lpellegr

Handful of peanuts and raisins.

Crunchmaster or Nut Thins crackers and hummus.

Apple slices with peanut butter.

Greek yogurt with honey or fruit.

Cottage cheese alone or with apple butter.

Slices of cheddar cheese and fruit.

Generally, something with protein plus something plant-derived in combination seems to keep me full longer than anything with a lot of carbs. If I know I'm going to be out I'll take a Lara bar or a baggie of nuts.

Iams dry cat foods don't have wheat gluten.

Sounds awesome! But if you don't feel like going to all that work, I find that eating Rice Chex and chocolate chips together tastes an awful lot like a Kit Kat.

Be careful with soba noodles - some have wheat flour in them as well as buckwheat. Read the labels.

Who is the gluten-free person - is it you or one of the kids? If it's you, one solution is to make similar but separate meals - you share the sides and veggies, but make a gluten-free portion or equivalent for yourself while making them the usual (being careful to avoid cross-contamination). This requires educating the family about how to keep from getting gluten into safe things, like letting you take your portion first and never dipping spoons into other foods than the one they are intended for.

Unfortunately, there are some things for which you will probably never find a satisfactory replacement, like the egg rolls. Search the internet for recipes and try making your own egg roll wrappers, but practice a few times before you try it for a meal for everyone. Crescent rolls - no flaky layer replacements are out there now. There are adequate pie crust recipes that could work, but nothing quite the same. What I would do with your recipe is to make the pie filling, save some aside for gluten-free, then finish the pie as usual for the rest of the family, washing your hands thoroughly after touching the dough, then cover the gluten-free filling with foil and bake them side-by-side. You might be able to find a drop biscuit recipe that works as a pie topping, using gluten-free flours.

If you're the gluten-free person, you will probably have to learn to live without some things (but after a few years you won't miss them. Much). If it's the kids, it's trickier because they are picky, but they will eventually adapt. Are they old enough for you to challenge them to find substitutes? Have them find recipes on the internet. Teach them to cook. Definitely teach them to avoid cross-contamination.

The internet is going to be your biggest source of recipes. Not all of them will work, not all of them will please your family, but it's worth a try. There may be whining, but tell them to suck it up or cook for themselves.

It's cereal - it counts as breakfast!

It has been a while, but what I remember about the noodles, was a big glob of butter and a spoonful of minced garlic sizzling on the metal plate, then the noodles on top of that with soy sauce, sizzling enough to put a little crispness on some of the noodles. Maybe some sesame seeds? Maybe some sesame oil?

Agreed, the Hershey Park gluten-free pizza was incredible! I wish it was available everywhere.

Cross-contamination is what you're asking about. Yes, Lay's potato chips are nothing but potatoes and salt and oil, but what else passed through the packaging lines that they share with other products? Just the smallest crumb or dust from a food containing gluten will be enough to contaminate your supposedly "safe" food with enough gluten to give you a reaction. Some people are very sensitive to this, others don't notice it. I can't eat Fritos or many other commercial products, presumably because of cross-contamination. If they don't share a line with a gluten-containing product they might be made in a building with a constant cloud of wheat flour in the air, settling on everything in miniscule amounts.

Ways to avoid cross-contamination: read labels very carefully. Some will tell you whether the product shares lines with wheat foods or is made in a facility that processes wheat products.

Utensils - don't get hard ice cream that could have been scooped with the same scooper used for the cookies and cream ice cream. Ask for a clean scoop or just get the soft-serve (even that's not guaranteed, from what I read on this forum). Don't eat off of someone else's plate or fork. Don't stir the rice pasta with the regular pasta's wooden spoon.

Don't share a drink with your kid or spouse. You don't know what they had in their mouth.

Don't eat anything that drops on the counter or table - you don't know how clean it is.

Don't bake regular bread at home and then expect the next gluten-free thing you make to be safe - there will be flour in the air, possibly for days.

Don't eat the burger or dog off of the bun - ask for it to never touch the bun in the first place.

Don't pick croutons off and eat the salad - it will hurt you.

Get a fresh set of wooden spoons for home cooking and mark them and threaten your family with pain if they use them for regular food.

Throw away the old pasta strainer or mark it for gluten only and get yourself a new one, because you can never get it clean enough.

Anything that TOUCHES gluten can't touch your food - that's where cross-contamination comes from. After a while it becomes second nature to watch for it and to set rules for yourself about how to avoid it, but in the mean time, be vigilant. It helps to stick to fresh foods and avoid processed foods, even those labeled gluten-free - save them for treats or for days you just can't manage to cook.

Just for the record, Six Flags Great Adventure in NJ is the same way with gluten-free food. Basically, I'm on my own.

And on a completely unrelated note, on the website Damn You Autocorrect I saw where someone's phone had autocorrected Six Flags to Sex Flaps. Now I can't think of these parks without giggling.

Cold sesame noodles. Cook up whatever gluten-free pasta you like, make this sauce, add cooked chicken or turkey (even lunchmeat), bits of scrambled egg, julienned cucumber, or any cooked or raw veggie you have around. Here's the sauce, just be sure to use safe soy sauce:

4 T peanut butter

4 T sesame oil

Mix those, then add 6 t of sugar (teaspoons, not tablespoons! I made that mistake once!)

2 T minced garlic

4T sliced scallions

1/2 c white or rice vinegar

soy sauce - the original recipe says 1 c, but that's way too much. Just add enough to make the sauce thin enough to pour, but not too thin to stick to the noodles.

Eat at room temperature.

I have worked with a lot of Bette Hagman's recipes, and had to modify quite a bit to get good results. These seem to help:

Reduce the water from 1 cup to 3/4 or even less. You can always add more if needed.

Reduce the oven temp from 400 to 350 and bake a little longer if need be. The crusts don't get as dark and I think it bakes more evenly.

Knock on the top at the end of the baking time, and if it seems at all soft, give it 5 more minutes, and then 5 more and 5 more until it seems firm.

Don't let the bread rise any higher than the sides of the pan before putting it in the oven.

This still doesn't guarantee that the loaf won't fall in the middle. The bread made with the lightest, least protein-y flours seem very susceptible to falling. I find some recipes from newer cookbooks using sturdier flours like millet and sorghum make sturdier breads than Bette's, but she still has some good recipes. She was working out her recipes at the beginning of the gluten-free awakening, and didn't have all the new flours to work with. Don't be afraid to substitute regular yeast for rapid-rise, either. I have even found some recipes work better when I use half of the yeast she specifies.

I'm glad it works for you! We have Bette Hagman to thank - this is from the first gluten-free cookbook I bought, "The Gluten-Free Gourmet". It really is good. Save all the scraps after your crust is made, bake them separately, smear them with grape jelly and pretend you have Poptarts!

Oscar Mayer are gluten-free. Some of the kosher dogs might not be, I seem to recall, but Canadian ones might be different.

Lasagna made with Tinkyada pasta freezes well in individual portions. I have also had good luck with their pastas with cream sauces in the freezer. Eggplant parm works, too. Potatoes seem to come out of the freezer a little odd, but other than that stews and soups work. With enough sauce or liquid, you can avoid freezer burn.

This probably isn't the kind of reply you were looking for, but you might also want to think about gradually phasing most of those bready foods out of his diet. You can eat sandwich fillings with your fingers (lunchmeat) or a spoon (tuna salad) and no bread, you don't have to have toast frequently, or muffins or bagels. Eggs and yogurt are good for breakfast. Hash-brown patties are actually a pretty good base for tiny pizzas. Eating more fruit, veggies, meat, etc and minimizing the processed/bread group will give him a healthier diet in the long run and cost you less in substitutions of gluten-free starchy carbohydrates for wheat starchy carbohydrates. I know kids are picky and we hate to disappoint them or make them unhappy, but gluten-free can be easier when you avoid flour based foods in general, and saves you the cost of gluten-free alternatives.

The ice cream truck just came through my neighborhood for the first time this year! I could kill for a Choco Taco, but since I know that isn't going to happen, what have you found that's safe? What prepackaged ice cream novelties can we get from that truck? Any brand name stuff that I might be able to find?

Of your choices, the closest sub for white rice flour would probably be the King Arthur mix. You could sub just the brown rice flour, but it would probably come out a little different because it would have more protein and fiber, so maybe denser. You could try substituting half brown rice flour, 1/4 tapioca, and 1/4 potato starch to make it more like a plain white rice flour in terms of starchiness, but if you're going to bother to do that you might as well just use the King Arthur mix.

Yogurt, fruit. Yeah, the pickin's can be slim at a convenience store.

Astonishing. I hope they can stay in business, they're having money issues. I would kill for a gluten-free Tastykake lemon pie.

I make bread just so I can have bread crumbs. I make Bette Hagman's 4 flour bread, which doesn't make the best slicing bread and crumbles fast, but it makes great crumbs. To go from loaf of bread to bread crumbs: Cut the bread into 1/2 inch cubes. Let dry in a bowl or on a cookie sheet overnight if you have time. Put the cubes into the oven at 250 F and stir every half hour. Check each time to see if they have gotten hard and crunchy yet. When they are ready, turn off the oven and leave them in there until the oven is cool (overnight is fine). Throw the cubes into the food processor to make crumbs, or fry them up with seasoning to make croutons. These will be dry enough to store at room temperature without getting moldy, or you can keep them in the freezer. This might be your alternative to trying to toast the bread dry.

Some of this is already out there, for example this site and the Clan Thompson site. I don't know if newly diagnosed people would be willing to pay someone for things they can get for themselves, but maybe some are not able to pull it together for themselves. I went to the bookstore immediately and got cookbooks and other books about being gluten-free, then found these sites on the computer. Clan Thompson sells frequently updated lists of commercially available foods that are gluten-free and restaurant menus with gluten-free options, which you can put on a PDA or computer (probably on smartphones by now). I know I was given outdated and just plain wrong information by a dietician and had to educate her (no, Rice Krispies are not gluten-free). Lots of places have available information if you take the time to look, but for those who don't know where to start, here's what I would suggest:

Someone they could contact when they have a question about a food.

Someone to point them to sources of lists of safe foods and meds, like this website.

Someone to go through their cupboards and let them know what is safe and what is not, and then set up a sticker program (green for gluten-free, red for not) so that everything in the house gets tagged as it comes in and the whole family knows which foods are which.

Someone to go over the whole issue of how to avoid cross-contamination in the house, especially when cooking some gluten-free and some not. What utensils to duplicate, what to never use for gluten-free, what needs to be replaced.

Someone to educate them on label-reading, cross-contamination in processing, and hidden sources of gluten.

Someone to take their current diet and find them ways to substitute gluten-free items or learn to live without.

Someone to hold their hand through their first baking attempts and their first experience with nasty expensive gluten-free bread from stores.

Almost like alcoholics, new celiacs need a sponsor who has been there and figured it out. You can find a lot of that in the tribe here, once you find this site, but having someone you can personally call when you panic or just don't know might be a help. You could be a service matching newbies with old pros, maybe working through doctor's offices - let them know that when someone is newly diagnosed they can contact you for a "how to get started gluten-free" package.

Congratulations! You're past the hardest times, and soon all of the things that seemed so difficult about this diet will be so routine you won't even notice until someone asks you to go out to eat. I'm going on 7 years and I still keep count. Isn't it nice to feel better?

Similar one, which I use for mac and cheese:

3T butter or fat of your choice - melt on low heat.

2T cornstarch or gluten-free flour mix (I find the mix thickens more)

Stir together until all lumps are out.

1t salt

(1t ground mustard powder)

Add 2 c milk. Raise heat and stir continually until it starts to boil, then lower heat a little and cook for 1 - 2 minutes while stirring.

Turn off the heat and add in 8 oz grated cheddar, stir until it melts.

Good over veggies to disguise their nastiness.

It took me a while to convince the people at Shop Rite this morning that the organic farro does not belong on the gluten-free shelves with the organic quinoa from the same company. The customer service woman kept protesting, "But it's organic". I finally got a manager to remove it, but they took the quinoa, too, because it "didn't belong there". Sigh. I wonder how they'll take it if I tell them that all of the Van's waffles in the gluten-free frozen section are not the gluten-free ones, which apparently they don't have at all? I just don't want some newly diagnosed person to assume that anything on the gluten-free shelf is okay. Sigh again.