lpellegr

I agree - some things are better made from scratch, but bagels aren't worth the effort to make yourself. Go for the frozen ones.

Here's an update to my earlier post. The manager of Naked Pizza in Ewing showed me around after we had some e-mail exchanges, and they do seem to know how to keep the crust, sauce, and cheese segregated, although I wouldn't count on any of the other toppings. I just ate half a gluten-free pie with no ill effects, and it was pretty good. Just being able to go somewhere and buy a pizza that I don't have to make myself is going to be a treat. So Naked Pizza in Ewing gets a thumbs up.

It may not be the ingredients of the candies that contain gluten. Since some of their candy contains gluten (there's probably malt flavoring in the rice krispies in the crackle bars), chances are that there is cross-contamination of the manufacturing or packaging lines. Even though they clean the lines between different foods, there's still a chance of a trace of gluten getting into the next food. I seem to hear more about this relating to the smaller sizes of candy or holiday special versions. You may have to switch to another brand of chocolate to get your fix safely.

I have been drooling over the dresses. Mary had a red number with some red velvet and lace trims that just knocked my socks off in season 1. But I'd still rather be wearing my jeans to watch it than wearing those dresses all day!

Like Rosetapper I have flown on several overseas long-haul flights with many layovers and delays. So, I take Kind bars, pepperoni sticks, homemade crackers, a bag of Skittles and falafel chips with little sample-sized Nutella and peanut butter. Oh, and Chex mix (with peanuts, etc.). Air Canada does serve gluten free meals on long-haul flights but they are downright yucky so I am always glad to have my snacks along. Oh, I forgot. Fruit leather is also great to take along. Easy to make, too.

Sample size Nutella!!!!! Where can I find that?

You will probably come up with a set of rules for yourself, based on how your body reacts to different foods. For example, I'll eat things that say they are manufactured in a facility that also processes wheat, but I won't eat things that are made on the same equipment as wheat. But there are probably many times I eat something that has been made under one of these conditions and doesn't say anything on the packaging. That's one reason I eat as little processed food as I can.

I've been buying Food Should Taste Good Chips for a few years now. The Cheddar and Multigrain flavors are ones I buy frequently and have never had an issue with the oat fiber. I am very careful at reading labels when buying gluten free products, as I am a highly sensitive celiac and will react to the slightest amount of gluten. I am VERY confident that Food Should Taste Good chips are a perfect addition to any celiac's diet. They seem to take great pride in the quality of their chips...they are the best on the market after all

Wow, that doesn't sound at all like a manufacturer's rep who flagged this post and signed up just to reply. If you are a sensitive celiac, then welcome, but I'm taking this response with a grain of salt (and not oat fiber).

I make this sauce for mac and cheese, and it doesn't take too long. It's a little more work than microwaving, but more likely to come out edible.

In a pot, melt 3 T of butter/margarine/your favorite fat on low heat.

When it melts, add 2T of cornstarch or a gluten-free flour mix and stir to combine.

When it is all combined (don't let it start browning) add 2 cups of milk (or your substitute). Turn the heat up, then stir continuously until the whole thing thickens and starts to bubble. Turn off the heat.

Add 8 oz of shredded cheese and stir until it melts. That's it, cheese sauce.

I usually add 1 t of salt and 1 t of dry mustard (at the butter and cornstarch step) when I'm using it for mac and cheese, but you can season it however you like. Some cheeses are very salty and don't need as much salt. I can't guarantee it will work for all forms of non-cow milk because I haven't tried them.

If you want to make mac and cheese: while this is going on boil 2 cups of Tinkyada elbow mac for 12 minutes, then drain. You don't have to rinse it off, since you are going to want your casserole to stick together anyway. Dump the elbows into the sauce and combine well, then pour into a greased dish and bake at 375 for 30 minutes. It also works low-carb if you substitute cooked drained cauliflower for the pasta.

Somewhere new for us to eat in central Jersey! Buds and Bowls in the Lawrenceville Inn on 206 south of Princeton. Pretty setting in an old house, with a yoga studio upstairs and floral arrangements for sale. Everyone is completely aware of gluten, and all sandwiches are available with gluten-free bread or regular. It was a treat to have a grilled cheese sandwich somewhere other than my house, and feel safe about it. Small menu for now, but a nice selection including desserts. www.budsandbowls.com/

It depends on how far you want to travel. You can look for Outback Steakhouse (Hamilton and maybe Edison?), Bonefish Grill, and PF Chang's (one of those in Princeton). In Central NJ there is the Blue Rooster in Cranbury, which has a limited menu but understands gluten-free, Blue Bottle Inn in Hopewell which marks its menu with gluten-free items (a bit $$$), and usually the Brothers Moon in Hopewell can find you something gluten-free. In Lawrenceville, at the Lawrenceville Inn there is now Buds and Bowls, which is only open for lunches, but caters to gluten-free and vegan - everything is gluten-free unless you want normal bread for your sandwich. There are various places that claim to have gluten-free stuff, like Chuckles Pizza and Naked Pizza, but they don't segregate ingredients and cross-contamination is a strong possibility. Uno is another chain with some gluten-free offerings, although I haven't found anything there to write home about. The biggest selection of gluten-free items (not a restaurant, this is stuff to take home) I have seen is at DeLiteful Foods on Quakerbridge road in Lawrenceville. I found ice cream sandwiches and soft pretzels there! In NY there is Risotteria, although I thought I heard it may have been closed temporarily and I have not been there, but it gets good reviews.

Just successfully converted this recipe. Originally intended as a copy of Tastykake Kandy Kakes (Tandy Takes for those of us of a certain age), also resembles Girl Scout chocolate-covered peanut butter cookies, sometimes called Tagalongs.

2 T butter

2 c sugar

1 c milk

1 t vanilla

1 t baking powder

2 c flour (this should be a light flour mix, like white rice/tapioca/cornstarch/potato, rather than bean or sorghum or brown rice-ish)

4 eggs

1 t xanthan gum

smooth peanut butter

2 to 2 1/2 7 oz chocolate bars, or as many chocolate chips as it takes

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease a 9 x 13 pan.

Scald milk and set aside to cool. Cream butter and sugar. It won't be creamy, as there is only a tiny bit of butter, but mix thoroughly. Add vanilla and eggs.

In a separate bowl, combine flour mix, baking powder, and xanthan gum. Gradually add it to the wet ingredient mix.

Add milk last. Mix to combine. It will be thin. Pour into greased pan, bake for 20-25 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

While the cake is still hot, spread with peanut butter. This will melt and create a thin layer.

Let cake cool, then refrigerate to harden peanut butter.

Melt chocolate or chocolate chips and spread over hardened peanut butter. Let set.

Personally, I'd like the cake layer to be even thinner so there's more balance with the peanut butter and chocolate, but that's my preference. The cake holds together nicely, with a fine crumb.

Baked ziti (you can substitute penne) is pretty much the same ingredients as lasagna, but instead of layering everything you just mix it all together and then bake. Cooked pasta, ricotta, mozzarella, sauce, grated parm or Romano on top. Doesn't get much easier and tastes the same.

Undercook the noodles quite a bit, and what has worked for me in the past is to carefully remove them one at a time from the pot by draping a noodle over a wooden spoon, rinsing it under cold running water, then setting it in a colander to drain as I rinse the others. This is pretty labor-intensive, and if you cook them too long, they still fall apart. Last time I just dumped them into the strainer all at once, and that was not successful. I had to construct my lasagna with noodle puzzle pieces, once I got them peeled apart. I'd recommend the no-cook method. I haven't tried it, but I'm going to next time.

Bread crumbs or croutons - cube it up, bake at 250, stirring every 30 minutes, until dry and crunchy. Saute briefly with oil/butter and seasonings to make croutons, or use a food processor or blender to make bread crumbs. Roll the slices flatter, cut in quarters, and toast in the oven at 250 until crunchy to make a version of Melba toast. Or make chocolate bread pudding!

Good for you! If you have much left, you might want to slice it and freeze it in pairs of slices for later.

If you toss the toxic gliadin fragments into BLAST, all sorts of wheat relatives and grasses come up. Aegilops tauschii, an ancestor of modern wheat, comes up with particularly long matches and even has the toxic 33-mer peptide. I don't know who this Dr. Davis person is, but clearly he has not bothered to do his homework.

Thanks for doing the work! I should have known that someone here would know what the sequence was and how to BLAST it. Maybe the older wheats had low enough amounts of the proteins to not be a problem, but our guts aren't adapted to what's in the modern wheat for sure.

Evolution will only breed you out of existence if your mutation is something severe enough to prevent you passing on your genes. Gluten-sensitive people still are able to have plenty of kids, for the most part, even if their bloating and gas make them occasionally unattractive .

Another simple method: Peel (or don't), cut into strips about 1/4" thick, toss in a bowl with a little olive oil. Add seasonings if you want. Spread on a baking sheet, not overlapping. 10 minutes at 450, then turn them over and give another 10 minutes at 450. The thinner parts get very brown by the end, so you might want to keep an eye on them for the last 5 minutes or reduce the heat a little.

We got one of these or something similar a few years ago when my son was younger. It required full parental input, the parts didn't fit together the way they needed to, some of it never did work, and it wasn't anywhere close to being as easy and fun as the commercials make it seem. Which will not deter a child who wants one, admittedly. On the other hand, that same boy found that his sister's Easy-Bake oven could make cool stuff. You can find some homemade recipes for that online, although I can't remember if there were any gluten-free ones. But now that there's Betty Crocker gluten-free mixes, you can at least do that. Not the same, I know.

Speaking as a scientist: modern wheat has been bred with multiple copies of the chromosomes (DNA, genes) that exist in old forms of wheat. It's possible that the older forms of wheat produce less of the gluten protein than do the modern varieties because of having fewer copies of the gluten genes. What I have not seen discussed is whether the amino acid sequences of the modern gluten proteins are different from the ancient ones, because that could make a difference in how your body reacts to them if the difference is great enough. Without having more information, it's hard to determine from the info in this thread what the difference between modern and ancient gluten is. The safest thing to do is to avoid any kind of wheat.

And as for wheat raising blood sugar, yes that's entirely possible because wheat flour is high in starch, and starches (carbohydrates) are broken down into simple sugars. It's not just what you think of as sugars that raise blood sugar, it's starches as well, so a bag of chips or bowl of rice or slice of bread will indeed contribute to blood sugar levels. Giving up wheat and replacing it with rice flour, cornstarch and tapioca like most commercial gluten-free replacements probably will still fill your diet with simple carbohydrates that can raise your blood sugar. But avoiding not just wheat, but its replacement starches as well, can make your diet easier on your body. Fruits, veggies, meat, eggs, nuts - all low carb (well, maybe not the fruit) and better for you than a slice of bread.

By the way, Dr. Davis has a website that talks more about this - I think you can look up "Track Your Plaque" to find out more.

Tidy Cats, the non-clumping kind, does seem to have less dust to it than the cheaper brands of clay litter. Yep, you definitely have to get rid of the wheat litter.

Here's a crumb topping as an alternative to the crust top:

1/2 c sugar

3/4 c gluten-free flour mix (any)

1/3 c shortening (Crisco, butter, whatever)

Cut together with a pastry blender or your favorite method until the fat is in small pieces and everything is blended. Pile on top of the apples and bake.

We always triple this for two pies.

Notice also that the Pacific cream of mushroom soup has garlic in it, which I wasn't expecting. It wasn't bad, but not what I was used to. If the recipe is something where the taste of the sour cream or yogurt (plain yogurt could also work - not vanilla!) could show through and throw off the taste of the dish, you're probably better off making a thick white sauce from a roux of butter and cornstarch or gluten-free flour.

Breakfast was the last piece of the crustless spinach, bacon, and swiss cheese quiche I made Sunday. Lunch was a bowl of leftover meat sauce over cauliflower instead of pasta (also made Sunday). Dinner will be some of the crockpot turkey Makhani with carrots and basmati rice that I made - can you guess? Yes, Sunday. Whatever hasn't been eaten already this week will go in the freezer in single-serving portions. I'm big on hot meals, so I make big batches on the weekends. Tomorrow I will forage in the fridge or freezer, and then start all over again on the weekend. I'm thinking stuffed shells and bean soup. Or risotto with butternut squash and whatever the farmer's market has.

I have found Heinz cream of tomato soup in the English imports section, and it tastes just like Campbells, but is made with rice flour instead of wheat flour. I found it at Wegman's. Now if I could only find some gluten-free saltines to go with it....