It’s often hard to get meals during the holiday due to our increased activities. We are doing extra shopping, decorating, and attending social activities.  It’s also hard to attend so many social activities knowing that much of the special, yummy party food is off limits for a Celiac.

I’ve compiled a list of Holiday Survival tips for anyone newly diagnosed. My first Gluten free Holiday was very emotional for me and the holidays still can be sometimes. I wasn’t able to have all the special comfort foods I grew up with and it really hurt. I felt really deprived.  No one around me understood how I felt, either. It never occurred to anyone around me that it would be hard for me to get through the holidays without the foods that they take for granted. Now I have my own set of coping preparations (more…)

So what do you do when Lay’s decides to add corn oil to your only safe corn-free vending machine junk food snack? Well, you start to think outside the box a little. We know there are other chips on the market that offer the consumer a corn-free experience, such as Cape Cod or Miss Vickie’s Vintage chips. But let’s face it, these are high end chips, and worse yet they don’t come in convenient individual sized bags for on the go allergy sufferers. We needed an alternative for our rainy day munchies and a fun and fattening episode of Paula Dean’s Home Cooking put some ideas into my little chef’s head. He decided we should deep fry something too. I wanted to chalk it full of veggies if I could, so I settled on three lovely and large sweet potatoes. (more…)

Here is a quick healthy snack that will use up that leftover salmon from last night’s dinner. The kids and I whipped this up in five minutes and it was polished off in about the same time. The boys all gave this one a perfect score. My oldest thought it deserved 15 out of 10 points. That is a record for sure! I’m wondering if the judges were just a little biased since they were also the in-house chefs?

This snack includes about 1 1/2 cups of raw veggies and is Gluten, Corn, Egg, Soy, and Casein-free. Here is what we did…. (more…)

A twinkie isn’t just a cream filled cake made from milk, flour and eggs. When Hostess seals the little dessert treat into it’s individual plastic wrap it is a conglomeration of over 39 ingredients with a shelf-life of over 24 days. In Twinkie Deconstructed, Steve Ettlinger writes a road map for understanding the etiology of this familiar favorite Hostess snack. He chronicles his “Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats.” (more…)