Something that resembles an everything-free devonshire tea.

I have found on this diet that you have to do a lot more mastication. (Sounds rude.) My jaws are getting tired. I'm longing for something that doesn't crunch or require great amounts of chewing.

Despite saying I wouldn't eat gluten free bread because it's too depressing, I found myself hovering around the gluten free bakery stall at the markets this morning. After lingering around some neat looking lemon meringue tarts, I diligently picked up a some gluten free buns. When I got them home I cut them open and took a little bite. It was quite scone-y in texture.

I'd also bought some lovely Macadamia nut butter (did you know that macadamia nuts are pretty much the only indigenous food product that gets exported from Australia? Oh, that and Roo meat. The Russians can't get enough of it.) Back to nuts. I thought about spreading it on the bread but decided the texture would be altogether too smudgy. "What I need" thought I "is some jam". And believe you me, I have lots of lovely plum jam in the cupboard that I made in summer, and some fab peach, lime and passion fruit jam made with my friend Anthony........ before I went low sugar...... Oh dear.

I did have some rhubarb stalks starting to look a bit straggly at the bottom of the fridge so I cooked them up. I thought the mac nut butter would be nice and sweet to balance the sharpness of the the rhubarb, and the zingy-ness (and wetness) of the rhubarb could deal with the too-much-smudge factor of gluten free bread and nut butter.

So. I quickly poached the rhubarb in apple juice (it only took a few minutes).



While that was going I also cooked up some goats milk chai, sieved it and put it through the milk froth-er and then made up the toast.

Rhubarb poached in apple juice on mac-butter and gluten free bread with goats milk chai.

Recipe

1 bunch of rhubarb cut in chunks.

1/2 cup apple juice.

Macadamia butter (you can just put some macadamias through a food processor if you don't have any as it turns to paste very easily).

Gluten free bread.

Cook the rhubarb in the juice until soft. I think you know how to build it. I toasted the bread first.

As for the chai, well, just make sure you don't use a chai teabag. Mine was 2 tsp tea, 2 tsp sugar (I know, I know, I just can't drink chai without it), 1/2 inch chunk ginger cut in fine slices, 1 cinnamon stick, 3 pods cardamon crushed, a bit of water. Boil it all together on the stove, sieve then froth.

Now the confession. The latest cooking flop.

Listen, unless you are Heston Blumenthal, believe me when I tell you this. If you can't find a recipe for it in 10 min of internet searching, it's because it can't be done. Take for example, my attempt at a black rice tart base. Buoyed on by the success of the polenta tart bases I thought I could do something similar with glutinous black rice. I ground some up and then cooked it in some goats milk like polenta. Unlike polenta, as I cooked it, it became extremely sticky. Gluey, one might say. Never the less, I ploughed on and sure enough, when I got to the stage of pressing it into the tart tins it worked quite fine. I thought I had invented a winner! The colour was quite a fabulous deep purple and I was wondering what would look good on this as a filling. The problem was when I came to baking it. The higher sugar content (I'm presuming?) meant that it lost it's form entirely once heated and dissolved into a bubbling porridgey glug at the bottom of the tart tin. When cooled this became sticky and chewy. I quite liked it in a weird food experiment kind of way, but seriously, there was no way this was going to hold a filling, and in the end, after a few optimistic chews, they went in the bin. Dang. But maybe I could somehow use this mixture to create something with a tuile effect..............hmmm........