lpellegr

The snickerdoodles are good, but the "no-oats" oatmeal are NASTY! I took them to work to share, and people agreed they were something you would eat when you wanted to punish your mouth....

I tried it for a year, and it's okay - it does have a good archive of gluten-free recipes, but nothing that you couldn't find for free on other sites. New stuff every month, but I didn't renew it. There was a previous thread on this magazine, and there were people who loved it, so you could search and see what they said.

It's all a matter of taste, but here's what I use: one pound of hamburger, one egg to glue it all together, salt, parsley, dry gluten-free breadcrumbs (I make loaves of bread, then cut into cubes, dry at 250 in the oven until crunchy, then pulverize in food processor and freeze just in case they're not dry enough to avoid mold) - I'm not sure the amount, but the more you have, the more tender your meatballs can be. Try 1 cup or a couple of handfuls. Then, the best part, lots and lots of minced garlic. Fresh is best, but a lot of work, so a few teaspoons from a jar works as well. Mix well with your hands, and if it seems stiff add some warm water, just a little at a time. The breadcrumbs will soak up the water, which is why I said more of them might give you more tender meatballs. Less water gives you tougher meatballs, but too much makes them mushy inside. When well mixed, roll into balls, no more than 2" in diameter. Fry in olive oil, turning as each side browns, until cooked through and crisp. They are best right out of the pan, but you can also freeze them - make 2 or 3 pounds' worth on a weekend, then bring them out of the freezer on a busy weeknight.

Some alternates: if you have time, you can drop raw meatballs into sauce and simmer all day to cook. Or drop the cooked ones in for a few hours - they get a wonderful texture but lose the crunchy outside. And my Italian father tells me that you don't need breadcrumbs - you can substitute leftover cooked rice or other leftovers. You could also use crushed cereal. I have also used oatmeal (in my pre-diagnosis days) and rehydrated textured soy protein crumbles and my family didn't notice. You could also use turkey or any other ground meat, or add bulk sausage. Meatloaf is basically the same recipe except using onion instead of garlic and making a loaf instead of balls.

I agree with the cookbook suggestions. If you're going to try it just a few times, you might want to get a pre-packaged gluten free flour mix rather than going out and trying to find rice flour, potato starch flour, xanthan gum, etc if you're not sure you're going to need them. Look online to save time - you can probably find other posts in this forum about where people find them. I loved to bake too - made pizza dough every week, Christmas cookies, etc. At first I tried making both regular and gluten-free, but it's too easy to get cross-contamination. I gave away 5 pounds of sugar because I wasn't thinking and dipped a cup in that had been used for wheat flour. The wheat flour gets into the air and might be settling out for days, and gets up in your mixer. And if you start baking gluten-free you'll have to unlearn a lot of what you think you know, and you'll never have to knead again - it's all batters. You should also have a Kitchenaid mixer, because mixing these recipes by hand can be hard, especially once the xanthan gum meets the liquid. I also find these recipes to be a lot more variable than regular ones - the same recipe comes out great sometimes, full of holes and crumbly another time. Phase of the moon? Who knows. But you'll have fun experimenting if you like to bake, and you can save the crumbs from any failures. Sometimes I bake a loaf of bread just to break it down into crumbs for other uses. Cookie and cake crumbs can be saved, too, for pie crusts and desserts. Go for it.

I carry a note from my doctor in my wallet - it's written on a prescription blank and says that this patient requires a special diet. I haven't had to use it yet, but I got it with the ADA in mind - I figured somewhere I would run into some yahoo in a ball park or other place who wouldn't want me to take in my fanny pack of gluten-free snacks and only by waving this official-looking note and invoking the ADA would I manage to change his mind. That's the theory, anyway. There was also a good thread here a while back about how to smuggle food - cargo pants, inner pockets of jackets - my favorite was to tuck it into the bottom of a box of tampons because nobody wants to inspect that!

Before I got my Kitchenaid mixer I used to mix up recipes by hand and always found the bowl and spoon slimy when I washed them, so I attributed this to the xanthan gum, which my old recipes didn't have and they didn't feel slimy. I think once the xanthan gum completely absorbs enough water it changes, but if it hasn't been mixed for long I can still feel individual slimy grains of it under my fingers when I clean up. And I can smell it in the recipes as they mix and bake. I don't mind that it's a bacterial product - yeast is a microorganism and most of us don't mind consuming it, and we eat yogurt and other products with live bacteria - but I'm not wild about the smell and feel of it, especially in raw batters. So if I can leave it out, I will. Raw dough doesn't need to hold together for me to eat it. And yes, something like egg beaters is safer than raw eggs - I always forget about that option. Incidentally, I once read a series of science fiction/fantasy books by Piers Anthony set in a land called Xanth, and their main export was - xanthan gum. Now you know where it comes from .

A PF Chang's just opened at the Marketfair Mall in Princeton on Rt. 1. I called and they said they understand the gluten-free menu and how not to cross-contaminate - I sure hope so. There are no other local restaurants around Princeton/Trenton with specifically gluten-free food without driving a while (Red Robin near Neshaminy, Outback up Rt 1 near Edison), so I hope this is good! I plan to try it out soon. And I pass it on my way home, so maybe I can get take-out.... Ooh, I'm starting to drool.

I knew you guys would come through! I love this forum. No xanthan gum and the freezer it is!

I had asked an Indian coworker about this, and she said since the spice "hing" is in a lot of foods and hing is made from wheat, according to the Triumph cards, she thought a lot of Indian foods would be unsafe for me. I don't know if this holds true for restaurants or if she was thinking of her own home cooking, but it's something to be aware of.

Yes, I know eggs are potentially dangerous to eat raw, but at 1 in 20,000 potentially contaminated with salmonella I sometimes play those odds . I had a hankering for raw chocolate chip cookie dough, and thought it might be better without the xanthan gum, which always seems to make the uncooked dough slimy. Then add a little if there's any remaining dough to be baked into cookies. Has anybody tried this either way?

I tried some Bette Hagman noodles once and they came out fine texture-wise (by hand, not by pasta machine), but smelled very eggy. I find gnocchi easy to put together although a little time-consuming: start with a pound of ricotta or a bunch of mashed potatoes in a bowl. Add an egg or two, some parmesan cheese, and enough gluten-free flour (I use Bette's basic mix) that you can handle the resulting dough without cursing. Roll small pieces (egg-size is easiest) into ropes about 1/2" thick on a gluten-free-floured board and cut into pieces 1" or less. Pick up each piece and press gently onto the back of a fork that you hold tines down, curving outward - this puts grooves on one side and your finger dent on the other to hold sauce. This sounds very tedious, but put some music on and groove while you do it. Separate the pieces on wax paper, and either freeze and then bag for later (don't try to bag first and then freeze or you will have one massive gnoccho) or drop into boiling water and cook until they float. Don't cook much after they float or they will start to dissolve. I hear you can add spinach, squeezed dry, or garlic or parsley or whatever makes your mouth happy.

Look under Travel - I asked for Cape May restaurants for a birdwatching tip and there are suggestions there. Have a good trip! Post us what you find!

Just for another opinion thrown in, I make big batches of Bette Hagman's original blend and her 4 flour mix and store them both at room temperature and I haven't noticed any problem with them. I wish I had room in my fridge or freezer, but they're too full. I use white rice flour from the Asian market which has a nicer texture so they're not at all gritty.

"part" means an equal portion. So if you decide "part" equals "1 cup", then 1 part = 1 cup, 3 parts = 3 cups, 1/3 part = 1/3 cup. If you have a big bowl and you want to make a lot, then 1 part might = 3 cups, in which case 1/3 part = 1 cup. She did this to give you options on what size. I guess if you're into weighing things out, a part could be an ounce or a pound and it would still come out in the right proportions. Heck, you could measure by handfuls or shoefuls or bucketfuls and as long as you had the right number of each, it would come out the same.

Thanks for the tips - I hope I get to use them! I was between jobs when I posted this so I was planning to go during the week to avoid crowds, but I'm starting a job next week and will only have the weekends left! Might be worth a try anyway, but I might not get there this year. But I'm definitely filing this info away.

I think Tom's of Maine lists their strawberry children's toothpaste as not gluten-free because part of the strawberry flavor is from vinegar. It could be just CYA for them, but it's something to consider.

I have seen research, but I don't remember where, that they tested several batches of oats from different manufacturers, including McCanns, and they did detect gluten, but the amount varied quite a bit from batch to batch. I'd avoid oatmeal entirely just in case. Pity, the McCann's Irish oatmeal was wonderful - one of the things I miss.

Good for you that you can cook! This is a much harder diet to cope with if you're used to living on fast food and opening cartons. Look into the South Beach diet - the start of that is carb-free so it's almost naturally gluten-free (just make sure to watch out for tricky ingredients like hydrolyzed veg protein and modified food (unidentified) starch) and there should be a lot of recipes and meal suggestions there to get you started. If you want to bake bread from scratch, you can find mixes in some stores (but expensive), and might have to scrounge around in different health food stores at first to find the flours you need. Also try Asian grocery stores because they will have most of the rice, tapioca, and other flours really cheap and much finer in texture. Start with things like muffins and banana bread and get used to handling them before you try yeast breads or cookies. And if you're going to bake with xanthan gum, first there will be sticker shock at how much it costs, but it should last you a long time. Then you need to know that it seizes up like concrete once it gets wet, so mixing with a spoon will be tough. If you're going to bake a lot it's worth getting a Kitchenaid mixer or you'll never get the batters mixed well enough. And you will probably have a lot of weird failures until you get to know how the recipes work in your kitchen, but save the flops to make bread crumbs and try again. And remember that things like unprocessed produce and beans and meat and dairy are safe (with a few minor exceptions like bleu cheese) so you can find plenty to eat without having to go to any special stores. This forum is a great place for tips, so come back frequently - we'll help!

I'm trying to avoid or minimize carbs, so here's some of what I eat (and it keeps me full a lot longer than grains):

breakfast:

rolled up ham and cheese slices, fruit

hard boiled eggs

sausage (make a bunch one day, then just microwave as needed all week)

scrambled eggs with kale, bacon, and swiss cheese mixed in (bacon is leftovers, kale is cooked and reheated)

peanut butter on apple slices or banana

leftover anything from dinner

lunch:

again, rolled up lunchmeat and cheese with veggies

celery with peanut butter

hummus with Nut Thins or veggies to scoop

big salad with feta cheese, hard boiled egg, sunflower seeds, any leftover meat, olive oil, red wine or balsamic vinegar

apples and cheese

tuna salad with veggies or Nut Thins to scoop

dinner:

whatever I make for the family (always gluten-free), making sure I eat two veggies instead of one with potato or rice. There are some good recipes in the Moosewood cookbook - I made a big pot of Russian Cabbage borscht (vegetable soup) and can live off of that with a plop of sour cream for days. I often cook a big batch of something for myself that the family doesn't even like and then that's my lunch for the week.

Some of this involves cooking, and some is just open the package and dig in. I hate vegetables and would happily never eat one but I know I should, so I force myself to eat as many as possible of the ones I can stand. Even before I knew about the celiac I realized that the more fiber I ate the better my intestines worked - eating huge salads all summer kept the celiac symptoms down. And this stuff has been keeping me full much longer than when I used to eat all the cereals and gluten-free substitute baked stuff. And I don't put on weight and my cholesterol is fine. but this does take a little thinking ahead to make sure you have stuff on hand.

I buy the Clan Thompson foodlist for my Palm, and I love it. They update it about every 8 weeks and they will e-mail you in between if there's a change in something that you should know. I don't use it as much after 2 years gluten-free, but in the grocery store it's a help as I stand there in the aisle checking to see if this lunchmeat listing "modified food starch" is gluten-free, and it has restaurant foods in it so I can find out what's safe at Wendy's or Chik-fil-A when I'm out somewhere. I think it's worth having. Clan Thompson is a good site. I believe it's www.clanthompson.com, but I'm sure you could google it just in case.

If you search this site, some people have posted celiac-friendly restaurants, but they're usually the expensive ones not on a student's budget. There's a Whole Foods on South Street where you can stock up on gluten-free goodies for home, but your best bet for lunches is to pack. There are plenty of foods in any grocery store that fit a gluten-free diet. There are plenty of things to take that don't need refrigeration for a morning - peanut butter and Nut Thins or celery, hard boiled eggs, rolled up lunchmeat and pickles alone or in a Mission corn tortilla, tuna, gluten-free muffins and bagels (from the grocer's freezer), single-serve Bush's Beans or Dinty Moore beef stew, fruit. Supplement with Lay's chips, Cheetos, Fritos, which are supposed to be okay, when you need a decadent snack. Wendy's has good stuff - the baked potatoes and chili are safe (always beware of cross-contamination). Mr. Ritts is on the expensive side, I think. You're better off with simple foods, and if you don't try replacing all the breads, cereals, etc and instead stick to meats, beans, nuts, and produce, you'll be healthier and not go broke. Find a couple of gluten-free bars you like (check the labels - most Lara bars will be okay, and the GeniSoy peanut butter fudge bar is kind of like chocolate covered peanut-butter sawdust but will fill you up) and keep them in your bag. Good luck - you'll find plenty to eat once you get used to it.

The King Arthur Flour catalog has lots of good quality steel pans for things like hamburger and hot dog buns. It's torture to read that catalog because of all the goodies we can't have, but I love it anyway - it's like celiac porn . I'm sure they have a website.

A lot of the recipes using rapid-rise yeast have you add the yeast to the dry ingredients, while regular yeast is usually dissolved in warm water first. I think if you're going to use regular yeast, you might have better results if you dissolve it in the warm water with a teaspoon of sugar and make sure it's dissolved and starting to foam before you add it. That gives it a head start. Then you will probably just need to give it more time to rise than you would with rapid-rise. Or you could just get some rapid-rise yeast, Fleischmann's is gluten-free and easily available at the grocery store.

I'd like to spend an overnight in Cape May, NJ for the fall migration this year, and wondered if anybody had any suggestions for a place to stay that accomodates gluten-free. A bed and breakfast would be lovely, otherwise I guess I'll just get a motel with a fridge and microwave and provide my own!

My problem is I stay hungry all the time. Does anyone else have this problem?