Gluten-Free and Chex Muddy Buddies

Four months ago when we first went gluten-free, my husband and I started looking around for gluten-free products. We went to our local food co-op, which has lovely bright green stickers on the shelves to indicate gluten-free items. We found some of what we were looking, some rice pasta and some Blue Diamond Nut Thins, very tasty crackers, but we were disurbed by the lack of breakfast cereal that was gluten-free.

We found granolas and a few high priced, gluten-free things on the cereal aisle. To be fair, the food co-op tends to have prices that are a bit higher than the chain grocery store. But what really surprised us was that none of the cereals we thought should be gluten-free, like Rice Krispies, were. Nope, they're flavored with malt syrup.

This lead to two major problems. First, an abiding fear that we would never be able to eat the things we liked again and second, a huge need to find desserts that we could eat.

Before we went on the gluten-free diet, we ate desserts about once a week, when we had company. But with the holidays on the horizon and the fear that we wouldn't stick with a diet if we felt deprived, we began to search high and low for gluten-free desserts or things that could be made into gluten-free desserts. Rice Krispies treats, something we hoped originally that we could continue to have, were off the menu.

Until yesterday. Yesterday, my friend Amy Duncan pointed me to GlutenSmart, a sister company of CarbSmart, where I can get gluten-free Rice Krispies treats. Ok, so they aren't the name brand. Who cares?

But all that aside, what we found while trying to celebrate the holidays and sort of stick to the comfort foods we grew up with was that we were eating a lot of junk that we normally don't eat. We made lots of cookies with almost meal and rice flour. We tried several varieties of gluten-free mixes, most which tasted like grit and were things that we didn't normally eat before we went gluten-free.

It seems that we sort of forgot our basic healthy eating rules when we decided to go glutne-free.  Oops!

However, the one good thing that came of our foray into foods we shouldn't eat even though we can was that just before Christmas, we found that General Mills had announced their corn chex and rice chex were now gluten-free!  They call it muddy buddies, we call it puppy chose.  Whatever you call it, chocolated and peanut butter coated chex was now an option for the holidays!

The more interesting thing about the announcement is the side panel on the cereal box saying why General Mills did it. Apparently, according to the Celiac Disease Foundation, one if every 133 Americans has some form of gluten sensitivity. That's a lot of people fighting the bloating, misery and health impacts caused by consuming wheat.

The move also makes two major mainstream brands that have gluten-free foods. Betty Crocker also recently introduced a line of gluten-free cake and cookie mixes. Gluten-free is gaining steam and I have the muddy buddies to prove it.


Disclosure

Cooking More to be Gluten-Free

As I mentioned yesterday, one of the few real problems we have encountered with our new gluten-free lifestyle is eating away from home. It’s no longer a spur of the moment decision and so far at least, seems to involve about four restaurants where we can go and get one or two different menu items.


Steakhouses are generally the safest, though any place that does not insist on breading everything in sight might be ok. The problem lies in the might be.

Asking a server if something contains gluten is often like asking them to define astrophysics and is met with the same blank stare. So, we resort to eating at home most of the time.

This results in two major problems: 1) I spend a lot more time cooking than I did before and 2) I can rarely catch a break from my own cooking.

Now, to be fair, I have an advantage that most people do not. I work exactly five feet, well, maybe less, from my kitchen. My husband and I run a self-storage facility and I’m a freelance writer. I’m more flexible to be able to make my own meals than someone who has to go to an office e very day. But…I lose precious time to doing it.

Since we switched our diet, I probably spend an extra forty minutes a day cooking, because I can no longer do soup and sandwiches for lunch. Pancakes, waffles and biscuits and gravy ( a major tragedy!) are no longer on the breakfast menu and cooking from scratch takes way longer than opening a can of Campbell’s soup.

To be fair, there is a decent line of gluten-free convenience food put out by Amy’s Kitchen, but the problem is that they are horribly expensive. I just can’t make myself pay more than $3 for a box of macaroni and cheese. So, I cook from scratch a lot more often.

I read on site about celiac disease the idea that the longer the ingredient list, the more likely something will contain gluten. I agree. So I try to cook from scratch, without benefit of boxes or mixes as much as I can. The result is that I’m getting a lot fewer other additives in my food as well, but I spend more time doing it.

So what about you? Any tricks for gluten-free eating that you can share?