Gluten-Free Banana Nut Bread Recipe

Warm from the oven gluten-free banana nut bread. Just a fad?

I hope you all enjoyed a safe and nourishing Thanksgiving holiday, stuffed with all good things- familial affection and laughter, kindness, acceptance and generosity of spirit. Food for the soul as well as food for the body. I hope your table was inviting, inclusive and beautiful- and untarnished by condescension, resentment, or the snorting ridicule of your Uncle Stu (whose politics alone are enough to give any thinking person a spike of schpilkis).

Because out there in the cold cruel world, Darling, some folks apparently (still) view our gluten-free lifestyle through a jaded foodie lens, believing, first of all, that gluten-free anything is never going to taste anything but awful, and second, that this whole gluten-free trend (their word not mine) is a fad not worthy of serious consideration and compassion. Apart from the standard (and always brief) lip service that non-afflicted food writers, non-GF bloggers and journalists pay to celiac disease, adhering to the medical treatment that is a gluten-free diet is degraded- for that sexy topical hook- to a bandwagon. An eating disorder. A diet by choice.

They dub it a controversy. 

Gluten-Free Pumpkin Streusel Muffins

My new pumpkin muffin recipe- with streusel topping.

This isn't a Thanksgiving post, exactly. Though Thanksgiving is just a stone's throw away- if you could somehow conjure a metaphorical stone to metaphorically hurl into the time-space continuum, piercing the veil of forty-eight hours that blows by in a singular exhale, surely faster than light. And this exhale, it was only following a previous breath- a breath I took yesterday- which turns out to be one year ago. A year since that Pumpkin Praline Pie I baked. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around this.

This is more a post about time.

Some days I feel as if I am slave to the calendar, an unwitting cog in the wheel of the year with Sundays and holidays appointed by proxy, designated by some superior force that rules my random wandering nature with an unforgiving fist, demanding obedience. Charting the course of my life.

Then I remember the truth.

Gluten-Free Thanksgiving Recipes & Tips 2011

Gluten-Free Thanksgiving Recipes and Tips

The Big T. Thanksgiving. Nothing sends shivers of trepidation up a gluten-free or dairy-free girl's spine like the mental image of Grandma's sage pungent white bread dressing or shimmying slabs of Aunt Ida's pumpkin pie. It's a butter and wheat flour gorge fest with danger at every turn. The gruesome gut-twisting threat of thirty-six hours chugging Pepto Bismol is poised to strike on every holiday decorated plate- jovial forkfuls of tradition and conviviality aside.

It can be a nightmare.

Gluten-Free Goddess eBook

My new ebook- best loved recipes

My blog anniversary is just around the corner. Yep. Number six. And I am trying to wrap my little gluten-free brain around it. Six years. Six. That is a long time in blog years. (Maybe blog years are kinda like dog years? Every twelve months of blogging seems equal to seven human years. What I think I'm trying to say is that GFG feels... more grown up somehow. She's no longer a lurching toddler- or as Johnny Depp likes to phrase it, "tiny drunk"). The bumble-puppy years are over.

We're respectable now. (But hopefully not too serious.)

I  began blogging and sharing my recipes in late fall of 2005. There are over 400 original gluten-free recipes now on Gluten-Free Goddess. This astonishes me!

Looking over my recipe index this past summer I began to imagine the beginnings of a cookbook- a collection of recipe favorites from Gluten-Free Goddess. (In full transparency there have been cookbook offers, and some tempting projects pitched to me this year. But none seemed like the perfect fit. In fact, most felt like a tight shoe that pinched and chafed and left me preferring to go barefoot, taking my own meandering solo path, focusing on blogging, my first love.)

But then you know what happened. I got an iPad. And soon discovered the convenience and pleasure of bringing my entire blog into the kitchen with me. And that led to ebooks...

Gluten-Free Butternut Pecan Scones

Get sconed, Babycakes, with these fab gluten-free scones.

Let's get sconed. Butternut squash style. But let me warn you. I'm having an existential week. The kind of week where gushing about a gluten-free scone recipe just seems kind of silly. The kind of week where irony reigns supreme on her cold and shiny throne. Yeah, I know. I could shrug it off and stuff it out of sight and soldier on. I could kick it to the back of my closet, behind the pile of ratty sneakers. I could swallow the pill of denial like a good girl and use words like tender and buttery and melt in your mouth scone goodness.

Who would know the difference?

But this morning I'm just not interested.