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.
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