Grilled Shrimp Ceviche

Today, I tried another of the recipes from Delight magazine's summer issue -- Grilled Shrimp Ceviche. Traditionally, a ceviche is actually done with raw seafood and the acids in the lime juice and/or vinegar "cook" the food over time in the fridge. I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that, but luckily this recipe had you start with grilled shrimp.

I skewered the shrimp, sprinkled a little cumin and garlic powder over them (not in the recipe but recommended by the seafood guy at HEB) and grilled them. Then, while they cooled, I chopped the red onion, tomato, and cilantro. Once the shrimp were cooled, I cut them in thirds (also not in the recipe, though I thought the picture didn't look like whole shrimp so maybe they just left that instruction out) and mixed them with the veggies, lime juice and olive oil. I chilled the whole mixture (though it was equally good when I tasted it immediately) and served them with tortilla chips for dipping. It was FABULOUS!!! (Again, if you want the measurements for the recipe, email me or pick up the magazine -- I got mine at Whole Foods and so far, their recipes have been delicious and healthy!)

Apparently it is a common practice to serve ceviche in a martini glass -- almost all the pictures online show it that way. Serving with chips is also apparently a common practice. The recipe actually called for spooning it into Tostitos Scoops and serving as individual pick-up cups, but I chose not to do that b/c I've read some conflicting info about cross-contamination gluten issues with Frito Lay products. Till I get confirmation that they're truly gluten free, I'll stick with ones I know (or at least believe!!) are.

Fewer Carbs, More Veggies, and New Stuff

Last week at a celiac group meeting, we listened to a very good and knowledgeable speaker who spoke about several key elements to good health, particularly in the face of food intolerances and allergies. Some of her presentation was on diet, some on supplementation with various vitamin type things, and some on lifestyle (including physical activity, prayer, meditation, and stress reduction). As an added bonus, for the first time ever, someone gave an explanation for why it would be a good thing to include a Fish Oil supplement in my regimen that actually made logical sense!

A couple of key points she made regarding diet were to use carbohydrates sparingly and to eat more veggies. This may sound like "duh!", but the discussion got me motivated, at least for the moment. She pointed out that those of us whose bodies have been fighting against us over our carbs (namely wheat) really need to give our systems a break from complex carbs that aren't easily digested. For me, that means that my chosen path of stopping wheat consumption but going full-out with non-wheat carbs is not helping enough (not to mention the less than stellar effects it has produced on my scale...). I just need to reduce my starches across the board. As we talked about the “eat more veggies” part, I was inspired by the notion of trying to incorporate more veggies into lots of different meals and food combinations, so I decided to explore some options. I haven't gone far into exploring new veggie varieties yet (there are more than I can count that I never eat) but one step at a time...

I started with breakfast. Let’s face it - except for eggs and fatty meats, breakfast is a carb heavy meal. IMHO, you can only eat eggs so often before you start thinking "ugh - no more!" But at least I can have eggs a few times a week if I get creative with my preparation options, and that’ll let me… get more veggies in my breakfast! For example, one day I made an omelet with broccoli slaw in it - surprisingly good! (Broccoli slaw is in the produce section pre-bagged and is mostly thin strips of broccoli -- stalk part -- with a few carrot strips and cabbage strips in it.) Another day I sautéed up some onions and mushrooms and threw them with some tomato into an egg and cheese breakfast casserole - also yummy, though next time I will use less onion and will make sure I have some diced green chilies for it too because -- YUM!!!

I had also been wanting to try out an alternative grain that is supposed to be super good for you and incidentally is higher than wheat in every nutritional quality EXCEPT complex carbohydrates (and gluten) - which works for me! Yes, it’s in the carb category that I’m supposed to use sparingly, but for something in that category, it’s considered to be exceptionally good. It's called quinoa (pronounced keen-wah). I had already tried quinoa flakes for a hot breakfast cereal, and that was pretty good – especially with some diced apples and a little brown sugar – but I had never used the grain itself. It’s a bit weird looking (shown raw and cooked below)

and I had no idea how to cook it, so off I went to teh interwebz to find some recipes. I stumbled across one for Quinoa Pilaf and decided to try it out with lunch. I used the recipe here but made a few changes (added 1 or 2 cloves pressed garlic, used chicken broth instead of veggie broth, and used sliced almonds instead of walnuts b/c that’s what I had). Verdict -- it was yummy! Since I had plenty of leftovers, the next day I sautéed some chicken breasts in a tiny bit of canola oil and then I set the chicken aside and tossed some broccoli slaw in the same pan. Once that was crisp tender, I threw the meat back in and added some of the quinoa pilaf, heating it all together. It was delicious -- a lot like fried rice in its flavoring. I highly recommend it!

We also tried another really fantastic veggie and fruit salad dish this week that I found in a GF magazine called Delight. I cannot TELL you how many fabulous looking items were in that magazine, but so far, this is the only one I’ve gotten around to making. It’s Roasted Corn, Pineapple & Black Bean Salsa (though the consistency is more like pico than salsa) and is made with corn, pineapple, black beans, red onion, red pepper, lime juice, garlic, and cilantro. The picture showed avocado and tomato but the recipe didn’t call for them, so I diced and added about half a tomato and half an avocado to mine. It was delicious! It appeared from the instructions that you are supposed to serve it immediately, which we did, meaning that it was a tiny bit warm (from sauteing the corn), but it was equally good the next day cold. Email me if you want the full recipe.

My one foray into new-and-different veggies came from our neighborhood’s new weekly farmers market, where I got some pattypan squash. As a side dish to grilled fish, I sauteed that up with a little zucchini, some good seasonings, and a diced onion. Honestly, I can say the pattypan was mostly the same as the zucchini in flavor, but the dish was tasty enough.

So that about sums up my veggie adventure so far. For me, this is HUGE b/c normally, I eat no veggies with breakfast, none with lunch, and 1-2 with dinner each day (and one of those 2 would be a starchy veggie like potatoes, if that even counts as a veggie). So for me to be incorporating them into my diet multiple times a day, much less mixing them together, is a very big step! Yea for expanded horizons!

Next up: Grilled Shrimp Ceviche! Mmmm!

A Lovely Bridal Shower (and Cake!)

My cousin's bridal shower was last weekend and I was one of the hostesses. I was not really relishing the idea of watching everyone else have dessert when I could not partake, so I talked with my mom and sister about baking the cake myself and making it GF. I also wanted to be sure that everyone would be happy with the result, so I did a test run earlier in the week for them to taste test. I had baked a wonderful lemon sour cream pound cake from the Four Chickens blog I follow, and I figured that would be a winner. (Actually, I had a couple of other ideas from that blog that were various chocolate cake options, but mom and Michelle voted lemon for the shower.)

Anyway, the test run was a hit -- it even resulted in my 12-year-old asking for this lemon cake for his next birthday, so you know it had to be pretty good! So I baked it again on Friday night for the Saturday shower. Mom had requested that I make the glaze a little more yellow so it was obvious it was going to be lemon flavored before you bit into it, so I used a tiny bit of a Wilton lemon yellow dye to adjust that. Michelle brought raspberries to add a splash of contrasting color to the cake and this was the result (no flash so the yellow of the glaze is not obvious in this picture, but rest assured, it's a beautiful shade of lemon yellow):


I think it turned out very pretty and very tasty, and the bride-to-be was happy as well! Everyone seemed to enjoy it so I'll count that as a success. The only other thing I'd like to figure out is how to make the glaze stay shiny after it dries. It was a much more vibrant yellow while it was pouring on wet than it was when it dried. Guess I'll have to Google info on that!

(Now, if only I had remembered to grab the gift for the bride from my dining room before I left town to drive to Houston for the shower, everything would have been perfect! But let's dwell on the positive, shall we?)

King Arthur Flour Muffins

King Arthur Flour company is my hero! I just had a TO-DIE-FOR blueberry muffin made from their GF muffin mix (my own frozen/thawed blueberries added). They are moist, beautiful, and delicious! This adds to the already long list of wonderful product mixes they make -- brownies, cookies, and pancakes (and the bread mix was good, just not better than others I've tried that are slightly cheaper). I am highly impressed by and appreciative of their work to make a wonderful GF product for this market niche!

Thank you Land O' Lakes!

The Land O' Lakes website has an awesome recipe for GF chocolate chip cookies! It's no more complicated than the Nestle Tollhouse recipe and makes totally delicious and normal looking chocolate chip cookies! Yea them and yea me!

I've tasted them warm and cool and they're good both ways. I've frozen a couple of cooked cookies to see if they reheat from frozen well and I'm going to try to take some of the batter and form it into balls and freeze that to see if they can be good break-and-bake (from freezer) cookies too. The trouble with GF baked goods is that they don't really keep for long (they're best consumed within the first 24 hours) so finding ways I can make it easy to make just a few cookies when I want some is key.

I'll keep you posted!

Update 1: They reheat from frozen cooked cookies quite well. Microwave doesn't heat them perfectly evenly, so it's better if you get them warmed and then let them sit for a bit so the hot spots cool and the cold spots warm to room temperature. Then they taste the same as when first cooled. Will try another couple after they've been frozen for a few days.

Update 2: The frozen dough can be cooked and makes good cookies but takes freakin' forever to cook. I think the frozen and thawed cooked cookies are both more efficient and tastier, so I guess next time I'll just make up the whole batch and freeze what I don't think we'll eat.

Delicious Chocolate Cake!!

Unending thanks to Jeanne Sauvage and her Four Chickens blog for the recipe for this one! It was SO delicious and rich, and reasonably easy to make -- yea!

I added the strawberries as a little decorative touch. I think I was supposed to let the ganache (icing) cool a little more than I did, so it poured and spread more than it might otherwise have, but that's just aesthetics (and more icing to eat off the platter)!

Yum! Yum!

Another pancake mix

Are you sensing a theme here? Evidently, pancakes are a critical part of my happiness in life!

Well, I have even more good news. I have found a GF pancake mix that's even better than any of the other mixes I've tried AND I think is better than the rice-flour-based recipe I had decided was my favorite before this. The Kinnikinnik Pancake and Waffle Mix is AWESOME. Very exciting -- they LOOK like normal pancakes -- all the other GF pancakes I have tried have a kind of speckled or heavily freckled look to the surface, but these are smooth and brown like regular pancakes usually are. The mix smells like vanilla cake batter. I've looked at the ingredients to try to figure out what makes it smell that way but I can't tell (no vanilla in the mix or anything).

The downside is it has a LOT of sugar and about twice the calories of Bisquick (I hadn't looked at that till today and I'd probably be happier not knowing it, but I can't unlearn it now...). So perhaps I shouldn't use it EVERY time but it sure is good and even my kids don't say a word about it being different or weird or anything like that.

Yea pancakes!

Impatience

It's been over a week since I posted last and this one is mostly whining, so forgive me in advance but I guess -- it's my blog and I can whine if I want to (sung to the tune of It's My Party...)

I am very impatient for this to become second-nature easy. I'm certainly doing fine and making progress, but it's far more time consuming to deal with food than it was before. It's a huge up-and-down see-saw for me, balancing the pride I feel in making it work against the drain of having to make it work.

Some examples of this duality:

• I feel a great sense of accomplishment that I can duplicate condensed cream of chicken soup without the can (I modified the recipe I found to omit the added salt and it's just right), but it takes more time than opening a can (maybe only 10 minutes or so, but it's an adjustment I have to factor into my cooking).
• It's not a huge deal to pack some food in a cooler to take to a track meet or school carnival or whatever, but I have to be thinking that much further ahead to make sure I have suitable things in the house and that I budget the time in advance of our required arrival time to pack them. And if I don't, the consequence is that I don't have food to eat.
• It's kind of a pain to have to investigate every restaurant I want to go to, figuring out if I can even eat anything there, but it's also been nice to find some new restaurants to visit that I wouldn't ordinarily even know about, necessarily.

I'll figure it all out eventually and have it become close to second nature, I suspect, but it is annoying, at least at present.

More ranting about Pancakes

I tried the rice-based pancake recipe again this morning -- it's definitely the best -- better even than the King Arthur Flour recipe and much cheaper, if more time consuming b/c it involves mixing 8 ingredients instead of 3-4. But I can live with that.

Gluten-free beer

I had heard that there were several types of GF beer on the market shortly after my diagnosis. I'm not a big beer drinker, so it was extremely low on the priority list to check out, but just yesterday, someone told me our local combo beer pub/wine-and-beer store sold a GF beer. So I figured, if for no other reason than to encourage them to continue to do so for sometime in the future when I might be there again, I should go try it out. Turns out they only had one variety -- one called Redbridge that is an Anheuser-Busch product. I had heard from some (one in person and several online) that it wasn't great, but I had also heard that it had recently been reformulated to be better.

Well, turns out that those who think it isn't great have MUCH higher standards for beer than I do. When I do drink beer, though I'm generally not inclined toward a basic American beer (like Bud, Miller, or basic light beers), about the strongest flavor I can handle is a Fireman's Four or a Harp. Redbridge ran somewhere between the home-brew Mike used to make and a Sam Adams -- totally drinkable and flavorful. It's actually slightly more hoppy than I'm accustomed to, but it's tasty and I liked it. Turns out, though, that this one was one of the old formula ones -- the bottle labels have changed with the new formula. So I am now curious to know whether I will like it more or less when I stumble across the new one.

Either way, as I said, it's not a huge priority, but it is a nice-to-know.

Update: Anheuser Busch screwed it up! I got the new Redbridge this weekend and it's not as good at the old! Ugh! But the good news is that I also tried a different kind called Bard's that is better than the new Redbridge. I think I liked the old Redbridge better than Bard's, but Bard's is totally drinkable. I emailed A-B to let them know the old Redbridge was better, so maybe they'll get that feedback from lots of people and eventually change it back...

Doin' the Happy Dance!

I just made a batch of chocolate chip cookies using the King Arthur Flour brand GF cookie mix. Oh my gosh! I can't even tell you how good they are. They look like chocolate chip cookies, they taste like chocolate chip cookies -- and good ones too! I am just bursting with happiness!

The mix is currently only available via the KAF website (brand new line of products) but they're working on getting them in stores. They're over $5 per box, which is kinda insanely expensive, but it makes 3 dozen cookies and that's a substantially better price per cookie than the pre-baked ones I found at Whole Foods that is $6.99 for 8 cookies! And I gotta say, at this point, the mix is worth every penny!

Now, I still have 2 home-made recipes to try (not today but soon), so perhaps I won't need to spend that kind of money for my sweet treats eventually, but knowing I have that option ROCKS!

More Pancake News

After trying their amazing brownie mix, I bought a variety of the King Arthur Flour GF line (new and not even in stores yet -- only available online). So this morning, I attempted the pancakes. It was nice and easy -- butter, eggs, milk, and mix -- and mixed up to look just like pancake batter... promising...

Verdict: Very yummy! Not a sweet recipe like the ones I did that called for sugar and/or vanilla, so more like what I'm used to (where the sweet comes from the syrup). Not Bisquick flavored -- Mike said they tasted like buttermilk pancakes to him -- so once I adjusted my mindset (after a bite or two) and appreciated them for the pancakes they were, I was very happy! Cooked up the rest of the batch and am going to freeze them for future days' meals.

One thing I wish they'd do -- I'd like to know how much mix is in the box b/c the recipe calls for you to use the whole thing at once, not measure out a quantity, and it made WAY more pancakes than I need -- even if I'm feeding the kids too. I could have done a half batch and been fine if they made that easy. All the ingredients are easily divisible by 2, so I just have to figure out how much mix there is and divide that in the future. At $6/box, I'd like to be able to make it last!

My friends rock!

Just wanted to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to all the wonderful people who are paying attention to all my whining about this GF thing and have been sending me links to web sites and blogs about GF foods, restaurants/bakeries, and blogs.

Just today, one friend sent me a link to the blog Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef, which led me to another called Four Chickens. Both of these bloggers appear to be awesome GF bakers publishing some really fantastic-looking recipes! (Now I just have to find the obscure flours they use in their homemade GF all-purpose flour blends and I'm set!)

Also, for lunch today, I tried the Wildwood Cafe that several of you have recommended. Got a hot turkey and provolone on foccacia bread that was SOOOO delicious. I even bought a set of 4 buns to take home for other sandwiches or for burgers! Very exciting.

Finally, I tried 3 of the recipes from the Year of Slow-cooking blog/website that a couple of you pointed me to. (The author cooks GF but the recipes are written to cook either way). 2 of them were fantastic (the carnitas and the sweet mustard roast) and the third (orange chicken) had potential but my timing was off and it ended up overcooking (she indicated 6 hours on low and apparently she meant it...).

It is wonderful to know people are thinking of me when they see these things and go out of their way to take the time to drop me a line about them. Thank you all for all the support! Please keep the info coming as you find it -- there is a lot available but I don't necessarily stumble across the same resources you do!

Getting My Just Desserts

It's highly likely that, as I write this blog, I will dwell rather heavily on the topic of dessert foods. I admit, I do have a sweet tooth, but before anyone starts thinking that I'm a little piglet who spent all my pre-GF days gorging on sweet stuff, let me assure you, that wasn't the case. The thing is, though, that with a GF diet, most of the sweet stuff we all take for granted is right out the window!

Think of your grocery store. You know that section with the Chips Ahoys, Oreos, Nilla Wafers, and even Animal Crackers? Don't bother stopping there. The baking aisle with the cake, brownie, muffin, and cookie dough mixes? Not for you. How about the refrigerated section with the break and bake cookie doughs? Nope. The bakery's baked goods? Not a chance. Hostess section with its Ding Dongs, Little Debbie Snack Cakes, Honey Buns and Donettes? Don't even look! Freezer section? Can't eat the pies, cakes, eclairs, etc. there.

Okay -- just bake from scratch. Oh wait... you can't use regular (wheat) flour. And unfortunately, as I have discovered, substituting a GF "all purpose flour" blend doesn't always work (example: my Nestle Tollhouse Cookies that melted flat and turned out like "lace" cookies -- FAIL).

So what's left? Luckily, there are some mainstream non-baked sweets I can still enjoy. These include ice cream (as long as I avoid the flavors, like Blue Bell Chocolate, that contain gluten), pudding (Jello brand is safe), and some chocolate bars (Hershey bars and kisses are fine as are Reese's cups, Butterfinger, and Baby Ruth. Milky Way, Twix, Kit Kat and Nestle Crunch, though, are out).

So that's the deal. It's not that I'm wanting to eat them non-stop. It's just that so many of the options are out that I really want to find a way to replace at least some of the basics -- brownies, chocolate chip cookies, cake. This means either finding pre-packaged GF options and mixes or learning to bake from scratch with GF flours (or both).

Stay tuned for updates on this quest!

Recap 2: The Pancake Ordeal

So perhaps this was a bit of an over-reaction, but I just about lost it when I made my first batch of GF pancakes. Many GF folks reading this will go "Huh? There are tons of pancake options that are good! What was the problem?" The problem was that I was all set to enjoy some Bisquick-style pancakes made with something else that was magically going to mimic them exactly... except they didn't.

My first GF pancake attempt was the Saturday or Sunday after my initial diagnosis using Pamela's Baking and Pancake Mix. Sounds promising, right? I thought so -- especially since many people raved about how great they were on websites, forums, product review pages, etc. So I followed the recipe on the bag exactly, prepared my griddle just so, and cooked them up. Oh... I forgot to mention that the mix contains these little dark brown flecks from one of the ingredients (can't remember what off the top of my head, but they even have a note on the bag so you don't think that's a problem when you first see it), so they look a little different even in batter stage. The appearance of the cooked pancake is also slightly unusual, but not totally weird, so I keep an open mind and my high expectations. My verdict: they're edible, but they're nowhere NEAR tasting like a Bisquick pancake (and they're definitely not as good to my taste buds). If I had any notion of being able to switch the whole family to my new pancake recipe, this was NOT going to do the trick. Deflation...

So with a busy week and plenty of other new things to figure out, I set the pancake issue to the side (though it continued to poke at my mind). By Friday, I was just mad as hell that pancakes weren't a no brainer and I was really craving some. So after the kids left for school, I got out my griddle, mixing bowls, and recipe books (including my Better Homes and Gardens book and one of the new GF cookbooks I'd bought).

First, I tried the Bob's Red Mill GF Pancake Mix. Someone else who hadn't cared for Pamela's said her kids liked BRM. Again, it was a decent pancake but I just didn't like it -- probably because it still didn't taste like "regular" pancakes to me. No worries. I had recipe books to go to -- if the mixes don't work for me, let's cook for real!

Next, I tried to substitute a GF Food For Life All Purpose Flour Blend for the wheat flour in the BHG recipe. I'd used the BHG recipe before when we were out of Bisquick, and that flour blend had worked well as a flour substitute in a roux for a cheese sauce earlier in the week, so I figured it might do great. Um... GROSS is all I can say about that batch of pancakes. Not even close to edible. Threw out the cooked ones after attempting to eat half of one and rinsed the bowl.

By now, I was getting mildly upset and worried. But not to panic -- I still had a very promising cookbook left to go: You Won't Believe It's Not Gluten Free. This cookbook's organization is really interesting -- the author includes 3-4 recipes per item she's making, all using different flours or combinations of flours. The pancakes offered 4 recipes: a rice flour, oat flour, potato flour, and corn starch option. Based on the taste-tester opinion info included on each recipe, I had the highest hopes for the rice and corn ones to meet my flavor needs. I did the rice first b/c the feedback from her testers said they tasted "like pancakes", which is all I wanted! It worked really well! My pancakes don't usually call for sugar or vanilla, so they tasted different, but not in a bad way. The texture was a bit lighter than "normal", but all in all, I was very happy.

Since I was already cooking, I then went ahead and did the corn recipe from that book. Again, it called for sugar and vanilla, so they weren't exactly like my old ones, but they were definitely pancakes and didn't have any strong grain flavor that my palette found off-putting. I decided the corn ones were a bit drier than the rice ones, so I preferred the rice. In the end, I ate some of each of those and put the rest in the fridge to (a) taste test w/the kids and (b) see how they reheated.

When I reheated some the next day for the kids, Erin preferred the rice (and actually said she thought they might be better than Bisquick) and Matt preferred the corn. Figures they'd not agree, huh? I thought the rice ones reheated better (and in some ways were better reheated than they were hot off the griddle on day 1)!!

Since that day, I've done the rice flour pancakes one other time and they were very yummy.

Just this morning, I decided to give Pamela another try at the pancakes. Though I like the rice ones, it's kind of a pain to have to mix a bunch of ingredients together in the morning when you're in a hurry (mix, milk, eggs is much easier than 7-8 ingredients whose mixing order matters). This time, I just substituted Pamela's into my Bisquick recipe instead of using the Pamela's bag recipe. I liked them MUCH better. Then after the first batch of 4, I tried adding some vanilla to the batter. Even better! They've kinda got a whole-grain flavor to them and the vanilla seemed to soften that.

So while I'll still do the rice or corn pancakes when I have the time to spend, it's nice to know I can whip some up in a hurry on a school day if I want to.

Ahhhh... Pancake success!

Recap 1: Google is my friend, contaminated grocery items, and GF-friendly restaurants

So, as promised, I'm going to recap the first couple of weeks of this journey.

During the first week (okay -- let's be honest -- I'm still doing this), I spent an inordinate amount of time on my computer googling every food-related thing I could think of (from restaurant names to brands of groceries to types of food items) and appending "gluten free" to each search. Through this, I found out more than you'd ever want to know (but lots of stuff I needed to know) about the non-obvious, hidden gluten in things.

Some examples of gluten-containing products that by all rights should be Gluten Free (GF):

• Crispix (rice on one side, corn on the other -- why wheat/barley anywhere??)
• Rice Krispies
• Corn Flakes
• Nestle Crunch bars (chocolate, crisp rice -- why did they add barley malt?? At least their Butterfinger and Baby Ruth bars are fine)
  
• some jarred spaghetti sauces (others are fine)
• many brands of canned chicken/beef/etc broth
• some brands of yogurt
• soy sauce -- it's from Asia -- they didn't even have wheat till Europeans brought it there!
• some salad dressings
• Pringles -- sure, they're majorly synthetic but they're POTATO chips!
• almost all (if not all) cans of cream of anything soup -- maybe this isn't unreasonable b/c they do need something to thicken it with but it's no less irritating

Okay... enough whining about groceries for a bit...

So in our household, we have eaten out on Friday evenings for practically forever. So I get this diagnosis on a Thursday and all of a sudden that's not a no-brainer! Italian seems like it's mostly out. Much Mexican has flour tortillas or sauces that contain flour. Burgers? sure, w/o the bun! Add to that the surprise element that some restaurants dust their fries or tortilla chips in flour before they fry them -- say bye bye to those (and anything else fried in the same oil with them)!

But then there's the good news -- many restaurants, both here in Austin and around the country, either have printed GF menus or have knowledgeable management and/or staff who can help me order safely! We chose to start with Matt's El Rancho on that first Friday, where the word was that I needed to talk to a manager. So I asked when we got there and they sent Heather to my table to help me out that first evening. WOW! She knew what she was doing!!! Apparently they have several GF clients, at least one of whom goes in weekly. Heather has apparently worked with them extensively and knows exactly what has to be done to modify the food prep to make it GF. Plus their chips are fried in oil that is only used for their chips (no flour dusting either), so they're always safe. I have to say goodbye to any sauces other than queso and the table salsa on my enchiladas/tamales, and I can only have the whole beans (not refried), but that's not bad! She says other managers know what to do too, but I haven't had to find out b/c both times we've been there since my diagnosis, she's been there and helped me out.

So here's a preliminary list of restaurants I know about for me to get started:

• Matt's El Rancho
• Guero's (owner is GF)
• Serrano's (manager says they have a printed menu; haven't been in yet to check out)
• Cantina Laredo (emailed me the menu and have it in restaurant; haven't tried)
• PF Changs (menu online w/some of my favorites on it -- can't wait to try!)
• 360 Uno Trattoria (very delicious; waitress was not very knowledgeable, but owner is GF, so several options on menu are available GF, including pizza, which I will try sometime in future)
• Fogo de Chao (they say almost everything is GF, including the bread rolls -- yea!)
• Brick Oven -- especially one on Brodie has a bunch of options; others have pizzas
  
• Chipotle (as long as you avoid the tortillas, everything's GF, but b/c of cross-contamination, I have to ask them to change gloves before preparing my food)
• Terraburger
  

Chipotle has been my primary grab-it-quick destination, though I enjoyed a Terraburger one day last week (very tasty including the GF bun!). So far, we've eaten out at Matt's twice and 360 Uno once. Some of the others are high on my list to try soon, and I'll keep you posted.

The Beginning

Welcome friends!

Quick recap: On April 8, 2010 (just 2.5 weeks ago), I received a diagnosis of Celiac Disease* from my gastroenterologist's office and my whole dietary world changed in an instant. Gone was the option of swinging by any ol' fast food joint for a quick bite when I was hungry while out and about. Gone were most of the easy desserts I knew and loved -- especially the prepackaged grab-and-go ones like store-bought cookies or even break-and-bake ones. I was going to have to relearn how to make many of the dishes I regularly served because not only did many of them contain obvious sources of wheat (like flour tortillas, pastas, or bread crumbs), but many also contained hidden gluten sources (like condensed cream of chicken soup). I was instantly transformed into a grocery store label reader, whether I liked it or not. Worse, I am now, at least for the short term, forced to be a high-maintenance restaurant patron who has to ask for a special menu or assistance from a knowledgeable manager every time we go out to eat.

At the urging of more than one of my friends, I have started this blog. Part of it will undoubtedly be about venting my frustrations over failed batches of cookies and unavailable replacement products for some of my favorites from days of yore. Some of it will be sharing my elation when I find a perfect brownie or a main dish my family all loves to eat with me. In the end, I hope to structure it in such a way that it can help others who may find themselves forced onto this journey due to their own diagnosis down the line. There are countless resources online that have already been a HUGE help to me, so maybe this will end up being more clutter than help. If I decide that's the case, I'll abandon it and/or take it down because the LAST thing I want to do is make this transition HARDER for someone else to deal with in their life!

Since I've already been through several triumphs and let-downs in the first 2 weeks, I'll probably create a couple of posts in the next couple of days about some of that, just to have a complete-ish log of my journey. Stay tuned...


*NOTE: Celiac Disease is an inherited autoimmune disease in which the lining of the small intestine is damaged from eating gluten and other proteins found in wheat, barley, and rye. Oats are also often forbidden (unless they're certified gluten-free oats) not because they are a problem in and of themselves but because they are often cross-contaminated with wheat.