Happy Gluten Free Birthday
Just when you think you have your new gluten free (GF) lifestyle figured out, along comes another activity to prepare for and redesign to fit your GF needs. A big one that is a dreaded activity for many parents, GF and gluten eating alike – the Birthday Party!
Perhaps your child is used to an annual visit to a party zone, with coupons for free pizza and a birthday cake provided. Maybe your family does a sleepover for 10, culminating in a breakfast of delicious chocolate chip pancakes for everyone. Whatever your past party plans, GF parties do need to be a little different to be safe for your child, but not so different that any other child attending will know they just had an entirely GF celebration.
The main aspects of a birthday party from a GF planning perspective are location, food, and cake. Obviously, a party in your home allows complete control over the presence of gluten, but that might not work best for your family if your child is used to celebrating elsewhere or your home is not conducive to groups of active kids. If you aren’t hosting the party in your own home, look for a place that will allow you bring in all your own food, such as a local park, pool, or zoo. An old-fashioned bowling alley can be a great choice if there is one in your area; and sometime places like karate studios will offer a birthday party package. A trip to the hair or nail salon is a fun party that doesn’t involve food at all!
When planning for the food at the birthday party, think about both the timing of the party and the expense. Not all birthday parties need to be centered on a meal. 2:00-4:00 on a Saturday afternoon with snacks and cake is a perfect option for a GF family. GF pretzels and chips, fruit, and cheese sticks may not seem festive, but kids love healthy snacks, and the lack of sugar can keep the craziness to a minimum. If you have to serve lunch, consider GF friendly options other than pizza and hotdogs, like tacos or nachos. Tacos in a bag (using snack size GF corn chips) are really fun! **Make sure your taco seasoning is Gluten Free, Penzey’s Spices offers great choices, or find a recipe to make your own**
The final, and probably biggest, hurdle in hosting a GF birthday party is the cake. Many people are not really bakers, nor do they have a local GF bakery to use. Since most kids only want the frosting anyway, it seems like a lot of money to buy a cake, and ice cream cakes usually have that crunchy stuff in the middle – not gluten free! Luckily, Betty Crocker has come through with the easiest Gluten Free cake mixes ever, which can generally be found in the baking aisle of your local grocery store. Available in chocolate or vanilla, one cakes mix makes 12 cupcakes that taste great, frost easily, and look like regular cake. Your party goers will never know the difference!
It is important to remember that our Gluten Free Kids want to be just like everyone else, especially on their birthdays. A little thoughtful planning and a yummy cake mix can make your child’s party all about them, and not all about the food they eat.
Tips for a Gluten Free Lunch Box
Tips for a Gluten Free Lunch Box
Every day, Gluten Free (GF) kids head off to school each day without having the ability to buy lunch in the cafeteria. Even if you are planning to work with your school district’s nutrition services to determine possible GF options for your child, that will take time and there will probably be quite a few lunches needed before that happens.
Here are some easy ideas for those first few days:
- Cut up fruits and veggies
- GF brands of corn chips with a container of salsa
- Corn tortilla wraps
- Hard boiled eggs – a favorite in our house
And if your child can eat dairy:
- Cheese sticks
- Cottage cheese containers
- Yogurt with some GF granola to mix in
One of the most important Gluten Free lunch box purchases is a small hot thermos – I recommend buying a high quality camping thermos, not a kid’s one. You will want to be sure the food was still hot at lunch time, and we always heat the thermos with some boiling water before putting in the food.
Here are some hot lunch suggestions:
- Rice – plain is fine, but homemade chicken fried rice is even better
- Soup – You can make it from scratch, but there are more and more GF brands available every day
- Mac & cheese – Trader Joe’s makes a good one that is also the cheapest, but there are other brands, too
- Leftovers!
It probably seems like time you won’t have to make a hot lunch while also making breakfast, but kids love to help, and before you know it, they will be heating things up in the microwave and boiling up the mac & cheese noodles themselves.
Your child will probably notice right away that turkey or PBJ sandwiches are no longer showing up in lunches. As most people discover, packaged gluten free breads are prohibitively expensive and don’t taste all that great. There are definitely some good mixes available, but expense and taste are a consideration with those as well.
If you enjoy making yeast breads from scratch, Nicole Hunn’s Gluten Free on a Shoestring is an excellent resource. If you have the time and inclination to bake, this is the place to go for recipes and tips – everything from sandwich bread, tortillas and hamburger buns, to muffins and cookies of all kinds. If you want to splurge on bakery bread and live in the Minneapolis / St Paul metro area, Bittersweet Bakery is a favorite of ours.
In a few more years, maybe our schools will have as many Gluten Free options in the cafeteria as grocery stores and restaurants are starting to have in the real world. In the meantime, lunch from home can have lots of variety and nutrition for our Gluten Free kids. It may take a little extra time and planning, but maybe not as much as you think, and it is totally worth it!
Eating Gluten Free – the First Big Decision
Another great post from my friend Anneke on their big decision … does one or everyone eat gluten free?
If we were all single, living alone and cooking for ourselves, eating gluten free (GF) would be so much easier – not cheaper, of course, but easier. No cross-contamination, no separate snacks and cookware, no eating the lonely GF cupcake while everyone else has Grandma’s family recipe double-chocolate cake. One of the first big decisions you need to make is whether you plan to continue cooking with gluten while also cooking GF.
At first glance, this might seem easy – GF is expensive and doesn’t taste as good (or so you think), so why make the rest of the family suffer? Believe me, I contemplated making two meals, boiling two types of pasta and having multiple kinds of bread and snacks. Partly, I think this decision is based on who in the family needs to eat GF and why. For those of us with celiac disease, the tiniest portion of gluten can bring on symptoms, while other people (on a GF diet but not celiac) may not react as strongly or as quickly to being “glutenized.” If the person on a GF diet is an adult, it seems easier to have separate meals, adults can handle being different, but if it is a child it is much harder to see others eating the “good stuff.”
My decision came down to who, how many, and ultimately, the size of my kitchen. I have celiac disease, I do the cooking, and I didn’t want to expose myself constantly to gluten while preparing meals. My daughter also has celiac, and when I went from cooking GF for one person to cooking for two, it started to make more sense to go all GF in our home. The final vote, however, came down to the space I have to use – my kitchen is small, has little storage space, and a very bad flow. Think about this – if you are cooking both GF and with gluten, you need to have two sets of the following cooking equipment:
• Colanders
• Utensils (especially if you cook with wood or bamboo)
• Any stoneware or cast iron
• Toasters
• Dish towels, cloths or sponges
• Cutting boards
We got into space issues very quickly in my kitchen (the toaster was for sure going to cause a big problem), and when you add the need to store GF products in a separate cabinet, or at least on a separate shelf, I was out of room before I even got started! I decided to cook gluten free for everyone, all the time. My exceptions were mostly self-contained foods, like packaged granola bars for lunch boxes; although with experience, I have learned to make my own snacks and those are mostly all GF now, too.
The important thing to remember here is that whatever decision you make, that decision is right for you and your family. Decisions can be changed, too, and as you learn to cook GF and find more resources to help you, you may find yourself ready to include more GF cooking for the whole family. You will adapt to this new lifestyle, and it will become easier with time.
I often wondered if going to all the trouble and expense of GF cooking for a family was worth it, until I had an “ah-ha” moment one day in my kitchen. I was cooking for a crowd of teenagers – pasta and bread, of course – and decided to use regular pasta and serve bread from the local bakery. The stress that I felt while keeping my dishes separate to be completely scoured of gluten later, and the number of times I washed gluten from my hands and counters told me that having gluten in my kitchen is just not worth it. That afternoon of cooking with gluten was enough to tell me that going GF all the way was the right choice for my family!
How about some nachos instead?
When you first hear the diagnosis of Celiac disease, and find out that you can no longer have gluten in any form, you feel totally overwhelmed.
We all know that gluten is in everything, and how on earth will we eat now? While people mean well, it is somewhat difficult to be constantly told that “there is so much more available now,” or “I just saw a whole line of great gluten free products.”
I know it is better than it ever was, I know there are more choices, I know people want to be supportive, I get it.
But . . .
Here’s the thing — I don’t want to buy food in a box. I don’t want to drive 30 miles round trip to get bakery cupcakes for my kid’s birthday party. I don’t want to throw a tiny frozen pizza in the oven on a busy weeknight when that pizza cost a fortune and tastes like cardboard. Initially we did that and, while we didn’t starve, I found myself increasingly frustrated by the inability to cook real food for my family.
I grew up in a household where we ate real food all the time. My parents had a large garden at our house, and rented another garden plot at a nearby arboretum. They visited several farmer’s markets to buy produce to freeze and can throughout the summer. My mother made every dessert from scratch and made 8 loaves of sandwich bread every weekend – this while working full time. We sat down – as a family — to a home-cooked, balanced meal every night. While my early years as a parent were not spent at as pristine a dinner table as the one I sat at growing up, I made a real effort to cook well for my family. The diagnosis of celiac was truly devastating for me as the chef and food provider in my home.
In the first two years of this new reality, I struggled. I converted recipes to GF with some success, but often with great failure. I wasted countless dollars worth of GF flour blends and I made more than one birthday cake a second time, late at night, after an initial disaster. I sat at my dining room table and watched as my family gamely tried the latest creation – but didn’t ask for seconds. Finally, about a year ago, I found a cookbook that helped me learn how to make GF yeast breads from scratch, with success! Since then, I have been able to make all of our breads – sandwich bread, burger buns, french bread, tortillas – not always on the first try, but eventually I manage to get it. For me, while I am spending much more time in the kitchen, I am also spending much less money at the grocery store, and that has been incredibly freeing.
Gluten free cooking and eating is still frustrating and expensive, but the excitement of the challenge has taken over my thinking, putting the overwhelming aspect of the job in the back seat most of the time. I find myself trying to work around the days I have no bread made by coming up with a different idea, instead of tossing up my hands in defeat. I have even gotten the family on board. Just this week, I was planning sandwiches for lunch, when I realized the day’s loaf of bread would not be ready in time. My husband, after looking at the exorbitant price of four GF bagels in the grocery store, looked at me and suggested that perhaps he could make us a batch of chicken nachos instead. I liked that idea – it meant he was on board with the plan, and I didn’t have to cook!
-Anneke
Snappy Dog Salsa
I am frequently at craft shows and expos for my job, and I meet some interesting people and find out about fun products that way. This fall, I met a guy named Dave selling SnappyDog Salsa. He had a whole row of flavors…mild, medium, hot…and even some that had sweeter things mixed in with the spicy. I’m a strictly spicy girl myself, so I went straight for the hot. Wow! You can numb your tongue a little bit by eating too much of the hot, but it tastes great!
In the course of my conversation with Dave, I found out that he makes his salsa in a Gluten Free kitchen, which absolutely appeals to me and my family. I like to support people who go to the extra effort to make foods friendly for those with allergies, so I bought a few bottles to take home and try that night. My family wouldn’t go along with anything quite as spicy as the hot, so we settled on the medium, which still has a pretty nice kick to it. We bought two cases of this a couple of months ago and it’s already gone. We use it on everything; my most recent favorite meal is Smart Chicken, cooked lightly with olive oil and some seasonings, and then covered with Snappy Dog Medium Salsa once it is on the plate.
To find out more info about SnappyDog Salsa, you can find info HERE. You also may run into Dave at local events in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area in Minnesota. If you try it out, be sure to let me know what you think, and I’d love to hear any creative new recipes!
