Just a heads-up: salad dressings are sources for gluten as well. I’m thinking my headache might be related to the ginger-miso dressing on my salad tonight.

Uff da!

Given that the amount of food I can eat has diminished due to either wheat, contamination with wheat products, or it contains barley and rye (the other two gluten troublemakers), I’m focusing on eating 4-5 small meals a day in order to keep full. For snacking purposes (two of those meals), I have discovered:

-carrots dipped in hummus. It’s not pita but it works with the hummus.
-apple slices dipped in peanut butter.
-fresh fruit
-fruit snacks (not ideal but they also don’t have dye issues like other ones do)

Hope this helps those who are trying to come up with meal plans that work around gluten.

If you’re like me, you consider coffee a necessary evil but you can only drink it iced and if it tastes like ice cream. So how do you do this? Well…

My standard order at a coffee chain: iced vanilla latté made with whole milk.

My standard way of drinking it at home: iced coffee with whole milk and Torani vanilla syrup. (Avoid the sugar-free stuff — it tastes horrible and is a chemical _____storm.)

Why do I not do the commercial coffee creamers? Many of them have gluten in them as a thickener. The vanilla soy milk creamer my mom uses says gluten-free on the label and we were laughing at it until I found out *WHY* they very clearly state that. (It was actually pretty good too.)

So how about baked goods? Well, it’s all about labelling and knowing who made things and how they were made. I know that It’s A Grind frequently had locally-made goodies and some of them were gluten-free or egg-free (my other dietary restriction). $tarbux has marshmellow dream bars which are effectively rice krispies treats, except not as sweet at as the Kellogg commercial ones, and that’s my go-to order if I order food there.

One of my guilty pleasures is Kraft Mac n’ Cheese in the thin blue box which I had to abandon due to their unethical use of dyes prohibited outside the USA. (The Kraft Deluxe Mac n’ Cheese with squeezable cheese is a close second.) Of course, I can’t have tyat now due to the whole “wheat pasta = gluten” thing but I’ve found an alternative at Trader Joe’s and Target:

Rice pasta and cheese.

You prepare it the same way you would prepare the stuff in the blue box. The only difference is that the macaroni is made of rice flour instead of wheat. Unfortunately, this means that it tastes better right after it is cooked than it does the next day after being refrigerated. (It’s kind of like how rice is coarser the second day you eat it.)

I mention this for all my mac n’cheese loving readers so that some of you can find something that you can eat that isn’t going to mess with your stomach (or Texas).

It has been a tough day with Daniel waking me up at 5:30 a.m. by using me as a trampoline, dealing with an AYSO coach who was being a jerk (thankfully *NOT* Daniel’s coach), Daniel being a pill all day… Since this is my blog and my whining place (though I don’t do this TOO often), I thought I’d list what I’m craving right now:

-chocolate bars (most use dextrose which is a wheat derivative)
–Arby’s roast beef sandwiches
–Maruchan oriental-flavored ramen
–In N’Out burgers that are not “protein style”
–Round Table Hawaiian pizza
-any of the bistro boxes from $tarbux (without having to pass the crackers on to someone else)
-cake
-chocolate chip cookies (my in-laws brought some home from Panera yesterday and I almost cried)
-bread bowls with clam chowder from Panera
-bagels
-pumpkin cream cheese muffins

Gah. Time for me to try and sleep. (Thankfully, I got a nap this afternoon.)