Mosaics' Blog

This Blog board has been pretty dead these past few weeks. Seems after the initial flurry of activity, we've run out of things to say and hardly any new entries are posted.About three weeks ago I went out to eat lunch with a friend at a place called Cafe Max. It's a very popular place with the business lunch crowd and serves soups and salads. I used to eat there years ago, but hadn't been in a long time...even before my diagnosis. I had the Ceasar salad and the seafood salad. I asked before I ordered if the seafood salad had any gluten. They said it had modified food starch, but I know that's usually made from corn so I thought it'd be OK. I forgot about the croutons in the ceasar, but mine only had two and I picked them out.As soon as I got home from lunch my stomach started roiling and I was sick the rest of the afternoon. I thought it must have been crumbs from the croutons.So my friend asked me to go again this Thursday. I'm not too keen on that idea, but I said I'd go anyway. Yesterday I stopped by the restaurant and asked to speak to the manager. I told him my problem and asked if he could help me determine which things were gluten-free. He was very happy to help and named several things that I could have. I asked specifically about the seafood salad because it's my favorite thing on the menu. He said it was gluten-free, but I asked him to double check just to be sure because I didn't want a repeat of the last time I ate it. He went to read the ingredients and came back with a long face. He said, sure enough, the last ingredient on the list was WHEAT.So, I guess I won't be having the best thing in the restaurant. The restaurant is a cafeteria style where we go through a line and tell which salads we want so they're all right next to each other...pasta salad, chicken salad, seafood salad, Ceasar salad, etc. I'm a little nervous about going there again, because gluten had never made me that sick before and I can just imagine little gluten pieces falling into the gluten-free salads. I tell ya, I'm getting more and more sensitive to gluten. It's weird.