Gluten-free vs. wallet

Joe and I are looking at our budget. We have put off this task for some time, as if by giving the budget some space, we felt it might be encouraged to spontaneously increase. This idea, like so many other great ideas throughout history -- the three-hot-dogs-a-day diet, for instance -- has proven to be tragically misinformed.

We noted that a generous amount of our income is spent on food.

"Those gluten-free foods of yours are not cheap," I said. "It's getting expensive to keep you. We might have to do some sort of fundraiser. Do you have any talents we can exploit?"

A few talents were named and/or demonstrated, after which it was decided that perhaps another financial solution should be pursued.

Joe suggested I start a business selling gluten-free baked goods. "There's not much out there," he said. "You could charge whatever you want."

"That's a great idea," I said. "Just one thing wrong."

"What?"

"I've never baked a single gluten-free thing."

"How hard can it be?" said the voice of wisdom. But the voice of wisdom has never looked at a gluten-free baked-good recipe.

I, on the other hand, have looked at several, which explains why I have not tried any of them. I ordered a cookbook sight unseen with some trepidation, expecting 189 ingredients in each recipe, with things I had never heard of that would involve extensive travel to locate ("You must use the Canniloris cocoa bean, which grows only in the remote Cannilora region of Huro-Kai-Shi, which is inhabited by cannibals. Shots are required before visiting, as we do not want to spread disease among the cannibalistic natives"). But when the book finally came, I realized that all my worry had been for nothing. The recipes contained only 67 ingredients each.

But although each recipe contains a mere 67 ingredients, each uses several other entire recipes from the book, so that you have to make those recipes first, with their 67 ingredients, in order to make the one you want.

A typical list of ingredients might include, among others, the following:

1 chocolate base (p. 79, first making cupcakes from p. 162)
1 cup chocolate sauce (p. 231, using directions from vanilla drizzle, p. 378)
2 cups chocolate crumbs (leftover from chocolate macaroons, p. 894)
rum-laced double chocolate sauce (see The New York Times cooking section, June 29, 1986, or possibly 1973)

This brings the total number of ingredients for a single recipe to about 1,497, and the amount of time required to make one item -- say, a basic chocolate cake -- from all these other recipes is so great that someone from the next generation will have to finish baking it, because I certainly will not be around to do so.

It is also very likely that this process of making several pre-recipes will result in your forgetting, at least temporarily, which recipe you wanted to make in the first place. So you find yourself with chocolate crumbs, some vanilla frosting, and a cup of roasted apples, but no idea what you were going to make with them.

And then there is the issue of equipment. There appears to be some law by which gluten-free foods cannot be made using standard-size bowls, pans, etc., but only with bowls, pans, etc. that are either 1-1/4 inch larger or smaller than the standard, and there can be no substitutions, or dire consequences may result. Like the gluten-free ingredients, this special equipment is not easy to locate, nor is it cheap if you are lucky enough to do so.

"How many mortgages do you suppose they let you take out on a house?" I asked Joe.

"Why?"

"Oh, no reason."