Celiac Bites

Yes, Virginia, you can eat at a restaurant.

I hate going to restaurants. Especially when I'm traveling on business.

There you are with a bunch of peers from the office, partners, or customers and you get to interrupt the order taking process with a 17 minute grilling of the server.

Are your steaks marinated?

What else do you cook on the grill?

Am I going to die if I eat here?

What else is on the plate? Onion straws, fried items, sauces, condensed gluten dust?

Do you have any reason to want to harm me?

How exactly are your mashed potatoes prepared?

Is any pan coating spray used in preparation?

Are your sauteed vegetables prepared with oil, real butter, or a plastic facsimile of butter?

What seasonings are added to grilled items?

Have you sterilized your hands since last handling bread?

And so on...

Meanwhile, your business associates have either fainted from malnutrition or quietly left via the back door to find another restaurant.

But sometimes I am pleasantly surprised. This evening for instance. My hotel in Salt Lake City is right across the street from a Romano's Macaroni Grill. Yep, a pasta place. Brilliant Tom. Let's go try to eat there without getting sick. Maybe for dessert I could hit an Atlanta Bread Company or something.

Anyway, as there were no other choices within easy walking distance, I poked my head in and asked if by chance they had a gluten free menu. And yes, I was embarrassed to ask this question at a pasta place.

As a matter of fact they do - and it's very well done. Unlike many companies who are more concerned with writing endless disclaimers than useful information, Romano's offered a factual, current, and quite useful gluten free menu. In fact, their web site offers a PDF guide that covers about 8 different food sensitivity categories. You can find it here.

To make a long story short, I ordered a great meal and felt quite safe doing it. Check this out:

Strip steak.

Lightly sauteed spinach.

Roasted garlic cloves.

Fresh rosemary just for fun. And it smelled pretty.

Mmmmm.

I was impressed.

Kudo's to Romano's for doing a great job of communicating useful information about the food they serve and making it easy for us celiacs and other food sensitivity sufferers.

I'll be back!

Man vs. Celiac: PizzAlley's

These are the voyages of the Celiac Tom, continuing my mission to explore strange new restaurants and other eateries, to boldly go where no Celiac has gone before.

I found myself in St. Augustine, Florida over the holidays, wandering aimlessly in search of a restaurant for dinner along with 9 other family members. It was about 8pm - not an ideal time to start the hunt for food in a heavily trafficked tourist town. The early crowd from the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum was out and ravenous from their viewing of Martha Stewart's Tiny Egg, and Ponce de Leon's Fountain of Youth had just closed, so seats at tables were at a premium.

Trying to get 9 people to agree on anything, especially a restaurant choice is about as easy as nailing Welch's Squeezable Grape Jelly to a wall. So in the interest of eating before the 2010 holiday season, I elected to abstain from voting on restaurant selection. After all, this is Man vs. Celiac, so I saw an opportunity for a new and unforeseen challenge, and put myself at the mercy of group think. Family group think.

Bad idea.

We ended up at a pizza and Italian place called PizzAlley's. That's what I get for ducking out of the group decision making process. Like crime, indifference doesn't pay. Trying to find a gluten free meal at a place that orders flour by the metric ton is kind of like playing russian roulette with all 6 cylinders loaded. Sometimes you just have to admit defeat.

So I settled on one of the few safe bets in my repertoire. Times 3. It's OK, Aunt Rissy drove home.

Got a little Captain in ya?

The case of the walking glutonia

Just because I'm paranoid doesn’t mean that Senseo coffee pods are not out to get me. In fact, I've been having recurring nightmares about them. In my dreams, they have mobilized like those "scrubbing bubbles" on T.V. and they are chasing me through an abandoned and really creepy summer camp. I have no idea why, in my dream, I have elected to go to a creepy abandoned summer camp in the middle of the night - by myself. And like the nameless extras in 'Friday the 13th' movies, I back into a dark room (without looking) where they await. But I digress.

Oh yes, Senseo Pods. They are evil, or maybe just demon possessed. Or maybe they just don't drink enough of their own coffee. I'm 95% sure that they are one of the many causes of 'Walking Glutonia' as I like to call it. You may be familiar with it. It's when you unknowingly ingest microscopic amounts of gluten for days or weeks. The quantity is so seemingly insignificant, kind of like the number of gluten free meals available in a Papa Johns restaurant. However, after ingesting these microscopic doses for several days or more, you suddenly get very, very sick. Like nuclear sick. Like if we could bottle it, the war on terror would be over like instantly. 

The worst part of Walking Glutonia is that its just about impossible to figure out what made you sick because you felt fine for the first several days of toxic poisoning. That's the really insidious thing. The second worst part is actually being sick.

Well, about a week after buying a new Senseo coffee maker, I came down with Walking Glutonia. It never even crossed my mind that the Senseo was to blame. After all, its only water and coffee - none of those fancy flavors for me. I'm a mans man after all and drink my Senseo out of my cute little coffee machine with unflavored breakfast and medium blends. And Walmart sells them, so its not like its some product made by the lowest bidder or anything. So of course I kept drinking the Kool-aid coffee. It was then I discovered that caffeine alone cannot overcome all physical ailments, so I stopped drinking the coffee. That really stunk, but I got better. Except for those daily occasional caffeine headaches.

Refusing to accept reality (I REALLY like coffee) I re-started my morning Senseo binge a couple of weeks later. I mean of all the things one eats and drinks over a day, I figured it had to be something random, certainly not my SENSEO. You'll never guess what happened next - after about a week of drinking lots and lots of coffee. Satan was unchained once again.

Obviously I was not going to give up my morning coffee, so I started the detective work and called the Senseo people.  They directed me to Sara Lee. There we had it - Sara Lee makes all kind of people poison like pound cakes and pies. Obviously they were injecting their Senseo pods with baked goods to build a dependence habit among the coffee drinking population. So I called to expose them.

Helpful Customer Service person: "Hello, my name is Marcie Jong-il, how can I help you today?"

Me (sick and in a really foul mood): "OK, confess.  You're in a call center in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, you're working under direct orders of Kim Jong-il, and you are tirelessly toiling day after miserable day to destroy the free world by means of gradual gluten poisoning."

Helpful Customer Service person who is obviously an enemy agent working under cover: (silence)

Me: "OK, so you won't talk. Fine. Can you tell me what's in the Senseo pods? What is that paper material made of? Are there any gluten ingredients in the paper? Where were you on the night on February 7th?"

Helpful Customer Service person: "Sir, our pods are made with pure paper products, there are no other ingredients, and no gluten." (at this point I could have sworn I heard her sniggering under her breath)

Me: "Aha! Caught you! What about the GLUE that holds the two halves of the paper together? Answer that!"

Helpful Customer Service person: "Glue?"

There you have it. She was busted and she knew it. Playing dumb didn't fool me for a minute. I still can't prove it, as she was obviously accustomed to tough interrogation techniques and never did talk, but it sure looks to me like those Senseo pods are held together with glue. And I bet its glue made of 100% pure gluten. It all fits with my conspiracy theory. So there.

Be safe out there, and watch your coffee.

What's for breakfast? Glutino English Muffins

Glutino English Muffins are one of my long term favorites. I always have some in the freezer. The only thing about them is that they don't really taste like English Muffins much at all.

This brings up a great point, one probably worth an entire post, but I'll touch on it here.  When I am eating some gluten free food product, people ask me "Does it taste like regular (fill in random food product here) ?"  Usually the answer is "no" and I get the predictable sad looks of sympathy. That's when I explain that the real question is not whether something tastes like the glutonium version - the right question is "does it taste good?" And more often than not, there is no sad look or sympathy required - there is some really good Gluten free stuff out there.

Back to the muffins. I think they're awesome, even if they aren't much like Thomas' English Muffins.  They are much softer, and more dense in texture - kind of like a sponge cake.  They don't have the huge craters to hold cups of melted butter. If you enjoy butter like I do, you have to balance the lake of butter on a fairly smooth surface lest it runs off the side.  And when you toast them, they stay fairly soft with the lightest hint of crunchiness on the surface.  The other big difference, in my opinion, is that they taste sweeter than normal english muffins. I like that.

They're not just for breakfast anymore either.  They are a pretty good compliment to a hot sandwich and are the best bun for a gluten free hamburger that I have found. Makes you feel like a normal person again when you can eat a killer hamburger, bun and all.

From Glutino.com:

Premium English Muffins - Toast or microwave and enjoy. Great for mini pizzas, too. Cholesterol free, no refined sugars or hydrogenated oils, this calcium rich English muffin starts your day off right.

I like to order a ton at a time and keep them frozen. I bring one package at a time to my gluten free drawer in the fridge and let them thaw out overnight. Store in the fridge until gone. Enjoy!