Ten years ago and after decades suffering from various ailments, Shauna James Ahern was finally diagnosed with celiac disease. From there her life turned around. She began to cook from scratch, teaching herself how to bake without gluten. Her energy level rebounded, her migraines were gone. She decided to blog about her transformation, and started Gluten Free Girl in 2005. Readers soon flocked to the website, swapping advice, recipes and encouragement.
Now married to a former chef, Daniel Ahern, and the mother of two children, Shauna lives on Vashon island, not far from Seattle. Her third book, American Classics Reinvented, is published this week. She took the time to answer a few questions and share one of her recipes, for smoked corn fritters.
‘American classics’ – I bet you had to draft a gigantic list to define the term. How did you choose what to include?
We were deluged by requests! Since we wanted to write this book for other people, we crowdsourced it. When we announced the book deal, we told people on our website that we wanted to know what they missed. We went through comments at our Facebook page on posts written for each region of the US. The southerners and folks from the midwest were the most vocal!
We also received hundreds of emails. Slowly we sifted through them, trying to listen to the most urgent requests and compiling lists of the most popular dishes. And then we put recipes together like a puzzle, trying to balance all the regions of the US with the kinds of dishes people requested. Then, we started cooking and baking.
Gluten-free awareness is so much more visible than when you started blogging, back in 2005. What changed, in day-to-day terms, between those years in the life of people who have celiac disease?
When I was first diagnosed with celiac in 2005, I was elated. I had been so sick that I was thrilled to have an answer. And the only treatment was to eat well? Give me this disease! However, awareness wasn’t great. My first trip to the grocery store took three hours, examining every label. I had a server at a restaurant ask me, confused, why I was worried there was glue in my food. I had no other choice but to learn how to cook and bake on my own.
In the past 10 years, the landscape changed entirely. Now there are so many gluten-free packaged foods that it’s sort of dazzling. (Most of them are still as bad as other packaged foods with gluten.)
When I’m in a restaurant, servers sometimes roll their eyes when I say gluten-free, since so many people ask. As soon as I explain I have celiac, they understand. However, I still think we do best if we cook and bake our own food, most of the time. That’s why we wrote this book too.
So how do you to cook gluten-free, easily, every day?
I think cooking gluten-free takes as much time as cooking with gluten. Many meals don’t involve gluten at all – slow-braised carnitas; nachos; steak and baked potatoes – and so the struggle is still to find the time to do it all.
We make our lives easier by having a theme for every night of the week. We don’t do a strict meal plan, where we know every dinner for seven days. Instead, we know that Sunday is Japanese night. Monday is leftover night. Tuesday is tacos. Wednesday is soup and salad. Thursday is world cuisine. Friday is pizza. And Saturday is Italian.
There’s a lot of room to play, which we like. But we still need to prep some of the same things over and over: pizza dough; sushi; a big pile of dark greens for salads; tomato sauce for pasta and the pizza. We do an afternoon of prepping for the week ahead on Sundays. It helps a lot to have all the vegetables prepped, the dressings made, the stock ready to make into soup.
If you have to pick one American classic, which one would it be?
That’s so hard! However, when Danny and I talked about this, it became pretty clear: fried chicken.
There’s something simple and homey about fried chicken. That shattery crust with tender meat beneath it? Hot or cold, this is a crowd pleaser.
Fried chicken as we know it today is also a dish that originated in the south, a combination of the Scottish tradition of frying chicken and techniques of slave cooking, along with the the spices brought to the United States from western Africa, by many accounts. That means there’s sadness and complexity woven into this dish, a history we really should grapple with more thoroughly to understand America today.
That’s part of the reason we used Edna Lewis’s technique for frying chicken for the dish on the cover of our book. (It’s also utterly delicious.) I love how people come together over a table full of food. Maybe fried chicken could help us start talking about our history together too.
Recipe: Smoky sweet corn fritters
Feeds 6
In the middle of July and into August, there’s nothing better than fresh corn. For the first few days of corn season, we eat corn on the cob with nearly every dinner. At first, that corn is slathered in butter and salt. Then we graduate to cotija cheese and a squeeze of lime juice. By the second or third week, we still crave corn but we want a different texture. Grilling the corn before cutting off the kernels, plus the sharp bite of aged cheddar cheese and a shake of smoked paprika, makes these smoky sweet corn fritters a little unexpected and very much a hit at every summer party we have thrown.
6 ears sweet corn, husks and threads removed
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 large eggs, beaten
4 ounces (1 cup) freshly grated sharp Cheddar cheese (or soft chèvre)
4 scallions, finely sliced
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil leaves
45 grams all-purpose gluten-free flour, or your own blend
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika (optional)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Fat or oil of your choice for frying (we use olive oil or butter)
Prepare to cook. Fire up the grill. Make sure it’s screaming hot.
Grill the corn. Coat the ears of corn in the olive oil. Put them on the grill. Let them get a bit of color on one side, about 2 minutes, then flip and grill until all the sides are smoky hot and almost charred. Remove the corn from the grill and allow to cool to room temperature.
Prepare the corn. Using a sharp knife, slice the kernels off the corn. Flip the knife around and use the back of the knife to push out as much of the milk from the kernels as possible. Put the kernels and milk into a large bowl.
Make the fritter batter. Mix the eggs, cheese, scallions, basil, flour, smoked paprika, and salt and pepper with the corn. Let the batter sit for a few moments for the liquids to absorb the flour.
Make a tester. Set a large skillet over medium heat. Add enough of the fat of your choice to make a generous puddle in the middle of the skillet. Make a small fritter with the corn batter and put it in the hot fat. Fry until the bottom is golden brown, about 2 minutes, then flip and fry it on the other side. Turn off the heat and take the fritter out of the skillet to cool. Taste the fritter. Need more salt and pepper? A little more smokiness? More cheese? Add to your own taste.
Make the fritters. Turn the heat on medium again. Add enough fat to cover the entire skillet. Fry the fritters in the same way you fried the tester. When both sides are golden brown, transfer the fritters to a serving platter.
Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
