The End of the GF Trail Mix

The Great Gluten-free Diet Experiment has come to an end.  I had intended for it to run to the end of June, but I've been at it for five weeks and I decided late this past week that it had gone on long enough.  I started eating gluten free because I have had some symptoms over the last three years or so that haven't been relieved by anything that my doctor has suggested.  Then I met someone who had had the same set of symptoms who told me that her condition had improved greatly when she cut gluten out of her diet, even though she had tested negatively for a gluten allergy.  So I decided to cut gluten out of my own diet for a month or so to see if it had the same effect on me.

After a five-week trial I have noticed not one iota of difference in the way I feel.  Some might say that makes the experiment a failure, but I declare it a success.  I accomplished my purpose of determining whether eating a GF diet would help me.  The answer is that it would not.  So I can be confidant that something other than a gluten allergy is the cause of my symptoms. 

I have mixed emotions about the result of the experiment.  It would have been nice to have some relief of my symptoms, even though they are mostly just annoying and not life-threatening, but there were so many downsides to eating gluten free that I'm kind of relieved that I don't have an allergic reaction to gluten.  Most of the prepared GF foods that we tried were inferior to the non-GF alternatives.  To be sure my wife was able to cook tasty GF meals at home, but even eating a GF sandwich was a disappointing experience, mostly because of the tendency of GF bread products to be dense and largely tasteless and to crumble when they come in contact with condiments.  That was even more disappointing if I decided to wash the sandwich down with a beer because I wasn't able to find much in the way of variety in the GF beers I tried and the taste was different enough from other beers I have had that it was more like I was substituting something entirely different rather than just another variety of beer.

It was pretty expensive to eat a GF diet, especially since my wife and I like to eat lunch out frequently.  We weren't able to eat at a lot of the restaurants for which we have BOGO coupons, so we had to pay full price for two meals instead of one.  In addition, the GF meals were more expensive to begin with and the restaurants that served them were often more expensive than the those where we usually eat.  So the net was that eating a GF diet made us cut back significantly on eating out.

Eating gluten free put a real crimp in our day tripping as well because a lot of the places we like to visit are small towns that don't have much, if any, GF options for meals.  So during the course of the GF experiment we've stayed home a lot more than we normally do.

We still have a supply of GF food in the larder and, rather than waste it, we are still eating it.  We have begun to work some non-GF stuff back into our menus, though, and over the past couple of days we've started using the BOGO coupons again.  I think we have eaten at three non-GF places on BOGOs in the last two days.  That's more than we usually do, but Ellie has been champing at the bit to get back to our normal routine.  This morning she has been looking through the adventure book with dreamy eyes, so I see a day trip or maybe a weekender in the near future.  Works for me.

Gluten Free Goodies

It has been nearly five weeks since I started eating gluten free and one thing I have observed is that it is a lot more expensive than eating my normal diet.  I've mentioned in previous posts that eating GF in restaurants is more costly than eating “normal” food.  I've discovered that it is a lot easier and less expensive to eat GF at home, but it is more expensive than eating non-GF food at home.  I've also found that a lot of the GF food items are not real tasty.  So today I'm going to review some of the store-bought GF items I've tried and give my impression of them.

The good news is that a lot of the things that I normally eat are gluten free.  My wife and I eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables and they are all gluten free.  So if you're a fruit and veggie fan and you do your own cooking, you can eat GF pretty inexpensively if you use fresh produce and avoid processed foods.  Some processed foods are inherently gluten free too.  That includes some of the things that I normally eat, such as  Yoplait fat free yogurt.  So I was able to continue eating those things.  Gluten does show up in some things that I wouldn't have thought would have it though.  For example, my favorite mustard contains gluten.  So it was on the no-no list.

Here are some of the GF foods that my wife and I have tried:

Since I'm pretty much a beerophile, I'll cover that first.  I've only tried two GF beers.  Both of them are sorghum-based.  The first one I sampled was Anheiser-Busch's Redbridge.  It wasn't bad.  In fact I think it was better tasting than some of their beers that contain gluten.  It is a little more expensive than things like Bud Light, but about the same price as what I pay for the beers that I normally drink.  The other GF beer I tried is Bard's, which received good reviews on some of the Internet sites that I searched.  I found it to be a lot more robust than Redbridge but it has a strong, sort of molasses, taste that takes some getting used to.  It's pretty good once you get used to it though.  In our area Bard's is harder to find than Redbridge.

If you're going to drink beer then you've got to have some snacks to go with it, right?  So I tried a wide variety of GF snack foods.  Chips are kind of a traditional beer munchie and I was glad to find that my favorite chips, Fritos, don't list any ingredients that appear to contain gluten, although the package doesn't specifically say that they are gluten free.  I figured no gluten news is good news, so I ate 'em.  Some chips, like Kettle and Boulder Canyon potato chips are labeled gluten free.  Boulder Canyon also makes several types of rice and adzuki bean chips, which I had never eaten before but which are really tasty.  I'd eat them again even if I wasn't on a gluten free diet.  If adzuki beans aren't exotic enough for you, try Arico Natural Foods' CrispRoot cassava root chips.  Good stuff.

Of course sometimes you need sweet snacks.  I tried quite a few of those.  I really liked Immaculate Baking Co.'s Chocolate Chunk cookies.  They come as little dough balls that you have to bake yourself but they are good enough that you can't tell that they are gluten free.  Enjoy Life's Lively Lemon and Gingerbread Spice cookies are already baked, soft cookies.  They're not bad but IMHO they aren't as good as the Immaculate Baking Co. cookies.  Lucy's Cinnamon Thins remind me of Pecan Sandies without the pecans.  I also tried vanilla cream sandwich cookies from  KinniToo.  I wasn't crazy about those.  They're so sweet that they made every orifice on my body pucker up when I ate them.  I wouldn't buy them again.  We also tried some kind of cookie from Pamela's Products.  I don't remember the flavor but I do remember that they were good.

For a healthier snack I tried several flavors of GF granola from Udi's Gluten Free Foods.  To be honest, I mostly ate them for breakfast on top of yogurt rather than as a snack.  They were good though.  I also ate Enjoy Life's Cinnamon Crunch Granola for breakfast rather than a snack.  It was good, although I kicked it up a notch with some dried fruit and walnuts.   I tried scads of GF breakfast/cereal/energy bars from Enjoy Life, Soyjoy and Larabar, among others, and liked all of them pretty well.

I like hummus and, while most of the hummus I've run across doesn't specifically claim to be gluten free, I couldn't find any ingredients listed that looked as though they had gluten in them.  So I ate hummus on Mary's Gone Crackers Original crackers as well as Crunchmaster's Multi-Seed crackers and Rice crackers.  I liked all of them.

I guess I mentioned some breakfast stuff above.  That was one area where I was sort of unhappy with the GF choices that I tried.  If I'm going to have cereal for breakfast I usually eat Post Great Grains Raisons, Dates and Pecans and kick it up several notches by adding walnuts and dried and fresh fruit.  Even after adding the fruit and walnuts to the GF cereals that I tried, they paled in comparison to my usual breakfast cereal.  In addition to the Enjoy Life granola I mentioned above I tried Rice Chex (muy bland) and Barbara's Peanut Butter & Chocolate Puffins (not as bland as Rice Chex but none too exciting).  Another GF breakfast thing my old girl and I tried was Pamela's Baking and Pancake Mix.  My wife made pancakes with it and they were good, although she had to add some GF Bisquick to the mix because we only had a sample packet and it didn't make as many pancakes as we needed.  She also added some walnuts and dried cranberries.  Tasty.  I don't usually eat frozen waffles but I tried Van's frozen GF toaster waffles and they are as good as non-GF toaster waffles.

My wife has made a lot of GF meals from scratch but occasionally we like to have a frozen entree for dinner.  In general they cost two to three times as much as a comparable non-GF entree.  However, I have tried several Amy's frozen GF entrees, which are priced about the same as non-GF entrees at our local supermarket, and they were great.  This is another one of those things that I would eat even if I wasn't on a GF diet.  My favorite is Black Bean Tamale Verde. In the "not frozen entree but not made from scratch either" category we liked San Gennaro GF Polenta with sun-dried tomatoes and garlic.  We eat a lot of pasta and were worried that we'd have to give that up for the duration of the GF experiment.  Fortunately there seem to be quite a few brands of GF pasta to choose from so we were able to substitute that for our usual pasta.  The only GF pasta we tried was Schar Multigrain Penne Rigate.  It wasn't quite as tasty as the whole wheat pasta that we usually eat and it was a lot chewier, but it wasn't bad.

Next to beer the GF food that has been the biggest disappointment to me has been bread and bread-like products (bagels, English muffins, etc.).  After one bite my wife decided to stick with her non-GF bread so I got to be the lone guinea pig on this one.  Most of the GF bread products that I tried were not very tasty and they were usually quite dense.  Also, almost all of them fell apart when any liquid touched them, which made a real problem for me, since I am the king of condiments and like to slather my sandwiches with all kinds of relishes and load them up with pickled veggies of myriad types and tastes.  I had bad sandwich experiences with multi-grain bread from GNI and locally purchased buckwheat bread from a woman who bills herself as The Gluten Free Queen.  Both of those breads worked OK as toast with peanut butter or jelly on it, which they both needed because they were not too tasty without it.  The best GF sandwich bread from a more or less national company that I have found is Rudi's Multi-Grain bread.  It not only holds up better in sandwiches, but also tastes better than the two I mentioned previously.  The absolutely best GF bread I have found by far is a rosemary focaccia bread that we picked up in a local GF restaurant called the Wildwood Art Cafe.  It holds up well in a sandwich and tastes like non-GF artisan bread.  Two thumbs up on that one.  My wife tried baking some GF bread at home.  She used Bob's Red Mill GF Cinnamon Raisin Bread Mix.  It wasn't bad, but it suffered from the same texture and taste problems as most of the rest of the GF breads we tried.  It was OK toasted with a little organic apple butter on it though.  Although we often have sandwiches for lunch, we tend to eat more wraps than sandwiches at our house.  Most of the time we use burrito-size Smart & Delicious whole wheat and oat tortillas from La Tortilla Factory to make them.  When I decided to go gluten free our first thought was that we would just substitute corn tortillas for a GF wrap, but we couldn't find any that were big enough.  Eventually we bought some wrap-size Food for Life brown rice tortillas.  They tasted fine but had a tendency to break up when we used anything with any liquid on them.  See the item about the king of condiments above.

I like peanut butter so I used that to make the GF breads a little more palatable.  I had checked out the ingredients in my favorite PB, Jif  Reduced Fat Creamy, and didn't see anything that looked as though it would have gluten in it.  Never-the-less I decided to try a GF peanut butter.  The one I chose was Earth Balance Creamy, No Stir, Natural Peanut Butter with Flaxseed.  I was pretty happy with it.  It was tasty, smooth and creamy and it didn't separate in the jar.  The only negative thing I could say about it is that it has more fat than my regular peanut butter.

We tried more GF foods than I've documented here but these foods illustrate the spectrum of pre-packaged GF foods available at our local supermarket and at places like Sprouts and Natural Grocer.  My overall impression is that GF foods are more expensive than the equivalent non-GF foods and, with some notable exceptions, not as tasty.  There is a wide variety of them, however, and someone with celiac disease or a serious gluten allergy should be able to find a GF substitute for any food they are used to.  Given the large number of people who are alleged to have some degree of gluten allergy, my guess is that the variety and quality of GF foods will only improve.  Hopefully the price will come down as well.

Out on the GF Town

My wife and I tend to eat lunch out fairly often so over the last four weeks that I've been on a gluten-free diet we've had the chance to try several restaurants, some of them local to the central Texas area and some nationwide chains.  So I thought I'd let you know my view of the situation with them, GF-wise.  I'm naming names here so I'll preface all this by saying that everything in this article is my own personal opinion and, especially in the case of chain restaurants, is based on our experience at the location where we ate.  Other locations of the same chain might be different.

The first place we tried to eat gluten-free was the Monument Cafe in Georgetown, Texas.  This local restaurant has a real healthy food focus, growing many of their own herbs and veggies in plots that surround the restaurant.  Their landscaping runs to native and other xeriscape plants and they seem to be tuned into all the minimum footprint, healthy diet stuff.  So we expected them to be all up on GF diets.  Just shows to go ya how things aren't always what you would expect them to be.  When we told the hostess that we needed a GF menu, she said that our waiter could tell us everything we needed to know.  That was an overstatement.   In truth, the restaurant seemed to have no dedicated GF support and we were not given a GF menu.  The waiter wasn't ignorant of GF diets but neither was he tremendously knowledgeable of the restaurant's GF choices.  He sort of pointed out GF foods on the menu and had to go to the kitchen to answer some questions we had. This made it a bit awkward to choose what we wanted for lunch because we felt that we had to guess what would be GF and what wouldn't.  So I ended up ordering a salad with a dressing that I felt fairly sure had no gluten in it.  I wasn't really in a salad mood so I was kind of disappointed.  Even though the restaurant has at least one dish, a dessert, that is labeled gluten-free, I'd rate the Monument Cafe as one-and-a-half thumbs down for GF support.

Our next attempt at a GF lunch was at Tarka Indian Kitchen, a sort of Indian fast food chain.  They had great GF support.  I don't think they have a dedicated GF prep area but they do have a separate GF menu with a lot of choices since most of their food is inherently gluten-free.  So, even though this is one of those places where you have to order at a counter (and hold up other diners in the process)  we were able to quickly make choices from the GF menu.  The food was tasty and reasonably priced.  I'd rate Tarka as one-and-a-half thumbs up for GF support.  The only thing that would have made it better was if they had a separate GF prep area.

The next place we tried was by far the best and set the bar for any other restaurant where we might choose to eat a gluten-free lunch.  It was the Java Dive Organic Cafe in Lakeway, Texas.  The owner of this restaurant has a gluten intolerance problem so he is very knowledgeable about GF food prep.  The restaurant has a separate GF prep area and all of the food is gluten-free unless otherwise noted.  There is an extensive menu and the food is tasty and reasonably priced, although not inexpensive.  The only knock I have on this restaurant is that if you don't know in advance that all of the food is gluten-free unless otherwise noted, you might easily overlook the daily specials, as we did, and miss some interesting GF food.   Otherwise it is the ideal place for a person on a GF diet to eat.  Two thumbs up and a plate of homemade GF cookies to the Java Dive Organic Cafe.

One of our favorite lunch chains is the Tropical Smoothie Cafe.  We were pleasantly surprised to discover that, although there is no separate GF prep area and no GF menu, most of the Tropical Smoothie Cafe's menu items are gluten-free.  The tortillas used for the wraps contain gluten and there is no GF bread choice, but the restaurant is happy to turn any wrap into a GF salad and the people that work there are very knowledgeable about which dressings are gluten-free.  Nearly all of the smoothies are gluten-free as well.  So my wife and I were really delighted to find that we could eat good, tasty GF meals at one of our favorite eateries, especially since it is one of the few restaurants with GF food for which we have BOGO coupons.  One-and-a-half thumbs up and a GF smoothie to the Tropical Smoothie Cafe.

There is a local restaurant in north Austin, Texas called Terra Burger which is a great place to get a GF burger.  To the best of my knowledge they don't have a separate GF prep area but most of their ingredients are gluten-free and they even have GF buns for the burgers.  This seems to me like a good place for kids to eat gluten-free too because even their chicken nuggets are made with a non-gluten flour coating.  One-and-a-half thumbs up and an order of GF fries to Terra Burger.

Another fast food restaurant which is a good place to eat GF meals is Chipotle.  Their burrito bowl, which is essentially the innards of a burrito without the tortilla, is gluten-free.  There is no separate GF prep area or menu, but the manager told us that, if you request a GF burrito bowl, the staff will change their gloves, which have been used to fill wheat-based tortillas, so that there is no cross-contamination.  One-and-a-half thumbs up and bowl of GF black beans.

Another chain that we tried is Firebowl Cafe.  We didn't really try the food there, even though they have a GF menu (but not a GF prep area).  Here's why:  The Firebowl Cafe is one of those places where you pick up a menu as soon as you step in the door and then, in very short order, you have to order your meal at the cashier's station.  We went there at prime lunch time after checking the web site to ensure that they did indeed have a GF menu.  We didn't make a choice from the menu on the web site because we have learned that the web sites of restaurants aren't always up to date and there are sometimes differences between the web site menu and the one in the store.  So we stepped up to the menu racks at the local Firebowl only to discover that there was no GF menu in the racks.  We tried to get the cashier's attention to let her know that we needed a GF menu but she studiously ignored us until we were right in front of her.  We explained that we weren't ready to order yet because we needed the GF menu.  She projected a real attitude while she rooted around behind the counter looking for one.  After she thrust the menu at us we had to step out of line while we looked it over.  The GF menu was a bit confusing and there wasn't anything on it that looked all that good to us, but we were going to order something anyway.  However, while we were looking at the GF menu, about eight people got in line ahead of us.  So we would have had to wait behind them before we could order.  Given this and the cashier's unfriendly attitude, we said “the hell with this” and had lunch at the Chiptole next door.  All of this could have been avoided if there had been a GF menu in the rack at the Firebowl.  Two thumbs down and a bowl of soggy udon to the Firebowl Cafe.

Well, all this talk of food is making me hungry so I'm going to post this thing.  More restaurant reviews in a future post.

Gluten-free Whine

It's two weeks since I started the gluten-free (GF) experiment and I kind of feel like a runner who has just hit the wall.  I haven't really noticed any improvement in the symptoms that caused me to experiment with taking gluten out of my diet to begin with and I'm kind of focusing on all of the negative aspects of GF diets.  So this article is sort of a downer and, if you are a person who is affected by things like that, you should probably stop reading right now before you do something you might regret.  OK, maybe things aren't that drastic, but eating GF has put more of a crimp in our lifestyle than I had anticipated and I'm in kind of a grumbling mood today.  Here's the kind of stuff I've been running into:

Condiment withdrawal  I'm known in my family as the king of condiments because I never met a relish or sauce I didn't like.  I'm not even sure how some of my favorite foods taste because I usually slather them with potions from my cabinet of condimental curiosities before they are allowed to approach my mouth.  I kind of thought that my penchant for basting everything on my plate with spicy concoctions from lands near and far would make it easier for me to eat gluten-free, especially after I had my first bite of GF bread.  Ah, but that was before I started reading the labels on my agglomeration of piccalillis, salsas, dressings, and other gourmet goodies.  Who would have thought that sweet and hot mustard and low country red tomato chow chow would contain wheat !?  Not me.  That's for sure.  So now I actually have to taste the things I'm eating and I've gotta tell ya, when the things you are eating are GF foods... Well all I can say is that now I really understand why all the oyster-slurping masochists I know pile hot sauce and horseradish on those little globs of mucous before gulping them down without letting them touch their tongues.  BTW, oysters are gluten-free.  I think.  I've never read the label.  If they have one.  Which I doubt.

Sticker shock  As I've mentioned in previous posts, my old girl and I are confirmed BOGO couponaholics.  So we rarely pay full price for meals when we eat out.  The problem here is that there are a lot of people eating GF food these days and damn few restaurants that serve them.  So those that do are apparently pretty proud of it.  Well, judging by the price they are.  My wife is trying to support me in my GF torture regimen so she usually orders something off the GF menu just so I won't feel bad because she's eating something that smells great while I'm eating steamed something-or-other that smells like, well, steam.  Also she likes to share meals.  That is, my wife gets half of my meal and I get half of hers.  Normally I actually like that because that way each of us gets to sample two entrees, which is a good thing, especially when we are at a restaurant that is new to us.  However, the price of two GF meals is way more than the price for the one non-GF meal that we pay for when we use a BOGO coupon.  So we have been eating out less and, in my case at least, enjoying it less as well.  I know.  Whine, whine, whine.  You're all probably playing air violin about now, but hold on.  It gets worse.

Adventure unhappiness If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you know about Ellie's Adventure Book .  So this week she tried to open it up to a GF page without a lot of success.  At first we tried to find someplace to go where we could have a day trip and eat a GF lunch.  That proved to be almost impossible because, on our adventures, we like to eat at little one-off cafes and we often don't try to find one before we head out.  We just see where we are around lunch time and then look to see what is available nearby.  We've discovered a lot of neat little eateries that way.  Stopping at a little roadside diner and asking for a gluten-free menu is an iffy proposition at best however.  So, even though it removed some of the spontaneity that is one of the main things we like about our little adventures, we decided that we should let our fingers do the walking over the keyboard and try to find a place with a GF menu that was in an interesting little town we hadn't been to.  Drew a blank on that.  We might have been able to go to a chain place in some of the little towns of interest, but those were mostly burger places and their idea of GF eating is to pitch the bun (along with most of the condiments that always seem to stick to it... sigh) and just eat the burger or chicken breast or whatever (but not Bocaburger, because they have gluten in them) and that didn't strike us as interesting. 

Ellie is resourceful, though, so she decided that we would just pack a picnic lunch so that she could make me a GF wrap.  That would probably have worked out OK except that it was a Saturday, which meant that every park we came to was totally crowded with nary an empty picnic table in sight.  We did have a blanket that we could have spread on the ground, but this is fire ant country.  They are real active during droughts and Ellie has a life-threatening allergy to them, so we rejected that idea too.  We ended up eating in the front seat of the pickup with 97-degree sunshine streaming in through the window.  That kind of put a damper on the adventure.

Darn few beer choices  This is the thing I miss the most on the GF diet.  I'm a dedicated beerophile.  I always have a wide variety of beer in the fridge: light and dark lagers, pilsner, pale ale, stout, IPA, Belgian style dark ale, really anything that isn't a flavored beer or shandy gaff or something like that.  I mostly drink beer with meals and I try to suit the beer to the meal in the way that an oenophile tries to use the right wine.  So far, though, I've only been able to find one affordable GF beer at the places I shop, so no matter what the meal, I only have that one type of beer to drink with it.  It's OK, but nothing to write home about and I'm getting pretty tired of drinking that same beer whenever I'm in the mood for a brew.

It hasn't been all bad though.  I have discovered some halfway tasty GF foods and Ellie, who is a terrific and resourceful cook, has made some great GF meals.  Today for lunch we had leftover GF pad thai, steamed Aggie carrots (they're maroon), Cherokee purple tomatoes from the garden and grilled bison burgers with tomato, onion, pineapple and GF mustard and, in my case, a GF bun.  It was great and I didn't even notice that it was a GF meal, except that my GF bun fell apart and I ended up eating the burger with a spoon.  I would have used a fork but I didn't want to miss any of the mustard.  It was the only condiment I had on there.

I've got about four more weeks of this self-inflicted culinary misery to go through and I'm starting to have mixed emotions about what I would like the results to be.  As long as we eat at home the GF diet isn't too hard to take; but the impacts on our day trips and eating out are a problem for me.  So I'm not sure whether I hope that the GF diet resolves my symptoms or if the impact on our lifestyle caused by me eating a GF diet is going to make me feel like the operation was a success but the patient would rather be dead.  Stay tuned for more inspiring reports on the great GF experiment.

The Gluten-free Fair Adventure

So last weekend Ellie and I were wrapping up some organic veggie shopping, homemade GF gelatto slurping and live music listening and she says that she noticed on some blog or something that there is a gluten-free fair going on this weekend just a few miles up the road.  Now, when I hear the word "fair" I don't associate that with carnival rides, sulky races or things like that.  In my mind “fair” means skinny little French fries with malt vinegar, deep-fried Twinkies, or deep-fried anything for that matter, washed down with mega quantities of lukewarm beer in paper cups.  So I was having a little trouble trying to reconcile my view of a fair with GF food, but it was on the way home so I was up for it.

The fair was sponsored by this little GF store that is owned by a woman whose child has high-functioning autism.  We had a nice chat with her.  She said that she got into selling GF products because she had put her son on a GF diet to see if it would improve his symptoms and it did.  She had trouble finding GF stuff at a reasonable price so she opened the store. While we were there we bought a few items, like burrito-sized GF tortillas, that we had not been able to find anywhere else.  Then we hit the fair.

Right away I could see that we weren't going to be munching on any deep fried thangs.  No beer either.  Not even GF beer.  Despite that the fair was pretty neat.  We were really surprised to see how many booths there were.  I don't know why but I was expecting maybe two or three of them.  Seems like a  lot of folks must be getting into GF diets because there were at least a dozen booths and way more people there than I had anticipated.   There was also a much larger variety of GF products than we had seen in one place before.

A couple of the booths were manned (actually womaned) by  manufacturer's representatives.  One brand that I remember being represented was Glutino.  All of those booths had free samples of their products.  We had brought along a reusable shopping bag so we started stowing samples of everything that looked interesting.
 
I guess we had thought that all of the GF products we would find would be assembly-line manufactured, pre-packaged foods.  So we were pleasantly surprised to find vendors with locally baked goodies.  There were a few free samples of those, but they were little bites that were intended to be eaten on the spot.  We tried a sample of GF berry pie that was so good you wouldn't even know that it wasn't made with wheat flour.  We bought a snack-sized pie to take home.  It was five bucks for about a four-inch pie.  The full-sized pies were twenty-five bucks, which was way out of our price range, but the little pie we bought was good and I guess the full-sized ones would be worth it to someone who could afford them.  None of the local vendors that we spoke with had storefronts.  Most of their wares are sold over the Internet, although at least one woman sold her baked goods through a local drugstore.  That's one place I would have never thought to look for local homemade GF goodies.

The only retail store booth that we saw at the fair was from Sprouts.  It was a good one though.  They had brought a stack of reusable grocery bags and had so many GF food samples there that it was easy to fill an entire bag with items just from that one booth.  The other good thing about the Sprouts booth was that at least one of the people there was a buyer.  So we got to have a discussion with him about GF products we were interested in but had not been able to find at Sprouts when we shopped there.  I was especially interested in finding Bards Tale beer, a type of GF beer I had read about on the Internet, and I was glad to hear that Sprouts plans to stock it.

By the time we packed up and headed home we had filled three bags with what I estimate was at least $30 worth of GF goodies.  We had a lot of breakfast and snack bars including things like a pomegranate blueberry pistachio bar from Kind and several flavors of bars from Soyjoy and Enjoy life.  We picked up half a dozen flavors of granola from Udi's and Bakery On Main.  There were snacks like Funky Monkey Purple Funk chips, Boulder Canyon rice and adzuki bean chips (and potato chips too), Crisproot cassava root chips, Lucy's cinnamon thin cookies, several flavors of Pamela's cookies, and Mary's Gone Crackers crackers (redundant, but that's the way it is).  We also got Pamela's baking and pancake mix and Lundberg short grain brown rice, and other things too numerous to mention here.  I'll be trying these things in the upcoming month and I'll let you know what I think of them.

All in all Ellie's and my gluten-free fair adventure was a success, and I didn't even miss the the deep-fried Twinkies.  Well, maybe a little.