreciate them even more. At any rate, deprivation is almost always an adventure, and at the very least an exercise in self-discipline.

This being said, I have decided to go gluten free (GF) for another week. Since we've been on the GF boat before and survived heroically, this time we embark upon it with no fear. This is the diary of an entirely home-cooked GF diet. For all you dabblers in cooking, remember that healthy meals don't have to be tasteless. In fact, as I pledge to demonstrate, they can be even more delicious than less-healthy ones.

First, my two cents on gluten. Gluten is a protein found in wheat (including spelt), barley, rye and malts. Sensitivity and intolerance to gluten are becoming more widespread, especially in North America. Celiac disease is a strong autoimmune response to gluten, but it must not be confused with wheat allergy. A person can be allergic to wheat without having celiac disease. Read more about the whys and hows of a gluten-free diet here and here.

And thus starts the journal. Yesterday we explored light non-gluten flours and decided to make pancakes the size of our heads. Needless to say, we ended up with much more than we could handle. Lesson learned: non-gluten flours can be just as filling and heavy as gluten flours.

Buttermilk pancakes from brown rice and coconut flour. Instead of buttermilk I used half whole milk and half rice milk. Fluffy suckers, still.

Brunch with pancakes, scrambled eggs, tomatoes and cheese. And of course tea.

For dinner, southwestern soup with lima beans and bacon. If I make this again, I would go lighter on the celery and onions since they tend to be overpowering. But overall, a soup with personality.

And if you're brave enough... voila recipes for pancakes and soup.

In search of Crappy

“Get the pink one” he says, and he’s off.

I mount the diminutive bike and start rolling after him, a little awkward at first. The handlebars jerk right and left as I not-so-smoothly negotiate my center of mass. On your horses, to Building 43!

“Careful,” he yells at me, half-turned on his fairy cycle, “the brakes are tricky on these!”

“What?” I holler back, his words only now making sense as I almost cause an accident to happen rolling into the intersection on red. The drivers stop indulgently, unfazed, and wait for me to wheel along open-mouthed, passively holding the brakeless handlebars. A blonde on a pink minibike.

I pedal furiously to catch up.

“How do you stop?” I ask breathlessly, now traveling by his side.

“You pedal backwards,” and he promptly demonstrates, coming to a full stop as I almost run into a tree.

“Oh.”

Building 43. Through the clear doors people are coming and going, and the reception area beyond the doors seems busy enough too. People of all kinds - Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Africans, Yankees and maybe even Eastern-European oddments like myself. I try not to stare, but it’s pretty cool - this is what the streets of Toronto look like. Everyone is going somewhere. As for me, I’m not sure where I am going, but I’m guessing there’s got to be food at the destination.

We park the Google bikes and before we’ve even walked away a couple of dudes hop on and they’re off with them.

“You can leave them anywhere on campus and someone will pick them up,” he responds to my questioning look. I gaze after the dudes squeaking and creaking away with software engineer nonchalance.

“Maybe I should have told them about the brakes?”

But folks here seem to know everything. It’s something in their eyes when they pass you in the hallway, like they are teeming with a secret they’ve only just discovered, like Marie Curie jubilating with the radium in her pocket - um, only less radioactive and less creepy. There is something like sparks everywhere. Even outside, the air is heavy with the vapors of brainstorming, which is probably happening everywhere. After all, we know that Building 43 is where Sergey, Larry and Marissa work their magic.

After I’ve found out about the Google campus bikes, the Google shuttle that collects employees and deposits them at their houses, like royalty, and the 25 cafes in the Googleplex, I will confess that I am a little pissed. I’ve set my mind on finding something crappy about Google. Decidedly crappy.

Our next stop is at the bathroom, where I find a warm toilet seat and reading materials on the back of the door. I spend more time than is normal here, and I tear myself away from the reading material only because I don’t want to make him worry. The autoflush toilet refuses to autoflush, so I am now desperately looking for the flush button, which is nowhere to be found. Instead, there are myriad other buttons. I could get a front spray, a back spray, a quick dry, a long dry, maybe there’s even a candy dispenser right in this wall. Seriously, Google? How about some flushing.

A-ha! It dawns on me. What a clever intelligence test they’ve devised. Only those who can figure out how to flush the toilet deserve to work here. So now I am frantically pushing on pipes and fittings and finally, finally, one of them turns out to be the incognito flush button. Ha! I would have passed that test with flying colors. In only 3.67 minutes.

Over Indian food, I find out more annoying things about Google. It turns out that right here in the Googleplex there is also a smoothie bar (which we later visit, and I have a finger-licking rabbit-style concoction), a massage parlor, a gym and a rec room. A rec room? We later play two hours of Ping-Pong, where I get dangerously competitive, and get intoxicated on Kit-Kats. Kit-Kats too? Jesus, Google!

Outside, the bikes that will take us to the edge of the campus are right outside the door, left by some other weary travelers. How convenient. Riding through campus, in the chilly air of California in winter, I feel my lungs fill with serenity. The squeaking of the bike is like a song, and I sing along, pedaling faster and faster. Outside one of the buildings, we can see large, looming silhouettes of the seven flavors of Android: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. On a closer look, a sign says picture-taking is encouraged, but please don’t climb on the sculptures. I’ve half a mind to climb the eclair just to see what they’ll do to me. I bet they’ll give me a cupcake, pat me on the head and send me home. I can’t imagine anybody getting angry here.

No luck. I couldn’t find anything crappy at Google today. Maybe tomorrow.

Sacred space

Eliade talks about modern man as a creature mired in practicalities, leading a profane existence that breeds confusion because all things are relative, and all contexts are always in flux. Admittedly, as a Westerner I feel beset sometimes by aggressive advertising. Billboards everywhere encourage me to buy, to use, to discard, and for a few extra cents to supersize my experience. Temptations are everywhere and they are juicy, cancelling for a time all other voices in my head that whisper about health and wellness. But some people hear no such voices. So I imagine they are easy preys for temptations. American advertising stirs, dares, pokes, lurks and stalks. An ad will linger, through some mnemonic and subconscious legerdemain that only advertising people know, on our mental taste buds long after we've ingested it. What is the most effective thing that displaces the memory of an ad from our mind? Another ad. They never shut up. And so it is that time off from work does not give me the respite my brain needs and I return to work just as lethargic and fed up as I left. I often long for a vacation from advertising.

And yet, according to Eliade, modern (nonreligious) man is also capable of creating his personal sacred space, despite his pragmatic and unsentimental environment:

"There are, for example, privileged spaces, qualitatively different from all others — a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life."

I do remember certain firsts as landmarks in my life, far more memorable than other subsequent similar episodes. For instance, the first time I traveled to Belgium - also the first time to Western Europe - everything was magical. The streets sparkled under the incessant drizzle, the French-speaking people were chic and picturesque, as if teared right from pages of Vogue. The bread was fluffy, the pastries light as air, the beer more flavorful than the richest mulled wine I'd ever had. I idealized everything.

And then there I was, my first time in the States, on the shuttle ride from Atlanta to Macon. It was like a journey to another planet, and I was full of trembling excitement to hear a Southern lady at the back of the bus speaking in her native droll, talk which a few months later I found especially irritating. The lush, humid heat of the green Georgia summer was exotic and intoxicating, like a mind-altering drug, and this heat too I later grew averse to. Yet in my mind, that first ride to Macon was like going to Wonderland, and I now realize that a starry-eyed, 20-year-old me experienced, in that beatific heat that steamed up the windows of the white minivan, a shard of sacred space.