Renovations

They have been renovating our building recently and making the hallways more modern and bright. Overall, the changes have been good because when we first moved in it was kind of dark and scary. But during this last week they re-did the elevator, which was circa the mid-1970's, and I am not sure the "new" elevator was a step in the right direction.

Basically, they put down some fake marble linoleum flooring and covered all of the elevator walls with this low-pile beige carpet. I have no issues with the floor because it looks a lot nicer. But with the elevator being as small and confined as it is, the soft beige walls now remind me of the solitary confinement rooms for decompensating patients that I saw in the inpatient psychiatric facilities during my 3rd year of medical school. It's a bit creepy. Oh well, I guess it's motivation to take the stairs and get some exercise.

Adventures in Gluten-Free Baking

Yesterday I had to give a journal club and bring in food. I made gluten-free brownies from a mix and everyone loved them. This success motivated me to bust out my gluten-free flour and cookbook and give some chocolate chip cookies from scratch a try. Supposedly, with the proper ratio of gluten-free flour and xanthan gum, you can follow a traditional wheat-based recipe with the same proportions of flour. We decided to take a trip back to childhood and make the recipe on the back of the Tollhouse chocolate chips.

The first clue that something might be amiss was probably the runny consistency of the batter after we followed the recipe to a T. Was it the Smart Balance Trans-fat free spread we used? Or was the gluten-free ratio just a bit off? Who knows. We plowed ahead and put teaspoonfuls of "dough" on the cookie sheet. Into the oven it went and within a few minutes we noted the "cookies" were running together a bit. By the time they came out 10 minutes later, they gave the term "cookie sheet" a whole new literal meaning. We had a sheet of chocolate chip cookie. It was rather hard to get off the pan and came out in big, flat chunks. Luckily, it tastes good, but is very aesthetically unpleasing.


We decided to bail on traditional cookies that that point since it was clear that they would not hold their shape. We dumped the remaining batter into well-greased a baking pan and created a cookie-brownie-cake sort of thing. Hopefully it will taste good. Better luck next time.


Update: it is yummy, like a very delicately textured brownie with excellent cookie flavor. And you can never go wrong with chocolate.