Gluten-Free Time

Gluten free meal of the day:
1 Adele's sausage - chopped into half-circles
1-2 large leaf(s) of chard - torn to bits
1/3 small can of Bush's Baked Beans
1 slice cheddar cheese

Put the sausage & chard in a pan and cook (browning the sausage and wilting down the chard). If too dry add small amounts of water. Once browned add beans. Once hot add cheese to get melty. Serve.

It might be a little high in fat & calories for some people's tastes. But it is fast (5-8 min.), yummy, and anything with chard can't be that bad for you, right?

And yes, for those who haven't heard yet, I'm currently eating gluten-free. Probably forever. Sometime after Pennsic (so mid-August) I will probably eat a bite to confirm whether I react now that it's out of my system. But I think yesterday's adventures confirm that I do.

Yesterday there was some drama surrounding getting milk to put in my coffee. I have completely forsaken sweetener in my coffee and even, more dramatic and eccentric, from my chocolate beverages. So it's very important to me to have good milk to put in.

Anyway, at last, at my lunch break, I obtained milk to bring back to the office to put in my coffee. Full of blissful anticipation I took a sip. My mouth felt...strange. Kind of dry even while it was wet. Kind of tight. Well, freakish things happen to me all the time so I didn't worry overmuch. I swallowed my coffee. I had another swallow, turning my attention back to work. Except by the fourth swallow my throat was starting to throb painfully and my mouth felt even more tight and strange.

I stopped drinking the coffee, had some water and food and in time the sensation faded. Just to confirm the correlation--lest denial eat at me later--I took the coffee to the sink once I no longer had symptoms, took a mouthful and swished it around my mouth...and felt that odd tight-dry feeling returning. I rinsed my mouth and resigned myself.

You see, the thing that was different about this coffee was that we'd run out of regular so my co-worker had made Vanilla. And I'd been warned that many flavored coffees use a little gluten as part of their "natural and artificial flavorings" to help the flavor adhere to the coffee beans. The only reason I can think of why I would suddenly react to Vanilla coffee--the exact brand of Vanilla coffee I've had dozens of times before without any reaction back before I went gluten-free--is that they must in fact use gluten and I must in fact react to it.

What's interesting is that this is not at all the expected reaction. Stomach cramps, bloating, headaches, vagueness, even hormone-like emotional wonkiness...I've heard all these reactions to gluten from the gluten-intolerant. But this? Odd.

At any rate, it looks like I'd better settle in for the long haul of gluten-free living. So, recipes!

My philosophy is definitely primarily towards eating foods that never really wanted gluten to begin with. There are some exceptions. There is a gluten-free bread that's not bad for when I really really want toast (so 2 or 3 times in the last month). And I have done some substitutions. I'd been making turmeric quinoa to eat with other things and then discovered last weekend that it goes rather beautifully with fresh-made pesto. Yum.

But I've also been in a total bannocks craze. For those who are less familiar with Scottish cuisine, bannocks are oatcakes. I've been making them with combinations of bacon and/or cheese and/or pine nuts. Very tasty. Making the bacon is the most time consuming part so I may have to try them with butter or oil or some other source for the fat. Made plain, you'd really want to eat them with something else. But they are solid and filling and tasty.

You just have to make sure to use gluten-free oats. Oats don't naturally have gluten but crop rotation wisdom says that alternating oats versus wheat every other year does good things for the field productivity...and means that you get miniscule amounts of stray wheat gathered in the oats and likewise trace amounts of oats in the wheat. If you have an allergy that reacts to trace amounts of things, this can be a problem. So gluten-free oats are simply oats that are grown in fields that only grow oats (or that only grow gluten-free grains I suppose, but I think in practice they just grow oats in general). Scottish oats are often gluten-free because oats grow a lot better than wheat in the Scottish climate. But we've been getting certified gluten-free ones at the house.

I had a recipe for the bannocks at first, but we've lost it and it's become rather arbitrary.

Take quick oats. Add some fat (bacon grease is our fat of choice). And add enough hot water to stir up the oats to a dough-like consistency (the dry end of oatmeal). Add any other mix-ins you'd like (bits of bacon, grated cheese, pine-nuts etc. Or you could use a more neutral fat and go in fruity directions instead....though I've not actually tried this, wanting bannocks for meals not desert). Mix well. Take a clump of oat-dough and form it in a ball and squish it to about 1/3 inch thick. Put in pan and cook on medium heat until just begining to brown. The edges will just begin to curl up subtly. If you use non-stick pans and perhaps even if you don't you shouldn't need to grease the pan at all. Once browned, flip. The second side will brown more quickly. Repeat until you've cooked up all the dough. Eat hot or cold. Enjoy!

The original recipe called for either baking powder or baking soda. Whichever it was we used the wrong one and it didn't seem to matter so then I tried cutting it out entirely and that didn't seem to matter either. Simple is best.