PIZZELLE BY PAOLA An Italian American mother who can't cook  pasta for her family—I ask you is there a fate  worse than this? Don't laugh, Giulia Melucci,  author of the memoir I Loved, I Lost, I  Made Spaghetti. I've seen a clip of you  preparing your luscious Italian dishes in your  kitchen, telling your audience to enjoy...if  they can eat gluten. Well, my youngest son  and husband are senstive to wheat, and their stomachs tell them so. Maybe someday you'll  date a gluten-free guy and you'll see what I  mean. If I cleared all the Italian food with the G word from my table, there'd be nothing left  but an olive to mangia. No linguini with sugo  and meatballs, no pastina in wedding soup,  farfalle with lentils, orrecchio with escarole  and beans, risotto with pesto. No spinach  lasanga and mushroom ravioli along with140  other varieties of the wheat noodle. And there's more: bread—glorious Italian  bread, gnocchi, artichokes stuffed with breadcrumbs, salad with garlic croutons,  not to mention one of my favorite Italian cookies: pizzelle.  Pizzelle, those round, crisp wafers pressed in irons with designs from the days  they were fashioned with a family's crest in the Abruzzi region of Italy. Buttery  thins that melt in your mouth. Mine are not your Nonna's standard anise-flavored:  They're chocolate peppermint, kaluha and cream, coconut lemon zest, rum raisin,  savory herb with fresh basil or rosemary from my flower pot, and flavors I don't  even know yet because it will depend on whatever ingredients I have in my  cupboard. I've put behind all my kitchen catastrophes of yesteryear (when my mother and I  used to say that we don't cook, we burn) to begin a tradition of making Italian  cuisine without setting off the smoke alarm or getting out a knife to whittle away  the char. I now press burn-free pizzelle to share at special occasions such as  weddings or book parties, family picnics and music recitals.   All these sweet-smelling waffle cookies but none for youngest son, Mario who  carries on my father's name? This Italian American mother knew she better start  thinking outside the Ronzoni box and wasn't going to get any help from Lydia or  Giada. She's concocted a gluten-free recipe by trial and error. The result: the  lightest of pizzelle, so airy you pat your stomach and can't remember if you ate  them or not. And if you do, you stop counting how many. Here's a recipe that  combines and adapts several I found on the Internet. I pressed Gluten-free  Chocolate Chip Pizzelle for my bello figlio, and he loves them. Let me know how  they turn out. Enjoy in good health! Of course, I still make pizzelle with the G word, and my mother has come to give  them her seal of approval. This was after I asked if I should pack the pizzelle iron  on a visit to Pittsburgh once, and she said, "It's up to you. If you want to lug that heavy thing on the train all the way from Brooklyn, I won't stop you." I took that  as a resounding no! But after we hung up, she must have put on a pot of coffee  and found nothing to dip in her tazza because an hour later she called back and  told me to bring it.  I packed, I pressed, she dunked. Read an Article about a pizzelle iron maker.