No Cakes nor Ale

I am a Foodie.  I can admit it.  I love food and I love to cook.  I love making meals come together, and I love watching my family enjoy them.

Back in the days when I celebrated the Sabbats regularly, I used the celebrations as an opportunity to learn new recipes, to build new traditions that I would pass on to my family as the old secular holidays I’d been raised with were passed on to me.

Food has always been a big part of my family’s traditions.  Big pot roasts with yorkshire pudding, turkey with all the trimmings, cookies, fudge, cakes, ambrosia salad, hashbrown casserole – familiar flavours marked the holidays of our year.  Flash forward a few years, and I come to find myself gluten intolerant.

No more bread.  No more yorkshire puddings or cookies, cakes, stuffings … I could go on, but it makes me sad, so I’ll stop.  I had to clean out my pantry  of anything that might have wheat or other glutenous grains.  And there was a lot.

It’s gotten easier over the last 3 years or so.  I cook mostly from scratch, and the world seems to have gotten the clue that people who can’t have gluten do  exist – I can buy chocolate chip cookies when I feel lazy, and they taste good!

Bread, however, has always been more of a challenge.  Udi’s makes a wonderful line of bread products that have been a life saver in days of extreme sandwich/bagel cravings.  But, it’s still not the same as baking your own bread for a Sabbat.

Since I have every intention of returning to my Sabbat celebrations this year, I have been scouring the web for a recipe for gluten-free braided bread.  I have found a couple, but one thing I have learned from my previous forays into GF bread making is that GF bread dough is REALLY sticky.  Braiding it may not come easy.

I may be able to get by with biscuits or scones for Imbolc, so I think I can probably sneak in a good 7 months of practise before it is really important.  I’ll post my progress with GF Sabbat baking as the year progresses, and if the braided bread never comes together, Lughnasad celebrations will commence with my fabulously buttery cornbread.

B is for Bread.