Monthly Archives: June 2011

It’s (almost) the 4^th of July!

Last time at this year we posted a tasty recipe for a red, white and blue gluten-free cake. The formatting seems to have gone a little wonky, but the recipe is unchanged and totally worth checking out.

Since that’s already posted, I thought maybe this year we’d take a look at some ideas for festive foods that aren’t cake. Plus, you know, it’s bathing suit season. And it’s a little hot for using the oven.

So how can we celebrate our fair land’s independence, keep ourselves safely gluten-free, and eat ourselves silly?

America is the land of choice and freedom, and fittingly there are plenty of delicious options out there. A year of July 4ths, and there would still be recipes I hadn’t posted. To narrow down the focus, I thought I’d just share a collection of ideas for strawberries – the season is winding down, they’re a perfect red for any patriotic dish, and most people love them (exception made for those of us who are strawberry-allergic).
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Can I make a confession?

You know how all those bars – energy bars, meal replacement bars, protein bars – are sort of designed to be meal-replacers?

Yeah. About that. I don’t like replacing my meals, but I do like a handful of the gluten-free bars out there. So I just eat them, plus my meals.

I suppose that’s not an especially shocking confession, but what DID shock me was how quickly I plowed through the TrueBars Bakery on Main sent over. I went looking for another one this morning to chow down on – but as much as I rummaged through the catch-all bowl on our kitchen table, I just couldn’t find one.
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It’s hard to decide what’s better: the taste of the cupcakes I tried in Elana Amsterdam’s Gluten-Free Cupcakes book or the enticing color pictures of them.

For gluten-free eaters who have been sad not to be able to hop on the cupcake bandwagon, this book is a lifesaver. This collection of 50 cupcake recipes is gluten-free, refined-sugar-free, and high in protein and taste.

We first tried the White Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes with White Chocolate Frosting. The white chocolate chips and cherry pieces were of equal size and they were easy going down and easy on the eyes. Equally good were the Strawberry Cupcakes, and the recipe is here.

Most of these recipes are made with coconut or almond flour. Some are even vegan and dairy-free. Vegan chocolate lovers will be satisfied with the Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes with the Vegan Chocolate Frosting.

Amsterdam’s Cinnamon Crumb Cupcakes were a good start to a lazy weekend morning. They can be topped with frosting or served without as the streusel topping is quite good on its own. One of the book’s nice features, other than its positively gorgeous photography, is the sweetness rating. This is helpful when deciding whether to make something as a snack or as a special dessert.

The book contains a few savory muffin recipes. While the ones I tried were good, the festive, dessert cupcakes are really the author’s sweet spot.

Gluten-Free Cupcakes is published on Ten Speed Press and available for purchase on Amazon. For more information about this popular food blogger, go to www.alanaspantry.com.

A few weeks ago, the folks at Zatarains asked me if I’d like to try some of their gluten-free options. They were in the process of getting certified by FARRP, and thought we might like to try some of their New Orleans-style dishes.

If you’ve read this blog for more than a week, you know that if someone asks me if I want food, the answer is almost always yes. I don’t always write about the food (sometimes it just isn’t worth sharing with you) – but that’s a topic for another time.

Zatarains sent me three boxes: yellow rice, dirty rice and jambalaya. It was more than my roommate and I could eat, so we threw a party.
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There are a few of different gluten-free labels out there. One day, we’ll go through them – I think that’s got the makings of a good post or three, and there are subtle differences between them that make certain labels more or less necessary for certain consumers.

For today, though, I just want to share some news about a new label on the block: Certified Gluten-Free, which is offered up under the auspices of the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness and Quality Assurance International.
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I have to confess that in my adult life I’m not a big cereal person. It’s just not a food I keep around the house. But when the folks over at Attune Foods sent me boxes of their gluten-free Erewhon cereal, I was pretty excited.

Over the course of a few weeks, I looped in a couple of additional taste-testers (gluten-free, vegan, and omnivorous). With the cereal all eaten, I can now decidedly say: it’s tasty stuff. To borrow some lines from a classic philosopher: I will eat them in a box. And I will eat them with a fox. And I will eat them in a house. And I will eat them with a mouse.
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We’ve talked before about how terrifying I think babies are, right?

Not that babies themselves are scary (in the way that, say, clowns strike fear into the hearts of even the bravest amongst us). It’s more in the shocking number of ways that things can go “wrong” with them.

It seems like for every malady out there, there are 5 different courses of action. Each is guaranteed to keep the baby in question safe – and comes with strict warnings about the dangers of veering off the path of righteousness. For example: when do you feed your child gluten? Do you even feed it to them at all?
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I got an iPhone the other week. It’s both useful, as in “since I work for myself, I work all the time, and this lets me work from the checkout line at the grocery store,” and “useful” – as in, “sometimes I really need to know the words to ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’, now.”

Back to that grocery store checkout line. Did you know Triumph Dining has an iPhone app version of the gluten-free grocery guide?

Incidentally, I’ve been told the grocery store nearest my home is a known pick-up scene (the check-out puns must be an inevitable precursor to modern romance). No-one’s ever picked me up; probably it’s all the Def Leppard work up on my screen.

But you probably don’t want to know about that. Let’s talk about the app instead.
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I was checking out the ever-wonderful Heidi of Adventures of a Gluten Free Mom on facebook the other day, and wanted to share a link she posted.

The link was to one of Dr. Vikki Petersen’s videos, on the difference between cross-contamination and cross-reactivity. It’s an important one, and I highly recommend watching the video – especially if you just aren’t feeling as good as you think you should, despite being safely gluten-free.

In a nutshell, here’s what Dr. Vikki goes over:
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Let me tell you a little story about the first and last time I had a Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

The scene: In line to get into a poetry slam the Nuyorican Café, New York’s Lower East Side. Dusk is falling.

The actors: myself and 2 of my friends. We’re 16. We’re VERY 16.

One of my friends was feeling nervous. This was no N’SYNC concert. We were clearly the youngest, whitest, suburbanest people in line.

I had the answer: she clearly needed an alcoholic beverage.
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