A week of Gluten-Free meals

I've been trying to figure out what to post about for my first official post (beyond my introduction), so I think I'm going to just tell you about our weekly menu of yummy gluten free food.

Every Thursday or Friday, depending on the week, I make up our dinner menu for the week.  I pick 7 to 10 meals that we are likely to want and then make the grocery list from those items.

Remember all of these meals are gluten-free!

This week, we are having:

1. Chili
2. Chicken Parmesan 
3. Chicken marinated and baked in Kraft Zesty Italian Salad Dressing and baked potatoes
4. Manwiches and homemade french fries.  Manwiches served on my homemade bread baked as buns.
5. Turkey breast (Jennie-O) and mashed potatoes.
6. Greek-style Chicken
7. Grilled steak and mashed potatoes
8. Some sort of seafood, grits, and fries.

The chili is pretty easy.  I throw a bunch of tomato stuff in a giant pot with browned hamburger, add spice, let simmer.  I use canned whole tomatoes, some diced and a can of sauce, then add tomato paste later on to thicken it up.  I use McCormick's chili powder.  I also use Bush's Chili Beans.  I had read from a poster somewhere online that chili beans were impossible to find Gluten-Free.  Well, the only chili beans I have ever picked up say right on the back "Gluten-Free," so it's not impossible.

Number 2 is a staple in our house.  Thaw chicken, put in a glass dish, pour Zesty Italian dressing all over it, bake it for about an hour.  I buy the biggest bottle I can find of the zesty Italian because we use the dressing in the dish to pour over our baked potatoes, and I use it on top of my broccoli.  It's VERY yummy!

I think the manwiches are pretty self explanatory, so I won't bore you with any details of that one other than that I bake my own buns.  I just use our favorite bread recipe and scoop it in to quiche/tart tins that I found at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Mashed potatoes:  We make them from scratch...potatoes, milk, butter, salt, pepper, mix.  Yummy!

Steak: It had been a while since we had had grilled steak.  Martin used a rub on it of garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and something else he bought GF.  It worked and was wonderfully seasoned.

Greek-Style Chicken:  I have NO idea where this food got its name, but we've been eating it for probably 20 years or more in my family.  You take chicken and put in on a baking sheet.  Cut up as many potatoes as you want.  Put generous amounts of butter around on top of the potatoes and chicken.  Sprinkle Oregano and salt on top of it all.  Bake it.  I bake mine at about 375 for an hour or more.  We love the buttery potatoes.  I prefer my potatoes slightly crispy on the outside.  You can also add onions to the whole thing if you want.  This was one of the first meals that I realized I wouldn't have to change AT ALL for our new diet.

Seafood:  Martin hasn't decided what yet.  I'm hoping for shrimp but he may decide he wants fish.  We coat our seafood in corn flour and fry like normal.  It's the same think we do when we make fried Chicken.

Chicken Parm:  Since I can't bake or broil the chicken in bread crumbs like I used to, I dredge the chicken in SOY flour! and then pan fry it with some melted butter.  After browning both sides of the chicken, I add Bertolli Vidalia Onion pasta sauce and simmer until the chicken is done.  I use the Heartland spaghetti pasta that Walmart sells.  It's a corn and rice mix so it stands up pretty well.  It is a very close substitute for Gluten pasta, and yummy too.  After eating it the first time, my husband said he liked it BETTER than regular pasta.  To make our plates, we put down a bed of baby spinach, a little bit of fresh grated mozzarella cheese.  Then we put the drained GF spaghetti on top of that, then some of the pasta sauce, chicken, and then top with more mozzarella cheese.  It is so good, and it's always a hit with the entire family.

Our Background Story...

It seems like it's been years, but it has only been maybe five months since my entire household went gluten-free.

It all started with a forum post on Cafemom.  My older son has developmental delays.  He has speech problems, communication problems, attention problems, and various other small delays that add up to cause him some bigger problems.  He was tested and placed in an amazing Pre-K ESE program.  He has a bus that picks him up and takes him to school and brings him home again.  It has been a wonderful program for him to be in, and I have watched him blossom during the time he has been in the program since August 2010.  Despite all of this, as a mom, I wonder if it's my fault or what I could have done differently to have kept these obstacles from being in his path to his future.

Anyway, there was a post on Cafemom asking about a link between gluten intolerance and developmental delays.  That part of me that is always looking for a reason for his problems stopped and took notice.  I started researching.  The world began to completely change for my family.

I read things that made so much since...but not for my older son...for my HUSBAND...bowel problems, bloated abdomen, skin rashes, reflux, weight he couldn't lose...the list goes on and on.  I talked to my husband about it, and he didn't really have much to say about it.  I brought it up again a few days later, and he agreed we could try it.  I just asked him to give me 2 weeks.  If nothing changed in 2 weeks, we could give it up.  What we didn't know at the time was that we would never want to give it up.

We got rid of all the gluten products in our house.  If we thought it had gluten in it, it was gone.  It would takes weeks before we were able to completely clean out our diet, but not because we didn't want to, but because gluten is hidden in so many ways in so many things your wouldn't think of.  We also had to figure out that some people aren't sensitive to maltodextrin and MSG, but my husband is.  So, we had to make sure to get all that out too. 

By the time we were done, problems that my husband had had that I didn't even know about were gone!  His bloat went away; his reflux was gone almost overnight; his rash that he had had for YEARS was suddenly gone; and weight began to fall off him; he had energy and was playing with the kids in the yard (something he had NEVER done before).  I was giddy with excitement for what I had discovered.

However, the benefits didn't stop there.  Our then almost 2-year-old younger daughter had had the WORST bowel movements ever.  They stunk and were always loose and probably occurred more than 10 times a day.  When I say stunk, I don't mean normal stinky poop.  I mean that my husband had to stick toilet paper up his nose to be able to change her diaper without vomiting.  She had also been showing signs of PICA.  She ate anything including ashes, sand, and drywall!  At her 18 month appointment, she had gained like 5 pounds in 3 months.  Her growth curve had a spike in it, and her poor little belly was so big we had to buy her bigger clothes than she would have otherwise needed just to cover her belly.

After the gluten was our of diets, she stopped!  No more eating strange things and no more loose poop.  She dropped to only 1 to 2 poops a day.  We discovered her belly had been bloated like her dad's, and that went away.  At her 2-year appointment, she was back on her old growth curve.

We did have our older son tested using the blood tests for celiacs.  He doesn't have that.  I must say we were hoping that would come back pointing toward celiacs.  If it had, we would have assumed that was my husband's and daughter's diagnosis and moved on with our lives.  That wasn't the case, so we are left with gluten intolerance.  For right now, I'm okay with that.  We will deal with the rest as it comes.  It would have been easier to explain to people as a disease, but instead we just try to explain the best we can when we have to.

It's been a struggle, but it gets easier everyday.  I have learned that I LOVE to cook, and I LOVE to bake.  I have learned to bake all different types of desserts (cookies, cakes, etc) and experimented until I found a bread we all loved.  I have pulled recipes from the internet and cookbooks, and I have adapted some of our old favorites.  We have found some amazing stores that carry tons of products to cook with and snack food.  We have been able to focus on eating more whole foods rather than processed crap which makes me feel better about what I feed my family.

Most of the struggles have revolved around family.  Some family do not care and refuse to make any attempt to pretend they do.  Some of these same family members seriously need to look into it for themselves.  My husband's aunt, for example, got us $50 in giftcards to the Cracker Barrel....really?  The Cracker Barrel??  Why????  Some other family try to get it but just don't.  Then, there is my wonderful family that has embraced this for us with open minds and open hearts.  I was able to make gluten-free rolls for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, and everyone raved about them.  Everyone made sure that almost everything we ate was gluten free.  I'm not sure if we were able to keep all the cross-contamination out of it or not, but hubby wasn't in pain the next day, so we must have done pretty good.

Anyway, we are on our journey, through our new open window.  Our son, who isn't completely GF yet because of his Pre-K program , is already asking if things have "guten" in them.  I'm pretty glad that door is shut, and I'm trying to double bolt it so it can stay shut.  I don't want us to ever go back to the way things were.

I want to take a moment to thank Elisabeth Hasselbeck for her book, The G-free Diet.  I bought it for my kindle and started reading it.  This weekend, I bought 2 copies in real book form.  One for my mom and one for my mother-in-law.  I love it.  I really think this book will help get through to my MIL and will also help my mom help us and allow her to feed her grandchildren when they are over there.  The book also helped us refocus and find a few more hidden glutens that were starting to weigh my husband down.  So thank you for writing such a wonderful book and helping to bring greater awareness to this problem, and to all of you, if you haven't read it, BUY IT AND READ IT!!!

One last point I want to make...this new adventure has caused me to start dropping weight as well.  Around the time my son was born (7 months ago), I was about 220 pounds.  I'm now at 200 without doing anything new.  Nothing changed, just what we eat, not even really how we eat.  I also have a ton of energy and have started walking with my mom...mostly just to get out of the house...I do have 4 kids after all!

My hope is blog often about the foods we are eating and new finds that make our lives easier.  So, hopefully, you can look forward to recipes, links, ideas, and all sorts of gluten-free stuff we are finding outside our new window...