It is somehow fitting that this site launched at the beginning of Celiac Awareness Month. Call it a happy accident. My tech team (aka the husband) had time to devote to the project that has consumed me for months, and I took advantage of his generosity.
(His clients, unfortunately, never see me as the priority I obviously am!)
So me. I am Kassia Krozser. I am gluten-free. And I am really happy about it. That’s strange for me to say since I am notorious in my family for my love of white food…aka bread. In fact, the last gluten-based meal I prepared was Thanksgiving dinner. I’d spent the preceding months baking sourdough bread from a starter I’d nurtured and loved.
Spot (the husband named the starter) had achieved that perfect level of sour and delicious. Leftover Spot (oh, that sounds bad) became croutons. I hoarded those croutons, no easy task with my husband, knowing they’d be the centerpiece of my Sausage Stuffing. They were.
Spot was good. Spot was a sourdough superstar. Spot was making me very, very sick.
So much so that I didn’t eat a single bite of leftover stuffing. Thanksgiving was my last hurrah. As you get to know me, you will know this for the heroic act it was. Many mashed potatoes were consumed during this period of time.
Being gluten-free isn’t easy, and it isn’t fun.
Then again, being gluten-free isn’t always hard, and it can be very rewarding. Very creative.
Which leads to the purpose of this website: food, good gluten-free food.
I’ve been cooking since I was a kid (not well, I promise you, not well). My mother, a fantastic artist and brilliant, wonderful parent, wasn’t into cooking creative food (in her defense, the four hellions she called children weren’t all that into eating creative food). My grandmother, however, was a great cook — her style was pure roadside diner, with all the Crisco and bacon fat a body could take.
I would watch her cook…a little of this, a little of that, a dance in the kitchen that ended up a full meal on the table. Okay, I may be exaggerating on the dancing, but the food was good, and as far as I can recall, there wasn’t a measuring cup in sight.
As I melded my memories and my dietary lifestyle, I had a crazy notion. A wonderful notion. A notion that, as a fiction writer and essayist, surprised me. I wanted to write a cookbook.
A gluten-free cookbook. A cookbook that celebrates what I love in food, the kind of food I love to make. A cookbook that reveals the opportunities of a gluten-free diet. A cookbook that confronts the reality of people who work full-time, yet need to put dinner on the table every night.
The first edition* of the cookbook is nearly complete, and I’m very excited about it. I’ve had to abandon the lessons of my grandmother and do a lot of writing down, a lot of measuring, a lot of explaining. It’s been interesting. I’m pretty sure every recipe has a note about adjusting spices (and garlic!) to taste.
While the work continues on writing and editing and testing (my poor husband, suffering through yet another GF lasagna), I’m eager to get out of my writer’s head (scary, scary) and into your heads (surely a safer place). This is the first step.
* – Are cookbooks ever done? Are they always works in progress? I like to think so, and I’m going to talk more about this idea in future posts.