Homemade common-allergen-free bibimbap!

Not gonna lie: having this many food allergies and sensitivities sucks. Since Kara was born, my body has lost the ability to process chicken eggs, soy, and bananas. Add that to all of the other things my body hates and the only common food allergen that I can still eat without consequence is wheat (which is good, 'cause my only meat-like substitute these days is seitan — and I'm trying to eat that sparingly, lest I develop a sensitivity.

But yeah, I missed the simple, quick and easy meals I had next-to-no-time to throw together when Kara was a baby, like egg sandwiches or — in my predominately Korean neighbourhood, with grocery stores to match — bibimbap.

So it was a revelation to discover, just before Christmas of last year (i.e., about 3 months ago) that people with chicken egg allergies can sometimes eat duck eggs without difficulty. That was around the time that I picked up a 6-pack from the local Chinese grocery and tried it in my baking, thinking that having trace amounts of a single egg across a batch of shared baked goods would be a good litmus test for sensitivity on my part. I'm happy to report that not only did it work out, but that I've since been able to branch out into making duck egg-intensive foods like tamago-yaki without ill effect.

When you factor in the fact that I've recently been mainlining episodes from Maangchi's YouTube cooking channel, it's not hard to see how I might've arrived at the conclusion that I ought to try my hand at making bibimbap. And so it was that I had a common-allergen-free bibimbap as my early lunch today. This one features short-grain brown rice, blanched spinach with chives, and "sweated" and stir-fried carrots, zucchini, cucumber, and red bell pepper. It was topped with an over-easy duck egg. Everything was seasoned with salt, sunflower seed oil, and garlic.

I began the vegetable prep work last night to minimize the amount of time that'd take today. It was fairly time-intensive, but I think the results were well worth it. I had an unbelievably delicious, nutritious, and quick-to-assemble meal option today and still have plenty of the vegetables left over for later in the week.

Sadly...

...this looks much better than it tastes.

I've heard great things about Bunner's, a Kensington Market-based vegan, gluten-free bakery (helpful for the ever-growing roster of g/f friends I have -- you know, with a genuine gluten sensitivity, rather than a willingness to follow fads) and have wanted to make the trip to sample their goods for months. I have yet to go, but a trip to Indigo on the weekend provided me with a copy of their cookbook! Eager to get testing, I purchased the ingredients which I didn't already have in my heavily-vegan pantry and got working on their strawberry cake. As a caveat, I completely omitted the arrowroot flour called for in the recipe, so my results are undoubtedly atypical. Nonetheless, this cake is much denser than I would have liked; it's much more like a banana bread than a "white" cake. I know that density is the bane of gluten-free baked goods, but was hopeful that the xanthan gum called for in the recipe would offset that considerably. I didn't.

So I think I'm going to forgo further experiments in gluten-free cakes for now, but given my recent success with developing my own gluten-free brownies, I think I'll attempt to make some of the cookies in the book next. After all, a dense cookie isn't nearly as egregious as a non-fluffy cake.

P.S. I vastly prefer the vegan buttercream in this book over the equivalent recipe in the other vegan baked goods recipe book I own. As long as I remember to add a generous pinch of salt in each case, that is.

I have achieved the impossible!

You are looking at a vegan, gluten-free, refined-sugar-free, fudge-y, delicious brownie!

• 18 dates, soaked and drained
• 1 c. aseptically-packaged coconut milk (I think the stabilizers help with the texture of the brownie, so it's best to avoid the canned stuff for this recipe)
• 1 t. cider vinegar
• 2 t. vanilla
• ¼ c. coconut oil
• 2 T. ground flax seed
• pinch salt
• ¾ c. cocoa
• 1 c. all-purpose gluten-free flour blend
• ½ t. baking powder

Preheat oven to 350°. Add the cider vinegar to the coconut milk. In a food processor, blend the dates, adding the coconut milk mixture. Add the vanilla, coconut oil, flax seed and salt and blend again until smooth. If clumpy, sift the cocoa powder (I found I didn't need to follow this step). In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients together. Pour the dry ingredients into the food processor and blend briefly, taking care not to overmix. Pour/scrape the batter into a lightly-greased pan (I used a round cake pan) and bake for about 25 minutes -- this brownie should fail the "toothpick test".

These are excellent chilled!