James Ahern - Gluten-Free Girl Every Day

Copyright 2013 by Shauna James Ahern and Daniel Ahern. All rights reserved.

Photography Copyright 2013 by Penny De Los Santos

Cover design by Suzanne Sunwoo

Cover image by Penny De Los Santos

Interior design by Kara Plikaitis

Food styling by Karen Shinto

Prop styling by Anne Trenner-Mishka

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York, New York

Published simultaneously in Canada.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ahern, Shauna James.
Gluten-free girl every day / Shauna James Ahern, with Daniel Ahern; photography by Penny De Los Santos.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-118-11521-3 (cloth); 978-0-544-18659-0 (ebk)
1. Gluten-free diet--Recipes. I. Ahern, Daniel, 1968- II. Title.
RM237.86.A339 2013
641.5638--dc23
2012030520

v1.0413

For Danny, who is my loyal, indispensible partner in everything, including the creation of this book.

For Lucy, who is all joy.

Thank you.

Thank you to the farmers and food makers on Vashon Island and in Washington State, who not only provided the produce and salmon that made these recipes possible but also inspire us every week with their celery root and Japanese cucumbers.

Thank you to our legion of practical, loving friends, who listened to us wonder about what to cook, ate our meals, and gave us feedback on recipes that seemed too elaborate to make on a weeknight. (None of those recipes is in this book.)

Thank you to Tara Barker, Charissa Luke, Lisa Stander Horel, and Erin Swing Romanos, who helped us with all the baked goods, particularly the sandwich bread. We wanted to nail that one, make it foolproof, and you folks helped us do it.

Thank you to Tracy Chastain and Kim Malone, who meticulously tested nearly every recipe in this book, making the millet skillet bread and quinoa sweet potato stew much better, in particular. These two took notes, took photographs, and took the time to make our lives much easier. We owe you two a Vitamix blender and a dozen cookies every week for years.

Thank you to Anna Painter, whose friendship and fine mind helped make every one of the recipes in the dessert chapter what they are. Anna, I owe you some peanut butter and jam bars.

Thank you to my brother, Andy James, who sat down with me at the table one day and said, Listen, I dont cook according to ingredient, the way you do. I think about the kind of dinner I want to make. Why dont you structure the book according to types of meals: breakfast for dinner, rice and beans, one-pot meals. He was right, of course.

Thank you to Gypsy Lovett, who gave us feedback on recipes that didnt work, let us use her home for a Thanksgiving feast photo shoot, and cheered us on with good advice and stories.

Thank you to Penny De Los Santos for the stunning photography, Anne Treanor Miska for the gorgeous props, and Karen Shinto for her ninja skills at food styling. Thank you to Molly Wizenberg and Brandon Pettit, dear friends who allowed us to invade their home for a week to make the photographs for this book.

Thank you to Stacey Glick, who continues to be the best agent we could ever imagine.

Thank you to Justin Schwartz, whose friendship and enormously high expectations of the quality of work we can do informs everything here.

Thank you to Lucy, who brings more joy than she could possibly know.

Thank you to Danny, whose voice and food authority is in every single recipe in this book. Life without gluten? No big deal. Life without you? I cant even imagine it.

And finally, thank you to every reader of Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef. You have made our lives what they are.

W ERE MAKING GRILLED ANCHOVIES WITH AVOCADO AND GINGER-SCALLION sauce. See the five kids over there at the table? Theyre shaping the sticky rice into little boats. Yep, theres rice all over the floor. Well get that later. Here in the kitchen, Danny and our friends, Tami and Alejandra, are slicing strawberries while I pat the dough for shortcake into a smooth round. Cutting out biscuits is one of my favorite actions. So soothing. Were laughing and drinking iced tea. Now Lucy is telling Johnny not to play with her toys. Josie and Cisco go outside to unearth the dirt from the pots of herbs. The baby needs feeding. The wailing begins. Hey kids, its time to eat!

They pile into the kitchen, and I hand them little packages of sticky rice, bits of anchovy, slices of avocado, and drips of ginger-scallion sauce. Everyone goes quiet. Each kid wants another one. Raena eats four. For a few moments, the sun is shining through the window, the kids are happy and chewing, and all is right with the world. Mayhem will ensue again but this moment is still.

This is why I love cooking so much. A good meal can change someones day. Cooking is the most deeply creative act with the most practical application.

I came to cooking later in life than I did writing. From the time I could clutch a pen, I started forming words and trying to turn them into sentences that made sense. There were so many poor poems and wretched short stories on the way to essays that werent too terrible. Its said that it takes ten thousand hours of doing something to become quite competent at it. Not a geniusjust good. Ive put in those hours in writing, and Im planning on ten thousand more. And while I love the grateful responses I sometimes get from people who read my books, I love the act of writing even more. Its hard, slogging work, putting words on the page, like laying down bricks and hoping theyre not too lopsided. I love this work.

But cooking? Cookings much more fun. Cooking can be deeply contemplative, if you have an empty house, a clean kitchen, and an entire afternoon to make that complex bread recipe. Does that happen often in my life anymore? Not really. Usually, the counters are covered in vegetables we just brought home from the farmers market. They all need washing and slicing and putting away. Danny gets an idea to make vegetable pot au feu, a dish he hadnt made since culinary school twenty years ago. And our three-year-old daughter, Lucy, wants me to play Candy Land with her at the same time shes saying, But Im so very hungry, Mama. Time for food. Now.

Real cooking rarely looks like it belongs in the pages of a glossy food magazine. I discover that Ive run out of onionshow did we run out of onions?when Im about to make a big pot of tortilla soup. Fishing through the spice cupboard for the onion powder I bought for these kinds of emergencies, Im reminded again that I really should come up with some sort of system for keeping the spices organized. Oh man, I left the skillet on, and its smoking. Honey, what did you say? You want to watch the Wiggles? Not right now, okay?