Cooking up a storm August 31, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in family, food/cooking, older son, younger son.Tags: chores, cleaning, cooking, housekeeper, older son, younger son
add a comment
I have to admit that I think we’ve finally got the hang of this whole cleaning/cooking thing. A while back, I mentioned that we’d gotten a housekeeper. That lasted for almost a year, but then we decided that it wasn’t working as the housekeeper couldn’t keep up. I suspect it’s because of the overload of fuzzy creatures.
We changed tactics: basically, we just pick a time every weekend to spend a couple hours cleaning (although it doesn’t work so well when we’re gone for multiple weekends in a row) and we all spend an hour or two working through the list. Each item on the list is worth a certain amount, depending on the effort involved, so this is what the kids get for an allowance. I think we spend 1-2 hours every week cleaning, and while the house is more cluttered than I like, it’s actually staying reasonably clean. Also, I no longer have to spend tons of time instructing the kids on how to clean the toilet AGAIN since it has only been a week or two since it was last cleaned. (Our biggest problem comes in the fact that every one likes to put the cleaning supplies in different places…)
In the past year, though, I found that I am sensitive to even tiny amounts of contamination in a lot of gluten-free foods, and this resulted in a shopping list that involved almost no processed foods. The amount of time I spent cooking increased drastically, so I recently decided to try this same approach with cooking: the kids now spend about an hour in the kitchen getting dinner ready or helping with other things (baking bread, making snacks) 3-4 nights a week.
It’s only been a short while, but this seems to be working, too. I’m not sure why I never tried this before, although I suspect some of it is that I was nervous about the younger son handling certain cooking activities, particularly those with knives. (I have to admit that I still give a lot of those chores to the older son.) He loves to bake, though, so as long as I get the ingredients out for him, he’s getting pretty good at following recipes. He makes a pretty mean beer bread…(with gluten-free beer, of course).
I’ve been very surprised how positive their attitude about this has been, particularly since they don’t get allowance for this. (It wasn’t quite pitched as, “You don’t help, you don’t eat,” but I think they understood that my frustration was almost to that level.) However, I uncovered another reason why this may be working: I suspect the real motivation is that they’re tired of waiting for me to make their favorite foods. The baking, in particular, tends to be put off in favor of making dinner. They must’ve realized that if they learn to do it themselves or help take care of some of the other cooking chores, they don’t have to wait as long. I have to admit that if there’s something they really want to cook, I’m not inclined to say no.
Kohlrabi Catcher July 11, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking, pets.Tags: cooking, Gigadog, kohlrabi, pictures, teradog, video
add a comment
I got this very weird vegetable from our CSA:
I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but it’s apparently kohlrabi. I’d heard of it but never eaten it. After asking on Facebook and searching the Internet, I now have a million ways to prepare it but opted for throwing it in some tikka masala sauce for a first go round.
Whenever I cook, Teradog and Gigadog hang around the kitchen. Or maybe it’s more appropriate to say they consume the entirety of the kitchen floor space. They know the command “out,” something I came up with after many near-death kitchen catastrophes. However, I still like to provide them with samples of my cooking as much as possible because they’re a quite appreciative audience. Through their sampling, I discovered that Teradog likes pretty much all vegetables except romaine lettuce. Since I was dicing the kohlrabi, I decided to see if he’d like some, as well. (Just so you know, throwing food and videotaping simultaneously isn’t all that easy.)
Gigadog also liked the kohlrabi, but if you try to play ‘catch’ with her, it bounces off her nose and she looks annoyed at having to wander over to its landing spot. I guess some food isn’t worth it.
Rhubarb, white, and blueberry muffins (gluten-free, dairy-free) July 2, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking, photography, younger son.Tags: baking, blueberries, cooking, muffins, recipe, rhubarb
add a comment
No one in our house likes rhubarb. It’s one of those things that all the German grandmas would bring to church potlucks, and my parents would say, “Isn’t this great!” Meanwhile, my face is about to implode from puckering.
My worst experience was in high school. I had a crush on someone, and when I went to visit him, his mom made rhubarb bars. I had to impress this boy’s mother, so I didn’t say how much I hated it. No, I suffered through the whole bar, eating every last bite. Later, he decided he didn’t want to date me, and I realized that if he couldn’t appreciate how much I’d suffered, he obviously wasn’t the one for me. No man is worth eating rhubarb for.
I was glad, therefore, when I met Mike, and in one of those deep, get-to-know you conversations, I found out he disliked rhubarb as well. He comes by it genetically: his dad hated it so much he would change oil over the rhubarb plants in their yard.
Therefore, when I opened our CSA box last week and saw three pounds of the stuff, I thought, “Oh, crud.” Actually, I thought something else, but I’m too polite to say it in a blog post. I tried to pawn it off on my parents, but no luck.
Anyway, I spent some time pondering and decided to at least try it. I won’t eat tons of it, but I concocted a recipe that uses a tolerable portion. And the rest of the muffin is so good that I don’t mind eating around it. I also discovered that the smaller the pieces that you chop it into, the less intense the flavor. (Now, if you really like rhubarb, cut it into big pieces and substitute a half cup of rhubarb for the blueberries.) I figured it must be okay since the younger son, who is the food critic of the house, really enjoyed them.
And since the Fourth of July is coming up, it seemed appropriate to give it a patriotic theme.
Rhubarb, white, and blueberry muffins
Rhubarb, white, and blueberry muffin
Makes 12 muffins
Dry ingredients
- 2/3 cup sugar
- 1 1/2 cups gluten free flour (if you like to blend your own, I’d use 140 gms or 1 cup white rice flour, 46 gms or 1/3 cup potato starch and 26 gms or 1 tbsp + 2 tsp tapioca flour)
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp xanthan gum (leave out if using a flour mix that includes this)
Wet ingredients
- 1/2 cup + 2 tbsp butter (for dairy free, use coconut oil)
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup buttermilk (for dairy free, use 1 cup full-fat coconut milk from the can (I like Thai Kitchen brand) + 2 tbsp lime juice)
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 cup diced rhubarb
- 1/2 cup blueberries
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°F.
- Place muffin papers in muffin tray or grease and flour muffin tray.
- In a medium bowl, combine thoroughly all dry ingredients except sugar and set aside.
- In a large bowl, cream butter (or coconut oil) and sugar together. (If using coconut oil and it’s liquidy, I suggest sticking it in the fridge to let it solidify. Cool coconut oil works much better for this. If you’re still not having much luck, go to the next step, using cold eggs, but mix for much longer and it will cream.)
- Add eggs and mix for another 20-30 seconds.
- Add buttermilk (or coconut milk and lime juice), vanilla, and dry ingredients and mix until thoroughly combined.
- Add rhubarb and blueberries and stir until evenly distributed. (Note: I prefer using fresh blueberries because frozen tend to ‘streak’ the muffins. If all you have is frozen, though, pull them out right before you’re going to add them and toss to coat them with some potato starch.)
- Distribute batter into muffin tray.
- Bake for approximately 28 minutes.
- Let cool in pan for about 10 minutes and then move to cooling tray.
Wordless Wednesday: Pictures in food April 23, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking, photography.Tags: cooking, food, pictures, wordless wednesday
add a comment
3 Karrot Gluten-Free Muffins February 23, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking.Tags: carrots, celiacs, cooking, fodmaps, food, gluten free diet, muffins
2 comments
(Note: I’ve made a couple changes since I originally posted this. It produces much fluffier muffins, and fluffy muffins are good in my book.)
I could tell you what I’ve been up to lately, but it’s pretty much the same thing I’ve been up to for the past year and a half: I’m either working on a paper or a proposal…although now and again I’m trying to help my student out. But really, it’s kind of getting silly to say this as it hardly changes.
I have, however, been spending a lot of time perfecting my carrot cake recipe. One day, a few weeks ago, I had this horrid craving for carrot cake. The problem I have is that a lot of gluten-free food in general tastes pretty awful: I haven’t had one I like yet. Second, even if I did like them, most mixes I come across are not FODMAPs friendly…meaning they have some ingredient or other that will make me sick. (If you’re not sure what this is, you can read about it here.) Finally, I try, as much as possible, to eat paleo. Unfortunately, FODMAPS friendly paleo foods are rather tough to come by. Most use nuts or coconut flour (or taste even worse than the run-of-the-mill gluten-free foods), so those are out.
I decided I had to come up with something myself. I added the condition that my friends who eat ‘normal’ diets must enjoy eating it, too. I am pretty sure this one succeeded. I also tried, very hard, to make it mostly carrots. I don’t think I succeeded, but I did manage to at least balance the carrot to flour ratio…it’s much better than the standard 3:1 flour to carrot ratio in most recipes. (Most carrot cake, in my opinion, is just spice cake pretending to be healthier than it is.) I am aware that most people don’t consider sugar or brown sugar to be paleo, but those, along with molasses, are the only FODMAPs-friendly sweeteners I can handle.
I’ve finally perfected my recipe, so I’ll share it below. I’m very excited because it’s one of the very few baked goods I’ve made lately that I can actually eat myself. I will warn you that it’s really a pain to make, but it’s totally worth it. However, I’m quite serious when I say not to deviate from the instructions. As much as I love kitchen short-cuts, you don’t want to just throw everything in the food processor and call it good.
And one last note: while you may want to try substitutions, be very careful about maintaining the moisture balance in these muffins. I learned the hard way (and repeatedly) that one little change can leave you with hockey pucks or mushy gunk in short order. Therefore, this recipe won’t work if you decide to throw honey in for the brown sugar. You CAN get away with 1/4 c. of a dry sweetener instead, like palm sugar or raw cane sugar, if you want to try something else.
If you do make changes, please let me know so that I can pass them on to anyone else who is interested.
3 Karrot Muffins
Makes about 12 muffins.
Ingredients
- 11-12 oz. fresh raw peeled carrots
- 2/3 c. dehydrated carrot (make sure it’s not processed on the same equipment as wheat…I buy them online)
- 3 eggs
- 1/3 c. potato starch
- 1/3 c. tapioca flour
- 1/3 c. sweet rice flour
- 1/4 c. white rice flour
- 1/4-1/3 c. brown sugar
- 1 tsp. baking powder
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- 2 tsp. cinnamon
- 1 tsp. nutmeg
- 1/2 tsp. ginger
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 1/3 c. coconut oil
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
Optional cream cheese ‘filling’
- 4 oz. cream cheese, softened
- 2 tsp. coconut oil
- 2 tsp. sweetener (sugar, maple syrup, whatever)
I’m going to start with the cream cheese filling: you don’t have to do it. If you’d like to do it, there’s an easy way and a harder way. The easy way is just to cut your 4 oz of cream cheese into 12 chunks of the same size. It tends to dry and crack a bit though, so the harder way is to blend the cream cheese and coconut oil (and sweetener, if you want some) in a small bowl using a mixer. This will have a nicer texture and look nicer, but it doesn’t really taste much different. Put it in the fridge for later.
Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
Mix the eggs and dried carrots in a separate bowl. Set aside. Leave this sitting for a while. In essence, you’re using your eggs to rehydrate the dried ones.
While waiting for the carrots to rehydrate, add the following dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl: potato starch, tapioca flour, sweet rice flour, white rice flour, brown sugar, baking powder and soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and salt. Combine thoroughly.
Place the raw carrots in a food processor or blender (if it’s a really good blender) and run until the carrots are finely chopped. (By finely chopped, I mean ‘not quite a puree but as close as the machine can get.’) Next add the dried carrots and egg mixture. The eggs should whip up and give the mixture a lighter orange color, and it should look like a puree. (Note: don’t shortcut and throw it all in the food processor at once unless your machine is VERY good. I tried that and ended up with a serving of baked carrots in the middle of a couple of muffins.)
Before you take the next step, get your muffin pan ready. I generally like to use foil muffin papers for these as they seem to soak through paper liners. I also suspect the foil liners do a better job of baking the muffins evenly.
Add the coconut oil, vanilla extract, and lemon juice to the food processor and run again. Add contents of the food processor to the bowl of dry ingredients and combine thoroughly. I usually just use a large spoon to do this as the mixture seems awfully thick for a mixer. Divide batter evenly between muffin liners.
If you’re using the cream cheese (mixture), add about 2 tsp. to each muffin. Make sure to press it down into the batter a bit. I don’t recommend making divots in the muffins as it seems to create big air bubbles.
Bake for 25 min. Let cool for a couple hours at room temp before serving (even though they smell incredible). Because of the raw carrots, these put off a lot of moisture and need to be cooled properly.
Recipe Double Header: Maple-whipped sweet potatoes and gluten-free sweet potato pancakes January 1, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking.Tags: breakfast, celiacs, cooking, food, gluten free diet, paleo, pancakes, recipe, sweet potatoes
add a comment
The other day, Mike and I were eating at one of our favorite local restaurants (i.e., one of maybe five that is celiac-friendly and hasn’t tried to kill me yet), I tried a new dish: maple-whipped sweet potatoes. We both fell in love with it, and so I’ve made it a couple times at home. It’s super easy. Also…it might be paleo, depending on your feelings on maple syrup.
The best part of making these is that I usually make large enough quantities that there are leftovers. Some people I know think, “Yay! Leftovers!” I personally think, “Yay! Pancakes!” Some people think that’s too much work. However, given I cringe every time I watch my kids dump a half gallon of maple syrup on pancakes, these are sweet enough (in my opinion) to avoid syrup altogether…unless you’re younger son who still thinks they need syrup. A pat of butter is nice, though. So far, everyone in the house seems to like them.
Mom! He’s not sharing!
Maple-whipped sweet potatoes
2 lbs. of sweet potatoes, peeled and diced
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
3 tbsp. coconut oil
1/4 cup. maple syrup OR 1/4 cup brown sugar, 2 tbsp water, 2 tsp maple extract
Toss the sweet potatoes in the cinnamon, nutmeg, and coconut oil. There’s two ways you can do this, depending on the time you have. You can throw them in the crockpot (low for 5 hrs, high for 3 hrs) or bake in a covered dish at 350°F for one hour. I prefer the crockpot method as they always seem more moist, but if you’re in a hurry, you’ve got options. Once they’re done cooking, let cool for 5-10 minutes, then put them in a large mixing bowl with the maple syrup. Use a hand mixer and blend until smooth and creamy. (Whether you’re doing this with the brown sugar mixture or maple syrup, you may need to add water, a tablespoon at a time, to get it creamy.)
Serves 8.
Sweet potato pancakes
1 lb. maple whipped sweet potatoes
1/4 cup tapioca flour
1/4 cup potato starch
1 tbsp. coconut oil
1 egg
Mix all ingredients together and cook on a non-stick pan or griddle on medium-low to medium heat until browned. Flip, and brown on the other sides. I’d suggest making smaller pancakes – about 3 inch diameter. You have to watch these carefully. Because of the high sugar content, they go from brown to blackened very quickly if the heat is too high. Also, there’s no good way to see if they’re done on one side except for checking. The high moisture content insulates the top side when the bottom side is being cooked.
Serves 4.
Mmmm! Pancakes!
Post Christmas food frenzy: buckwheat crepes December 28, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking.Tags: celiacs, cooking, food, gluten free diet, recipe
2 comments
Our family has had a tradition of having a ‘nice’ breakfast or brunch on Sunday mornings. For a while, this consisted of getting together with extended family and calling it “waffle Sunday” because we almost always had waffles. (After my celiac diagnosis, the waffle maker was handed off to another home where it is hopefully happy.) Later, I spent the summer with a friend in Berkeley, and the topic of crepes came up.
I adore crepes.
My friend said his grandfather made the best crepes ever, and so he spent a morning teaching me how to make them. It was far simpler than I thought. You combine 1 cup of wheat flour, 1 egg, and enough milk to have a very sloshy liquid. It’s probably the same consistency as warm custard before it’s set, or maybe egg nog. Then you add about 1/2 tsp. of some sort of oil to a small frying pan, and once it’s hot, add enough batter that you can spread a thin layer over the bottom of the pan. Cook until the edges start to get crispy, then flip. I moved from white flour to whole wheat flour (and my tummy hurts just saying that) because I liked the nuttier taste.
It’s not easy to make gluten free crepes. But another thing I adore is buckwheat because of it’s nuttier taste. The search was on, and I came across a wonderful site explaining the history of crepes and galletes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for as I wanted a buckwheat crepe that would be suitable for things like fruit fillings, and apparently galletes are not. I was thrilled when I came across this recipe for a way to improve the nutritional value of buckwheat and make a sort of pancake out of it. Still…too thick.
I decided instead to try my old recipe using the principles of soaking the buckwheat groats first. I took 2 1/2 cups of groats and soaked them in water for several hours. (You’ll want to check the recipe link to see why I do this.) I then rinsed the groats and blended them with a mixture of water and heavy cream (2:1 ratio, respectively). Once I had a thick enough batter, I added about 3 eggs. Then I continued to add water and cream until I had the same egg-nog consistency thickness I got with my wheat-based crepes. Everything else went the same as before, using between 1 tsp. to 1/2 tbsp. of coconut oil to cook the crepe. They will work for either savory or sweet fillings, if you like a nutty flavor. They are very filling, either way.
Gluten-free buckwheat crepes
(serves 2-3)
1 cup buckwheat raw buckwheat groats
1 egg
1 to 1 1/2 cups water and heavy cream mixed 2:1 (or milk of your choice)
coconut oil
Pour buckwheat into a bowl and add dechlorinated water to about 1 inch above buckwheat. Let soak for several hours. Strain and rinse with warm water to get rid of slimy texture. Add groats, egg, and water/cream mixture to blender and blend to smooth. Continue to add water/cream until batter is ‘soupy’.
Add coconut oil to non-stick frying pan over medium to medium high heat (somewhere between 1 tsp. and 1/2 tbsp per crepe). Add about 1/3 cup batter, pouring into oil, and tilting pan to coat the bottom. (You will have to figure out how much works for you depending on how large your pan is and how thick you like your crepes.) Cook until brown spots form on underside of crepe. Flip crepe and cook for an additional 30 seconds.
Favorite toppings at our house are sliced bananas, berries, sometimes whipped cream. We’ve also used straight syrup (did your insulin level just go out the roof), philly cream cheese honey and nut spread, or a blend of cream cheese (4 oz), orange marmalade (1 tbsp), and maple syrup (1 tbsp). If you want to go the savory route, ham and cheese are always good choices.
Post Christmas food frenzy: knoephla soup December 27, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking.Tags: celiacs, cooking, German-Russian food, gluten free diet, knoephla soup, recipe
add a comment
If you grow up in western North Dakota (which is about any place west of Valley City), then you probably love knoephla soup. It’s my favorite comfort food, and I’ve gotten into serious arguments about the best place to get it. I really liked the stuff I got at Sunset Inn in New Salem, but Trapper’s Kettle in Belfield and the Freeway 147 truck stop outside of Mandan aren’t bad, either.
I’ll be honest, though. The best knoephla soup I’ve ever had was at Nichole’s in downtown Fargo.
So what it is? It’s a creamy dumpling soup made by the German-Russians who settled North Dakota (and surrounding areas). The dumplings are typically made by mixing wheat flour (and now you see the problem) with water or milk or any number of things to make buttons of dough which you throw in the soup to cook. Some people put potatoes in, some don’t. The recipe that follows is fairly preliminary, and I have to admit that I cheated: I didn’t make my own knoephla and instead used gluten-free gnocchi. (Any sane person who eats gnocchi has got to admit that it tastes remarkably like knoephla.) At some point, I’m going to give that a try, but I admit that on this occasion, I was feeling pretty lazy. If I ever do make my own knoephla, I’ll let you know about it…unless it goes badly.
Gluten free knoephla soup
(Or, if you prefer, I suppose you could call it gnocchi soup, too)
1 qt. poultry stock (I prefer homemade bone broth because it really improves the taste)
1/2-3/4 cup chopped carrots
1 onion, chopped
1 tbsp cooking bacon grease or olive oil
2 tsp. salt
2 cups heavy cream
2 12 oz. bags of Conte’s gluten-free gnocchi OR 1 bag along with 2 potatoes, peeled and diced
The first step should be to pull the gnocchi out of the freezer. You don’t want it frozen solid, so just set it out at room temp until you get to it. You can set it out before chopping the veggies. Next, put carrots, onion, and oil or grease into a small frying pan on medium heat. While the carrots are cooking, put diced potato (if you’re using potatoes) into a large cooking pot (4 qt?) with the broth and salt. Bring broth to a boil whether or not using the potatoes. While waiting for the broth to boil, you can take the gnocchi and cut each one in half. Once the broth begins to boil and the onions in the carrot/onion mixture are translucent, add to the broth and boil for about 15 minutes. Finally, add the gnocchi and boil for an additional 8 minutes. Turn off the burner but don’t remove the pot. Add the cream and stir for a minute or two.
Makes six servings and takes about 45 minutes.
The paleo diet: just like grandma used to make October 19, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking.Tags: celiacs, cooking, food, gluten free diet
2 comments
I know this isn’t really sciencey in the physics sense, but it’s been an interesting exploration for me. In the past couple of months, I have been doing some dietary changes, primarily because I’m finding that, with my celiac disease, I really can’t tolerate any grains except rice. Even the wonderful, delicious, gluten-free Udi’s bread and muffins obviously do a number on me and have to go.
As a result of trying to go grain-free, I’ve started reading a lot about the paleo and primal diets. It turns out I’d pretty much gotten rid of dairy (although I have another post about that particular adventure) and beans since those have made me sick for a long time.
When you read the comments about paleo by non-paleo folks, it’s interesting how they discuss it as an extreme diet, how it’s horribly based on animal foods, etc. I understand what they mean. I have always had a bit of trouble with the idea of eating organ meats, which are touted as wonder foods. I remember being force-fed liver as a kid and forced to cook it as a teenager. I watched in disgust as my parents and grand-parents would squabble over turkey hearts and gizzards at Thanksgiving. (Heck, my dad and grandmother still argue about it.) Who would eat that stuff?!
Thinking about these things brought me back to a lot of the dreaded trips to relatives as a kid. Beyond the organ meats, there were canned veggies. My grandmother canned everything, and with the exception of peaches, it was generally pretty gross once it came out of the jar. That’s what they did on the farms: grow as much as they could during the summer and then can it for the winter. Old habits die hard when you grow up on a farm, so that’s what we ate for dinner at grandma’s: lots of canned veggies.
I often wondered about how these old ladies could live well into their nineties eating some of this stuff. It could only be attributable to their sturdy constitutions, as far as I was concerned. They had those hardy German-Russian and Norwegian genes to keep them going.
Except now I’m sitting here in my 30s with an autoimmune disorder that’s becoming increasingly common and I’m starting to wonder…if I ate that awful stuff, could I live into my 90s? Because really, I look at this “extreme paleo diet” and am realizing that it’s really not that different than the things that farm families ate all the time in the rural areas of North Dakota just 100 years ago.
I pulled out my copy of “German Food and Folkways” and started looking very carefully at the recipes. You know what I noticed was lacking? Flour. There are a few recipes here and there, but they’re scattered and there’s no section that focuses on baked goods.
If you click on the pic, you can buy a copy of the book.
I did find a huge section talking about meats. Apparently my German-Russian ancestors probably gorged on liver and kidney. They ate tons of fresh eggs and raw or fermented dairy. And then there were the veggies: copious amounts of beets, cabbage, and potatoes.
Corn was fed to animals when there wasn’t much to graze, so no one in their right mind would eat it. Wheat flour was used occasionally but not all the time because it was a lot of work to process and would go bad pretty quickly, not to mention attract rodents and other pests.
Now I’m starting to wonder. Rather than telling people that I’m going on the paleo diet, which people think is extreme, I wonder if they would react better to me calling it the traditional German homesteader diet? Because bacon is involved, I’m sure they’ll be more open to it.
And now you’ll have to excuse me…I have to see if I can force myself to cook some liver and onions.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
The difference a diagnosis makes August 6, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in food/cooking, societal commentary.Tags: celiacs, cooking, food, gluten, gluten free diet, health, low-carb
12 comments
I’m almost upon the 1 year anniversary of receiving my official diagnosis of celiac’s. It’s a happy thing for me because I’m feeling and looking far better than I did a year ago despite the fact that I still have a ways to go. I’m still waiting for my ability to digest peaches to be restored.
To celebrate, the FDA has just released new regulations stating that gluten-free items must have under 20 ppm of gluten. (Coincidence…but they were supposed to have come out with a decision on this
monthsyears ago.) My friend Kari posted an article about this on FB:It was an interesting article, but their whole ‘gluten-free is just a fad’ undertone got on my nerves. I’ve seen a lot of articles like this (I discussed one at length in this post).
This sort of thing gets on my nerves because for years I had to listen to people tell me how my low-carb diet was a fad and not healthy for me. I went on a low-carb diet at the age of 22 because I had fibromyalgia (*ahem* not really, but I didn’t know that then) and having weight problems. Miraculously, I got better after going on the diet. (Not so miraculous now that I know what I have.) However, the fact that I felt better and lost weight didn’t phase people. I continually heard from doctors how I was going to end up with high cholesterol, how the weight I’d lost was ‘water weight’ (ummm…I’m sure that 80 lbs. was all water), and on and on. I was flummoxed: I was told I needed to lose weight but once I did, I was lectured on how I did it the wrong way. As a side note, the fact that I was no longer in pain and my fatigue had gone away were irrelevant.
Going to any social gathering was even worse. I would be rather careful about what food I ate (and I never felt I was overly picky…just asked them to please hold the bun or whatever), but it never mattered. Inevitably, some stranger would come up and begin lecturing me on my poor food choices. I came to the conclusion that there were really a lot of busy-bodies out there who had nothing better to do than search out people who really weren’t looking for any advice on their diet in order to fill their ear.
I’ve been putting up with this for 15 years. I can no longer count how many times I’ve had to justify to ‘strange’ dietary choices to people. And the funny thing is, they never want to hear how as a vegetarian/vegan or on a normal diet, I actually grew sicker. (Celiacs, it turns out, impairs the body’s ability to digest protein.) The implication was that I must not have been doing it ‘right’…whatever that means. The fact that, in the last few years, it wasn’t working was an additional reason for people to come out of the woodwork and criticize my choices…nevermind that what they were telling me was exactly the wrong thing to do.
Now that I have the magical diagnosis, it’s amazing how differently people react. I always bring my own food with me to social things. If someone asks, I just say I have celiacs. Rather than telling me how unhealthy my diet is, I most often get the observation that I am eating very healthy. No one grills me about why I eat the way I do or tells me that I’m making poor choices anymore, but they ask questions about how I handle it and what things I need to look out for. Occasionally, I will get comments about how they know someone who has celiacs, as well. In fact, in the past year, I have had ONE negative comment about how gluten-free diets were a fad…and that person was obviously so woefully uninformed about that (and several other topics) that I didn’t bother wasting too much brainpower on him.
This has me stunned. The reason why I’m stunned is because I’ve hardly changed my diet at all. It was very easy to transition to gluten-free because all I really needed to do was cut out a slice of bread or a dessert here and there. (Okay, so I did have to cut out my favorite Chinese restaurant permanently, and I do have to buy all gluten free soy sauce, which is a bit of a pain.) Most of my diet was already protein and vegetables, and I’ve really found that sticking with that has been pretty easy as I’d already been doing it for 15 years. The only major difference I’ve noticed is in people’s perceptions.
This is why I get frustrated when I see these judgmental articles about how people who are doing things ‘gluten-free’ or ‘low-carb’ are just following a fad. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to the writers of such articles that food can have a profound impact on how your body feels and that, just maybe, some people really are paying attention to that. People don’t like to be sick or fat or tired all the time, so if they say something is helping them to feel better (particularly when 40% of people with celiacs have no symptoms), then I’ll cheer them on for making healthier choices.