About That Gluten Thing

Hubby and I just got back from dinner at the new Mexican place in town.  It was delicious.  Among other deliciousness, we had cheese dip, which we didn’t think about having gluten (flour as a thickener probably), and now that we’re home he feels like dropping into a coma and going to sleep.  After being (mostly) gluten free for two weeks, he’s ready to concede that I’m right and he really is gluten intolerant.   Which is good only in the sense that I spent a small fortune on alternative flours last week.  Looks like I’ll absolutely get the chance to use them.

So what does that mean for Pots and Plots?

Well, y’all I’m still gonna be cooking.  And I”m gonna be cooking a lot more in some ways.  Does that mean all gluten-free, all the time?  No.  I’m NOT gluten intolerant, and I won’t be giving up all my favorite foods.  But I’ll definitely be doing a lot of experimenting.

So here’s the scoop:  During the week, I’ll be focusing on showing you dishes that are appealing to the gluten intolerant and the normal eaters alike–proving that you don’t have to eat WEIRD to be gluten free.  And once a week, probably Fridays because I like the alliteration of Gluten Free Friday, I’ll be doing a post specifically geared for how to do the gluten free thing for harder stuff…like baked goods and breakfast.  Life without pizza crust and hamburger buns is not a viable option in this house, so my mission here on out is to find viable, delicious alternatives that taste like the regular wheat version.

May the Force be with us.

4 thoughts on “About That Gluten Thing

  1. It sounds like you guys have it figured out. At least you know how to cook for him. Do people become gluten intolerant later in life sometimes? I assume he hasn’t always been intolerant or he would have felt bad all his life. I don’t know much about it.

    1. Actually, he was diagnosed with a wheat allergy when he was a child, but there was so little really widely known about the issue that the concession his family made to that was to not eat whole wheat bread. Um…what did they think regular bread was made with? My own knowledge of food allergies was limited and all about the varieties that result in anaphalactic shock (shellfish, peanuts, etc.) or hives (strawberries, tomatoes, etc.). So when he told me about it, I totally blew it off because he ate wheat products all the time. Obviously it wasn’t a problem and he’d grown out of it, right?

      Um, not so much.

      With the gluten thing there’s 3 different things you can be looking at. There’s a WHEAT allergy where the body truly has a histamine response to wheat, just like it’s pollen or mold or whatever. There’s true celiac disease where the body has an IMMUNE response to gluten as if it’s a virus or microbe or whatever. Hubby, thankfully isn’t that. These folks have a lot worse time because they REALLY have to worry about cross contamination and stuff or they’ll get really really sick. And then you have the broad land in the middle of the gluten intolerant where the body has difficulty processing gluten to varying degrees. There’s a wide range of symptoms and it seems to manifest in a LOT of different ways. It may be that he is still just dealing with a wheat allergy, but we’re going to cut it all out for a good long while before we try adding in the sources of gluten that AREN’T wheat (barley, rye) to see.

      As it happens, his mom doesn’t use as much bread and pasta in general as I do. So while they didn’t lead a gluten free lifestyle at all, they did eat less wheat than he did once he married me, so I don’t think that he’s just developed it as he got older, but just was exposed to a much higher level both because of what I cook and the fact that over the last several decades the food industry has begun putting gluten in absolutely everything because it is an appetite stimulant, as well as genetically engineering wheat that has 12x the gluten.

  2. Wow, I didn’t even know there were differents levels of gluten intolerance and/or allergies. At least this new way of cooking and eating seems to be making him feel better. And that’s the goal. I’m glad you guys figured it out.

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