Last February my girlfriend was diagnosed with Celiac Disease, so I did two things, I went on a learning spree and I began eating only what she could eat while we are together. (We don't live together so this means I was gluten free about half-time). I made a gluten free shelf in my pantry and in my fridge and I learned all about cross-contamination, etc.
I read:
-Gluten-Free Diet: A Comprehensive Resource Guide- Expanded and Revised Edition
-The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook
-Cooking with Coconut Flour: A Delicious Low-Carb, Gluten-Free Alternative to Wheat
-Gluten-Free Baking Classics for the Bread Machine
and I got her this bread machine for her birthday (it is AWESOME and it goes with the above-mentioned book):
-Zojirushi Home Bakery Supreme 2-Pound-Loaf Breadmaker
Then, in October, I had a conversation with my mom and it turns out she is allergic to wheat. I have inherited the rest of my mother's allergies (grass, trees, etc), so I thought what if I am also allergic to wheat. There is a distinct difference between Celiac Disease and a Wheat Allergy and in my effort to understand this I read:
Healthier Without Wheat: A New Understanding of Wheat Allergies, Celiac Disease, and Non-Celiac Gluten Intolerance.
So, in mid October I went wheat free permanently. This fit nicely into the Paleo stuff I'd heard about so I read:
-The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet
-The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat
Both are brilliant books that I totally recommend. So, totally sipping the kool-aid, I got myself some tools:
-Deni 7600 3-Tier 9-1/2-Quart Stainless-Steel Digital Food Steamer
-LUX color changing egg timer
-Calphalon HE600CG Removable-Plate Nonstick Countertop Grill
-Blanched Almond Meal Flour, 5 lb.
So that's the rundown of the prep and information gathering. Lots of great books and information out there. Next was testing out new tools and there's the little detail of learning how to cook. Seriously, notice the hard boiled egg timer, I couldn't even hardboil eggs properly so I have to get tools to make up for my shortcomings. The most major shortcoming is that I don't enjoy cooking at all, in fact I'd go so far as to say I resent it...deeply. Cooking *with* someone else is okay, or watching cooking shows with the girlfriend. As a shared activity, spending time together, I don't mind it, I can ask really stupid questions and we're cooking or eating together. But alone, in sheer terms of feeding myself, it is just a huge timesuck so anything I can do to make it more hands-off the better. It is an important recurring event that deserves more attention and time than I want to devote to it and there is the problem. Enter the tools. :)
The maiden voyage of the Calphalon grill included unboxing, reading the manual, preheating, slap the steaks on, take a guess and set the timer and walk away, return upon ding, et voila there's dinner and some lunches. Same for the steamer; each basket has 6 evenly spaced subtle little divots to place an egg in so I hardboiled 18 eggs just by checking in on my LUX egg timer. Now I know the time ballpark.
So, between my cool new tools and others out there also embarking on Paleo ( like Dagney's revelation of making her own mayo), well there may be hope for me yet.
3 comments:
The idea of developing some kind of allergy later in life frightens me: I really don't know how I'd cope if I became lactose intolerant. My whole diet is based around milk and cheese. I could give up pretty much any other food before cheese, including chocolate. Man, I love cheese.
Presumably your girlfriend wasn't aware of having celiac disease before February, or did she suspect something might have been wrong a few years in advance?
For a moment I thought you were going to write an ode to cheese or bust into song. Good luck on your continued cheese consumption. ;-}
Apparently my mother is allergic to some other things as well that I didn't mention (corn, grapes, cheese [gah]), so I may do some restriction rotation testing to determine what might irritate my system as well. Corn is a problem for her, which falls right in line with my increasing sentiment of f*&k grains.
My girlfriend was aware for a pretty good amount of time that something was wrong, but it's pretty difficult to diagnose. She finally found a physician who connected the dots (including an antibody test and duodenal biopsy) to make the official diagnosis. Her improvement since going 100% gluten free has been significant and is ongoing. Lending further creedance to f*$k grains. ;)
Heh - I haven't written poetry for a long time. Much easier to analyse it: the more you read, the more you realise how the vast majority of poetry, both published and amateur, is either terrible or incredibly dull. So, always a treat to find those few gems amongst all the manure, and then spend 80,000 words babbling about them. ;)
I don't think there are any allergies in my family, so hopefully that means it is a lot less likely I'll be hit with anything nasty later on.
Best of luck to your girlfriend, and your mission against grains. Although personally, I'd be at a loss as to where the cheese should go without wheat. ;p
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