Gluten-Free Dining: A tale of woe via Ruby Tuesday restaurants

Apr 172013
 

Sick from a steak and mashed potatoes….how could something that simple go so wrong?

Earlier this week I traveled to visit my mom who needed a lot of help with a big project. I arrived right around dinnertime on Sunday and we decided to go out to eat. There are very few places in Williamsport, PA that are on the findmeglutenfree.com site, and Ruby Tuesday was one of them. I’d eaten out there once before, in a different state, about 6 months ago with no ill effects.

Sunday proved to be different.

As usual I took my GlutenEase pills as a precaution, and I’m so very glad that I did. I ordered from the allergen-friendly menu; a petite sirloin, grilled zucchini, and white cheddar mashed potatoes. I informed my server that it would be best if they could please grill my steak on a piece of foil, and use clean utensils when dishing up my sides because I am highly sensitive to gluten and cross-contamination would make me very, very sick. She seemed to listen and understand. What went wrong after that, I’ll never know. Did she brush it off? Did the kitchen staff? The restaurant was not super busy. There were more empty tables than occupied ones. I made sure to be clear that I am highly-gluten-intolerant, basically allergic to it, that this isn’t just a diet. If my allergy manifested in a need for something like an Epi-pen, perhaps I’d be taken more seriously. Perhaps my complaints to the company would be taken more seriously. Thus far, I’ve been ignored.

I generally find that approaching a problem at a singular “store” gets handled the best if you start at the top down. If you just talk to the on-duty manager, no one else will know. I want this location to be aware that a customer with serious health issues asked for a few small precautions to be taken during prep and I was ignored. I want corporate to know this. I want other people to know this; therefore I gave them a bad rating on findmeglutenfree.com.  I reached out publicly on social media (Facebook) and was kinda brushed off, too. I was told to email guest services. Guess what, I’ve been ignored, there, too!!

I’ve not eaten out a lot since going gluten-free. I’ve been afraid too, but until this week I’d been ok. I asked, I was accommodated  and treated with respect. Until this week. And I spent 48 hours in hell. It would have been longer had I not taken the GlutenEase pills.  My fear of eating out is now even worse than before. My mom and I want to travel, but now I fear that, too.

ETA: I’ve never felt such a lack of give-a-crap from a company apologizing for bad service/food/etc. The Facebook rep for RT simply told me to email guestservices. It took 5 days to get a response, and the response was nothing more than “It is our desire that every time you come to one of our restaurants your stay is enjoyable.   We take food allergies very seriously at the company and we and we do regret to hear of an unsatisfactory incident. ” and claiming that they will pass it on to management at the location I visited. That’s it. I’m really sure what I expected, but somehow I just expected a little more. Their motto is apparently “Do What’s Right”, and I think they’re failing on that.

Grain-based alcohol is not as safe for Celiacs as they want you to believe!

Apr 172013
 

A few months ago, not thinking a thing of it (hence the title of my blog) I had 2 mixed drinks, an Amaretto Sours, at a bar. Just two – I’d be surprised if there was more than a full shot between the two. It honestly just simply didn’t occur to me to think before drinking liquor. I knew I couldn’t have beer but that wasn’t a big deal to me, I hate the stuff.

Many articles that I read told me that grain-based alcohols were usually ok, since the distillation process would effectively “kill” or negate the gluten. However, on places like message boards I would see a number of people disagreeing with that, sharing their stories of grain-based alcohol not agreeing with them. I’ve seen posts on other gluten-free blogs listing off which alcoholic drinks a newly diagnosed person could have, many of them saying again about the distillation process.

Tread. With. Caution.

You can either try it, or not, but if you try it then be prepared for a rough few days. I had 3.5 days of absolute hell. Emotional upheaval, exhaustion, head-to-toe extreme aches and pains, brain fog like you wouldn’t believe, stomach pains, and so on.  It was honestly one of the worse flares/reactions I’ve had yet to being “glutened”.

I had experienced this last year in August when visiting a friend; I was only 3 months in on gluten-free. I’d planned and prepared for the trip, I was very diligent with my food. So when I experienced a flare-up I chalked it up to a few nights with poor sleep and a 3.5 hour drive. Now I know that it was actually the vodka shot they had me try. Again, gluten just didn’t enter my brain when contemplating that shot. Not at all. I think that perhaps somewhere along the way I’d assumed that all vodka was made from potatoes.

So what IS truly safe alcohol for gluten-intolerants or Celiacs?

  • Potato-based vodka
  • Corn-based vodka
  • Sugarcane-based rum
  • Kahlua
  • Agave-based tequila
  • Most hard ciders (Angry Orchard, Magner’s, Crispin, Woodchuck are a few)
  • Most wines (this includes Sherry and Marsala, commonly used in cooking)

Here’s a list someone cobbled together, but not everything is on there. I know that there are other brands of Vodka that are potato or corn based and they don’t appear on the list. The latter list there also says the Smirnoff is corn-based but I cannot locate this on their website.  In fact, many websites seem to guard what their alcohol contains with an iron fist. A personal friend of mine contacted Malibu Rum, and was able to get verification by phone that the Malibu Rum is truly gluten-free and not grain-based, but when I tried to email them I was ignored.

So it looks like I’ll be re-stocking my small at-home bar with safe stuff and ditching the much loved Sky Vodka, Peach Schnapps, etc. At least I can keep my Kahlua for when I make gluten-free tiramisu! And when I go out now, I plan to stick with hard cider. I’m a lightweight drinker anyways, but the last time I went out it was to an Irish bar, and their hard cider on hand was Magner’s. For the same price as I paid a few weeks prior for a weak and tiny mixed drink, I received a 12oz (I think? It seemed big) bottle of Magner’s which lasted me longer than a friend having 3 or4 mixed drinks. And cost me a heck of a lot less.

 

Review: Namaste Gluten-Free Pizza Crust Mix

Dec 302012
 

It took me a couple months of being gluten-free before I even thought that some of my local pizza places might be able to accommodate me. Here in Connecticut, the locally owned pizzerias are king and Domino’s is not all that common. To my surprise, the pizza place literally just across the street had a gluten-free crust. When I queried about cross-contamination, the owner told me that the crusts are baked elsewhere; they arrived sealed in plastic and they are on their own aluminum disposable tray so that they don’t touch the gluten-infested brick bottom of the oven. He told me that they prep the pizzas in a different area than the usual. I didn’t get sick, but I wasn’t entirely happy. Sure, the first two times I was just thrilled to be able to order a lazy dinner and the wood-fired oven made the chicken bits on my pizza make up for the odd-tasting paper-thin crust.

But then the toppings no longer made up for the ultra-thin sour-tasting bland crust. The last two times I’ve ordered from there, the toppings appeared to be hastily thrown on and weren’t even. It simply wasn’t worth even half of the exorbitant amount being charged. And so I decided to ask my family for a pizza pan and stone for Christmas. Thanks to Savorfull and Tasterie, I have a few pizza crust mixes waiting in the pantry. I happened to grab the Namaste brand mix first.

The directions do warn you that it will resemble cake batter moreso than the dough your gluten-self remembered, and they tell you to spread it out to 14″ on a pizza pan. They do not, however, tell you HOW to go about this daunting task, for the the “dough” is sticky yet batter-y and it resembles a plate of mashed potatoes. My first attempt had the peaks and twirls of a casually frosted cake and I worried about it until I transferred it to the stone with my homemade sauce and some cheese. While the crust came out looking a lot more dry than a traditional gluten counterpart, I shouldn’t have worried. It was very crispy on the outside yet lovely and chewy on the inside and boy did it expand!

 

My second attempt went a little better. I grabbed my nearest soft silicone spatula and coated it heavily in olive oil. This helped me to further spread out the dough and trowel down those Dairy-Queen-esque peaks. Since I had somehow screwed up the measurements of the first crust (it being smaller than it should have) the second crust was bigger than I expected. I think. I sadly couldn’t locate a simple ruler so I’m not sure if I should have spread it out more to equal 14″ or what. I thought I’d done so well enough and that I would have a slightly thinner crust, but it still nearly doubled in height. If thin, cracker-like crusts are your style, you might want to skip this mix. I don’t see how I’d ever be able to mimic the crusts from the pizza place across the street – but I personally don’t want to, either. While I’d once enjoyed in the past a thin, crunchy crust, the inability of the thin packaged crust to retain a crunch other than the tooth-destroying edge has put me off of that endeavor for gluten-free pizza crusts. Instead I’m just going to be happy that I have something that my picky husband will eat and enjoy. The outside of the crust is very crunchy and dry-looking, but the chewy inside made it all okay. The package says that you can make pizza breadsticks with this, too, but the consistency of the outer crust isn’t what I think of when I think breadsticks like the kind you get at pizza places, with a little garlic and cheese melted on. True, Italian breadsticks though, yes as those are very crunchy and dry. But I don’t know how you’d mimic the rope of dough for that style.

Edit: Apparently, I didn’t measure very well the first two times I made this. The second time I decided to be more precise, and so I measured out by the gram to get exactly half of the mix. I added the exact amount of water…..and found that my resulting batter was a lot wetter than the first two batches. In fact, it was also less sticky this way, and a lot easier to spread out on the pizza tray. Unfortunately, I’ve found that I don’t like it this way! The crust was thinner but I wasn’t really able to get it to crisp up. It was less cripsy-chewy and just…standard meh slightly soggy crust. When I was mixing up those first two batches, the batter was more dough-like, albeit harder to mix: the batter kept clumping up on the mixer blades and climbing up. A tiny more water added fixed that. So my recommendation is to back off a little bit on the water by perhaps as much as a 1/4 cup.

Namaste’s Gluten Free Pizza Crust mix will make two lightly-seasoned 14″ crusts. All in all you’ve got about 3/4 of an hour until your pizza will be ready from start to finish. Baking the raw dough takes around 20 minutes or so, and then add your toppings and bake for another 8-10 minutes. I let my finished pizza cool off a few minutes right on the stone. The bottom of the crust wasn’t soggy, but it wasn’t exactly crisp, either. There is no rising time since there is no yeast but boy does it puff up something wonderful anyways! The Bob’s Red Mill pizza mix does require rising time since it contains yeast, so I would think that this mix is a little easier. My next attempt I will make sure that I’m spreading the dough out to a proper size. Of course, the current “Sicilian Style” crust isn’t bad!

Harry and David is NOT Allergen friendly!

Dec 272012
 

While I was browsing around for decent (read: not overpriced) fruit baskets for my in-laws, I gravitated back towards Harry and David, whom I’d ordered from a few years in the past. However, I see things through new eyes these days. Apparently, Harry and David used to have a small line of gluten-free cookies and brownies a couple years ago, but other bloggers reported that they were discontinued suddenly. never to be brought back. Lack of sales? Too much ppm of gluten? Who knows.

But recently I wasn’t looking there for gluten-free baked goods, I just simply wanted to know if their chocolates would be gluten-free. I recently looked at the ingredients list of a bag of Lindor Truffles my husband got, surprised (yes I still get surprised) to see barley malt something-or-other in the list of ingredients, but gluten was not listed in the “Allergens” line that mentioned milk. I searched the web for “Harry and David Gluten Free” and came up with mostly people talking a few years ago about their short-lived line of products, and I saw this line in the FAQ:

……Seriously? Yeah. There are no ingredients to be found on their website. I most certainly will NOT waste money to just “wait and see” and read the label when I get it.

My spidey sense says not to trust this company.  I’ve posted on their Facebook page about this, I’ll see if they respond.

Is it truly impossible to have a “split gluten” household?

Dec 272012
 

I was browsing blogs again and happened upon the “New to the GF Lifestyle” page of delightfullyglutenfree.com, which says this (something I’ve heard before):

Here are some variations that work for different families:

  1. Completely Gluten-Free House
  2. Mostly Gluten-Free, except for gluten bread (and a few items) and a toaster somewhere else (i.e. basement or garage)
  3. Half and Half (but no gluten baking). This generally requires 2 sets of meals to be made, different pans and utensils (and colanders and cutting boards), different condiment jars. This is really hard on the main cook (and can be on everyone else, too). Honestly, it’s not worth it.
  4. Gluten Everything Allowed. This can be hazardous to your health. Flour gets in the air, and can stay up to 2 days. It floats down and lands on whatever it darn well pleases. It is nearly impossible to not ingest gluten when you are constantly in this situation.

We’re currently doing #3 I guess. The author says it isn’t worth it. I say “My husband very much dislikes GF pasta and will not give up his Little Debbies” and frankly I don’t want him to be unhappy. Why should I force him away from tons of foods that he loves? Now, I don’t have Celiac (or at least I don’t think so, but I am very gluten-intolerant) so perhaps it’s not as crucial for me?

There is still gluten flour in the house and gluten baking mixes, but they haven’t been brought out since I went off gluten 7 months ago. My husband and I have talked about it at length and he’d like to be able to bake himself brownies or cookies (one of the very few things he can do himself in the kitchen) but will do it when I’m out of town. He says that he will be very careful, and will thoroughly clean the place when he is done. It still makes me worry, but I will allow it and see how it goes after that first time.

Do we have 2 sets of everything? Working on it. For the first few months, I would wash the plastic colander in the dishwasher in between uses, and then strain my pasta before his. Then I purchased my own colander. For Christmas I got my own toaster finally; for the last month and a half I’ve been using either toaster bags or the stupid toaster oven, which I hate. Yes….you read that right. For my first 4 months gluten-free, I was using the old toaster. I know. This is why my site is named what it is!! Also for Christmas I now have another set of cutting boards, and I have 1 stainless steel pot and 1 non-stick pot both for cooking my GF pastas and polenta and nothing more. The old pots and pans were contaminated, I was told, if they were scratched at all (which they were, mildly). I have 2 pasta forks.

We don’t have kids. Perhaps this is a factor for the “split gluten” working out ok? My husband isn’t big into bread; but when we do have hamburgers, I ask him to get his bun out of the bag (or I put on nitrile gloves). When he eats his Little Debbie cakes (a thrice-daily occurence sometimes), he is mindful of the crumbs. He can pay attention to detail a hell of a lot better than I, which is a great thing!! He truly dislikes the gluten-free pastas. He has tried them as I’ve tried them and genuinely doesn’t want to eat them. Since pasta is a big staple for us, I just make two pots. I’m careful. However, there are gluten-free things that he’ll tolerate and I’ve switched over 100% to. Using GF flour to thicken sauces and soups; gluten-free breadcrumbs; gluten-free cornbread mixes, etc. I would be the first to notice (since I was so heavily addicted before to cakes/breads/pastas/etc) if an item is way off taste/texture wise from the gluten counterpart; despite me genuinely liking certain cake/brownies, he can tell the difference right away and doesn’t really like it.

I guess I just wish that people wouldn’t be so dismissive of this choice, and push so hard for the entire family to be gluten-free. Would that be easier? SURE. But if he’s unhappy with his food, then I’m not happy. And plus, gluten-free versions are always 2-4 times the cost of “regular” so I’m also saving money.

Gluten- and Allergen-Free Monthly Subscription Boxes Review – GFreely

Dec 162012
 

I’ve tried out the three gluten-free monthly subscription boxes in an effort to find new foods. Gfreely, Tasterie, and Savorfull are the three I’ve found.

I only received 1 month of Gfreely, but quickly decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. At $25, it was the most pricey of the three boxes. The box I received (August) was very heavy on snack food items, and Gfreely is only gluten-free. At the time I was dairy and soy-free, but those were not options for the boxes so I was unable to eat a number of products.  While there were a lot of food options, I simply wasn’t able to eat many of them. The August GFreely box contained:

So while this was a lot of food….it was heavy on the soy, and frankly I didn’t like half of the stuff. I ended up tossing the weird Half Pops, giving away the edamame, Matt’s Munchies and Way Better chips. I liked the cookie and the MacroBar; I tried the Kay’s Pretzel Sticks because they were cinnamon-sugar and while they were tasty, it was very heavy on the soy so I couldn’t finish it. I shouldn’t have eaten the GF Mac n Cheese cup, but I had a weakness. It wasn’t worth the dip into dairy-land, it was about on par with Kraft Mac n Cheese. I am a picky eater, though. At least there wasn’t any items from Enjoy Life, a brand that Savorfull seems to favor, and a brand I absolutely hate.

I would consider giving this box another try, once I’m done with my prematurely-bought 6-month Savorfull subscription, as I’ve seen other reviews showing food items I might prefer, but the fact that I cannot choose no dairy or soy is a big deal to me.

Thanksgiving scares the crap out of me!

Nov 152012
 

Last year my only worries about the holidays were in trying to reign in my over-eating. This year I’m not at all worried about “cheating” on my diet. I’m terrified of getting sick from cross-contamination.

I’ve researched a whole bunch of “remedies” for being glutened. I’ve recently seen a naturopathic doctor who I was able to question about the things I’ve read like charcoal pills (she didn’t think that would be necessary). She did, however, clear up a misconception I’d been seeing all over the place: The digestive enzymes will not do you any good if they’re taken on their (with no food) or with food that has no gluten. I’ve read where people take the enzymes with a meal that has a decent risk for cross-contamination and then continue to take more enzyme pills later on and into the next day. Apparently, this is a waste of money.

My ways of dealing with my first gluten-free holiday so far are:

~ I’m bringing my own special no-gluten colander

~ I’m bringing a brand new sponge, for cleaning up my gluten-free dishes and to prevent gluten from being swiped everywhere

~ I’m going to try my hand at making my own gluten-free gravy, one that will fool everyone so that I can prevent wheat flour from floating around like a virus in the air

~ I’m stopping at a local gluten-free bakery the day before and buying a premade GF pumpkin pie, along with gf stuffing.

~ I’ll bring things with me like my own bread, breadcrumbs…heck I’ll even bring my own tub of my Earth Balance and my own mayo (to prevent the cross-contamination from knives)

~ I wrote up an email to the key players in the two dinners I’ll be attending (including my mother!) to let them know about how sick I can get, what needs to be done by them and what I will be doing.

I’m hoping that I never hear the skepticism and the “a little bit won’t kill you” and such. If I do…I might just snap.

‘Idiot’ Moment of the Week #1

Nov 112012
 

While I do try my best to be dairy-free as much as possible, there are times when it’s just simply necessary or vastly more convenient to have a little dairy. It doesn’t cause the “allergic” reaction in me like gluten does; so far as I can tell I will just feel a little congested (more if I had ice cream, much less if I had real cream in coffee).

Since it is very difficult to easily keep on hand my coconut-milk-based coffee creamer because only the health food stores stock it, sometimes I run out. Sometimes, I’m on the road and this coconut-milk creamer doesn’t exactly travel well. So I get coffee from Dunkin Donuts because, unlike say McDonald’s, I know that DD uses truly only plain cream and sugar if that is what I ask for.

It honestly did not occur to me until this week, during my 6th month, how incredibly risky it is to get my coffee from a place that SERVES PRIMARILY GLUTEN. At this point with me, all it takes is for the employee to have recently touched the bread or donuts they have there and then use that same hand to put the lid on my coffee. That’s it. I chalked up my previous bouts of malaise due to overconsumption of coffee, or perhaps it was too strong for me.

It also *never* occurred to me that a flavored coffee might contain gluten. This summer I had a couple of their Butter Pecan flavored iced coffees. I don’t recall if I felt sick after, and I can’t look it up now (since the flavor was only temporary) but there’s a good chance it had some gluten somewhere in it.

I guess I’ll be getting my road-coffee from gas station type places where it’s self serve, from now on.

Brown Rice Pasta Review – Bionaturae, Tinkyada and Trader Joe’s

Nov 102012
 

My first experience with GF pasta was that I chose the only brand on Peapod, Tinkyada. I picked penne because it works well for numerous applications in our house. I was so peeved when it cooked up to actually be ziti. As an adopted Italian, you don’t try to bait-and-switch pasta shapes on me. Ziti has no texture and is used far less than penne. Penne has a texture to it; it grips the sauce or even just butter and cheese.

Also when I first opened up the bag of Tinkyada brown rice “penne”, I was hit with an odor that immediately made me think “latex wall paint”. Yum, right?

Browsing blogs and talking to other people led me to try new brands. I really wanted to try Jovial’s GF pasta because it was so highly recommended by Gluten Free Girl, but I couldn’t find it in my stores. So I bought one brand recommended by a friend, and another brand that I’d purchased their pasta before and loved it (regular pasta).

 

Pastas shown below from left to right all photos are: Bionaturae Fussili, Tinkyada Penne, Trader Joe’s Fusilli

Brown Rice Gluten-Free Pastas: Bionaturae, Tinkyada and Trader Joe (L to R)

The Bionaturae was the closest to regular pasta in look and feel, but it had a slight bit of an aftertaste that I didn’t prefer. However, when paired with a hearty sauce (or dressing, for pasta salad) you wouldn’t notice. Bag says cook for 10 minutes and I think I cooked it for 9.5, turned out great.

In the middle is the Tinkyada. Ick. The bag says cook for 15. The first time I cooked it I did, and it was too mushy. The second time (shown here) I cooked it for 13. STILL too mushy. Slight aftertaste and really slippery and just not right. It’s the only one you’re supposed to rinse, and I did rinse.

To the right is Trader Joe’s. It says to cook for 7-10 minutes, I chose 9 and that seems to be too much. It was a little overdone. However, it had the best taste and no aftertaste.

If you want people not to know that it’s a GF pasta and you have a fairly flavorful sauce, use the Bionaturae. I would have to try a “less slimy” pasta shape than their ziti/penne, but the Tinkyada so far isn’t something I’d buy again.

Of course, the Bionaturae is more than just brown rice. It also has potato starch and soy flour. Some people might want to avoid it. Maybe it is the “rice bran” in the Tinkyada that contributes to the bizarre texture and smell?

In the end though, after trying to like the brown rice pastas I moved on to corn-based and much prefer those.

Gluten Free – 6 months

Nov 102012
 

It’s been about 6 months now and I’m still finding little ways where I am getting cross-contamination which leads to a low-grade icky feeling sometimes. Sometimes it’s my own fault, sometimes it is unavoidable.

While Mcdonald’s may claim that their fries are done up in a dedicated fryer, separate from the breaded items…you just can’t always count on the young kids who work there to understand why this is important. Or maybe I had someone handling the fries who handled a bun without gloves…who knows. All I know is that last week I had fries from there and I was in the bathroom 20 minutes later.

That’s another thing that has changed for me. My sensitivity levels are higher now and I can tell I’ve been “glutened” much sooner than 3 months in. I’ll get stomach and/or intestinal cramps that half the time accompany diarrhea. This is not as bad as I’ve seen others describe so who knows if it will get worse or not as time goes on. I had a salad from the pizza place across the street, a few weeks ago, thinking that as long as I told them that I couldn’t have gluten and therefore please don’t put croutons on it I was ok. I was not. I have had their gluten-free pizza (which I was assured is prepared according to proper cross-contamination guidelines, in a separate area) and I was okay, but the chef salad was another matter. Airborne flour? Non-gloved handling of food items? Who knows. I was sick within a half hour though.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up, and I dread it. I’m currently on a mission to make a gluten-free gravy that every picky eater in the family will eat so that I don’t have to worry about airborne flour in my mom’s kitchen that day.

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