In a few hours I will be attending the wedding of a friend who has Celiac Disease. Her wedding will be a gluten-free picnic and all the guests will bring something in this theme.

I know very little, almost nothing about what I call "alternative baking." Luckily for me crisp topping is not really considered baking. There are no eggs, no chemical leaveners, no attempt at expecting something to rise in the oven, no faerie-dust finesse needed in the mixer. I need to put a bunch of gluten free flours together with various sugars and spices and butter, and hopefully, voila! Crisp topping baked onto glorious Pacific Northwest berries galore.

"Alternative Baking" is tricky business. Little has been written about the properties of these new flours as they relate or translate to what we know of wheat flour. Although wheat has not always been a year-round crop, almost all American and European baked goods start with it.

Celiac Disease is not the only major food allergy gaining momentum today. With the prevalence of soy and corn and wheat in almost everything consume, whether we know it's there or not, we are developing allergies to ingredients we are eating far too much of. Baking, cooking and eating that is considered "alternative" today may well be considered normal/standard/conventional in a dozen years or less.

Books like Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Cooking have helped me to understand new flours like Mesquite, Teff, Sorghum. In her beginning chapters, she gently and thoroughly explains the nutritional, taste and baking properties of many of these almost mysterious new things.

But, like all new ingredients, one must experiment until one gets what tastes good to them. Because crisp topping has no dangerous raw ingredients you can taste it, and adjust according to taste when it looks ready.

Follow instructions for the crisp topping I made last year near this time. It is exactly the same.

Here is what I put together for today's gluten free challenge. I used a scale so I could check proportions better. And I wrote it all down as I went along, tasting a tiny bit of each flour first to check texture and flavor. All these flours are ground to a different consistency, so measuring them in cups would have been dangerous. Some are heavier than others. (All Purpose unbleached (white) wheat flour generally weighs 5-6 oz. per cup)

2.5 oz Teff flour
4 oz. Sorghum flour
5 oz. Sushi rice flour
1.25 oz. Tapioca flour
1.75 ounces Mesquite flour
2 teaspoons Kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamon
1/2 teaspoon cardamon seeds*
1.75 sugar
3 oz. raw sugar
8 oz. Dark brown sugar
1 pound unsalted butter
*optional

All of these flours can be found at Rainbow Grocery. If you have a friend who is gluten-free, I hope you get the chance to make this for them!

I'm a bit of a skeptic when it comes to whole grains. You know the ones I mean: Amaranth. Millet. Quinoa. Teff. They sound faintly exotic, like semiprecious jewels or new colors from the Pottery Barn paint collection. But they also have a hippie-dippy air about them, and I like my food full of flavor (and my underarms shaved, thank-you-very-much).

With superstar bloggers like Heidi Swanson constantly singing their praises, though, lately I've started to waver. But something held me back. And then I went out and ate nine desserts in one sitting -- a feast so ridiculous even Dionysus himself would have surely chided me for it -- and I began looking about for ways to eat healthier. As luck would have it, The Wheat-Free Cook (William Morrow, $24.95) arrived in my mailbox during this moment of curiosity, and the first recipe to catch my eye was quinoa salad with cucumber, tomato, and mint.

Since that sounded like a dish for a warm, sunny day, I decided to call up the book's author while I waited for such a day to appear on San Francisco's foggy horizon. Jacqueline Mallorca is a local food writer who started her career by writing the first ever Williams-Sonoma catalog and later became an editorial assistant to James Beard and a San Francisco Chronicle food columnist. She now has more than 11 cookbooks to her name.

A little over ten years ago, Jackie was diagnosed with celiac disease. For Jackie and 1.5 million Americans, that means gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye, makes them sick. Like most newly diagnosed sufferers, she was taken aback by all the foods she could suddenly no longer eat -- bread, pancakes, crackers, cereal.

"Being a cook, a foodie from way back, I laughed heartily at the diet sheet I was handed, and said, 'Oh no, I can do better than that.' I started reinventing the way that I cook," Jackie told me over the phone.

That meant shifting to nut flours for cakes and cookies, rice flour for things like pasta or bread, and the aforementioned hippie-dippy grains I've been suspiciously eyeing for years. After spending a decade cooking gluten-free, she collected some of her favorite recipes in The Wheat-Free Cook.

Even though I can eat gluten, flipping through those recipes made my tummy rumble. They looked simple and sounded delicious: onion-Gruyere tart, Asian stick noodles with pork and asparagus, cornmeal and cheese shortbread.

Jackie says that her restrictions have actually made her cooking better. "A lot of the time, particularly if I'm making cookies and little petit fours and cakes with nut flours, they turn out much more delicious than the original versions because you're using such fine ingredients. Cakes made with ground almonds and the best quality [cocoa] powder and three or four eggs taste wonderful because they taste of the almonds and the good stuff," she reported.

I wanted to know more about all the funky grains that peppered the book, so I asked her what she couldn't do without, even if she could eat gluten again. "I'd never stop using quinoa because it cooks up very fluffy, and it makes the best grain salad because it doesn't go hard like rice does when it's chilled. I wouldn't give up on millet because it makes a really terrific pilaf. I wouldn't give up on teff flour because it makes the best brownies under the sun," she readily answered. "I find it's like cooking in color instead of cooking in black and white."

The sheer poetry of her answer inspired me to dig deeper into the cookbook. I went out and bought white rice flour to use for dredging sautéed foods in based on Jackie's observation that it's less gummy than flour. I dog-eared a recipe for peanut butter-chocolate chip cookies and another one for chocolate-hazelnut truffle cake (healthy eating having been long forgotten at this point). And yes, I bought some red quinoa.

A sunny day finally appeared, and I set to making the salad. I tossed in a bit of roasted chicken to make it a meal, subbed some spicy cayenne pepper for fresh ground black, and let it sit in the fridge so the flavors could introduce themselves. "Hiya," I imagined the cucumber saying. "How fresh!" would be the radish's sharp reply. But the quinoa just sat there, still and gentle, subtly flavorful, and down-to-earth. Yum.

Quinoa Salad with Cucumber, Tomato, and Mint
Serves 4-6

Recipe adapted and reprinted with permission from The Wheat-Free Cook by Jacqueline Mallorca, William Morrow, $24.95.

2 cups gluten-free vegetable broth
1 cup red or yellow quinoa, rinsed and drained
1 cup shredded roasted chicken
1 cucumber (about 8 ounces), peeled, seeded, and chopped
2 large, ripe tomatoes, finely chopped, preferably heirloom
4 green onions, thinly sliced
8 radishes, finely chopped
¼ cup chopped mint
½ cup chopped parsley
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
Fine sea salt and cayenne pepper

1. Bring the broth to a boil over high heat. Add the quinoa, reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the grains are tender and the liquid is absorbed, about 15 minutes. The grains will turn transparent, and the white germ ring will show. Transfer to a large bowl and let cool.

2. Add the chicken, cucumber, tomatoes, green onions, radishes, mint, and parsley. Whisk together the olive oil and vinegar, and season to taste with salt and cayenne pepper. Pour over the quinoa and vegetables, and mix gently but thoroughly. Taste for seasoning and adjust as needed. Serve at room temperature.

Shuna Lydon & Sherry Yard, both on team #1.

A number of months ago I received an email from an old pastry chef of mine, Stephen Durfee, who is now an instructor at The Culinary Institute of America, Greystone campus in Napa Valley. He was letting me know I would soon receive an invitation to The Fifth Annual Worlds of Flavor Baking & Pastry Arts Invitational Retreat.

But I thought I would have to respectfully decline, because I am not currently working for a specific establishment. The only name on my chef's jacket is my own. I could not be more grateful that Stephen talked me out of my no.

For 3 1/2 days at the end of April I breathed, thought, emoted, questioned, hypothesized, puzzled over, laughed about, informed, taught, learned, listened, typed, photographed, argued and dreamt pastry and dessert making. {I also "live-blogged" it. Find the blow-by-blow by clicking on this link.}

Notes from the Ideation Session before we went into the kitchen to start creating.

The dessert ideas and chef teams that were formed our team's Ideation Session.

From 8:30 am until near 8 pm every day our 70 plus pastry chef and industry representatives' gaggle went from demonstration, to lecture, to lunch, and then at night many of us went out to dine and commiserate. On the last day and a half we were broken up into 5 teams on the basis of various themes and asked to create 4 desserts each.

Team #1, my own, was themed "Health and Agriculture." In the one hour Ideation Session Sherry Yard and I threw out a lot of excited ideas, were reigned in, we all picked partners and then walked into the palatial kitchens that make up CIA's kitchen classroom. For the 'fruit dessert' my cohort/teammate was Master Bread Baker Mark Furstenberg from Washington DC.

The idea was we would showcase one ingredient, rhubarb. Although rhubarb is not a fruit, it's what's most in season right this minute, and I wanted to show off a special method I have of cooking/treating it, so as to preserve its original integrity, its rhubarb-ness. I like to hot-sugar poach the stalk in such a way as to keep it's crunchy, sour nature. {For a full explanation and recipe, order the Spring 2006 issue of Edible San Francisco, where I went into great detail about osmotic reciprocity and why rhubarb always turns into mushy, stringy baby food when it's introduced to heat.}

Verbena from the Julia Child Gardens at CIA, infused cream and rhubarb juice.

Mark made a slightly savory biscotti of cornmeal and toasted almonds, and besides the rhubarb I wanted something to mediate the textures and flavors of the rhubarb and cornmeal cookie. Plated dessert making is about balance. Pastry chefs are always thinking about texture, flavor, presentation, sweetness, acid, production, size, plating speed, accessibility, temperature, and the food you ate before eating our courses. The best desserts are the ones not made on autopilot. Don't get me wrong, I like my lemon bars, chocolate eclairs and creme brulee, but I want the pastry chef to be paying attention to all the ingredients to produce the best possible taste sensation.

Because of rhubarb's high acid content, it likes to be married with fat. I ate at Gary Danko recently and was not surprised to see rhubarb paired with foie gras. Rhubarb likes butter, cream, creme fraiche, and eggs. But the actual flavor of rhubarb is fairly subtle. If I want a diner to really taste it, I try and make pairings that are of complementary, not competitive flavors.

To this end, I made a light and aromatic, herbaceous sabayon. Instead of wine or alcohol, though, I juiced rhubarb raw through an extractor. If you have time for all these steps I can guarantee you an elegant and voluptuous, seasonal dessert.

David Winsberg of Happy Quail Farms said that he'll have rhubarb through 'til August, but Sabayon is a perfect foil for most fresh fruits, especially berries and stone fruit.

RHUBARB-VERBENA SABAYON

Large Egg Yolks 4-6 each
Sugar 1/4 cup
Honey 3 Tablespoons + (2 Tablespoons: later)
Sea or Kosher Salt Pinch

Rhubarb Juice 3/4 Cup

*Verbena, fresh The leaves from 3 stalks
Heavy Cream, not ultra pasteurized 2 Cups (I use Clover Organic.)

*Knoll Farms has some of the best Verbena available in the Bay Area.

1. Infuse cream and lightly crushed Verbena leaves and stems in a non-reactive pot by heating with low flame until hot. Shut off heat and let steep for at least one hour, preferably more. Do not allow mixture to boil. You can sprinkle in a little sugar to help with infusion.
2. After cream has steeped, turn flame to medium until hot to the touch and strain through a fine meshed sieve. Chill cream in ice batch until very cold. (This step may be done 1-2 days before making Sabayon.)
3. Combine first four ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer. Whisk yolks to break apart before adding sugar and salt.
4. Set bowl over a pot of boiling water. Bottom of bowl should not touch water. The steam is what's cooking the Sabayon.
5. Whisk thoroughly and rapidly, without pause, and, using your other hand, pour rhubarb juice into yolks a little at a time, letting custard thicken a little before adding more. When all liquid has been added, whisk until mixture holds a visible "trail" and has become quite thick.
6. Place bowl on stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment and set speed to medium. Add extra 2 Tablespoons of honey now. If it looks like honey spun to attach itself to the side of the bowl, stop mixer and scrape down Sabayon with a spatula to combine.
7. Increasing speed incrementally, whisk until custard is light and voluminous.
8. Whisk Verbena infused cream until soft peaks form.
9. When Sabayon is ready, transfer into a larger bowl.
10. Using the most pliable spatula in your kitchen, fold whipped cream into Sabayon in three distinctive additions. Fold intentionally, from the inside of the bowl to the outermost edge. Each stroke counts. If you over mix these two ingredients your Sabayon will deflate to the point of liquidization.

Rhubarb-Verbena Sabayon with Crunchy Poached Rhubarb, Corn-Almond Biscotti and Marshall Farms Star Thistle Honey. Pastry Chef Authors: Shuna Lydon & Mark Furstenberg.

Sabayon keeps, refrigerated, for 1 day, but it is best the day it is made.

"Sweet & Salt Relish" is a recipe entry dated March/April 2003 in one of my little recipe books. Each book corresponds to a time period, the restaurant I was working in at the time. The pages in this one reflect recipes I used in my first months at Aziza, a Moroccan restaurant with a particularly modern Californian slant.

I was attempting to create a vegan garnish for the sorbet plate. Mourad Lahlou, Aziza's chef/owner, serves food thick with aroma and spice, rich with clarified butter and intense from slow braised meat sauces. My goal was to create sweets clean and bright with seasonal flavors: desserts I would crave after eating his North African sweet-savory food.

Inspired by Haroseth and in lieu of Passover, a Jewish holiday ending in the eating of flour-free (unleavened) desserts, I give you an intriguing garnish for just about anything sweet, savory, or both. Although this recipe could be made very quickly in a food processor, I strongly suggest chopping all the fruits and nuts by hand. Not only will you have more control over the size and shape of each piece, it will give you time to meditate on the traditions of eating representational foods.

SWEET & SALT RELISH

2 C Organic Raw Almonds
3/4 Cup Candied Kumquats*
1 Cup California Dried Apricots
10 each Dried White Figs
1 Cup Cold Press Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 teaspoon Sel Gris
1/4 Cup Cocoa Nibs
Optional: Honey, Lemon Zest or 1/4 Preserved Lemon (peel only)

1. Rough chop almonds, candied kumquats (*get recipe by clicking here), apricots and figs, and place in bowl. Stir to combine.
2. Stir in olive oil, salt and minced preserved lemon peel or optional ingredients.
3. Just before serving, add cocoa nibs. (This step will preserve some of their crunch, but it's not absolutely necessary.)

Sweet & Salt Relish will keep upwards of a month refrigerated in a non-reactive, tightly sealed container.

I used this kooky garnish for sorbet, but it would also be lovely with most any cheese, especially fresh ones like ricotta, chevre or fromage frais. For those of you who like both a savory as well as a sweet breakfast, Sweet & Salt Relish would be delicious with yogurt-- plain, Greek or goat.

Enjoy! And if it pertains to you and yours, Happy Pesach!