Drum Roll….. It’s A Dud! Or.. Gluten-Free Dog Treats!

Goodness, lots of ingredients, lots of time, and eventually lots of frustration have at times gone into my food mistakes. I hate food mistakes, especially  mistakes I make consciously thinking they are not mistakes!  I guess that means I am even confident of my mistakes, which is probably not a good thing. When cooking I almost always have my notebook out  on my island and scribble down what I put into a dish.  I use a red pen, must be the teacher in me, to record my first attempt at a recipe. Later when I tweak and rewrite the scralled recipe I use a black pen. Going back through recipes now I know which have been rechecked. Anyway recently I decided to try a yeast bread with no gluten. People have invented wonderful things, but a gluten-free bread that doesn’t seem gluten-free must be the new impossible. Perhaps there will be a grand prize for the person who can bake a gluten-free bread that does not look, or taste, or yes, act like gluten-free bread. Not me, I will not be the winner!  I have read and read and tried and tried.  Recent attempts have resulted in a dough that looked like adobe waiting to be plastered on a house.  Another attempt was so flat and hard it could have been mistaken for a patio paver.  Yet another was so foamy you would have thought it came out of a beer bottle that was put on a paint shaker prior to opening.  You get the idea. The final straw was just the other day.  I mixed up what seemed like a reasonable combination of ingreditents.  It became paste.  The more I added the worse it became.  I could not take one more batch to the compost bin.  I thought wafer, cracker type product so I rolled it out and cut just six with a biscuit cutter.  Baked at 350 for 10 minutes they didn’t change in shape or size one bit.  Browned blotches showed up on the wafers but not with any regularity.  That’s it!  I rolled out the dough and cut the entire batch into wafers, baked them, and put them in a plastic tub for dog treats!  Thinking if nothing else Max and Ruby will like them for the bit of sugar and salt, I knew I had at least found a purpose for them. Gluten-free dog treats! Who knew?  Wrong!  Ruby licked it as though not to hurt my feelings, dropped it, and give me a look as if to say, ‘got anything else?”!  Max tried chewing it. He eats anything. He laid down with it and last I saw he was attempting to chew it as if it were a rubber chicken. Lots of effort, no results! I cannot come up with a decent yeast bread with no gluten.  So as a result that page in my notebook has earned the ‘dud’ classification!