Holiday Worries

Three Kings' Day is in January. I have no idea how to get or create a gluten free rosca. I've even googled it to no avail! I have already resigned myself to the fact that the Son won't be able to eat pulla at Thanksgiving, but no rosca for Three Kings' Day? Rosca pretty much is the holiday at our house because I'm not sure of what else to do (the 3 kings do come in the middle of the night of course) to celebrate. I'm thinking about just beginning experimenting with different flours now, but gluten free flour is so expensive I don't want to waste a lot of it on untried recipes, but I guess I'll have to! If anyone has any good suggestions on how to get started (I'm leaning towards almond flour) please let me know!

Popovers Hannah Swensen Style

Joanne Fluke writes the Hannah Swensen mysteries.  They're light reads, but I like them because they take place in Minnesota and Hannah is a baker so they're filled with recipes.  Because gluten-free flours usually result in such dense breads, I've been looking for something I could use instead of the biscuits I used to make a few times a week. My drop biscuits and corn tortillas have always been our main source of grain and it's been hard to no longer have anything chewy in our diets.
In the book Key Lime Pie Murder, there is a recipe called "Bernadette's Popovers" on page 129.  I made them with the Namaste flour I like and they were fabulous!  Since there's a lot more egg and milk than flour, they were actually chewy even though there was absolutely no gluten in the popover.  I served them with Trader Joe's Mango Butter and they were a hit.  The Husband even thought I should make them again!

Note:  I don't know what the Son thinks of them because he wasn't hungry last night.  We shall see.

OMG. These brownies rock!!!!

I've tried about 5 gluten free brownie mixes now and some of them are much better than others. The best ones are strikingly similar. They are Trader Joe's brand and the Namaste Gluten Free Brownie Mix. They're chewy, they're sweet, theyre chocolatey, they're somewhat dense because there's no leavening but believe it or not that does not detract from the awesomeness. It probably helped them that I ignored the packages' baloney about vegetable oil and used real butter from pasture raised cows. Yep. It's good to have a dessert that doesn't thud like a rock if you drop it on the counter.
BTW, the Betty Crocker gluten free brownie mix is okay, but I haven't ever prepared it. I do like the taste of Namaste and Trader Joe's better. (Trader Joe's, if your people are reading this, your locations are extremely inconvenient for me. Please do your best to remedy this. No one else in the metro area does corn spaghetti like you do.)

Maple Grove Farms Gluten Free Pancake & Waffle Mix

The Son has always loved pancakes, so I picked these up at Target. Since the in-laws (aka the Suegra and the Cuñada) are staying with us, I decided to make some for breakfast today.
They actually weren't that bad! They tasted a little tiny bit off, but you got used to it after a few bites. For a gluten free product, the texture was pretty good. It was just a little bit grainy. The Son thought they were fabulous. When I put honey on them, he thought they were even more fabulous. So, I'd say 9/10.

Ignorance (not mine this time)

"Here, Son, have a cookie," the Husband's cousin says. "It doesn't have any wheat," she tells me proudly. "I checked the ingredients."
As I grabbed the cookie out of the Son's mouth (who promptly starts to whimper), I show her how wheat is THE VERY FIRST INGREDIENT ON THE PACKAGE.
As I hand the son a Rice Krispie Treat from my purse to console him, I start to consider how many people out there have assumed similar things. Take his teacher at daycare. "Oh, okay. So he just can't eat bread then."
When I calmly (which is surprising considering the alarm bells going off in my head) told her that wheat is also in pasta, cookies, cake, etc she was in shock. It's amazing to me that so many people have graduated from high school and still do not understand where their food comes from. When the United Stated finally does switch to Common Core standards, that needs to be included. People need to know what their food is before they can have an inkling of an understanding about why people worry about food ethics, food intolerances, and food allergies. My son got sick the next day and he should not have. It's because people do not have an understanding of their food beyond the package it comes in and that is a very sad thing. This country really needs to step up its food awareness.

Grateful he didn't eat his taco

We had a kind of flaky waitress at a Mexican restaurant today. Luckily I asked a different waiter before her if they had a dedicated fryer for chips and corn tortillas because NO they don't.
So the Son's food arrives later, I had ordered him a taco in a corn tortilla, thinking it'd be a regular soft corn tortilla. The taco shows up with a fried shell. Being the idiot that I am, it didn't occur to me to say, "Was that cooked in the same fryer as the chips?"
Luckily, the son wasn't hungry at lunch today. It didn't occur to me until now, 10 HOURS LATER, that there was probably some cross-contamination in that taco. Wow. Dodged a bullet there.

Day 9-SUCCESS

I'll admit it. I was having doubts. I was starting to think it was the placebo effect. "Maybe I don't actually feel better and my judgement is skewed. Why am I still doing this gluten free business?"
Then, today, the event we'd been waiting for finally happened. The Son had a normal BM. This hasn't happened in months! I never knew poo could make a person so ecstatic, but I guess it can! (guess we're not giving the gluten free thing up) Hurray!

Minsky's Pizza

My brother suggested we all go out to Minsky's because they offer gluten free pizza. I'm intrigued that they only offer it in small and mini-they must not make that crust on site. Despite my assumption of a lack of freshness, the crust was actually pretty good. The flavor was pretty typical for a pizza crust; what was different was the texture. Since there was no gluten in it, the crust was somewhat drier and not chewy at all. This actually made the pizza easier to chew, so I think I ate faster than I typically would have (which is too fast anyway). I probably ate a slice or 2 too many, which of course spoiled my dinner. It totally did not spoil my snacking. I don't know who started this misconception that eating gluten free will help you lose weight; there's still plenty of junk to binge on!
So, I totally recommend the pizza, but if you're prone to overeating, watch yourself (or eat some fruit before you go so your stomach feels fuller).

Awesome Resource

After playing around on google for awhile, I found this blog: Gluten Freely Frugal.  Every day it lists coupons at major drugstores for gluten free items, which is nice but the real awesome part is its Amazon Freebie of the Day.  On Thursday, I downloaded one free kindle gluten free cookbook from Amazon.  On Friday, I downloaded another one.  Today, I downloaded 2 different books that are relevant to having to live gluten free.  The one I downloaded yesterday, I'll probably delete.  It's about breakfast food, which honestly isn't my thing.  We eat Chex cereal and we're happy.  I also bought some gluten free pancake mix at Target, so we should be good there as well.  I don't really foresee my mornings ever becoming so unrushed that I'd attempt the creation of a frittata, eat it, and clean the pan before going to work.  I'll make a bunch of gluten free pancakes some weekend and freeze the extra so we can microwave it on a weekday.

6 Weeks No Gluten

After being tired of being told by medical professionals that our son's digestive issues were normal (and having the daycare tell us that he gets sick much more frequently than the other children), the Husband and I decided to seek out other healthcare professionals. We took him to a chiropractor that I have just begun seeing, who immediately put all three of us on a gluten free diet (dairy free looms in the future too...).
We're in to Day 4 of no gluten. The Son is still having some trouble, but the Husband and I have noticed some improvement in our own digestive system when we didn't even know there was a problem because we thought it was normal. Let's hope the Son improves quickly so we can keep drinking milk!