Substitutions

If you've spent any time in my kitchen in the last three years, you've seen a lot of these in the meals I prepare.

Ever since D and I stopped being able to eat much refined sugar and starch, thanks to reactive hypoglycemia, we've been using any stand-ins that would produce similar results in cooking -- even if the ingredients in question weren't those that naturally occur in foods you could buy at the farmer's market. We're talking products that have been enzyme-modified or chemically transmogrified to fool our bodies into ignoring them. Our pantry was a shrine to the gods of Splenda (packet-style, available in boxes of 700 from Amazon's subscription service), maltitol syrup (straight for baking or flavored for coffee), erythritol (granular for creaming into batters and powdered for whipping into frostings), and xylitol honey (in a squeezable bear-shaped bottle to boot).

It turns out our bodies don't take lightly to being deceived. Cue insidious digestive deterioration.*

The elimination diet forced me to stop using our usual sweetener stock, among many other staples: wheat flours; corn, soy, and dairy products; even eggs and yeast. Did you know that baking powder contains corn? And some vanilla extracts too? What in the name of all baked goods is left to make a pan of muffins with?

Plenty.

Of late, I've been craving cornbread. It's cold out, hearty soups have returned to our menu in full force, and I've been missing the sweet-savory flavor of a fresh-from-the-oven pan of golden goodness to go along with a bean-and-chicken stew. D's mother's cornbread recipe had been languishing in our kitchen file for too long, and I was getting tired of eating rice at every meal. So I pulled out the instructions and started making substitutions.

But wait, you're thinking. How do you make cornless cornbread?

With millet.

The results were more than I could ever have hoped for. These tiny little grains, when cooked, produce an uncannily cornmeal-like texture and flavor. I won't say the final product was indistinguishable from true cornbread, but it was a more than respectable stand-in that I had to remind myself not to consume in a more than reasonably sized portion. (For anyone with reactive hypoglycemia, it's still full-strength on the carb scale, even though it contains no refined sugar.)

The success made my week. It's been hard not to think of the food I've been allowed to eat as a second-rate option to the foods I've had to give up. But that is exactly what I've needed to change in order to move forward with the body I have now -- the one that probably will never be able to eat wheat or dairy again. No more thinking of our allowed options as substitutions. They're alternatives, incredibly freeing ones because they won't mistreat my body.

That said, I'm not settling for lesser quality in our baked goods. If an alternative bread or scone or muffin doesn't make me want to go back for seconds (against my better judgment), then the recipe needs tweaking.

So. I'm posting this week's cornbread recipe with original and alternative ingredients side by side. For anyone with food sensitivities or just a curiosity about different baking options, you can employ as many or as few of the suggested changes as your palate desires. (N.B.: the directions account specifically for alternatives; if you use only standard ingredients, simply mix the dry then add the wet and pour into your chosen pan.)

Corn/{millet} bread

2 cups all-purpose flour / {1 cup gluten-free oat flour and 1 cup brown rice flour}
4 tsp. salt
5 tsp. baking powder / {2 tsp. arrowroot starch, 2 tsp. cream of tartar, and 1 tsp. baking soda}
4 tbsp. sugar / {3 tbsp. sucanat** and 4 tbsp. pear butter***}
1 1/2 cups cornmeal / {3/4 cup millet flour and 3/4 cup cooked millet****}
2 eggs / {2/3 cup water and 2 tbsp. ground flaxseed}
2 cups milk / {2 cups coconut, rice, or almond milk}
1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp. melted shortening / {1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp. olive oil}

1. Mix flours, salt, arrowroot, cream of tartar, baking soda, and millet flour in a large bowl. Add sucanat and cooked millet, breaking up clumps with a fork.

2. In a separate bowl, mix water and flaxseed. Allow to stand 5 minutes (mixture will gel slightly). Stir in pear butter and milk.

3. Add wet ingredients to dry; beat quickly with fork. Stir in olive oil until combined.

4. Pour into 12 muffin cups (place extra, if any, in mini loaf pan or ramekins). Bake at 400 F for 35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean (crumbs are okay, batter coating is not). Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then unmold and transfer to wire rack. Centers will fall slightly -- without gluten or egg, the bread has less structural integrity -- but should not cave in. (Xanthan gum is a recommended additive to rectify this problem, but I'm holding off on experimenting with it until after the remaining food trials are done.)

Makes 12 muffins plus one mini loaf. Half recipe makes one 9-inch square pan of bread. We use a muffin pan to make single servings easier to measure.

* I do not claim that substitute sweeteners single-handedly caused the GI disaster of 2009-2011. But they were certainly associated with the problem; once they were eliminated from our diet, I started to feel better. Symptoms returned during repeated trials with at least one of the sweeteners mentioned above, as they did during trials of a number of other foods. Which just means I won't be consuming any of those items in the near future.

** Sucanat is plain old dried sugar cane juice (but not the same thing as evaporated cane juice, which undergoes more processing). We've found it at Whole Foods, on Amazon, and in our local co-op.

*** We make our own pear butter by boiling down ripe pears with a little water and honey. If you want our recipe, just send me an e-mail; otherwise, similar fruit purees can be used (e.g., unsweetened applesauce).

**** I had leftover millet that I'd prepared in our rice cooker (one part grain to two parts water). For simple guidelines on cooking millet on the stove, check out this site.

And then I got a job

Not the first thing you expected after a vacation absence, right?

It wasn't what I expected either. But a week before our departure, a posting landed in my inbox offering the chance to work as an online tutor. True grammarian wanted, the ad said, flexible hours available.

I was a little skeptical about the quality of the employer, given the odd (read: unorthodox, bordering on misspelled) abbreviations elsewhere in the text, so I asked Marketing Sis if it looked legit enough to consider -- my goal was to start earning a wage through some form of teaching while still trying to balance that commitment with my own writing, among other necessary fall projects D and I are working on. So when Marketing Sis's magical search skills didn't turn up any employee complaints (or evidence of a scam), I threw together a resume and sent it off. Look at this as a chance to get your feet wet, I told myself, and if it ends up being disastrous, you can always walk away.

The business, it turns out, is owned and managed by one woman out of her home on the opposite side of the country, from which she contracts tutors all over the U.S. for students primarily on the East Coast. She failed to notice my Seattle address and called to interview me two days later at 6 a.m., without any prior contact to schedule said conversation.

I have to admit, I'm not swift to wake up and probably sounded a bit bewildered when I answered, fearing a close relative had gotten sick or injured. But when the woman quickly made her disdain known -- "Do you even remember sending me your application?" she asked, perhaps in response to my silence after she'd introduced herself -- I snapped to attention. Simple oversight, I thought, as I explained the time difference, after which the woman was effusively apologetic. So I padded downstairs from the bedroom, D still half-asleep in the darkness, and took her questions in my pajamas.

"You'll be tutoring students who need help on the grammar section of the SAT exam," the woman explained, which sounded manageable enough, even attractive. Subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, misplaced modifiers, parallel construction -- I'd always enjoyed the rules of syntax, thanks in part to my own middle-school grammar teacher. The orderliness of language that she'd revealed, the characteristics of each part of speech, the algorithmic ways of determining the functions of each word in a sentence -- I loved all of it. Could I teach it? Oh, yes.

So I left for Hawaii, agreeing to start work within the week of my return.

Given my long silence since the beginning of October, I'm sure you've guessed at this point in the story that the job has turned out to be much more of a commitment than I believed it would be. Not because I have that many students -- there are just four -- but because my employer is more disorganized than, say, a five-paragraph persuasive essay with no thesis statement and randomly collected statements of fact instead of substantiated arguments. Teaching materials? Sent the day of my first tutoring session, minutes before it was supposed to begin. Oh, and did I mention that this woman decided during my absence to assign me some SAT writing students? My feelings on teaching essay writing to college students have been, at best, mixed -- comp instructors, breathe your collective sighs with me! (And then think about doing what you do, only with high schoolers. Mm hmm, specifically what I didn't want this job to be.)

But of course, given my experience, the woman "thought I'd be perfect" and went ahead with the plan without asking if I cared.

I've spent the last week putting some safeguards in place to keep my sanity from leaking out my ear, but let's just say that there's still plenty I need to do in order to get more timely information from my boss before each tutoring session -- and prevent her from transforming my job description any further. I've promised myself that I will live up to my new duties, but I'm drawing the line at further unforeseen demands.

As for our Hawaiian vacation: it was a getaway better than any we could ever have imagined. More on that trip -- which deserves so much more than passing mention -- once I get my work-life balance back.