Wheat Free Cooking

While I have no need to live a wheat-free lifestyle, I know plenty of people who do. And as an avid baker, and pasta lover, and cookie fiend, I was curious whether wheat-free alternatives were palatable or not. I attended an event at the author's home, where she holds small cooking classes. There, I sampled her pasta, cookies, pizza, and other foods.

Later, I tried making the bread recipe from the book. As you can see, it looks like a standard loaf of white bread. And the greatest praise came from my husband's comment. "I don't get it. What's the big deal about this bread, again." In other words, there was nothing weird about it that he felt a need to comment about. To him, it was regular bread.

The wheat-free alternatives Mary Capone created are actually quite good. But still, I'd glad that I don't have a wheat problem, because working without wheat makes many dishes a more complicated, and some of the ingredients are a little obscure. When I last spoke with her, Mary said she was considering marketing some of her mixes, to make it easier for people to recreate her recipes. I have no doubt she'll get that project off the ground. She's passionate about making the wheat-free lifestyle a tasty one.

The following article was first published in the December, 2008 edition of the Left Hand Valley Courier.

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The Women's Bean Project

Do you have someone on your gift list who doesn’t need anything, but you still want to wrap up a little something? Do you know someone who prefers practical gifts?

Would you like your gifts to benefit someone other than mega-companies in foreign lands?
Do you want to send some Colorado products to friends and family elsewhere? And do you want to buy those products locally?

You can wrap all of that up with just one purchase from The Women’s Bean Project. Founded in 1989, the Women’s Bean Project helps women break out of the cycle of poverty and unemployment by giving them jobs that act as stepping stones to other employment.

Jossy Eyre, the founder of the project, saw that women’s homeless shelters kept women safe, but didn’t help them better themselves. She bought $500 worth of beans, and put two homeless women to work, and the idea grew from there.


Today, women are referred to the project by parole officers, shelters and other agencies. Many of the women are single mothers who have been on public assistance, and many don’t have a high school diploma or GED.

The women are given jobs so they have an immediate income while they learn skills that will help them find and keep future employment. According to the project’s website, “The Women's Bean Project does not hire women to make and sell bean products. We make and sell bean products to hire women.”

Meanwhile, the project’s product line has expanded from just bean soup and chili mixes to salsa mixes, spice rubs, baking mixes and more. You can buy single items or gift baskets directly from the company, and several local stores also carry some of the products.

While all of that makes the project sound good, it doesn’t answer the question of how good the products are, so I decided a taste test was essential.

I’m usually not a fan of pre-packaged mixes, but the Women’s Bean Project products aren’t like the boxed mixes that contain unpronounceable chemicals and strange additives. These are normal ingredients that are premeasured and packaged to save you a few steps.

So far, we sampled the black bean soup, the 10-bean soup, and the cornbread mix, and all of them were very good, and the recipes were simple to follow. The bean soup recipes suggested a few optional ingredients, which is nice if you aren’t comfortable making recipe adjustments on your own.

Each of the packages includes a tag with the name of the person who packed it, which is a nice touch. Also on the packaging is the phone number and web address of the project, in case you have any questions.

As of this writing Women’s Bean Project products were available in Colorado at Vitamin Cottage in Longmont; all Colorado King Soopers stores and some Safeway stores. Outside Colorado, see http://www.womensbeanproject.com/ for ordering information and other sales outlets.

The Olivator

A while back, a kitchen store called Cayenne Kitchen opened up in town, and I quickly became a regular customer, and got to know the owners, Terry and Bill. Recently, they moved to a larger space which gave them enough elbow room for more product demos. I volunteered myself to help out, if they needed someone to talk about gadgets and bring food samples.

The second demo I did was for a product called The Olivator, a product designed to stuff olives and other small stuffable things. Yes, I'm going backward. I'll get to the first one later.

When we were discussing The Olivator, a woman who overheard the conversation said that she'd probably use a pastry bag to stuff olives.

Since I hadn't yet seen The Olivator (it was on order) I had to conceed that if someone knew how to handle a pastry bag, that would certainly be an option. But when I finally met the gadget, I realized that it really wasn't meant for squeezing fluffy stuff into olives. Instead, it's meant for cutting a core out of something a little more solid and inserting that into waiting olives.

A pastry bag would be great for smooshing softened cream cheese into an olive; The Olivator can cut a chunk out of feta or Muenster and jam that into an olive.

But stuffed olives are sort of...boring, really. You can buy jars of olives stuffed with everything from almonds to garlic to pimentos.

I wanted to demo something more unique and more fun. I considered making a chocolate ganache to stuff into strawberries and decided that it was a bit too fussy. People might want something easier than that. I looked around the grocery store for something with the right texture, and wound up buying a collection of cheeses and olives and strawberries. I was going to grab some other berries, but it was winter, and all the berries had that sad, desperate look they get when they know they're out of season and shipped way too far from home.

At the checkout, I grabbed a Milky Way bar. Crazy idea, but I thought it might work.

For the demo, I arrived with green olives stuffed with hummus, black olives stuffed with feta, and unstuffed strawberries, hulled and ready to go. And a couple Three Musketeers bars. Yep, I was stuffing candy bars into strawberries. And they were the hit of the demo. People loved the idea, and it was simple enough that anyone could do it. And people like me who prefer cooking from scratch could certainly make ganache and use that instead.

In two hours, we nearly sold out of Olivators, and I heard that the last two were sold the following day to people who had seen the demo, but didn't buy.

As far as my opinion of the Olivator...well, it's not really a serious tool but it's fun. And it does something a pastry bag couldn't. When summer comes, I have ideas for taking cores from different melons and inserting them into other melons to get a polka-dot effect. I was also thinking that could be done with refrigerator cookies that you slice and bake, but I haven't gotten around to that project yet. Or it could be used to punch holes in a pie crust top. Or other things, probably. I still have some experimenting to do, obviously.

A plus is that the gadget comes apart easily for cleaning and is dishwasher safe. And it's pretty small, so it's not like it's taking up too much of its share of storage space. I may not use is as much as I use my Kitchenaid mixer, but I have a feeling I'll find some interesting used for it over the next few months.