Month: May 2012

Although road trips are generally free of TSA hassles, they are very challenging to plan for, especially if you are talking about a multi-day drive each way. Here is what works for us. Please let me know what works for you. Although gluten free choices are available in more places than ever before, that rarely includes anyplace serving takeout at 9pm in remote parts of Georgia. For that and for other reasons we try to travel with all of our food for the entire drive stashed in the car. We do this because we never know where we will want or need to stop for the night and we also want to get there quickly. Yes, I can indeed find food at a grocery store way way way outside of Atlanta at 10pm, but I don’t want to. I want a shower and some sleep. So if you decide to follow that tip, here are a few things that make it work for us 1) We get a hotel room with a mini-fridge that has a mini-freezer for storing the perishables and for refreezing cold packs overnight. This way we can travel with things like lunch meat, lettuce and tomatoes for sandwiches and dairy free yogurt without getting food poisoning. Also we ask for a microwave whenever possible. In general if there is a fridge then there is a...

Never make a recipe with egg replacer that says “use your favorite egg replacer” because with a line like that you know that whoever wrote that recipe never tested it with actual egg replacer. It is never that easy. I found eggs to be the single hardest thing to replace in baking. I have brownie recipes that are delightful until you make them vegan and end up with a pulsating brown mass straight out of a 1960s low budget horror film that has to be chipped out of the tray. With real eggs…lovely. With egg replacer…yuk. I find it disturbing that the manufacturers of mixes have never actually tested their own product without eggs. Given the resources that they have at their disposal I think that an experiment that cost me only about $12 to run (once with Ener-G and once with flax seeds) and which took only about 15 minutes is a good use of their time and resources. I figure that for $300 or so in labor and materials they too could figure out how to make their product egg-free thereby opening it up to a much wider audience. I also dislike recipe writers who don’t test thier recipes. I tried a quinoa muffin recipe and made something utterly inedible. And I have eaten some pretty bad failed experiments (like last weeks strangely sticky lemon bars or...

Summer travel season starts today. While there are books about how to eat out gluten-free (hint, it involves a lot of salad, fish and steak), how to cook gluten-free, and how to handle your day to day gluten-free life, but I haven’t seen any on how to travel gluten-free with small children. Now that summer travel season is upon us let me share what I have learned. Air Travel 1) If you are not nut-allergic, fly Southwest Airlines. They let you check bags for free. You are going to be checking bags from now on. 2) Pack your child’s backpack with a sandwich, fruit, and a full day’s supply of safe snacks. That way when your connection in Pittsburgh is delayed overnight you don’t starve. 3) Carry on a box of breakfast cereal in your wheelie. If your luggage gets lost you can replace most of the other food, but you are going to need to get through breakfast first. Also you can get stuck in Pittsburgh overnight and its really helpful to be able to get through breakfast. And yes, we were indeed once stuck in Pittsburgh. 4) Check a suitcase full of bread, flour, pancake mix, shelf stable almond/soy/rice/coconut milk and hard to find items (like Sunbutter). You do not want to spend your vacation attempting to locate these foods. Put the milks in plastic gallon ziploc...

Today we remember Al. Al was the father of one of my best friends. He ate the most unhealthy diet imaginable. I only ever saw Al eating polish sausage, white rolls, or donuts. Although I never saw him drunk, that was at least partly because his body had built up a great tolerance for bourbon and cigars. I am sure that he accidentally ingested a vegetable at some point, but I never saw him eat one intentionally. Al’s fitness plan involved watching copious amounts of television and using the car for all travel that exceeded three blocks. He also avoided swimming, tennis, yoga, yardwork, gardening, housework and saunas. He did not, to my knowledge take vitamins. When Al died at the age of 77 no one was surprised…until we found out that his death was not natural and that his autopsy showed nice clean arteries. Al could have gone another decade on booze, processed meat and sugar. It is frustrating to have to watch everything you eat while people around you seem to exist on a diet of junk food with no apparent problems. It seems scientifically impossible, yet I know several other people besides Al who seem to be able to live on pepperoni pizza, beer and hot wings without any ill effects. I don’t know what is different in guys like Al. I wish I did. Time...

When we first started down this rabbit-hole, we were told that our child had sensory integration issues. For anyone who thinks this is a bogus diagnosis, the occupational therapist showed him a metal key and a wooden ball and clarified that he knew what the two objects were. She then made him look away and put one item into his hand and closed it around the item. She then asked if he was holding the key or the ball. He had no idea. His sense of touch was that far off. So this is not an issue of maturity. Babies can feel differences in objects. Something is wrong. Unfortunately, I can find NO research done on the causes of SPD. PubMed covers the value of occupational therapy, but there is not so much as a case study on anyone who has recovered or any tested hypothesis of causes. If anyone finds one, let me know. But I do know of one person who recovered. In the 1970s they did not have this diagnosis. Instead I was called clumsy, irritable, unaware of her surroundings and “does not seem to feel pain”. I was the sort of child who could fix the torn hem in a skirt with staples and sit on them all day without noticing. When my appendix burst, I calmly complained of “a really bad stomachache” and filled...

Move over Babycakes. Here in Chicagoland, everyone knows that the place to eat is Rose’s bakery. If you tell someone that you have a gluten intolerance, they will invariably suggest that you go to Rose’s. People eat there even if they don’t have food intolerances or allergies. Rose and her family operate a gluten-free, peanut-free, GMO-free bakery in Evanston. People drive for over an hour to get bread that tastes like bread, to get pie crusts, pizza with a real chewy crust (I am from New Jersey and wasn’t diagnosed until my 40s…I know what pizza is supposed to taste like) pitas (which make awesome mini-pizzas for birthday parties) and, if you are lucky croissants. Real ones, not crescent rolls. These are as airy and buttery as “real” croissants. Rose does use dairy, tree nuts, and eggs in many of her recipes, but many are free of all allergens and her website lists what is available with each restriction. She has a seeded sandwich bread that tastes like real seven grain bread and yet is both gluten-free and vegan. I mean no disrespect to other brands, but for a gluten-free vegan bread, this stuff is really good. It tastes like bread and it is the right density. She also runs a cafe where people can get breakfast or lunch and plenty of people with no dietary restrictions eat there...

I grew up in New Jersey. I once read a statistic that over 40% of people in New Jersey have some Italian relatives. I have no idea if this is true, but I can assure you that Italian food always played a huge role in my world and I am not even slightly Italian-American. Yes, I do know that it is my loss. So completely giving up pasta was not even on my radar. I would make gluten-free pasta. It would be fine. As anyone who has ever made gluten-free pasta can tell you, it is generally not fine. As a matter of fact if you boil it even a minute too long it disintegrates into a weird white, sticky mass. It looks like it would do a great job as wallpaper paste, but eating it appears out of the question. And if you do manage to actually get it cooked perfectly don’t even think about reheating it. Really, don’t do it. It will gel overnight and become inedible. So I kept going through gluten-free pastas trying to find one that was easier to use. I found Orgran’s Buckwheat Spirals, but they were only available as spirals. Trader Joes Organic Brown Rice Pasta was super inexpensive but needed instructions that included checking for doneness every 30 seconds after the first five minutes of boiling. I thought it was way...

For those of you who loved trail mixbut quit eating it because of nut allergies, here is one that is free of the entire big 8 (gluten, dairy, nut, peanut, egg, soy, fish and shellfish). You can order individual bags at Vitacost or bulk order packs of 6 on Amazon. The mix contains chocolate chips, cranberries, pepitas and sunflower seeds. I had a sample at the Nourished conference and its quite good. If you want to save money or get all organic ingredients it would not be hard to replicate, but for the time pressed and for camp lunches, this is a really neat idea. You can order it from Vitacost here http://www.vitacost.com/enjoy-life-mountain-mambo-nut-free-trail-mix Or from Amazon here http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1_13?url=search-alias%3Dgrocery&field-keywords=enjoy+life+trail+mix&sprefix=enjoy+life+tr%2Caps%2C227 The Amazon price is slightly cheaper and is free shipping, but you need to KNOW you like it before you buy 6 packages. Both are 20% cheaper than list...