Say "no" to a cookie?!

In the annals of innocence, the home-baked cookie is way up there with Ivory soap and newborn kittens. Unless you’re gluten-intolerant, in which case, the cookie compares to barbed wire and Idi Amin. Luane Kohnke, a lifelong baker, recaptures the cookie’s essential goodness for all of us with GLUTEN-FREE COOKIES (Sellers Publishing, March 2011).

Luane and I, her editor and publicist, had lunch last week at Candle 79 here in Manhattan, a vegan restaurant that proves vegan chefs know what they’re doing when it comes to satisfying, delicious food. Over "live" avocado tartare (a redundancy, but it assures raw foodies no heat has changed the avocado's enzymes), vegetable and quinoa nori rolls, a black-bean-pumpkin-seed burger with polenta fries, and grilled-vegetable-wild-mushroom-stuffed tempeh, she told me the story of how GLUTEN-FREE COOKIES, her first book, came into print. Seven unsolicited submissions of a completely different cookbook resulted in three responses: two nays and a “how about a book on…?” query from Megan Hiller at Sellers which re-directed Luane to create the 50 recipes in this book.

Think of the sheets and sheets of test cookies it must take to create 50 publishable recipes. Who are her testers? She herself takes a bite, puts a couple aside to test later for freshness, and takes the rest to her office (yes, she’s still employed full-time). She says her colleagues are opinionated and appreciative, a creative bunch, some of whom even volunteered their talents to start her blog and take her author photo.

Luane made every cookie in the book herself and shipped them from New York to the book’s photographer, Stacey Cramp, in Maine. Yes, the gingerbread men arrived decapitated and the meringues melted in the summer heat (note to aspiring cookie-book-writers: do the meringues in the winter and spring!), but disasters were corrected and the photos in the book show off each cookie’s unique charms.

With its recipe for a gluten-free flour mix you can keep in the fridge, GLUTEN-FREE COOKIES puts this simple pleasure back on everyone’s plate.