lpellegr

Tuna (plain, no mayo) and cheese sticks are also good. You can sometimes find tuna in individual serving cups that peel open. Individual cups of peanut butter or Jif's version of Nutella with some gluten-free crackers or pretzels are also a treat. Roll up lunchmeat and cheese together for a breadless sandwich, or use gluten-free bread or corn tortillas.

Lentils themselves are gluten-free, but they can become contaminated during shipping and packaging, so you may find unexpected grains in any bag of lentils. Pour them out in a plate and sort through carefully before using. It wouldn't hurt to then wash them to remove any gluten-containing dust. As for the finger millet, I don't know. Millet is gluten-free (except for possible contamination as above). Here's a link I found that says finger millet is gluten-free, but you will probably have to look into any specific product. Open Original Shared Link).php

I use Tinkyada elbows all the time for mac and cheese. Don't cook as long as the package says - I find 12 minutes is enough. The elbows stay soft in the sauce and even freeze well.

Tinkyada elbows, but only boiled for 12 minutes, no matter what the bag says. The bag is a dirty liar. A sauce made with 2 cups of milk is plenty for 2 cups of dry elbows. It also freezes well in individual portions.

Are you sure you need sweetened condensed milk and not evaporated milk? Just make sure you are substituting for the right one.

Most flours have been fine for me at room temperature, but I find that millet should be frozen because it will go rancid, and sorghum and bean flours should be kept in fridge or freezer if you have room, unless you go through them quickly.

I'm expecting to get a good amount of rain here in Trenton, NJ, and possible power outages. Thanks for reminding me about the bags of water in the freezer! Rounded up all of the candles and kerosene lamps, stocked up on everything (not a D battery to be found, though, by Saturday), pulled all of the yard miscellany inside, cleared the nearest storm drain, pulled the cars into the driveway NOT under the trees. I'm just glad it's not going to be snow. I hope. If nothing bad happens to you, it can be kind of fun to watch a storm like this - we watch to see whether the raging water in the gutters will get high enough to meet in the middle of the street, and after tropical storm Floyd lost some strength I sent the kids out to play in the rain. At 18 and 22, they probably won't be interested in that this time....

I second the Bette Hagman crust. It works up beautifully and consistently and gets thumbs up from the gluten-eaters. That's my go-to pie crust recipe for apple pie or pumpkin. I have even used dough frozen for a year and gotten perfectly fine results (yeah, I'm a slob about my freezer, so sue me). And if you bake the scraps and smear them with jelly you can pretend you have Pop-Tarts. Dammit, now I want pie.

There must be hundreds of recipes out there, and dozens of mixes. The mixes are probably the way to start, especially if you can find them in bulk or on sale. Bread recipes usually call for multiple kinds of flour and things like xanthan gum, gelatin, etc. If you don't want to invest in all of those items and the space they will take in your house, go with the mixes - try a few until you find one you like. If you really like to bake, then look into gluten-free bread cookbooks - there are plenty out there, more all the time. I started with Bette Hagman's books, and like a lot of her recipes, but gluten-free bread baking is always iffy - you may need to repeat recipes several times and monkey with times and temperatures and ingredients until they come out right in your oven in your house. Don't be afraid to fail - you can always make your mistakes into crumbs or croutons and try again. We will be here with advice!

I make bread just for crumbs, using Bette Hagman's Four Flour bread. You could use any recipe, but this one isn't very good for slices, but easy enough to make. After baking, I let it cool and cut it into 1/2" cubes or tear it up depending on how aggressive I feel toward the bread, let it sit in a big bowl covered with a towel to dry out a little overnight (and keep it from the cats). Next day I spread the pieces in a baking dish and put them in the oven at 250, stirring every 30 minutes until thoroughly dry. You can even leave them in the oven overnight as it cools. Cubes can be made into croutons at this point, or just bag it all up until you feel like getting the food processor or blender out. Grind in batches to the desired fineness and store at room temp. The key to safe storage is to make sure the bread is completely dry, otherwise it could get moldy. You could keep the crumbs in your freezer if you have more room than I do. A bread recipe that calls for 2 cups of flour will make, oddly enough, about 2 cups of crumbs. Today is a 2 loaf day because those eggplants need to be made into parmesan and that will take a lot of crumbs.

I have been known to bring celery to the theater. I just cut it in thick slices and put it in a bag. It's dark. They just see me eating little pieces of something so they would assume it is popcorn.

If I ate celery in the theater, I wouldn't be able to hear the movie!

Open a can of tuna, mix in a bowl with some mayo (or skip the mayo), scoop up with celery or Nut Thins crackers.

Slice an apple, eat with cheese or spread with peanut butter.

Hummus and carrots/celery or crackers.

Roll up lunchmeat (packaged, not sliced in the deli unless you are SURE the slicer has been cleaned) and cheese together and eat with your fingers.

Refried beans from a can, tostada shells or broken hard taco shells, shredded cheese, tomatoes or salsa.

Bowl of any kind of rice with just about any leftovers on top.

Salad greens, hard boiled egg, sunflower seeds, random raw or cooked veggies, leftover chicken or ham, olive oil and interesting vinegar.

Greek yogurt with honey or fruit and nuts.

Scrambled eggs or omelet with or without cheese and crumbled bacon or leftover ham or even Spam. Throw in some thawed frozen spinach so that the nutrition police will approve.

Most of these require no or minimal cooking (although cooking ahead to make intended leftovers is good). The occasional rotisserie chicken can be the basis for quite a few meals, and you can even make soup from the bones.

I was in Birmingham recently for a meeting, and for lunch I got sandwiches on Genius rolls, and was pleasantly surprised at how good they were. Lots of interesting gluten-free stuff in Tesco as well.

Also know that bagged dry beans often are contaminated with grains - I have found that I have to pour them out, sort through them, and wash them thoroughly before cooking. They are transported and bagged in the same equipment as barley and other dry bagged products, so it wouldn't surprise me if there was some level of contamination in canned beans, where nobody is going to sort out the random grains.

Agree with the "whole foods" replies - the less you buy the gluten-free substitutes for processed foods, the less you will spend and the healthier you will be. Learn to make do without (or as little as possible) bread, pancakes, muffins, etc. Don't buy into the "fat is bad for you and grains are good" line - that's bogus. Gluten-free breads and pastries are full of simple carbohydrates and are close to junk food. Replace that with protein and fruits and veggies. Limit the substitutes and your wallet and your body will thank you.

Oil and eggs aren't acidic, are they?

No, eggs and oil are not generally considered to be acidic.

Now I'm wondering how Mesa Sunrise crumbs would be on top of broccoli-cheese casserole. Hmmm.

Yeah, replacing the Ritz on the broccoli casserole is tough. I have used bread crumbs with some seasoning instead of cracker crumbs - I make bread and destroy it just so I have crumbs around. Which I need to do today, come to think of it...

Seems like every time I go to the local Shop-Rite I have to drag a manager over to the gluten-free section to tell him that the kamut or vital wheat gluten doesn't belong on the gluten-free shelves. I always love this response: "But it's organic!"

Stuff made with Tinkyada pasta freezes well for me if it's not overboiled. I freeze lasagna and homemade mac and cheese (12 minutes cook time for the elbow mac) in individual serving sizes. Anything that comes out of a crockpot with a sauce usually freezes well. I also make pizza and freeze individually wrapped slices - these are good lunches for when you don't have a refrigerator or microwave.

Yeah, I've been there. This is why I stick to recipes that someone else made up - if it doesn't work, I can blame them for the failure. My most spectacular failure was a loaf that rose during baking to twice the height of the pan and was almost entirely hollow in the middle. When cut in half across the top of the baking pan it was like having two bread shoes.

You are right about all the possible cross-contamination. They definitely need a clean scoop, but considering that a contaminated scoop may have already been in any given tub of ice cream, it wouldn't hurt to explain your "allergy" and politely ask if they could get yours from an unopened tub. Toppings could be contaminated too, and you can make the same request. I usually go for soft serve, but I have read one report on this site of employees being trained on how to fill a cone, and then the soft serve being dumped back into the mother container. But I still go for soft serve and haven't had a problem.

I'm curious why your butter has corn in it. Generally butter (real butter, not margarine) is made with cream, and that's it.

Most recipes using rice flour add other things to improve the texture. In addition to brown rice you could use white rice and sweet rice flour, tapioca, and potato starch flour (I can't remember if you can tolerate nightshades) - add maybe 1/4 cup of those per cup of rice flour. Things like quinoa and millet also help, but only 1/4 c or so per recipe. Yeast will make it rise, but the lactobacillus will not and will be killed during baking and will not add any further benefit. You will need some way to make it all stick together - search this site or the web for replacements for xanthan and guar gums. Some swear by chia seed or flax seed (ground and soaked in water to make a gummy stickiness). Eggs will help if you can tolerate them, and some gelatin.

Get a book like The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread by Bette Hagman or some of the other gluten-free bread cookbooks out there and you will probably find lots of recipes and ways to adapt them to your specific needs. Libraries often carry these if you don't want to spend the money.

And the return flight from Frankfurt to Philadelphia: chicken breast with sauteed peppers, polenta, and cheesy sauce, salad, fruit, and rice bread. Not bad. The "arrival snack" was a sandwich with the rice bread, but I felt like they forgot something - one half had lettuce and tomato, the other had lettuce and cucumber, but no meat or cheese! A veggie sandwich? Odd, but hey, when you're hungry after a long flight, you eat it.

Do we obsess over food? Yeah, a little.

Okay, I have some answers to my own question, for everybody else's information. I called them 2 days before (there's a number on their website somewhere) to request the gluten-free meals, and on the flight they knew which seat I was in and had my meal on the cart with the rest. I got rice (95% white, 5% wild) with a nice fish filet and some bok choi, a salad with a cup of dressing (which made the fish more interesting), some really good strawberries, and a rice cake and margarine. Later (it was a transatlantic flight) they brought a gluten-free breakfast: a rice cake with margarine and jelly. Could have been more interesting, but at least it was edible. I had also brought a sandwich and homemade peanut butter cookies and bananas, so I was set. The woman on the phone said that I was also set for the return flight and wouldn't have to call again, so we'll find out tomorrow. But I'm taking a bag of Babybel cheeses and the rest of the cookies, and might spend the rest of my pounds on food at the airport, just in case.

I have to say, the snack on the second leg of my flight (Frankfurt to Birmingham) was something I had never seen on a plane before - individual pizzas! Not gluten-free, unfortunately, but they smelled great. Sure beats a bag of peanuts.