The Best of the Summer Vine.

Wow Saturday was HOT! I knew that it was going to be bad, when at a little after 7:30 that morning I stepped onto my porch, with java juice in hand, only to be stricken by the immense heat and humidity that was already seeking to take away my very breath. It was already a balmy 87 degrees with a thousand percent humidity! As I struggled to regain my composure and my breath, because you don't walk outside at a little after 7:30 and expect it to be as hot as Hades, my wife asks if it feels nice outside. What? Nice? Um....sure! 

I told her that the tires on the car were melting onto the driveway and she got the idea. 

After doing a few things around the house we decided that we needed to brave our way out into the heat and get our errands done before it really gets hot. Now lets take a break and consider this...really? Before it gets hot huh? News flash...ITS ALREADY HOT! Oh...before it gets like the south side of Hell...oh got it! Sorry for the confusion! So around eleven we venture out to go to the store and get some provisions. We are driving down highway 76 heading to the new Super Duper Mammoth Gargantuan Wal-Mart with its shiny new asphalt and shopping carts that actually work when we come up on our local farm stand. I look over at my beautiful wife with little puppy dog eyes and ask if she would mind if we stopped to check out what they have. She said, "That'd be great!", and of course I was already pulling into the driveway at that point. I leap from the car, do an Irish Jig, and hop over to the bounty of beautifully stacked produce with its rich colors and smells! I see a vast array of peppers, and squash, and eggplants (oh my!) when my eye spots the very thing that I had hoped to see! There in their little unassuming green plastic basket sit the jewels of summer! Cherry Tomatoes! I give the attendant the same puppy dog eyes I gave my wife and ask if I could taste one. She just smiles and nods approval. I reach a shaking hand towards the little green basket overflowing with these beautifully ripe little treasures. I hesitate. Torn. Excited! Which one do I try? They all look so good! Too many choices! So I just grab one and pop it into my mouth. Slowly I bite down and as the juice and seeds fill my mouth I am transported to my childhood frolicking through my neighbors garden stealing little juicy bites of cherry tomato OK. So I was a bad child! But hey aren't all summer memories based on something like this? You were bad too! My wife's soft beautiful voice fills my ears as I am drawn back to the present time. "Huh?", I say. "So how is it?", she asks. The only word I can find to describe it is "WOW!"

I give the resident payment box it's dues and proceed hand in hand with my wife to the car. She looks at me longingly and asks if she can have one. She rummages through our bag of goodies and finds one that she thinks looks delicious and pops it into her mouth. A bit of tomato juice spills down the corner of her mouth as she exclaims "This tastes like Summer!" I just look at her an smile because it really does. It tastes like the fond summer memories that life is all about.

Go to your local farmer's roadside stand, pick up some cherry tomatoes that you know were picked that morning and try out my favorite recipe! You'll find this recipe on the "Recipes" page.

A little sweet tooth anyone?

What is the essence of a great peanut butter cookie. Really think hard on this one. Times up! Well if you are a fan of the peanut butter cookie you would have answered peanut butter of course! The whole reason we eat these things is that they are a vehicle to get peanut buttery goodness into out mouths without looking like complete lunatics. Who among us takes a spoonful of peanut butter and just eats it in the presence of company? Don't raise your hands I know who you are if you do!

Let us deconstruct the peanut butter cookie in all it's glory and then think about how to make it more moist, more peanut buttery, easier, and way more gluten-free. 

Let's begin with the traditional recipe shall we?

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unsalted butter
• 1 cup crunchy peanut butter
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

This is your run of the mill peanut butter cookie. Looks like a lot of time and effort and oh yeah...for those of us who CANNOT have WHEAT this one's definitely a killer! But in being fair let's take a look anyhow. 

1 C. Butter - Most things are better with butter. Those of us trying to watch our hourglass figures it means disaster! Here's the breakdown. 
1 Cup = 2 Sticks = 16Tbs = 1600 Calories. Think about it. Besides peanut butter is already choc-ful-o oil.

1 C. Crunchy Peanut Butter - Sounds good to me. But I like mine mixed half crunchy half creamy. Personal preference. 

1 C. White Sugar - I can go for this but just white sugar? Where is the caramel undertones of brown sugar? Bland.

1 C. Brown Sugar - There it is! Whoa! Can we say don't feed these to children as they may turn into Gremlins? Way too much sugar! 

2 1/2 C. AP Flour - Need I say more? 

2 Eggs - Good. They add moisture and a little body to your cookie.

The rest is just some leavening agents and I really don't feel like getting into a chemistry lesson right now. 

So ask yourself how can we make this gluten-free and taste good? How is it a cookie without flour of any sort? Let's get to it. 

We already discovered that peanut butter is choc-ful-o oil remember? So we omit the butter. I know, you can scream heresy at me later. We leave the peanut butter alone because it looks like a good amount. Seriously 2 cups of sugar? We need to change that because we really do want to taste the peanut butter;. We are going to half that. Don't worry they will be plenty sweet enough...trust me. We will make the sugar half and half. One half will be plain white sugar and the other half will be brown sugar. The white sugar will add a great sugary sweetness while the brown will add the level of caramel flavor we desire in a great peanut butter cookie! The real kicker here is that the flour really needs to go. So the question remains what will hold our little gems together? Rice flour? Tapioca starch? The answer is quite genius and simple. Oatmeal. Plain old quick-cooking oats. I use the GV brand from Walmart. The cookies really do work best with quick-cooking oats. I know that at this point you are thinking to yourselves that oats have gluten. There is so much debate about this among fellow Celiacs. Some swear them off while others like myself use them daily to substitute for body where flour is involved. I have never had a problem with them. Neither have any of the fellow groupies in my CSA group. Who knows? If you have a conviction about it don't go there; but you will never know unless you try them. Oats come in the run of the mill kind and Certified Gluten Free. The only difference is that one is 5x the price. The only thing that separates these is one is processed in a facility that processes wheat one is not. In my recipe I use only a 1/2 cup of oats. They will soak up the oil and moisture from the egg and make a flourless cookie that would fool the greatest of culinarians. I did take the amount of egg down to one egg only because there was no need for two. Our new cookies will have enough body to hold their shape so leavening agents are useless. I did however leave a pinch of salt in the recipe and added oh yeah one more killer ingredient. Banana! Add to the most awesome cookie a banana and prepare to make yourself the envy of all who come in contact with your beautiful little gems of delectable peanut butter goodness! 

So now that we have the main idea of the cookie and it's new ingredients go ahead over to the recipes page and try them out! Please feel free to leave comments! 

Till we meet again | Chris