Here's a quick update on my Baking Odyssey!

Here's what I used up today:

All-purpose flour
Whole-wheat flour
Rye flour
Soy flour (contaminated)
Wheat germ
Wheat bran
Powdered sugar (contaminated)
Buckwheat flour (contaminated)
Vegetable shortening (contaminated)

Believe it or not, all of these went into a batch of english muffins that is rising right now. I'm hoping it's not a problem for their texture that most of these items don't have significant gluten content--we'll see!

And now, here's what I have left:

Some contaminated tapioca balls
A bag of contaminated poppy seeds
Some contaminated sesame seeds (these are easy to use up)
A package of straight-up breadcrumbs (I guess I'll give these away)
Lots and lots of oats (breakfast for the next few months)
A package of contaminated quinoa.

I can hardly believe that I've accomplished my goal of finishing up all the flours. A few months ago--even just a few weeks ago!--that seemed like an impossible task. So now I can soak and wash my rolling pin and the beautiful apron Claire gave me last Christmas, and finally dedicate them to gluten-free lives!

I was thinking of giving you the updated list of items in the freezer, but that's kind of boring. Suffice to say that it's like the list in my previous post, but longer.

I'll still be eating glutenous things at home for a few months, but no more baking and throwing flour around the kitchen. That's exciting.

I've gone crazy baking.

The back-story is that I was never really excited about baking with gluten when Sara is so sensitive to it--not only did ambient gluten seem like a problem, but it meant that anytime I ate something with wheat, rye, barley, or contaminated oats in it, I felt like I was rubbing poison over my hands and face and had to be very careful around Sara. So we decided two months ago that I'd go gluten-free too (at least at home). (Actually, it wasn't all saintly motives--I also dislike the kind of meticulous, multi-stage cleanup that has to follow every glutenous baking binge.)

The problem was that we've always both been into baking. So we had a few issues: 2 partially-full 25-lb bags of white flour, 1 of whole-wheat flour, and various amounts of wheat bran and germ, oat bran, rye flour, contaminated cornmeal, contaminated cocoa, contaminated sugar (brown and white), etc. I couldn't let this all go to waste! Especially since gluten-free food is often a little more expensive than its glutenous alternatives (oats, for example, charge a premium for the guarantee of purity), I felt I had to wring some value out of these remnants of our former lives!

So I've been baking like mad. I just bake much more than I could possibly eat in the short term, and throw most of it in the freezer. Now that we have a deep-freezer, that's no problem. So right now, our freezers together contain (all made by me in the past month or two):

1 bag of flour tortillas
2 bags of rye buns with cheese in the middle
1 bag of bagels
1 loaf rye bread
1 loaf bran bread
1 loaf Nova Scotia brown bread
1 container rye cookies
1 bag of whole-wheat biscuits
1 container of sesame crackers

There may be more that I'm not remembering. I still have the following to get through:

rye flour (a few cups)
cornmeal (a few cups)
all-purpose flour (about 1 cup)
whole-wheat flour (about 3 cups)
wheat bran (about 3 cups)
wheat germ (about 3 cups)
contaminated soy flour (way too much)
contaminated cocoa (about 1.5 cups)
wheat gluten (about half a cup)
and a few other things.

My goal was to get through it all by Christmas, and then be mostly gluten-free (but with the occasional treat from the freezer) next semester. I may not quite make that goal (darn soy flour), but I'll be baking a lot more before we leave to visit our families, I'm sure!

Here's how I know Oliver missed me when I was on my interview. Sara said that at night, after scaring Nadia off the bed, he left and slept in his box (and he always sleeps with me, either between my legs or to the side). And when I came in, he was squeaking at me and following me, then when I sat down he leapt up for 30 seconds, got down and nuzzled/attacked my feet for a minute or two, then got back up and started getting settled to go to sleep.

What a sweetie...