Gluten-free baking can be discouraging for those who only want to dabble at it: you often dive into a tempting recipe only to discover it calls for three different types of flour and various thickening gums. It sounds daunting, and you don’t necessarily want to invest in ingredients that will just go rancid in your kitchen cabinet.

“Naturally” gluten-free chocolate cookies

I am more attracted to naturally gluten-free baked goods that use “regular” ingredients — though I recognize the notion is highly personal. But in the case of these gluten-free chocolate cookies, they can be put together by hand in no time at all, from just four easy-to-find ingredients: almond flour, cocoa powder, sugar, and butter.

You’ll be wowed by these divine little sablés — crisp as you bite in, then meltingly tender on the tongue, not too sweet but strongly chocolate-y, with roasted notes and the touch of salt that changes everything.

These gluten-free chocolate cookies are a recipe idea I’ve had on the mind for a long time, and I recently came around to developing it, to great success. Knowing that they are based on such a simple formula, you may be just as wowed as I was tasting these divine little sablés — crisp as you bite in, then meltingly tender on the tongue, not too sweet but strongly chocolate-y, with roasted notes and the touch of salt that changes everything.

Though I generally use a silicone baking mat for cookies, I find it more convenient to use a good parchment paper here. I use it to roll up the dough into slice-and-bake logs, wrap them up for setting in the freezer, and slide the cookies onto a rack super gently at the end of baking — gluten-free cookies are typically fragile when still warm, so they need to cool completely undisturbed before they’re all crisped up and ready for action.

Tell me everything!

Do you also feel put off by recipes that call for two kinds of gums and various specialty flours? Did a particular recipe or circumstance convince you to give in and build a gluten-free pantry?

PS: Here’s an index of my gluten-free recipes. And if you decide to invest in a bag of almond flour (I buy it by the kilo at G. Detou in Paris), I can offer many more recipes to make good use of it.

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If you’ve been feeling blah about the official arrival of fall this week, I have a lovely and easy recipe to make you feel every shade of happy about the shift of seasons and the new produce it brings.

{Related: Never sure what’s in season when? Grab my free seasonal produce calendar right this minute!}

Today’s recipe is a simple dish of noodles dressed in a peanut sauce, and tossed with garlicky kale and sautéed mushrooms.

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This is one of those recipes I’m super excited to have added to my repertoire: it’s very (very) easy, it can be whipped up from 100% pantry ingredients, and once it’s on the table it tastes and feels like a much more sophisticated dish, the kind that makes you sigh with pride and content and say, “We eat pretty well around here, don’t we?”

It started out as the 20-minute fish curry in Meera Sodha’s excellent book, Made in India, Cooked in Britain, which I own in its British edition and have used multiple times with great success. Her original recipe is for an Indian-style curry without the coconut milk, but after several iterations in my kitchen it has taken on Southeast Asian flavors (lemongrass, basil or cilantro, lime juice) that make it a little bit Thai as well.

An amazingly easy fish curry

I apologize to purists of either cuisine in advance, but the result is a fine curry, richly favorful and clean-tasting, that does really well on its own or served over rice. My current preference goes to this sticky rice, which I throw into the rice cooker Maxence talked me into buying despite my reluctance (rice cooks just fine in a regular pan on the stove! we don’t need a specialized appliance!), and I now love and cherish (perfect rice! every time! no need to watch or time or anything!).

Since settling on this wonderful fish curry formula, I now make sure I keep on hand a can of coconut milk, a jar of whole peeled tomatoes, and fish fillets in the freezer at all times (the spices, onions, and fresh ginger I always have around), and I throw the curry together almost on a weekly basis. Although I’ve only made it for our family meals so far, it is without a doubt a company-worthy dish, one you could even pull off for a weeknight dinner party, possibly followed by this vanilla-roasted pineapple.

Join the conversation!

What’s the most recent addition to your roster of easy, weeknight-friendly recipes? We all need more of those so please share!

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Because summers in Japan are hot and humid, Japanese cooks know a thing or two about the refreshing dishes such sultry days call for.

Gomadofu falls into that category: a concoction of sesame paste cooked with a thickening agent until set, it resembles tofu in color and texture, hence the name (goma = sesame), and is served chilled.

I first came across it when Maxence and I traveled to Japan last spring, and stayed overnight at a temple in Koya-san. There we were served a shojin ryori dinner, the vegan cuisine that is practiced by Zen Buddhist monks in Japan*, and one of the many little dishes brought to us was a shallow cup of gomadofu, silky on the tongue and richly flavorful.

I hadn’t really thought to make it myself until I found this post on Maki’s ever-helpful Japanese food blog. Her recipe seemed so easy, I couldn’t not try it.

I already had sesame paste on hand — mine is a Middle-Eastern-style tahini I buy at the organic store — so all I needed to get was some kudzu powder, a starch drawn from a Japanese vine, which is not hard to find if you have access to a natural foods store or a Japanese market.

I made my first batch following Maki’s recipe, to deliciously rewarding results. All you do, really, is combine the sesame paste with kudzu powder and water, heat it up to thicken, then chill to set.

On a later occasion, I used a couple of tips I got from another inspiring Japanese food blog I frequent, called Tess’s Japanese Kitchen. I steeped some kombu (a type of seaweed) in the water first, and added a little sake for flavor, but both of these steps are optional.

All in all, very little exertion is required to create your very own sesame “tofu,” which you’ll then divide into cubes and serve cold, as an appetizer or as part of a light meal, typically pairing it with soy sauce, wasabi, and freshly grated ginger, or the homemade sauce Tess suggests.

I myself like it with yuzukosho (a yuzu and pepper condiment) and a little seaweed — strips of torn nori or, as pictured above, a sprinkle of freshwater seaweed from Jugetsudo in Paris — in addition to soy sauce.

Having made the original sesame version a few times now, I am planning to branch out and make amondodofu with almond butter and kashudofu with cashew butter**.

Don’t forget to read Maki’s post and Tess’s post; they both offer interesting info on gomadofu.

* If you’d like to learn more about shojin ryori, Maki recommends a book called The Enlightened Kitchen, by Mari Fujii.

** Not official names; I’ve just made them up.

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