March 18, 2019

The low-carb-low-sugar life

Going gluten free was WAY easier than this latest iteration of eating of cutting out sugar and way down on carbs. We searched out a few GF substitutes for my usual favorites and called it a day.

Cutting out sugar and drastically reducing carbs is a lot harder.

I started this journey last year and after six weeks of experimenting with a gluten free diet, I wasn’t getting concrete results. If gluten was my problem, cutting it out should have definitively decreased pain. Instead, it seemed, mmm, iffy. I sort of hurt less, but it was really hard to quantify. When my friend separately suggested I give her no-sugar thing a try, I figured it was worth a try too because really, why not? It couldn’t hurt. Besides, as my doctor said: whatever the reason, reducing processed sugars is always a good thing.

We started with increasing vegetable intake on the theory that would be better than starting by taking all the tasty foods away and languishing with boiled eggs and cheese left on the menu. Not that I’d ever turn my nose up at cheese, I love it, I could eat it at every meal. (I probably shouldn’t.)

As we made the changeover, the results were almost immediate. I had my first low-pain day in years. Then another. I literally had trouble identifying what I felt was different because it was an absence of teeth-clenching pain. (more…)

November 28, 2018

The evolution of our diet

PiC and I grew up eating tv dinners, fast food from McDonald’s and the like, and all kinds of other junk food. I still have a nostalgic yearning for those Jeno’s frozen pizzas, we used to buy a huge stack of them at a time for $1 each. Or the cheap Chinese takeout from the place across the street from high school, we’d swing by there on the way home and for $5 fill up our tanks to the brim with the veggie medley, orange chicken and chow mein. (I miss chow mein.)

It was cheap easy sustenance, if not quite nutritious. We both had parents who worked away from the home and while my mom cooked hot dinners for us every night (in addition to working 15 hour days, thanks for the help Dad) we were mostly on our own during the day once we could be trusted to be home alone.

I learned to cook basics very early – rice in the rice cooker by 4 or 5, boil water for hot tea and ramen, scrambled eggs or eggs over easy on the stovetop by 6 or 7. The frozen food life started in our preteens and my addiction to boxed cake mix started right around then as well. As a teenager, my Saturday (late) morning breakfast treat to myself was a fry-up: french toast, scrambled eggs, whatever else that could be fried. The idea NOW makes my stomach turn a little bit because I remember how much grease was in there!

PiC started on a healthy food kick in his mid 20s, and my acquiesance to the whole thing started in my late 20s, so now we’re largely a healthy foods family. That’s not to say that our diet is totally boring, it’s not! At least it’s not because of choosing to be healthier. For that, I just find ways to reduce saturated fats and increase vitamins, minerals, and other good things for a balanced diet. It IS boring in that I rotate the same 20-30 recipes depending on what I can think of and what’s in season. (more…)

September 5, 2018

Gluten Free Living, Months 4 and 5

Month 4!

I didn’t get creative this month with food, travel logistics ate my brain, but my family did. For our trip to SDCC, my beloved Mama S made me so much good food, adapting my favorites to a GF version. She’s the best.

This was a very baking month. I turned out a few versions of rolled oat and peanut butter cookies. They’re still not quite right, they come out too flat and nearly crispy. I hate crispy cookies. Chewy is the goal! Next round, I’ll sub in powdered sugar for the granulated sugar and refrigerate the dough before baking to see if that helps.

Do you suppose reducing sugar in a cookie recipe without any substitutions would be dreadful?  If the recipe also has peanut butter and chocolate chips, it feels like a 25% reduction in sugar should be safe.

It was also Muffin Month. I bake like I work, I do what I feel like when I feel like it. And July felt like a muffin month so I baked as much as I could and froze the rest against a month when more cooking than baking was happening. It’s my version of making hay while the sun shines – when there’s energy and willingness to bake, roll with it.

Month 5!

Meatloaf! This was my first meatloaf since going GF and I substituted ground up rolled oats for the breadcrumbs. It was a little softer than usual, probably because I used a giant zucchini instead of a small one like usual, so I’ll double the breadcrumbs and reduce the zucchini next time.

Coconut curry (from a packet). We picked up a GF curry packet at Sprouts and combined that with my sauteed chicken thighs, cubed potatoes, and sliced carrots. We usually don’t like cooked carrots much but JB especially requested them.

Roasted pork log. I don’t remember which part of the pork this was but I slow roasted it at only 275 degrees with garlic, sadly we were out of pesto or it would have been covered in that, and we ate it for daaaaays with rice and veggies on the side. Later, the second and third pork roasts I made were slow roasted with pesto, for 3-4 hours, and it was perfection. I’m not making it any other way again!

Pork turned into enchiladas. PiC was perfectly happy eating the pork as is but I decided not to push my luck and transformed the leftovers. He was skeptical the first time I pondered this aloud but as is almost usual when it comes to experimenting in the kitchen, my idea panned out. I made red and green sauce enchiladas in the same pan because each packet only makes 4-5 enchiladas but our casserole dish holds at least 10-12. Leftovers!

Shrimp and cheesy grits.  I finally perfected the water to grits ratio (3 cups water to 1.25 cups of grits) when I’m also adding lots of mozzarella cheese, and cooked it all on low. We get our large shrimp frozen on sale from Sprouts for $7/lb every so often and I grill those babies right before serving dinner. This was a hit – so much so that JB ate all the shrimp that we adults didn’t eat, and nearly all the grits as well.

Speaking of perfecting ratios and recipes, I’m not there yet with zucchini but they’re back on our dinner table and not just hidden in pasta sauces, muffins, and cake. It turns out, when done well, we all like it. The problem is the darn things go from not cooked to over-roasted in some mysterious and mystical way that has no relation to temperature, cook time, or cut size. It’s driving me up the wall but also got my attention in a way that no vegetable has since we discovered brussels sprouts and bacon are a winning combination. For the moment. Update: 7 minutes at 400 degrees seems to be doing the trick as long as the quartered slices were big enough. My store bought zucchini has also been going into several rounds of a modified lower sugar version of Erin’s chocolate cake.

July 4, 2018

Gluten Free Living, Month 3

I left off the weekly updates after the first six weeks of the trial but I’m going to keep on with a few monthly reports for posterity and discussion.

Meal winners

• Rice pasta with ground turkey, marinara sauce, topped with mozzarella. Broccoli on the side.
• Coconut rice and baked tilapia
• Chicken and tofu masala, coconut rice. Palak paneer and lamb curry from a box on the side.
• White corn tortilla quesadillas – ALL HAIL white corn tortillas! Soft like flour tortillas but none of the gluten.
• Turkey and cheese enchiladas for dinner. The sauce packet says to make four, I made 15. It stretched!
• Gluten free three cheese pizza crust topped with fresh red bell peppers, sweet Vidalia onions, 1/3 lbs of sweet Italian sausage. And of course sauce (from a jar this time) and shredded mozzarella (bought in bulk from Costco). Pretty darn good!
• CPK’s cauliflower crust pizza, though not at all economical, was pretty good too.
• Herbed butter chicken thighs, garlic mashed potatoes, elote.
• Grilled pork loin chops, pan fried cauliflower with a touch of salt, garlic mashed potatoes.
• Cottage pie with sour cream mashed potatoes, and mozzarella on top

Meal losers

Nothing this time! Those horrible snickerdoodles are finally done and gone though. Thank goodness. The Trader Joe’s snickerdoodles are a little bit better but still not really winners for my palate. The Trader Joe’s fake Oreos are even worse than the snickerdoodles by a small margin.

(more…)

May 23, 2018

6 weeks of gluten free living: Week 6

Week 6

Here are Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, and Week 5

This is the last week of this food diary, and I think I’m really starting to see a difference in my baseline pain.

As Court mentioned, it does seem like my original estimate of two weeks for the de-glutening was really too short. It feels as though this entire six weeks has been necessary to get it out of my system. It could also be because it took me a few weeks to do things like avoiding cross contamination and cooking in entirely separate dishes and so on. Now I’m wondering how to make this more sustainable.

I do want to (very carefully) bake up several batches of healthy breakfast muffins for PiC and JB to have on hand, thus using up the wheat flour, before I start experimenting with alternative baking bases, and get back into the habit of baking and cooking in a GF-friendly way without having to expend a ton of thought and energy on the process. (more…)