I'll change the title later when I come up with something better/someone suggests something This thread is for complaining, commiserating, and advice. I don't have much to say right now except goddamnit i'm still mad that I had to quit my job cause I got diagnosed. i liked that job.
so no one in my family needs to avoid gluten but my mother can't eat wheat (sort of, it's complicated), and wheat-free and gluten-free recipes often overlap. if anyone's interested, i can post some recipes here? i don't know how it is for everyone else but when we started trying to cut wheat out of our diet it was really, really frustrating because that's like 50% of your regular american diet gone right there so i thought it might be helpful.
okay, here's a recipe i've made twice in the past couple of days: Spoiler: cheese and cauliflower casserole 1 bag (12 - 14 ounces) frozen cauliflower 4 ounces cream cheese 1 cup grated cheddar cheese, plus 1/2 cup for topping 1 tsp minced garlic 4 pieces of bacon, cooked and diced 3 tbsp butter, cut into pieces 1/8 tsp salt 1/4 tsp pepper 1. cook cauliflower according to directions on bag. drain. 2. microwave the cream cheese for a few seconds to soften it (or set it out a couple of hours early.) 3. stir all ingredients except for 1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese together in a mixing bowl. 4. spoon into pie pan (or other 9x9 baking dish.) 6. sprinkle 1/2 cup cheese on top. 5. bake at 350° f for 30 minutes. the salt and pepper measurements are an estimate since the original recipe doesn't specify amounts. basically, i just sprinkle salt and dump pepper and then taste the mixture and add more if i think it needs it. i like a lot of pepper so you may want to reduce the amount, or leave it out entirely, if you don't like it. also, @Bel Capricorn, i think i remember that you're a vegetarian? you can leave the bacon out of the recipe and it doesn't alter the taste much, it's still good. this recipe says it serves four, but i doubled it the first time i made it for five people, and we ate it all despite having other dishes with it. things i have successfully done: added diced sauteed mushrooms, added diced sauteed onions, added chopped fresh parsley, added protein powder. things i expect you could do, but have not tried: use other kinds of cheese (maybe parmesan?); substitute potatoes, broccoli, or green beans for cauliflower; substitute chopped chicken or ham for bacon; make a single-serving microwave version by halving the ingredients and microwaving it after mixing everything together. i'm going to try doing a version with green beans and a version with broccoli in the near future, so i'll edit to let you know whether it worked out. edit: i have made a version with kohlrabi, parmesan, and an egg, and a version with broccoli. replace cauliflower with broccoli: success. the only hitch was that, since i thought broccoli would cook faster than cauliflower, and i didn't want soggy broccoli casserole, i decided to just mix frozen broccoli into the rest of the ingredients. this didn't work out, everything got cold and wouldn't spread around properly, and i wound up sticking it in the oven to warm up and then taking it out and stirring it around to get it to mix like twice. but after that it was fine and tasted great. so, definitely get the broccoli hot before you mix it in. replace cauliflower with cubed cooked kohlrabi, replace cheddar with parmesan, add egg: success ... ish. tasted fine, but of course the egg changed the sauce to a sort of fritata. the texture wasn't unpleasant in and of itself, but because there wasn't that much sauce anyway, it was like eating cubed kohlrabi with tiny bits of scrambled egg. i would make this version again, but leave out the egg.
I do not have to avoid gluten myself (as far as I know, anyway), but my parents briefly flirted with the diet for a few months in one of their desperate Our Son Can't Have Autism, Right? phases. (For clarity, this was referring to my younger brother. I never got this amount of effort applied to me.) I treat celiac as if it was a particularly wide food allergy, which seems to work okay (at least for Nick). The nice-ish thing about gluten free having become a fad diet is that there's actually clearly-marked gluten free food choices available at average supermarkets now (as opposed to health food stores, which I remember having been carted to many, many times when I was a kid). The bad thing about gluten-free having become a fad diet is that most people do not treat it as if it was a particularly wide food allergy, and thus don't realize how big of a deal cross-contamination is for people who react to gluten.
yeah, eating wheat-free got much easier after gluten-free diet achieved fad status. we spent i think actual years eating spaghetti squash or quinoa noodles when we wanted spaghetti before walmart got a gluten-free section and started stocking rice noodles that have almost the same texture and taste as wheat noodles. if you can find oats that haven't been cross-contaminated (and nuts, apparently a lot of nuts are processed with wheat products?) here's a granola recipe that i found recently. it's a food blog so you have to scroll for like five million years before you get to the actual recipe. Spoiler: version i made 1/4 cup honey 1/4 cup peanut butter 1 tsp vanilla 1/8 tsp salt 1 cup chopped pecans 1 1/2 cups rolled oats 1. heat and mix honey, peanut butter, vanilla, and salt together. 2. mix pecans and oats into honey and peanut butter mixture. 3. line a pan (loaf pan or 9x9 baking dish) with wax paper. 4. dump granola mixture into pan, cover with another sheet of wax paper, and use hands or a glass to pack granola down firmly. 5. refrigerate 15-20 minutes or until you want to eat it. 6. turn granola out of pan and cut into bars. other things you can add in: chocolate chips (after the mixture has cooled, unless you want them melted everywhere) and/or chopped craisins. oh, i've also added protein powder and it didn't change the taste or texture that i noticed.
I became gluten sensitive at just the right time. I think it isn't just popularity of avoiding gluten; I think a lot of people are becoming celiac or gluten sensitive these days.
Ahahahahhah here's a story. I went to a really, really big party at a fancy hotel this weekend, the OTT Tea Party, aka lolita prom. Everything was fine, I got my own plate of GF tea sandwiches. But then they told me when they brought out the desserts that the chocolate covered strawberries were gluten-free and did not know what to do when I pointed out that I couldn't possibly eat them because they had been placed in the very centre of a plate covered with crumbly glutenous pastries because if I eat a bread crumb it will ruin my entire day minimum. They brought me more macarons and more fruit, but I was still annoyed.
