An Introduction to Celiac Disease (2:43), from Alicia Woodward, the editor of Living Without magazine. A “just the facts” presentation, highlighting the number of undiagnosed people with celiac disease, the obvious symptoms (Gastro-intestinal) and the not-so-obvious (migraine). It also is very clear about the only way to deal with it. Don’t eat gluten.
Hat tip to @glutenfreebee for tweeting about this video.
This is a short video from YNN (Your News Now – Time Warner Cable, Austin, TX). In this “Child Wellness” segment, a doctor discusses the many warning signs of celiac disease in children. Pretty basic stuff, but it is good to see this kind of coverage. Didn’t know that crayons could have gluten.
Hat tip to @JulesGlutenFree for tweeting this (and pointing out that Crayola crayons are gluten free.)
Visiting relatives brought the Namaste Foods Gluten Free Spice Cake Mix to our house and baked it for us. It serves as a great distraction for me against the piles of cookies and gingerbread house I can’t eat.
This product is made in a dedicated facility and contains no wheat, gluten, soy, corn, potato, dairy, casein, peanuts or tree nuts.
Eating something where the chances of cross contamination are virtually non-existent is always comforting.
My sister-in-law used applesauce instead of oil, but otherwise followed the directions on the bag. This is a very tasty cake. It is very dense and holds together really well. The only warning I can give is that I ate 1/3 of the entire cake last night. This was a lot more sugar than I usually eat, so it was good while eating it, but I learned that I shouldn’t eat that much in one sitting. This mornings “dose” of spice cake was a bit smaller. After microwaving for about 15 seconds, it tasted great. I would rate this as dangerously good.
If you are looking for a good and easy cake mix, try this. This mix was purchased at Henry’s, but is also available at Whole Foods and many other natural food stores across the country.
Other GF bloggers who reviewed Namaste Foods Gluten Free Spice Cake Mix:
Gluten Free Driggs/Teton Valley – an amazingly fluffy, moist spice cake, that has great flavor and texture.
Digestible Diaries – adds carrots to the mix for carrot cake!
D’s Gluten Free With Me – made a birthday cake with this mix.
Wheatless Foodie – documented the entire cooking process.
Grrlbake – would make it again.
Note: We are trying out this format to allow you to see other reviews to help inform your decision. If you don’t want your review linked here, please let us know and it will be removed.
Essential Root Vegetable Cookbook (front)
Essential Root Vegetable Cookbook (back)
For some, eating gluten free can mean eating a lot more root vegetables than you could have ever imagined. Many of our home cooked meals come with a side of sweet potatoes/potatoes/carrots/parsnips/etc. I found this in a used bookstore last week and it looks like Kim may give some of these recipes a try. They aren’t designed as GF recipes, so if you find a copy of this book, read the ingredients carefully. We will keep you posted if we end up making anything from here.
Have you had any great used cookbook finds?
Kim and I would like to thank you for making the first couple of weeks of Gluten Free City so amazing. It is hard to know what will happen when you launch a site and we certainly hoped for the best to happen.
With nearly 50 twitter followers we feel like we are engaging with the online Gluten Free community. We have already had a few posts generate comments and generally feel welcomed by everyone.
Yesterday was our largest traffic day with several dozen visitors. That may not sound like a lot, but for a new site relying on word of mouth it’s great.
If you have any suggestions, requests, or criticism, please let us know.
We are now on Facebook. I will be sharing many of the posts here over on our facebook page. I am good with Twitter and WordPress, but Facebook is a new thing. Pretty sure I am going to mess that up a few times.
And, as is the custom, I will ask you to “Please Like us on Facebook!”
That’s how the kids do it, right? 
Easy Paleo: 21 Practical Ways to Simplify Your Paleo Life by Jennie Harrell is a nice introduction to changing your eating habits. While there are great Paleo specific tips, a lot of the book can be used regardless of the diet you are thinking about trying.
Using the details of her and her husband’s personal journey through their dietary transformation, Jennie allows you to experience the highs and lows of making such a radical change. She shares their reasons for their decision and the 30 day plan to see if Paleo would work for them. This very personal look into their lives allowed me to relate the 21 ways to my own dietary transition. I recognized some of the same pitfalls, like having nothing in the house to eat and some of the same joy, such as feeling a whole lot better.
For $4.99, you really can’t go wrong here. Several of the heavy hitters in the gluten free/paleo world (Chris Kresser, Robb Wolf and William Davis) have praised the book. Even if you don’t think “Bacon is rad,” the tips can be effortlessly adapted to whatever change you are contemplating, with the exception of the grass-fed beef tips!
If there is one thing that I would change about this book, it is tip #3, “Remove ALL Temptation From Your House,” where it says (emphasis mine):
The easiest way to go about this is to decide on a date (tomorrow?), throw out all, and I mean all, the off-limits foods in the house (do not be stingy and worry about wasting food – it is junk that no one should be eating anyway!), and make sure you have other alternatives ready.
I can understand that a lot of us know that the stuff being thrown out is poison to us, but there are a lot of hungry people out there. I do not feel comfortable with the notion that the garbage is a better place than a food bank for this kind of thing.
I do agree that getting the bad things out of the house is great, but maybe in the next edition, the author could modify her stance to suggest donating the items that would be accepted by a food bank. Check out the AARP’s Hungry in America site for more details on how you can use your transition to a better diet to help those less fortunate. While you are at it, please consider donating Gluten Free food.
Food safety officials are increasingly finding value in plumbing shoppers’ food buying habits through these loyalty cards when they’re faced with food-borne illness outbreaks across communities and even states that seem to have no obvious links.
“It’s very helpful because it’s very hard for people to remember what they ate a couple of days before, not to mention a couple of weeks ago,” says Casey Barton Behravesh, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
From this article in USATODAY about using store club cards to track outbreaks.
This is a retroactive analysis, but imagine if we could get stores to combine that with this:
The Medication Check service by CVS (and those of other pharmacies) is great for detecting drug interactions for scripts written by different doctors (or the same dumb one!). This is a valuable service.
With this enhanced Supermarket Card, when you check out, the card could be set to warn you that you are buying something you are allergic to. You would have to tell them you are GF or CF or whatever, but if they let you set a warning preference of “put an asterisk on the receipt” or “Have cashier tell me”, it could help a lot of people avoid being glutened.
They have the technology to give you a Morningstar Farms coupon when you buy a Boca Burger, they can do this. We just have to tell them we want it.
Would you tell your supermarket you were gluten free if it meant you could get this sort of warning?
“The Mourning Period” from Lillian’s Test Kitchen.
This is so very true. My relationship with food has changed so much since the beginning of the year and I have made my peace with many of those changes. But I am still hanging on to a few things I shouldn’t.
My quixotic quest for a Gluten Free (and now Dairy Free) pizza that isn’t a glorified tomato flavored rice cracker should show that I have some work to do here.
I saw a coworker gently daub excess grease from a beautifully orange NY style slice today at lunch and about lost my mind! I really wanted a piece of a middle of the road pizza that I would have likely passed on a year ago. Running it back through my mind, I know I would trade an awful lot just to be able to eat that pedestrian pie without getting sick.
Do you have a food you are clinging to from “the before time?” Have you let go?
Getting glutened is not pleasant and can have lasting effects. When food can hurt us, we tend to pay a lot more attention to it. By using a food tracking application, like Lose It!, we can easily keep a food diary. I used to use this app for weight loss, but I have found that the features it has really help me understand what I ate and when.
Besides having a great food database, it can also scan barcodes, let you enter recipes and create custom foods. I am hoping I never get glutened again, but if I do, I think I will stand a better chance of understanding what might have done it.
Lose It! is available on iPhone and iPad and as a webapp on their site. It is free (and I was not reimbursed for this endorsement.)
I hope this can help you and would like to hear what you think. Do you use a food diary app or website?
