lpellegr

You'll have to check the ingredient list for each brand and watch out for the usual suspects. Every food seems to vary from manufacturer to manufacturer and even season of the year, so the label is your best bet.

Gluten-free breads get stale very fast. They won't get moldy any faster, but they will end up as crumbs sooner. Might want to plan to use up the breads in the first 2-3 days and then do bread-free meals after that to avoid disappointment. You can use corn tortillas to wrap sandwich fillings, or scoop them up with gluten-free crackers like Nut Thins. But don't expect the bread products to be like normal wheat breads.

I got the hamburger bun pan and a few others from the King Arthur Flour baker's catalog - it works great, but since my recipes usually make enough for 8 buns and it only does 6, I use 4" round cookie cutters, greased and floured, on a separate pan for the other two and it works just as well. Every time I get this catalog in the mail and have to look longingly at the baked goods inside I think of it as "celiac porn".

On the front page of the food section of the 3/23/06 Philadelphia Inquirer is an article titled "Hopeful steps for celiac sufferers". It tells the story of Ross Cohen, who was fine cooking for himself but afraid to risk eating out (sound familiar?). The story gives a nice overview of celiac and the difficulty of avoiding gluten and why you want to avoid it. Cohen and his fiancee Kay Inamine came up with a dining guide that eventually became the Triumph dining cards. There are two additional articles, one a resource guide for dining gluten-free in Philly - higher priced restaurants that won't throw you out when you say "special diet", chain restaurants with gluten-free menus, and info on specialty places like the Gluten-Free Pantry and Pam's Celiac Kitchen. The other tells about Jax Lowell, local author of The Gluten-Free Bible, and gives her suggestions for the etiquette of asking for gluten-free food at restaurants, parties, and catered events. Ironically, she lives in a converted bread factory. It's a nicely researched and written package of articles. And a recipe for Pad Thai! A lot of local celiac connections - Alice Bast, head of the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness lives in Ambler.

Some gnocchi are traditionally made with potatoes instead of ricotta cheese - used leftover mashed potatoes and work in the flour and eggs and other ingredients.

Bette Hagman's Vinegar pastry has worked for me and feels and tastes just like real pie crust.

1c white rice flour

3/4c tapioca flour

3/4c cornstarch

1 rounded teaspoon xanthan gum

3/4t salt

1T sugar

mix these together in a bowl. Cut in:

3/4c shortening

Blend together:

1 egg

1T vinegar (cider is fine)

Stir those into the flour/shortening mixture.

Add ice water 1T at a time until you can gather it all into a ball - should take only 2-3 T. Form into two balls, cover and refrigerate 30 minutes (you can also wrap in plastic wrap at this point and freeze or refrigerate). Roll out between two pieces of plastic wrap dusted with sweet rice flour. Use as usual - put into pie tin or over pot pie and bake.

I found that this handles pretty well without falling apart and even comes out flaky. I've been thinking about chicken pot pie myself, but I don't have a recipe - can I have yours? Then we can both enjoy some success!

"Legodary"?

I haven't been in NYC for a long time, but they used to sell roasted chestnuts in a lot of big cities - you could smell the charcoal or coal that they used to roast them. If they are big round reddish brown nuts with a lighter colored circle, they should be chestnuts and should be safe to eat.

Wait, I thought A-1 was okay. What makes it not okay?

Here are some Chili's selections from the Clan Thompson Smartlist:

Bacon or Old Timer burger without the bun

Baked Potato soup

Citrus Fire Chicken and Shrimp - order without seasoning on the shrimp

Flamed Grilled Rib-eye, classic sirloin, or NY strip - order "dry-grilled" without garlic toast, savory steak butter, and herb au jus.

Guiltless grill salmon

Most of the burgers without the buns - no Fajita onions, blue cheese dressing, blossom strings

They say the menu changes monthly, so ask the servers to be sure.

Okay, Pennsylvanians might think this is perfectly normal, but I haven't met many other people who are used to eating cottage cheese and apple butter. Looks like dog barf if you mix it up, but sooo good. Also Breyer's vanilla ice cream (with the vanilla bean specks) eaten with pretzels instead of a spoon. And back when I could have rye bread, thickly buttered rye bread with hot mashed potatoes plopped on top made a great breakfast. Mmmm, carbohydrates.....

Are you up for making your own? Bette Hagman's vinegar pie crust recipe actually works, and I have made a killer crust for quiche by grating raw potatoes (catch them in a bowl of water to keep them from becoming odd colors), mixing with an egg, some onion powder, and some salt, patting it into a greased pie tin, and baking about 40 minutes at 400F. It's adapted from the Moosewood Cookbook Cauliflower-cheese Pie recipe. It's a lot of time and some effort, but it's really good. You might be able to achieve the same effect with a bag of frozen or refrigerated potatoes for hash browns.

How about looking into gluten free bakeries that can ship a cake to you? There is one in NY called Happy Happy Happy, and in Philadelphia there is Mr. Ritts. I think they both have websites but I don't have the links at my fingertips.

I haven't eaten those styrofoam slabs since I was first diagnosed! There's lots to eat out there - if you like salty and crunchy, there's chips, Fritos, Tostitos, Pirate Booty (awesome), some brands of cheese curls, popcorn, etc etc. If you like candy there are plenty out there that are safe - search the web and this site for candy. M&Ms, Snickers. I'm not a big candy fan so I haven't memorized the list like the chocolate junkies have. Unless you go to a health food store or place like Whole Foods, you're kind of out of luck with cookies and crackers, but Nut Thins crackers are becoming more widely available in regular stores and they are really really good. And you can always snack on chunks of cheese, peanuts and raisins, peanut butter smeared on apples or bananas, lots of flavors of ice cream - it takes a little imagination and some planning, but there's lots to eat out there. Now if you're using rice cakes for sandwiches, there are corn cakes (like rice cakes) or corn tortillas or lettuce to wrap your fillings in or corn tostadas to stack them on. Or just roll up the meat and cheese and eat it, the heck with bread. You can do better than rice cakes, even if you find some non-contaminated brands.

I found also that it was getting harder and harder to keep the weight off. I decided to try giving up most carbs, which was ironic considering how hard I worked to find gluten-free substitutes for all the cereals, breads, muffins, etc that I used to eat! Upped the protein and fiber, reduced the carbs way back, and it worked. Weight is steady and even a little less, and the roll around the waist is reduced. A piece of ham rolled up in a piece of cheese and an apple for breakfast keep me full longer than 3 bowls of Cheerios used to. They say that the first stage of the South Beach diet can be a good starting point for a celiac because of the lack of carbs, and they might be on to something. It's worth trying higher protein and lower carbs. Heck, you had to cut out a lot of carbs to go gluten-free anyway.

Sorry to say, but your experience is absolutely typical. I find recipes are hit or miss, so when I find one that works, I make sure to mark that page in the book! I have also learned that you will never have bread exactly like normal wheat bread. You might have to go through a period of mourning for the old bread before you finally accept that ready-made gluten-free bread is expensive, dry or rubbery, and hard to find, and homemade gluten-free bread is going to be holey, crumbly, soggy in the middle, dipped on top, and generally annoying. That said, there is hope. If you are really determined to bake your own bread, go to the Clan Thompson web site, then go to "Ask the Cook" and read what Connie Sarros has to say. Find the Rebecca Reilly gluten-free baking book and see what she has to say. Get the Bette Hagman books and see what she has to say, and search this forum for what we have to say! Try baking your bread in muffin cups, small loaf pans, or in lumps to make buns or in 4" round cookie cutters or greased tuna cans minus top and bottom to make hamburger buns. Be prepared to laugh at your results, eat what you can, freeze what you can't eat at first, and make bread crumbs of what's left. But keep trying because there are recipes that work if you get the right pans, the exact ingredients, the temperature just right, and all the zodiac signs aligned perfectly. Don't give up yet!

Just be sure if you freeze something with pasta in it, like lasagna, use good gluten-free pasta because some of them don't keep well. Tinkyada rocks - I froze gluten-free lasagna with Tinkyada and it turns out beautiful. Also use the elbows for homemade mac and cheese that keeps in the fridge for days without drying out. Haven't tried freezing it yet, but it never stays around long enough to need to.

You may have to go to a Whole Foods or a health food store to find gluten-free cereals, but Mesa Sunrise is a good flake cereal, and Rice Crunchems and Corn Crunchems are just like Chex - you can even make gluten-free Chex mix with them. I used to eat 3 bowls of Cheerios every day for breakfast, and I haven't found a substitute for that, but lately I decided to switch from cereal to protein for breakfast - rolled up turkey and cheese or a bowl of cottage cheese with fruit and nuts, or even chicken sausage. Anything quick. And mostly cheaper than cereal and keeps me full longer. Something to consider. If you like hot cereal, try Bob's Red Mill Mighty Tasty gluten-free cereal.

I love the Clan Thompson list for the Palm - it seemed expensive, but it has been a really good investment. Many times I end up in the grocery store or in front of a vending machine or at a food court looking up what I can eat. The updates are great - it feels better than relying on a year-old printed list. And besides, you can put games on your Palm and play solitaire while waiting for your number to come up at the deli counter (for the rest of the family - I'm not eating anything from shared slicers!).

Try this:

Open Original Shared Link

I ate a Chinese New Year item last week that seemed to be gluten-free, but I ended up sick all evening. Ingredients were sticky rice, red bean paste (red beans and sugar), dried longan (fruit) and lotus seeds. It seemed to be okay, but I wonder if anyone know if commercially made Asian red bean paste might contain starch to thicken it, like wasabi sometimes does? I'll ask the person who made it to check that and the longan and lotus seeds for anything else (like flavors added to the dried fruit), but usually someone here has the answer.

If you can tolerate nuts, the Nut Thin crackers are great - non-celiacs beg to share mine. Another great crunchy/salty snack is Lundberg Rice Chips. Haven't found anything to replace Ritz - I did see some crackers on a website that claimed to be that. Maybe search the Gluten-free Mall and other places. You probably won't find them in a store but will have to go on the internet. Worth the shipping cost if you get a lot at once.

For oven baking they sometimes suggest longer time and lower temp to get the insides fully cooked without the outside getting overly crusty. Can your bread machine do that? What if you mix it in there, then put it into the oven to bake? The sugar is there for flavor, browning, and to feed the yeast - it shouldn't affect the wet inside/dry outside problem.

You have my sympathy. I've tried a bunch of the Bette Hagman recipes and had some spectacular failures (I think some of the recipes need proofreading or more testing), and I've had some good results. I just started using the 4-flour bean mix and haven't had much experience with it, but overall I get better results making buns than loaves. I got the GFG Bakes Bread for Christmas and had success with the caraway rye on p. 99 as a loaf. I made the Oregon Bread on p46, but made it into lumps for rolls and they were good - in fact they would be a good bagel replacement, with a chewy texture. I haven't tried it as a bread. The mock pumpernickel from the Gluten Free Gourmet has always been successful for me, but I haven't tried it with the bean flours. But you're right, many of the breads will fall and that beautiful loaf you take out of the oven will crash in the next few minutes. If you go to Clan Thompson's site they have an Ask the Cook section and Connie Sarros has a lot of tips on baking bread. Some of the advice is to lower the oven temp 25 degrees (but you'd think if it was printed in a cookbook they would have tested that, wouldn't you?), bake in smaller pans, use less liquid, etc. I think it takes a lot of trial and error with these recipes because the flours are very sensitive to humidity, etc. It's also easy for them to not be baked all the way through and I tend to see uneven air pockets in mine, even using the Kitchenaid to mix (I tried to do it by hand, but when that xanthan gum gets wet it just seizes up like concrete). I used to bake wheat breads a lot before my diagnosis and so I keep trying to bake these gluten-free breads because I can't bring myself to pay the outrageous prices for the store-bought stuff and I like to bake, but I've learned not to expect success every time. Fortunately I don't eat a lot of bread in slices now but I still like to use bread crumbs, so more often than not those buns in the freezer end up as breading or in meatballs. I'm not sure we can ever get normal sized bread loaves that give normal-sized slices for sandwiches from these flours, no matter what Bette Hagman claims. I think there may be only a few scratch bakers using this website and I wish I could give you more advice, but keep us advised on what works for you. Keep trying! I think Bette Hagman has gotten so good at it and maybe has just the right set of pans (right size, right metal, right finish) that she doesn't remember the struggles we mere mortals have to go through. She doesn't really hate us, but I haven't been able to find a website or e-mail address for asking her questions, so she doesn't really love us, either!

Sadist! Start with 4 glazed donuts and a pile of buttery, greasy croissants, and a butter-soaked toasted english muffin and a whole box of Cheerios (I used to eat 3 bowls every morning)! That should hold me till mid-morning. Then on to the KFC fried chicken (we're not going for healthy on this day) and french fries from every fast food restaurant in the area. And a dozen crunchy Taco Bell taco supremes. Then on to snack time: A whole bag of Splits pretzels (those of you not in the Pennsylvania area don't know what you're missing) and all of my grandmother's homemade pie and cookie recipes, followed by a loaf of her Dutch potato bread with buttercream icing. Dinner would be every breaded, fried recipe my family ever made and a big bowl of buttered egg noodles. Triscuits with apples and cheese for bedtime snack. We now return you to your regularly scheduled depressing diet.