lpellegr

I got glutened, and the only suspects I can think of are a full-size Snickers bar (which isn't likely and hasn't hurt me before), and some cheap canned crab. I was surprised when I opened the can, because the crab was just small white crumbles with occasional bits of shell ground in with it for realism. I'm betting some of that "crab" was surimi crabmeat, undeclared on the can (or maybe it was and I just assumed a can of crab would contain actual CRAB). Has anyone else encountered this? I spent three days in pain, a great reminder of how I used to feel all the time and why nearly 7 years scrupulously gluten-free has been worth it.

I don't go out to eat often, but I accept these additional charges. Not everyone has them, but I can totally understand how much more they have to spend on something like gluten-free pasta compared to regular (especially because they probably pay way less for regular than I do, but don't get much discount on gluten-free). If it bothers you, you can probably get around it by eating something that is gluten-free and doesn't involve substitutions.

If you don't have xanthan gum to hold the flours together, you won't be able to make bread that works. While you're still looking around for the ingredients you need, see if you can find gluten-free bread mixes to get you through. They will be expensive, but designed to work. Baking gluten-free bread is an art that takes time and many failures to get right, so if you really need bread fast, find mixes or buy premade loaves while you experiment with recipes. And don't expect any of it to resemble Wonder bread.

In a pinch you can make mini pizzas using hash brown patties instead of the usual crust. When I first started eating gluten-free I made these for myself while the rest of my family had english muffin pizzas, and they all sat and stared at mine, waiting for me to share and ignoring their own pizzas. You can't pick them up, but you can cut them up with a fork. Just top with sauce and cheese and bake as directed on the package.

I use the whole mix but make it on a big rectangular baking sheet like a Sicilian pie, then cut it into 12 pieces and freeze what I don't eat. I can take a piece out in the morning and it will be thawed by lunch. I think your best bet is to make the whole mix at one time, either two round or one huge rectangular crust. I have not tried this, but often people will half-bake a crust, then cool it and freeze it for later use, so you could eat one fresh with toppings, then freeze the other without sauce and toppings for another time. And if you are using a pizza stone that has been used for regular pizza, DON'T! You will not be able to clean all of the previous gluten contamination off of it and it will transfer onto your gluten-free crust. Buy a brand-new stone or use metal pans.

You can take things that aren't liquidy easily enough. Roll up lunchmeat and cheese for lunch, with some Nut Thins and fruit. Those flat packs of tuna should make it through, along with Babybel cheeses. Nuts, dried fruit, Snickers bars, hardboiled eggs - all can go for a few hours without refrigeration. Carrot sticks, peanut butter on celery. Yogurt and applesauce probably won't be okay with the TSA, so skip those. Things that are high in protein and fiber should keep you full longer, so concentrate on those. A box of Rice Chex can last a few days for breakfast once you get there, or cook eggs if your hosts don't mind. If you have to eat dinner out, a naked burger or salad is usually available, and in Chinese restaurants you can get steamed veggies, chicken or shrimp, and rice in white sauce (but don't use their soy sauce). Good luck!

Same here. I don't substitute in store-bought gluten-free stuff for regular, I just do without, with a few exceptions. I cook from scratch, leaning toward Paleo, make my own bread and cookies but not much of it. I buy Tinkyada pasta, but don't eat it often. About once a month a waffle or bagel. I try to avoid carbs, and it costs less to skip all that stuff. And I almost never get my old symptoms back, so I think I'm doing a decent job not glutening myself.

Try Clan Thompson's web site: www.clanthompson.com has lists for Blackberry and other smartphones. I used to use their app for Palm PDA, and it covered a lot of brand name foods, plus restaurant chain foods. You pay a yearly subscription, and they release updates several times a year. It was very useful back when I was a celiac newbie. They also have lists for medicines.

Gluten is a protein (actually several proteins), a chain of amino acids. The antibodies that give us celiac disease recognize short fragments of gluten, and antibodies can often identify a protein from just 3 or 4 amino acids in sequence. I don't care how small someone tries to break down gluten, unless they can reduce every gluten molecule in a food to its individual amino acids (which isn't going to happen) I'm not eating it. Plus, if you broke down the gluten protein in a food to that extent, it would no longer perform the usual functions of gluten, like chewiness and stretchiness and holding a loaf of bread together. So from a scientific point of view, don't hold your breath waiting for a miracle gluten treatment. My brain translated "micronized gluten" to "weaponized gluten" when I first saw this. It's good that you're diagnosed and can finally start healing, but focus on learning to avoid gluten as stringently as you can. We would all be ecstatic if something came along to make regular bread edible for us, but for now it's just a dream. Sorry.

I came across this. More and more health blogs are picking up on scientific evidence that wheat is responsible for and linked to a lot of chronic illness, not to mention obesity. Here's a guy who challenges people to go gluten-free for January 2011 and see if it makes them feel better in any way. His website for it: www.glutenfreejan.com. There is also a Facebook group. I'm going to challenge friends to try it (offering them lots of help, of course).

I could be wrong, it might just be Fiddlehead, not plural. In any case, it was very good and they knew what gluten-free meant! Good central NJ choice.

I have used a lot of bad words trying to get Spritz cookies to come out of the press and stick to the pan, regular or gluten-free, over many years. Rarely does it work exactly as it should. Now I just use the shapes that make a single long "snake" or bar and cut those into pieces. I was so lazy I just rolled out the last batch between sheets of plastic wrap, cut it into squares, and baked them.

This might be a stupid question, but when you make bread crumbs from bread yourself as you describe, does it keep longer than the loaf of bread itself? I remember my mother-in-law keeping a bag a fresh bread crumbs she got from a deli. I was appalled when she told me she kept it for months. Do baked/dried out crumbs keep longer? I always figured regular bread crumbs had some preservatives in them.

When you buy "normal" bread crumbs they are at room temp and seem to keep forever. The trick is to make sure they are dried out. Mold and bacteria need moisture to grow, so if your crumbs are thoroughly dry you can keep them on the shelf. I used to keep them in the freezer, but I started leaving the crumbs (or the dried cubes I was too lazy to pulverize) on the shelf and they have been just fine. If you have doubts, just keep them in the freezer.

I bought tickets to a Linkin Park concert, and didn't realize I was getting General Admission, i.e. standing room on the floor in front of the stage! That would be awesome, dude, if I wasn't 51 and not really up to standing through an entire concert of three bands with my winter coat and a thousand screaming dancing teenagers (yeah, I'll be screaming with my teenager, too!). Should I try to get different tickets (same price) through the ticket vendor, who doesn't seem to have great contact information, or through the venue (Wells Fargo center in Philadelphia)? Should I buy another pair of tickets and sell the first ones? Can I just find an empty seat during the concert or trade with someone in line? I'm there for the band, my son wants to crowd-surf, but I think having a seat would increase the fun for my old bones. Suggestions?

I have a recipe for crockpot swiss steak that uses an envelope of Lipton's onion soup mix, but next time I'm going to substitute some dried onion and some beef boullion powder, and I'll bet it comes out pretty much the same. You could try that. I'm guessing a tablespoon or two of the onions, and maybe enough boullion powder for 2 cups' worth of liquid (or 2 boullion cubes dissolved in some liquid).

I start testing it for doneness at about half the recommended cooking time, and then every minute or two after that. It only takes a minute for it to get over cooked. Rinsing it does help because unlike wheat pasta, rice pasta holds a lot of the starch that cooks out which can make it slimy. If you're putting it into a casserole like baked ziti or mac and cheese, you can skip the rinsing. Welcome to the world of foods that aren't exactly like you're used to. Believe it or not, in a few years (or less) you will have found all your replacement standards and how to make them just right.

I make bread just so I can make it into crumbs, but there are less labor-intensive substitutes. For breading meat or fish, you can use crushed Rice Chex, or potato chips, or something else that bakes up crunchy. One of my cookbooks recommends making corn bread or muffins and crumbling those as toppings. As a filler for meat loaf or meatballs, you can substitute cooked rice, grated vegetables, or gluten free oatmeal if you can tolerate that. To make crumbs from bread, cut or tear slices into cubes or small pieces, spread out on a tray to dry somewhat, then put into a 250 degree oven and stir every 30 minutes until they are evenly dry and slightly brown. If they are dry enough, you can use a food processor or blender to make crumbs and store them at room temperature. If you're not sure they are dry enough (you don't want mold), you can store them in the freezer.

Tapioca is usually available there too. I have had no problem with Flying Horse brand for any of these flours. Much cheaper, isn't it?

I personally love Chipotle. I've been in to MANY different ones all over, and they ALWAYS change their gloves and all the utensils in the entire place as soon as I mention that we have a "gluten allergy". We always get the bowl. The ONLY thing in the entire place with gluten is the flour tortillas and I can't imagine gluten "FLYING" around in there from a freakin flour tortilla. People worry way too much. I am SO thankful for a place like that where my son and I can EAT, it really bothers me when people start ripping it up one side and down the other. If you dont trust it, fine, dont eat there. To have a restaurant where the ONLY ingredient with gluten is an already made tortilla, I think that's pretty nice. I love their chips, they are SAFE, and good luck finding safe tortilla chips in a restaurant! And don't eat the corn tortillas if you dont like that they warm them on the same machine as the flour! OR, better yet, ask them to warm yours between foil! I do it all the time and they never mind! Or, get the crunchy corn, they are really good too! As for the lettuce and cheese, you can skip it, or you can ask them to get you some from the back. Or you can try to imagine the miniscule amount of gluten that would get on lettuce or cheese from a hand that touched a flour tortilla, and then imagine that being ENOUGH gluten to actually make you sick, and then you can convince yourself that you are indeed sick, and then hey, stay home for a week if it makes you happy. PHEW! I just had a pregnancy moment, but oh well, someone has to stand up for the people that aren't paranoid and are just out here trying to make it in this gluten filled world, while still enjoying our lives!

Wow. That was shockingly insensitive. If you can't imagine gluten "flying" around from a tortilla, or the amount of cross-contamination on a glove affecting the cheese and lettuce, then you lack imagination and experience. Good luck to you in your gluten-free life, because with this cavalier attitude you will surely someday hurt yourself or someone else.

Does anyone know locations, besides the Original Pancake House, where I can have a gluten free breakfast.

NJ's a pretty big state, so it all depends on where you are. I think if you're going to eat at a diner your best bet for avoiding gluten is eggs, especially hard-boiled or fried so you can see that there's nothing else added to them. Watch for omelettes - some places add pancake batter to the eggs to bulk them up. Bacon and ham are maybes, and if you get fried potatoes you will have to ask about what seasoning is on them or if they have been cooked in oil or on a grill where something gluteny was cooked. Eggs and fruit are your friends. There are also some fast-food things you can eat - check around on this forum to see, for example, what people eat from McD's. But I'm in central Jersey near Princeton and I don't know of anywhere that serves actual gluten-free things like pancakes or waffles. Go for the steak and eggs instead.

PCR tests for the presence of nucleic acid, so you can verify the presence of wheat with the proper controls, but can you quantify contamination? Can it detect 1 wheat kernel in a truckload of oats? Which gene are you testing for? Is it something expressed in the wheat seed or in the stem/leaf portion? Is it specific for a gluten protein gene? I think your results will be interesting, but it will not necessarily correlate with presence of gluten proteins, for which the ELISA will be more direct. Your test will tell only whether wheat was present in some form in the food you are analyzing, but not necessarily whether the contamination includes gluten or is significant in a dietary/allergen way. But I still think it's interesting and would like to see your results. Please follow up here!

Yup, I posted Bette Hagman's Vinegar Crust. That one works really well and acts and tastes just like a "normal" crust. I just thawed and used a ball of this crust from last Thanksgiving (yes, 2009!) and it was fine.

It's not unusual to find grains of some kind of grain in bags of lentils or beans or split peas. I have seen recommendations to spread them out on a plate and carefully sort, removing anything that isn't a pea or lentil, then rinse them carefully to remove any remaining dust from the grain. I wouldn't expect that to make it completely gluten-free, but maybe low enough to not cause symptoms. I miss split pea soup too, and I had been blaming the ham I cooked in it, but it was probably a sneaky ninja grain of barley or something.

Always amazed at the people who use mass quantities of almond flour, considering the price.

Agreed - cut back on the water added. You can always add more, but can't remove it. If it calls for 1 cup, start with 3/4 and add more only if it's too stiff for the beaters once all the dry stuff is incorporated. Lower the oven temp by 25 - 50 degrees and bake it longer (5 min at a time, and then check). It's not foolproof, but it helps. I haven't had any bread yet that suffered from too little liquid, and an extra 5 minutes in the oven doesn't hurt. Cover it with a loose foil tent after the first ten minutes to keep the crust from overbrowning.