A Peek Into My Pantry

A friend of mine has a gluten allergy but rarely buys gluten free substitutes. She lives off vegetables, fruit, meat, and rice. Now that is good, it is very important to keep variety in your diet, but sometimes I just crave a brownie.

So I have substitutes. My staple is Pamela's Pancake Mix. I first found it in small bags at the health food store in town. Now, I buy it in bulk from the co-op. Not only does it make pancakes, but I use it to make delicious chocolate chip cookies, scones, banana and zucchini bread, and a light fluffy cake perfect with berries and whip cream for a summer party (I love to make this for my mother's birthday in August). There are so many great things about this mix --> it comes iwth easy to follow recipes that are all very quick to whip up and they taste amazing. 

Most of the time I think something gluten free tastes good because I'm so used to it but those who are not on gluten free diets can taste the difference and don't like it. But everything Pamela makes tastes as good, if not better, as the original recipe. 

When I crave something chocolate I like to whip up some Gluten-Free Pantry brownies or Namaste chocolate cake. Again, both better than the originals. 

And then of course, pasta. I always have at least two boxes of Annie's rice macaroni and cheese. I'm a college student, I need mac n' cheese! And after a long stressful day wen I have absolutely no time to cook dinner, this hits the spot!

On special occasions (mainly when I'm at my parent's house) I have Gluti-no French bread and bagels. These I don't get very often because they are a little expensive and I haven't been able to find them in my local grocery store. 

As a nutrition student I also like to keep an assortment of fruits and vegetables in the house but it gets hard because of the cost. But, I always have a sweet potato because they are the most nutritional vegetable out there chocked full of vitamins and minerals. And, they are delicious. I also have green and red peppers and celery. I'm not a huge fan of vegetables, so I kind of stop there but occasionally I'll have broccoli and carrots as well. I always try to keep in mind that I need to eat as many "colors" as possible because they all contain different vitamins.

For fruit I mainly have bananas. I love bananas, and they are so great and easy to eat with peanut butter and call it a small meal. And I always have green grapes, they are a quick and yummy snack. With the cost of fruit though, I'm not able to buy a variety of fruits, and hardly buy berries, which is a shame because I love every type of berry. I just wait until summer and eat the berries that grow around me, those are better anyway. 

The Freshman 15

The hidden blessing in being diagnosed with celiac disease was I didn't gain the freshman 15, I lost it. When my roommates and friends were ordering calzones at three in the morning, I was munching on chips and salsa (my ultimate savior). And when they were devouring pastries and donuts at brunch in the dining halls, I was slowly eating my fruit and yogurt. 

When I was preparing for my move to college I was very nervous about what I would be able to eat. I would be living in a dorm without a kitchen and eating in a dining hall every day. It would be very difficult to automatically know what ingredients were in each meal, and even more difficult to make sure it wasn't contaminated. 

A few weeks before I moved into my dorm I looked through my school's website to see how they dealt with food allergies. I emailed the dietician asking questions about the dining halls and how I should go about making sure my  meals were healthy and completely gluten free. I set up a meeting with her for the day I arrived.

There was another girl at the meeting which relieved me. It's always nice knowing there is someone else going through this new transition as well. The dietician gave us a full list of "safe" foods for all dining halls, then we went on a tour of the dining halls and met with the managers. After the meeting I felt a lot more at ease about my new living situation. Then, the week started.

Although the school tries to accommodate students with food allergies, with about a thousand people eating at every meal it is hard to keep things uncontaminated. The peanut butter and jelly station and the condiment stations were typically the hot zones for contamination. The sandwich station was off limits, even if you just wanted the meat, because there was bread flying around everywhere. And then the food that was safe was always changing. Half way through the year Cocoa Puffs was no longer gluten-free, which left only Fruity Pebbles as a safe cereal (ick). And I will never forget the email from the dietician informing the celiacs that there was now flour in the scrambled eggs. Why there would ever be flour in scrambled eggs was beyond me. So there went another breakfast item. 

It was also so hard to keep track of what was safe and what wasn't. The chicken was safe at one dining hall, but not the other. And this server would go out of her way to find a piece of turkey without gravy on it, but if you ask that one it was like you were asking her to go out and kill you a whole new turkey. 

For awhile I was in a constant state of sickness, somehow eating something that had been contaminated at every meal. There were weeks when I only ate cottage cheese and rice because my intestines couldn't handle anything else, they had been damaged too much. I wrote to my dietician and she went about setting things up with the dining halls so that I would get my food straight from the kitchen to cut down on the chances of getting it contaminated and things improved.

After awhile I figured out the world of food delivery. For months I jealously watched my roommate have food delivered to her at any time of night while I sat and chomped on my baby carrots, finally I was tired of being left out. After a lot of research, studying the delivery menus and asking managers far too many questions I was able to order hot wings at two in the morning as well as, like a gift from heaven, pints of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. But thanks to my very low budget, this was only in dire situations.

My menu on a typical day would look like this:

Breakfast: cottage cheese and canned peaches, occasionally a hard boiled egg

Lunch: taco salad during the second half of the year (when they switched to a gluten-free taco mix!) the first half of the year I usually had cottage cheese again and a piece of grilled chicken.

Dinner: a cheeseburger without the bun and ketchup (all other condiments had a chance to get contaminated, ketchup was squeezable) and mashed potatoes or a sweet potato. 

Sometimes I would have a salad, but it tasted like plastic so I'd only eat some on rare occasions. 

Now, when I say this is a typical menu, I really mean I ate this exact thing almost every day. I might have a piece of turkey instead of a cheeseburger, and there may have some more fruits thrown in during the day, but that was basically it. As you can imagine, that gets pretty boring, and pretty soon I had no motivation to eat. Of course I did eat, but not as much as I normally would, just enough to sustain me. 

I lost twenty pounds that year and went down three pant sizes. By the end I knew that when I returned for my sophomore year there was no way I would survive eating in the dining halls again, I had to have my own kitchen. I'm off campus now, shopping and cooking for myself. I gained ten pounds back and I have not gotten sick from gluten!

Gluten-Free Overhaul

After I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease I knew a lot of changes had to be made, and not just to my personal diet. My family owns an inn and restaurant and, I swear, irony follows me everywhere. I was working at the restaurant one night and realized there was something terribly wrong with the menu. Under the pasta options there it was, "Anna's Pasta" and I couldn't even eat it. My brother had named the pasta dish after me about a year before when he was managing the restaurant. Of course then I ate it to my hearts content, but now one bite of it and I would be miserable for hours, not to mention the damage that it had already done to my small intestines. 

Yes, changes had to be made. I brought the menu to my father and asked if he found anything wrong with it. We were quickly doing everything we could to find gluten free pasta in bulk to offer in replace of regular pasta.

At first I was the only one who ordered it, and I'm sure it drove the cooks crazy, but as soon as word got out that we served gluten-free alternatives for pasta we were surprised to find that a few of our regulars were on gluten-free diets. They were thrilled.

It didn't stop there. The inn is known for our pancakes at breakfast so I went right to work to find an equally delicious gluten-free substitute. The chefs started to catch on and began ordering gf alternatives for other items on the menu, I was the official taste tester, if it didn't taste good we weren't serving it. Thankfully, however, there are many gf products that do taste good!

Since the first pasta substitute we have added many more alternatives to our menu. We now offer pasta, pancakes, croutons, cookies for our 3:00 snack time, brownies, and wheat-free granola (it still has oats in it). I'm still trying to work with the staff to make sure they are completely knowledgeable in gluten-free allergies and finding more alternatives for our summer lunch bar. 

Going out to eat is one of my least favorite things to do because of the hassle of finding gf items on the menu and dealing with waiters and chefs who have no idea what I'm talking about. I can't tell you how many times I have stressed to a waiter/waitress I am allergic to wheat, I cannot have anything with flour in it, all the while they are nodding their heads, writing it down, and then come and plunk a basket of bread right in front of me. Thanks. Or they ask me, "Would you like something to replace the potato?" 

"Does your potato have flour in it?"

"No." looking at me like I'm crazy for thinking potatoes have flour in them. 

And, I am not kidding, a cook has laughed right in my face for asking for a burger without the bun. 

Thankfully I am in the position to make it easier on other people with celiac disease, giving them a place to stay and a restaurant to eat at, worry free.

Visit www.wildflowerinn.com to learn more!

It all started on St Patrick's Day

The irony of celiac disease is that it is very common in people of Irish descent. Yes a nation that prides themselves with their beer drinking ability and savory Irish Whisky is also well known for the disease that prevents the consumption of either of these. 

I guess it's the irony that that makes my diagnoses so perfect. My "last meal" was Irish Soda Bread consumed in great quantities on St. Patrick's Day in 2005. Thinking back if I had known it would be the last thing I ate with gluten in it (on purpose anyway) I'm not sure it is what I would have chosen, but now I am glad I did, it is not something I can easily forget. 

Two weeks of nausea, especially after I ate, brought me to the doctors office. My doctor was all too used to seeing me since my bout with mono two years before, I never seemed to fully recover. This time I had had it, a person should not be sick that often, there had to be a real problem and a solution to the problem. The doctor performed many tests, years later I cannot remember what they were testing me for, but none of them were for celiac disease. My mother was the one who suggested they look in that direction. A family friend was living with celiac disease and my mother recognized some of the symptoms. She requested a blood test be done.

A part of me didn't want the test done at all. I didn't want to know I was allergic to gluten, what was I going to eat?? But I had no choice. The doctor handed me printed out sheets of how to live with Celiac and sent me home. I lived off corn chips and salsa for weeks. 

Slowly my mother and I did more research, poked through every grocery store and health food store around looking for gluten-free food, browsed the internet for any kind of information to keep me from starving to death. Thankfully we knew a whole family full of celiacs who were more than happy to help out with my introduction to the gluten free world. 

Four years later I feel like an expert navigating my way through new grocery stores, dealing with waiters, traveling abroad, and attending college. It has been a little difficult getting used to new things, living with new people, and trying to keep my food uncontaminated. But now, it is just a way of life. And when people say, "Oh, it must be so hard on you, gluten is in everything, how do you do it?" I just wave it off, "Eh, piece of cake." Gluten-free cake, of course.