Celiac Awareness Month: What's for dinner?

Eating gluten-free isn’t easy. It forces you to do research on what is safe to eat and isn't. It forces you to research menus online before hitting a restaurant. It forces you to cook. It forces you to be healthier and get creative.

Since my son’s Celiac diagnosis two weeks ago, we have been out to a restaurant as a family only once. This is a big change for us. While I love to cook, I work full-time and therefore have limited time to cook on weeknights.  A couple of nights a week, we'd opt for pizza or go out to eat on a whim. 

Overly indulgent, I typically make two meals a night –  sometimes three meals – because the kids don’t fancy quinoa; and my husband and I don’t like eating hot dogs and Mac N Cheese. When I have had a particularly stressful day at work, going to a restaurant and being served is an enormous treat. Impulsively deciding to go out to dinner on a random weeknight is something that we have had to curb as we discover which restaurants (that we actually like) have options that The Boy can eat.

The website and accompanying app Find Me Gluten Free has been helpful when trying to identify restaurants that offers gluten free options although it is not ideal. Often chain restaurants are listed or placed listed as offering gluten free however as a pick kid who likes pancakes, pizza, and cheese burgers, the menu items at this restaurants are not the right first. If he were a 30 year old yuppy, they would be perfect.

Instead of going out to eat as much as we have, I have opted to make some of the foods that they would typically order at a restaurant, like chicken fingers and french fries, at home using gluten-free ingredients. I've also tried baking using GF ingredients, which wasn't too difficult. Thankfully there are lots of GF options and I have been able to buy a lot of transitional food items that the boys like to eat, things like donuts and waffles. So far, no one has noticed anything.

This is often not gluten free or Celiac friendly

One major issue is that GF foods are expensive, although I have read that you can save by buying things online and making things from scratch is even cheaper. Realistically thought this is not going to happen. I am going to get my food items where I typically get them and I frequent stores like Whole Foods Market more frequently. It is all a journey and it is all a part of the process.

Gluten-free day two for me? So far. So good.

Celiac Awareness Month Heros

The National Foundation for Celiac Awareness (nfca) is featuring gluten-free bloggers in the final week of NFCA's Heroes Within Us campaign.  Check out these gluten-free bloggers and learn something new about Celiac Disease and gluten related diseases and sensitivities. campaign.www.CeliacCentral.org/awarenessmonth

Nothing like a good doctor

My son's doctor called earlier this week to confirm that his endoscopy and biopsies supported the recent Celiac Disease diagnosis. The staff at Boston Children's Hospital, the Celiac Clinic, and the Growth and Nutrition program have been truly amazing. The medical providers and support staff are incredibly knowledgeable, helpful, and supportive. The receptionists call us to book follow up appointments. They advise how us on how to position care for optimal insurance coverage without us having ask any questions. Not once have the doctors made us feel rushed or unimportant. Our doctor offered us his cell phone number and e-mail address. In thirty something years of life, I have never had a doctor give me his/her cell number or e-mail address.  Am I dreaming? Is this really 2014? Doctors do this? Boston Children's Hospital is best practices in motion and we are incredibly grateful.

The next step is for us to attend the Celiac nutrition class offered monthly by the Growth and Nutrition unit. It is here that we will learn about all of the intricacies of Celiac and a gluten-free diet. In the meantime, we have been making it work and it has not been half bad. Well, last night's gluten-free pizza take out was half bad. Otherwise, it has been going well.

Voila! It's a cookie and I made it without using gluten!

Success. My very first gluten-free baking experiment. No blending. No boxes. And, not a lot of chemistry. This is how last night's baking experiment began.

Enlarged to show decadence.

Thanks for the recipe. Yummy Mummy Kitchen. If you're interested, here's the recipe from Yummy Mummy Kitchen.

Didn't realize I need a BS in Chemistry to make gluten-free cookies.

Blending is apparently the “thing” in gluten-free baking. There exists an array of gluten-free flours that are best when blended together. Not all flours work well with one another, while others are the perfect complement to one another. There is arrowroot flour, almond flour, quinoa flour, sorghum flour, brown rice flour, and a bunch more. Who knew? Sometimes, I wish I did not know.

I thought that I would be all set with my 5lb impulse buy of almond flour. After purchasing this baby, I had visions of myself baking pizza dough, making bread, and perfecting my chocolate chip cookies for my son’s preschool class. Two weeks later, the bag remains unopened in my pantry.  

It is not that I don’t want to bake. It is that every time I get ready to try a gluten-free baked good recipe, I learn of one more obscure gluten-free ingredient that the recipes requires in order to be edible, like xanthum gum. 

What the hell is xanthum gum? It sounds intimidatingly scientific. I feel uncomfortable even using the word. I don’t know enough about chemistry to use xanthum gum in a sentence. Well, I am starting to. One needs xantham gum or a tapioca paste in order to help bind ingredients in order to optimize GF baking.

And, the almond flour? Well, apparently one is advised to blend almond flour with coconut flour. Why? I don’t really know. It just appears to be what people do and what people recommend.There are a myriad of ingredients – of which I am completely unfamiliar – required to bake something gluten-free from scratch, and it is a little much - for me any way. 

I love to cook, but cooking is forgiving. It is less of a science and more of an art. This how I approach cooking anyway. I can mix and match. I can improvise. I can make a meal out of 5 ingredients.  This does not appear to be an option for gluten-free baking.  Not to mention, gluten-free grocery items are also super expensive. 

I still have not baked anything from scratch because I still don’t have the basic "toolkit" of GF ingredients, which includes sorghum flour, coconut flour, and xanthum gum and some sort of yeast I have never heard of. It is actually sort of frustrating. 

I have used a variety of mixes to make GF brownies, muffins, and such. The results have been mixed. The baked goods came out “OK”, not great, but not terrible. The only thing that actually came out really well was the mixed berry muffins I made using the King Arthur Muffin Mix.

I would really like to bake something - from scratch - tonight. It is a “school night” though, so I am not sure I will have a whole lot of extra time or patience; and I certainly don’t have time to hit Whole Foods for the third time in three days.  

I’ll see what I can whip up. I was never really good at science, but I can attempt to create something out of nothing, which will be a success in and of itself.

Cheers.

What am I going to do with all of this almond flour?

In acknowledgement of Celiac Awareness Month and in support of my three-year old son who was recently diagnosed, I decided to take a pledge of going gluten-free for the month.  
  

I have been impressed by the wide-array of support which has contributed to making this journey fairly easy. Gluten-free options avail at groceries stores and at restaurants. For the most part, servers have been knowledgeable and helpful – no one has made me feel like a high-maintenance, trend-following customer when I ask about gluten-free options.

I recently bought a 5lbs bag of almond flour and I have no idea what do with it.  I keep spending money on gluten-free groceries because I don’t know what else to do. Somehow, I think that buying all of this shit is going to help heal him, help soothe him, to help soothe me, and provide me penance for not catching “it” sooner.

The specialists explained that we needed to re-introduce gluten into my son’s diet before the endoscopy and biopsies.  My husband and I have had a hard time doing this, especially since we have seen a noticeable and positive difference in our son’s health since he has gone gluten-free.   

We decided that once the appointment was a week away, we would re-introduce the gluten and give him on gluten filled item each day.  The surgery was today.  According to the doctor who performed the procedures, the cillia growth was not conclusive. She decided to conduct seven biopsies to help enhance the diagnosis. I am now fearful that we did not give him enough gluten and we will have to go through this again. The saga continues and we will know more in about a week. In the meantime, we are back to leading as close to a gluten-free lifestyle as possible.

I have been 100% gluten-free since May 1, that is, until this past weekend. I gave myself an “out” for three reasons – 1) it was my birthday/mother’s day 2) I ran my first 5K 3) my son has been eating some gluten this week in advance of his procedure.

 My first non-gluten free items were not mind blowing in any way. It was an entirely impulsive choice to even go off the diet. It was Mother’s Day (Sunday) and I was running my first road race. I have never done anything like this before and did not realize how much of a big to-do it would be. Since the race was for charity, there were tons of donations made by local restaurants. I ate about 1/8 of scone before the race and a half of hot dog after the race.  I split the hot dog with my son. To him it was just another hot dog, yet to me it was an example of me giving in, giving up, and sacrificing my integrity.  For what? Free food? Instead of feeling satiated by the gluten bites, I felt shame and guilt. 

I don’t have celiac disease. My gluten-free crusade is optional.  It is for a month. I did not even last two full weeks before having a lapse. Celiacs don’t have a choice. My son does not have a choice.