Food
BEST CHEAP EATS
Owner Alison Collins stephen Schlange photo
Boots Bakery and Lounge Best Gluten-Free Menu Options
A
Best Cover Band
cronkites.com 16 INLANDER BEST OF the inland nw 2013
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customer sits behind his laptop at one of the long wooden tables in back of the bakery/ bar as owner Alison Collins walks by. He stops her to say “Alison,” his fork pointing to the brownie on his plate, “That’s really good. That’s really good.” Hearing compliments that her baked goods pack a flavor punch, especially when someone says they can’t tell it’s vegan or gluten-free, is Collins’ favorite. Boots Bakery is entirely vegan and about 95 percent of the food is gluten-free, but when Collins opened Boots mid-June she didn’t set out to make it that way. It just sort of happened. As a vegan, Collins began crafting her own recipes because she thought vegans lacked baked goods options. It all tasted like granola to her — dry and terrible, she says. So she set to baking, but it took several months before she got her recipes dialed in. “I made a lot of hockey pucks in my time before I got it right,” she says. She admits it’s hard to find places that have the gluten-free/vegan “double whammy,” and it doesn’t always seem enticing. “It sounds limiting and one-track,” she says. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. So that’s what we try to do.”
Boots has both the sweet and the savory. Cupcakes, brownies, cookies, roasted vegetables, curried lentils, and macaroni and cheese are some of what fill the front case. The gluten-free macaroni and cheese, made with brown rice pasta, uses a “cheesy sauce” of silken tofu, garlic and onion and is tossed with greens and mushrooms. The array of cupcakes — almost all glutenfree — tempts anyone who even dares look at them. The spicy Mexican chocolate cupcake is a prime example of Collins’ tendency to make booze-infused baked goods, with another being her signature boozy brownie. But be warned: Boots doesn’t have a menu, or even a rotating menu. They just make whatever they want each day, Collins says. One reason is that their produce comes fresh from farmers; another is that it would drive her crazy not to. “It would be maddening to me to make the same things every day,” Collins says. But she’s not worried about her free-spiritedness being a deterrent. “People come here every day because it’s never the same,” she says. — JO MILLER 2nd PLACE: Wild Sage; 3rd PLACE: The Melting Pot