JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Today's a double treat, with our own Celia Wakefield introducing us to her long-time friend Charlotte Whatley, who recently made a truly delicious gluten-free challah bread for a festival celebration at her church. If you're like me, you're always on the lookout for tasty gluten-free recipes, because even if you don't need to be careful yourself, we all know someone who does!
Good morning to everyone in our Reds community and another
grateful thanks to Julia who encourages me in so many ways, not least of which
are our Sunday stories and the food we enjoy sharing.
I am living in Sudbury right now owing to a more complex
narrative than I need to share, but I am well and hope to return to Maine soon.
But for the current situation I am also in lockdown in my assisted living
apartment as there are folks in this building with COVID. Yes, just when we
thought it was all over - well - did you think it was all over, because it’s
not, and as this is a community of the over 50’s+ there is a need for concern.
So, I have tested -clean and do mask up when I Ieave my apartment. Not to
mention all the other precautions.
But even with all of this I do have a recipe and a story for
us today from my dear friend of so many years, Charlotte Whatley. But now it's
just fun to reminisce with Charlotte about times past and enjoy her great
cooking. We were chatting recently, and she told me she had had a great success
baking gluten free bread for a special occasion at her church. There was quite
a lot of research as you will see from the directions below which Charlotte met
but as you can see from the basket photo, the result of the gluten free Challah
challenge had spectacular results.
How did Charlotte and I meet? We are reaching way back to
the start of the birth of the British Butler. A time of high inflations and
financial woes rather like now! our accountant, a dear friend named Bob advised
us that starting a small business could offer helpful tax breaks and that is
how the BB was born. However, every small business needs an income source and
mine was obviously cooking. This led to gigs for dinners, for parties providing
food for all the best ways of helping people celebrate. But to survive all this
and grow I needed some staff and Bob’s young teen daughter, Charlotte, was not
only interested in helping me, but her mother was also a great cook, so
Charlotte was my dream assistant. Nothing phased her. Charlotte remembers
driving those French fruit tarts you see in Parisian bakery windows; fruit
arranged in artistic patterns and carefully glazed to protect the careful
layering, and suddenly something darts across the road causing her to brake
quickly and hearing ominous sloshing sounds behind. However, on arrival it was
all found to be in perfect order.
We cooked in the rain, in garages, in kitchens where the
ovens didn't heat up, or worse there was only hot water piped through both taps
and other experiences which honed my skills for crisis management. You might
wonder why crisis management would play a role with our catering escapades.
Thinking back, I can recall a few key moments of crisis.
There was an annual holiday party which we catered for
several years. One year stands out quite clearly. I was in the kitchen plating
the next offering when I heard a resounding crash. A tray of glasses lay smashed
on the tiled hall floor, luckily they were rented glasses and not some family
heirloom. Cleaning it all up quickly and moving on to the next offering became
the quick order of business.
On another occasion we arrived for a select birthday party
where the dessert was a hazelnut dacquoise layered with chocolate mousse and
served with a fresh raspberry sauce. I carefully handed the sauce container to
one of my wait staff to transport to the kitchen. To my horror, she tripped,
the lid flew off and I arrived to see a raspberry rainbow of sauce across the
kitchen floor and the horrified face of my host. Yes, we even survived that as
it was not all spilled and cleaned up quick and easy.
Now on to the current cooking aspect of this blog post with
our guest, Charlotte Whatley:
Thank you, Celia and thank you Julia, for offering me a
little space here to recount my recent foray into gluten-free baking. I’d like
to think I come by my writing skills honestly.
Both of my grandparents were
fiction writers. My grandmother, Alice Ormond Campbell, was a mystery writer in
England in the early part of the 20th century in the style of Agatha
Christie. In fact, some of her books are seeing a resurgence of interest as
e-books, published by Dean Street Press in recent years. She also published a
series of short stories in the Chicago Tribune, maybe those articles were
forerunners to today’s modern day blogging.
I was telling Celia that I had enjoyed researching and
learning how to bake gluten-free this spring. She thought the story might
interest the Reds community. At my
church we welcomed a new rector, the Rev. Mia Kano, this year and as is
customary in the Episcopal faith, there was a special Celebration of New
Ministry where the bishop comes to the parish and everyone celebrates the new
ministry together.
I am the head of our Altar Guild and I wanted to do
something special to mark the occasion. These days we offer two kinds of
communion bread, both wheat and gluten-free, and I wanted to bring us all
together into one celebration. I went into my research project with the concept
stuck in my head of, "One Bread, One Body, One Congregation." To do
that, we'd need to all be gluten-free together for the evening.
I had no idea when I started what an interesting and fun
project this would become. I had no idea the paths it would take me down while
learning about baking bread specifically to be used for communion. Now, setting
aside that there may be strong beliefs, opinions, and feelings about religion,
this project turned out to provide me with both religious education as well as
baking education. What an extra treat!
I started with learning the ideas
surrounding communion "Eucharistic" bread - should it be leavened or
unleavened? Must it contain wheat? Must it contain oats? With each new thing
the internet unveiled to me, I scrambled off to our new rector to ask for her
opinion and expertise, and together we settled on the recipe for the celebration.
For this occasion, we chose a leavened recipe, and we included oat flour.
Of
course, I over baked; we couldn’t fall short so the leftovers were served with
dinner. This recipe, originally published by The Loopy Whisk, is intended to be
a challah bread, braided in great fashion, but we discovered it makes for the
most wonderfully shaped “boule” for slicing and toasting. My GF friend is even
baking and storing it regularly in her freezer! I offer many many thanks to the
recipe author, The Loopy Whisk, who has made gluten free bread taste
scrumptious again! My version includes which flours I chose for this specific
project. Happy baking everyone!
