Rice Grinding

Making the allergen free banana bread yesterday (along with reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) has inspired me to be a little more adventurous with my kitchen projects.  I bought this grain mill and a boat load of allergy-free cookbooks before we moved.  The idea was that it would more than pay for itself (and it will if I use it more!) because store bought specialty flour mixes are really expensive.  The "gluten free" cake mixes and such are ridiculously expensive, and our little man has so many allergies that he can't have 99% of those.  So I bought it with good intentions, but then there was all the drama of my husband losing his job/housing etc. In the midst of all that stress I didn't feel up to figuring out anything beyond basic matters of survival.

But having a little success yesterday with the banana bread was very inspiring.  I stumbled across a recipe for gluten free play doh on one of the blogs I read, and it calls for white rice flour.  I've seen these recipes before and always intended to try making some, but just haven't made the time for it yet.  And I only had brown rice flour in the cupboard.  Then I remembered the grain mill. 

 It does an amazing job, but it does take quite a bit of elbow grease.  It isn't hard to turn the handle, but it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to get enough flour to do anything with.  The ones with a motor cost a fortune, so for now I'm left with a hand crank.  But I really can't complain.  It has an adjustment for how fine you want to grind your grain, and I only had to run it through once to get it ground as fine as I wanted it (after reading some reviews of different mills that require grinding twice).  

I went ahead and made enough to fill a small container.  I haven't had time to make the play doh yet and if it goes well, I'll be making a big batch for the church nursery.  They play with play doh all the time, and it's a pain for the nursery workers to have to keep my little one out of it.

I'm not sure how much these little containers hold.  I'm guessing 6 or 7 cups.  They are pretty handy.  The ones with the blue lids were found at the Dollar Store and the one with the red lid came in a set of three (nested together so the other two are larger) from the Family Dollar.  They have pour spouts on the lids.  I keep all the two year old's allergy free foods in these and keep them all in a separate cupboard so they don't get cross-contaminated.  The one with the blue lid on the left is the extra oatmeal I ground when I was making banana bread.  I didn't want to do too much at once since it's easy enough to do in the blender and I wanted it to be fresh.  Now I just have to get around to making the play doh.  Maybe during naptime...