Mo and I (well, mostly Mo, with some small help from me) have been adding features to our site. We now have a link to the Northeast Ohio Celiac Disease Information page, which links you from there to all kinds of great resources and fun activities. For example, this weekend there’s a gluten-free buffet at Tommy’s Pizza & Chicken in North Ridgeville (far west suburbs of Cleveland). It’s booked solid with a waiting list! Lucky I got our reservation in before it was too late, so I’ll post about it afterwards.

Also new and very exciting, our “store” page. This links you to Amazon.com, with many of our favorite books and groceries (by the case lot, don’t let the prices scare you!). If you are already an Amazon.com customer or if this is brand new to you, you can make your choices through our page and Amazon will pay us (a very tiny percentage) that will help us pay for things like our server space and URL registration fees to keep this site going. And if there’s some gluten free item on Amazon that you really love, and it’s not already in our store, let us know and we can add it!

I’m off to bake a cheesecake for a meeting tomorrow — the board of the figure skating club stuck me with a 3-pound loaf of cream cheese so I swore I’d make a cheesecake for the next board meeting. They don’t care that it’s gluten free — it just tastes good!

I’ll post over the next few days about the buffet at Tommy’s… stay tuned.

I posted the following to the Silly Yaks Yahoo! group a couple days ago. I just wanted to share it because it’s something that needs to be said and bears repeating.

I just wanted to add, there is a frightening tendency among people with CD, to blame ALL symptoms on gluten, sometimes without looking into any other possibilities.

For example, Mary knows that absolutely everything she put in her mouth yesterday was prepared in her own kitchen, and the only packaged food she used was a can of soup. Mary got diarrhea after eating dinner (with the can of soup cooked into her food). Therefore, even though the soup is clearly labeled Gluten Free, Mary assumes there must be hidden gluten in it. She rushes to post to all her friends, groups, and message boards that Brand X “gluten free” soup has gluten in it.

I have seen this time and again. It would never occur to Mary that maybe she has a touch of a stomach bug… maybe her fresh produce wasn’t scrubbed as well as it might have been, and she picked up an annoying microbe. It would never occur to her that maybe she’s sensitive to some other ingredient she used — maybe now that she’s off gluten, she’s developing (or noticing) some other food allergy? Or maybe — just maybe — her teenager managed to leave some gluten specks in her favorite cooking pan that he wasn’t supposed to use? It could be almost anything, yet Mary “knows” it was gluten in the soup.

And this is really sad. You can’t ASSUME that every food issue or symptom you have is caused by gluten, and ESPECIALLY you should not post that “Brand X” or “food Y” or “additive Z” has gluten in it unless you are darn tootin’ SURE of that and can post references to back it up. (Example: We all know that Quaker products are prone to cross-contamination because the company SAYS SO. Many of us have contacted them. They tell us that although the rice cakes have no gluten ingredients, they are processed on shared equipment and may contain traces. On the other hand, if someone said Lundberg rice cakes had gluten in them, I’d want to see some documentation!)

I’m not saying that people aren’t sensitive to other foods — dairy and MSG are two of the most common. What I’m saying is, if you’re sensitive to other foods in addition to gluten, DON’T EAT THEM. Feel free to whine about how much you miss cheese, or wish you could have Zatarrain’s Fish Fry (which is GF but has MSG in it). Feel free to ask here for suggestions on substitutions — some of our members have some darn good substitutions! Just don’t post that X, Y, and/or Z have gluten in them unless you have absolute proof. There are a lot of new people here, joining us on a daily basis, and many of them are confused enough without reading unsubstantiated claims, based on one person’s personal experience getting sick from a documented gluten-free product.

Incidentally, if you’re seriously concerned that some GF-labeled product really does have gluten in it (like the bread we keep reading about in the news from North Carolina or wherever that was), you can purchase a test kit here. (http://www.ezgluten.com/)

Eat what makes you happy and allow others to do the same.

Chandra

Care to comment on my rant? Am I totally right or off base? Inquiring minds want to know!

As I’ve said numerous times before, anyone who leaves my table hungry has no one to blame but themselves. Yesterday I served Christmas dinner for 12, and packed up a bag for two more (with enough food for at least two meals each), and my fridge is still nicely packed with leftovers.

The menu:

Relish tray with homemade dip*
Amish Valley spiral sliced ham (without the glaze due to guests’ diabetes)
Turkey with cornbread & chestnut stuffing
Bread dressing (on the side, different recipe entirely)
Gravy
Mashed red potatoes
Glazed (sugar free) sweet potatoes**
Green bean casserole made with Progresso soup and fried shallots from the Asian market
Green beans almondine
Corn muffins
Tossed salad with GFP croutons
Cranberry sauce (canned)
Apple pie
Cherry pie
Pumpkin pie (sugar free)
Buttermilk pie (sugar free)
Cocoa Pebbles marshmallow treats

* The kids (teenage boys) asked for dip for their veggies. I mixed about a cup of sour cream (all I had) with some dried minced onion, granulated onion, and a packet of G. Washington broth mix. They gobbled it up and begged for more, but I was out of sour cream!
** I used fresh peeled sweet potatoes, which I cut up and simmered and then baked with a glaze of sugar-free pancake syrup, clear maltitol syrup, and brown sugar-style maltitol sweetener.

Preparing this dinner would have been an absolute pleasure, except that I had surgery on my right knee less than three weeks ago, and managed to wrench the left knee this week so that it hurts more than the one that had surgery! So I was doing some serious hobbling about, and trying to take as few pain meds as possible.

I made the pies Wednesday night, since we were going to a family party on Thursday. The crust looked a little funny. I had replaced about 1/4 of the flour with buckwheat flour, in an attempt to raise the nutritional value and lower the glycemic load slightly. I also tweaked the pie crust recipe, combining two separate recipes, and the end result has the texture of pie crust and the taste of buckwheat pancakes! It sounds weird — and looks weird! — but no one said “blech” so I guess it was OK. For the pumpkin and buttermilk pies I just replaced the sugar with Splenda, using about 20% more than the recipe called for because Splenda tends to lose some of its sweetness when baked. It must have worked, because those pies vanished at an alarming rate. The apple and cherry pies used canned filling, and I still have about half of each left because my diabetic guests were avoiding the sugar in order to use their “carb choices” on starches.

Although I had saved some GF croutons (cut up from Thanksgiving dinner rolls that had baked a little too hard) in the freezer, I decided Christmas morning to stuff the turkey with a cornbread dressing. I had a pan of uncooked bread stuffing/dressing in the freezer from a couple weeks ago when I made my own belated Thanksgiving dinner while I was home from work due to the knee surgery. So having two kinds of dressing made sense. My cornbread recipe is simple — I use the Betty Crocker Cookbook and substitute Better Batter Gluten Free Flour for the 1/2 cup of all-purpose flour in the recipe. This is the same recipe I used to make the corn muffins just before dinner time.

While I prepared the cornbread dressing and stuffed the turkey, my downstairs neighbor kept me company and peeled the sweet potatoes. Then I sent the turkey downstairs with her to roast in her oven so that I could use mine for everything else. Alas — some day I will have my dream kitchen with two full-size ovens and six burners!

I cut up the sweet potatoes — dang, those things are tough to cut raw! — and put them on to simmer next to the pan with the turkey neck and giblets simmering for broth to thin the gravy. While I was on my feet, I decided to get the relish tray ready, so I hacked up a couple ribs of celery and some colorful bell peppers, and put them in a divided container with some baby carrots and stuck it in the fridge. Then I cut up the red potatoes, skin on, and left them sitting in a pot of cold water until I was ready to boil and mash them. I put the ham, tightly wrapped, in the oven at 250F to warm so that I could juggle it out of the oven later and then re-warm at the last minute. At that point I got a bit of a break so I could sit down, which was much appreciated by my knees. When the timer went off to check the sweet potatoes, hubby reported that they seemed to be softening so I told him to turn off the burner and leave them for me to deal with later.

Later arrived. I pulled the green beans out of the freezer, threw together a green bean casserole, and popped it in the oven. Then I started a glaze for the sweet potatoes using sugar-free pancake syrup, clear maltitol syrup, and some brown sugar-style maltitol sweetener. My diabetic friends might get a bit gassy from all that maltitol but it wouldn’t skyrocket their blood sugar! I drained the sweet potatoes and arranged them in a glass baking dish while the glaze simmered, then I spooned the glaze all over the sweet potatoes and put the dish in the oven beside the green bean casserole. Slivered almonds dry-toasted in a pan while I microwaved the other package of green beans, and then I tossed them together and left covered to be reheated at serving time. It was now after 3:30 and I took the time to get dressed so my guests wouldn’t arrive to find me still in my pajamas. (LOL) Once I was dressed, I put the potatoes on to boil, and when they were tender, I drained them and mashed them still in the pot with butter and a splash of milk.

It’s a good thing my friends operate on “delayed time”… I had said to arrive about 4:00 and it was more like 5:00 when people started getting here. The reason it’s a good thing is that the turkey still wasn’t done. We finally gave up on the pop-up timer and did the leg-wiggle test. It was done. By that time I had whipped up the veggie dip requested by the boys, and the corn muffins were coming out of the oven. Everything else got a last minute reheat while I made gravy and put salad in a serving bowl.

Finally it was dinner time. Everybody ate. Anybody who was still hungry ate more. If anyone didn’t get enough, it’s their own darn fault.

We packed up the to-go bag, and packed up leftovers, sat around talking and talking, and finally around 9:30 most everyone hit the road except for Kat, who stayed to help my hubby finish cleaning up as much as could be put in the dishwasher for a second load. They sent ME to bed to take my meds and get my legs elevated.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a Good Night!

As promised, here is my actual review of my trip to Lake Placid. I didn’t have the opportunity to visit many restaurants because I spent two solid days inside the Olympic Center skating and watching my friends skate in the ISI Adult Championships. Which is how I discovered gluten free sandwiches from Simply Gourmet on Saranac Avenue and the Big Mountain Deli & Creperie on Main Street. They deliver locally, free delivery on orders of $25 or more. The restaurants are actually two locations of the same operation and the menu is the same. (And a glutenoid friend of mine said the banana hazelnut dessert crepe was fabulous.)

I didn’t ask about the crepes being GF, so I don’t know if they are or not, I stuck with the sandwich menu. There are 46 sandwiches on the menu and you can design your own as well. There are about 8 different breads, one of which is gluten free. When I asked where they get their gluten free bread, the server provided me with a tag from the bread package. The bakery is called Le Garden Bakery in Lansing, NY. (www.legardenbakery.com) The variety used in this restaurant is the Multi-Grain Sandwhich Loaf — “sandwhich” is their spelling, not mine. The bread was dark and a little dense but not crumbly. It was very tasty with my roast beef and cheddar sandwich!

Now for the sad confession — I’m supposed to be on a no-sugar, no-starch diet at the moment while I’m off my diabetes meds. But when I saw a restaurant menu with gluten free bread, I caved. And it was worth it! (I got right back on my oh-so-boring diet when I got home.)

Not so very worth it was the French Meadow Bakery cupcake I bought in the local grocery store. The cupcakes were dry and a little stale. My glutenoid friends varied on their reviews of them (the crepe loving friend actually LIKES her cupcakes dry and stale…) but I was less than thrilled. My own homemade cupcakes are better.

Aside from these forays into the temporarily-forbidden carbs, I mostly lived on what I brought with me (Greek yogurt, protein bars, etc.) for breakfasts and some lunches, supplemented by the old standby salads with grilled chicken for dinners. One restaurant had chili that was GF (they had both beef chili and vegetarian chili; both were GF, I had the beef). A BBQ place my friends insisted on visiting was the least GF-friendly place we went. I was told that NOTHING was safe due to vinegar. No matter how I insisted that I was OK with vinegar (as long as it wasn’t malt vinegar), apparently the cook in this place had learned many years ago what not to give celiacs to eat, and he insisted that vinegar was not safe and therefore I could only have dry grilled chicken (and it was DRY), corn on the cob (I nibbled, it wasn’t great), and salad. So that was about the worst eating experience I had in my 5 days away from home.

Sunday, I made sure to hike up the street to Big Mountain Deli again to get an extra sandwich for the trip home on Monday. Tucked it into the little fridge in my hotel room overnight, and it was a yummy lunch on the road!

For my next road trips… four days in Columbus, Ohio — October 22-25, followed by a weekend in Cincinnati November 6-8. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Chandra

http://www.glutenfree.com/recipes.htm

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~coeliac/fav.html

http://www.glutenfree.com/recipes.htm

http://www.csaceliacs.org/recipes.php

http://www.celiac.com/st_main.html?p_catid=20

As we head home to Ohio today, I wanted to write a little about my experiences eating GF here in the Pittsburgh area.

First, we ate at Quaker Steak & Lube when we arrived on Thursday. They have a GF menu but it is in their nutrition notebook so they brought the notebook for me to go over available items and make a choice. I had the wings & loaded fries combo — they DO have a dedicated fryer, at least at this location (Robinson mall area). Most of the wing sauces are GF, there is a list that indicates which ones.

At PNC Park, I went to Guest Services upon arrival, looking for Redbridge beer. They said that two beer stands in the park should have it but that one might be out, so they sent me to the Pub 475 located in the left field food court. The worker there was apologetic that they were out of it, and said the other beer stand might still have some. I went to the beer stand at the right field food court (I forget the name of it) and the worker there was rude and claimed they had NEVER had such a thing and that it didn’t exist — and tried to sell me the local brew, which of course is not GF. Ugh. So I lived without a beer on a very hot sticky night. The food choices were also not great — OK, but not great. Their GF “safe list” must be out of date because it claims that dill pickles contain gluten (I’m guessing from the vinegar) and nachos with salsa are also not on the GF list, probably also because of vinegar. I had philly cheese steak without the bun (the list stated without cheese but the stand manager let me read the ingredients on the bag of cheese and it was fine, so I got cheese) but with the grilled onions and peppers, which the list says are OK. (I also got the dill pickle!) I didn’t have any gluten-type reactions, so I was happy enough with that. It was food, I was hungry, I ate it and didn’t get sick.

We spent all day Friday at Kennywood. Kennywood ROCKS!!!! I love it because it is a national historic landmark and features many historic rides (not to mention my very favorite flip-you-upside-down ride, the Big Kahuna). But now I love it even more because THEY UNDERSTAND GF! I took a chance on the cheese sauce on bacon cheddar fries from The Potato Patch stand — they were awesome and I had no reactions (yay!). Then I was at Guest Services for something else, so I requested a list of gluten free foods in the park. Mike from park operations came to talk to us and brought a GF list. The cheddar cheese sauce served throughout the park is guaranteed gluten free. Mike said that they had looked at sourcing cheese sauce from another supplier this year due to cost, but the other supplier could not guarantee gluten free cheese so they stayed with the cheese they had. WOOHOO!!! The list of safe items includes all items at the Potato Patch (though personally I would read the ingredients on some of the optional powdered seasonings), beef tacos and all nachos at the taco stand, bunless hot dogs in several locations, potato chips throughout the park, all salads except popcorn chicken salad at two locations, icees, etc. As of this season, you are still allowed to bring coolers of your own food into the park, there is a picnic area for guests (Mike indicated that there is some discussion of changing this policy). The absolute highlight of my day was the ice cream we got at the pagoda ice cream stand just before leaving. I took my own GF cone which is the same size as their small cone, and the server was happy to put the ice cream (which is on the GF list) in my cone. It has been at least 7 or 8 years since I had soft serve in a cone. I cried. I took a picture of myself on my phone with the ice cream cone. All together, a fabulous day.

If you are anywhere within a decent drive of Pittsburgh, I urge you to visit Kennywood. There are discount admission coupons available from various sources, but even the regular admission of $33.99 for adults is reasonable as amusement parks go (kids and seniors are less). We got $10.00 off coupons from a Cleveland Indians game day booklet, so we paid less than $50 for two adults to get in. The food prices are also reasonable and the souvenir drink cup ($5.99) can be refilled for 99 cents throughout the park so we just shared one and kept refilling. We also brought in our own bottled water. Locker rental is $1.00 per use. You can bring your own hot dog buns and ice cream cones, and eat JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE.

I get the Cleveland Indians game day booklets regularly because we go to quite a few games, so if anyone wants a coupon for Kennywood, e-mail me off list and I can send you one (first come first serve so if I run out you may be waiting a week or two until I get more).

Chandra

Posted from the Livejournal Community “what a crock” :

http://community.livejournal.com/what_a_crock/535976.html

2 Lbs generously chopped stewing steak
3/4 bottle cheap Sangria wine from the Supermarket (Keep the left over wine)
2 Leeks cleaned and sliced
8 small baby potatoes
Two handfuls of frozen baby carrots
4 – 6 small tomatoes chopped
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Basic Herb mix – crushed in the palm of your hand when you add it, to release flavours

Oil the interior of the crockpot with the Olive oil. Toss in the leeks, the potatoes, the meat, Sangria, tomatoes and seasonings. Give a healthy stir and cover. Switch on your crockpot — only had a few hours, so I cooked it on high for three hours and then did one hour and a half on slow while I threw a fruit salad together and made a loaf of bread.

In about three or four hours, you should have a fab smelling and cooked stew with a fair bit of juicy gravy.

Add on top of the cooked stew:

Gluten free Rice Noodles
(Allow 1/4 to 1/2 a cup dry per person)**
Pour in the rest of the Sangria

Cover and cook for another thirty minutes on high.

Stir your stew well. Switch off your crockpot. Serve at your leisure.

This and other gluten-free recipes can be found at the Livejournal Community “what a crock”

What do you do on a snowy Sunday in February?  I was supposed to drive 130 miles each way to a meeting today but I need new tires and didn’t feel like making the trip anyway.  So I baked gluten-free Monkey Bread and fried up some Jelly Doughnuts.

I used the same batch of dough for both, having made quite a lot of it.  You can find the dough I used on the Better Batter Flour website (www.betterbatter.org) under the recipe for Cinnabon Clone cinnamon rolls.  I made 1-1/2 times the recipe, which ended up as a large pan of Monkey Bread and 12 doughnuts.

Note:  while these treats are exceptionally yummy, they are loaded with bazillions of calories and are TERRIBLE for your diet!  LOL!

Monkey bread was easy.  I took golf-ball-sized globs of risen dough (floured so I could handle them), dipped in melted butter and then in brown sugar cinnamon mixture, and put them in a greased pan, drizzling the remaining butter and cinnamon sugar mixture on top.  After 1/2 hour of additional rising, I baked at 400F for 20 minutes, let cool for a few, and turned upside down out of the pan onto a baking sheet lined with parchment.  Grab a glob and enjoy!

The doughnuts were made from globs also, kneaded a little bit from hand to hand and then shaped and set to rise on a greased baking sheet.  When they had risen, I fried them a few at a time in canola oil, cooled to handling temperature, and filled with jam (half with raspberry, half with strawberry), then dredged in powdered sugar before serving.  Little fried balls of heaven!

Um… I guess I restart my diet tomorrow…

Gobs of cinnamon-sugar goodness!

On Saturday, January 31, 2009, the Celestial Prime writing group (www.celestialprime.org) held its first open-to-the-public event, the Feast Of The Superb Owl.  This “Harry Potter” themed party really was a feast, multiple courses served over a two-hour period in the evening.  (The remainder of the day was devoted to games, impr0visational theatre workshop, and general schmoozing.)

The Feast of the Superb Owl was a little different from your run-of-the-mill wizardly meal, however, in that it was completely wheat-free and gluten-free — even the bread and pasta.

We had asked ahead of time whether anyone had any food allergies or intolerances, or needed a vegetarian meal.  No one responded, so we went ahead with the menu as planned.  (If some of our diners needed a special meal, we would have planned specific substitutes within each course.)

We began with fresh vegetable trays with dip, and three varieties of homemade gluten-free bread (from The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread, by Bette Hagman) with a choice of real butter for spreading, or extra-virgin olive oil with herbs for dipping.  This was followed by the soup course, consisting of potato corn chowder, yellow split pea soup, and broccoli-cheddar crustless quiche.

The only item served that was cooked by someone else was our third course of rotisserie chicken from Costco (which is labeled gluten-free right on the package).  This was accompanied by mashed red potatoes with gravy, cornbread dressing, and fried apples ‘n’ onions.

For our fourth course, we brought forth (yeah, slap me for that pun) Trader Joe’s brown rice pasta with sides of sauteed mushrooms, marinara sauce, and homemade alfredo sauce.

By now, we were beginning to hear happy sighs of full tummies and had to remind the diners that there was still a Roast Beef course.  We gave them a little breather while we set it up — sirloin tip roast crusted with garlic and herbs, Yorkshire pudding with beef gravy, green peas, and acorn squash.

All this, of course, followed by dessert — vanilla cake with apricot filling, chocolate fudge cake, apple crisp, and three kinds of cookies.

Compliments to the cook abounded.  They never missed the gluten.