Kitchen Chaos

Last week was Thanksgiving and to be honest, I was dreading it a bit. I can somewhat control what goes on in my kitchen and I can limit my outside exposures. But for Thanksgiving we were going to stay with family for a week. A week where I had very little control. It went well, I did end up with some cross contamination but nothing very severe. I read that it isn't uncommon for the body to react strongly to a tiny bit of gluten to remove the gluten but for the body to sort-of shutdown in response to larger doses. I don't know. I just know I reacted strongly to a Sonic Blast that I suspect either had some pie crust or sugar cookie pieces but there was a ton of cross contamination at Thanksgiving. It is things I didn't want to mention because I hated to make things more difficult than they were already; things like the cast iron shouldn't be used, foil that covered the gluten-rolls shouldn't be used to cover the gluten free cheese bread, and I didn't bring

We just participated in our county's 4-H Food and Nutrition contest. Again. This was Daisy's 4th year and Juniors 3rd and I honestly just wasn't into it this year. It just felt rushed and we weren't able to participate as well as we would have liked. Plus some things I just didn't feel like messing with or forgot to put down. Anyway, although Daisy did well (from comments made by the judges and overheard by a friend) she didn't do well enough to win. I didn't really think she would when I saw who she was competing against. Junior on the other hand TOTALLY would have won if his age group got any sort of prize that was based on performance. Seriously, at that age a kid could say "I don't know anything about it, my mother made it, I don't even like to eat it" and still win a ribbon. Junior LOVED his dish though - since it was hummus I think a lot of the people were leery of it - this is East Texas. But Junior loves it. When he was asked

Baking is fun for me. I was 13 when I made my first loaf of bread, Mom was gone and Dad had no idea how much mess it could make. I enjoyed working with the dough, stretching and activating the gluten. It is rather ironic, isn't it. I didn't mind too much the thought of gluten-free baking. I mean how different can it be? Extremely different. Then my Dad died. And then 31 days later my husband's mother passed away. And I stopped cooking and I especially stopped baking.  I had no desire to experiment in the kitchen. At this point in our gluten-free journey, almost everything is an experiment. But finally, I am wanting to play in the kitchen. I am looking for things to surprise my family with. I am having fun in the kitchen again. I made Jowar Roti just to see how it turned out. Junior was ecstatic because they made great bean burritos. I made pumpkin hummus because Hummus is yummy and so is pumpkin. Junior made it for 4-H food competition because he liked it

A bit of background: Two years ago my sister mentioned that she was cutting the gluten out of her diet and had noticed that her headaches went away. I had looked years earlier at possibly removing wheat from my diet and there was almost nothing available (I also didn't know what I was doing and didn't really know how to cook). I thought my sister was crazy. But I had chronic headaches too. So I googled gluten-free to see what would come up and the first thing was Gluten-Free Girl's blog and after reading it a bit, I decided that maybe it wouldn't be that bad. After all, there were better options and if it would get rid of my headaches . . . . That time I wasn't able to stay gluten-free. This time I will and again Shauna James Ahern has a new cookbook out (my previous gluten-free episode was about the time her first book came out). Mikki over at Not the Perfect Housewife was having a giveaway of Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef and I won. Wow. I won. So I